We all know how that story turns out. Media often functions as a propagandistic tool that turns the truth on its head. The best example of this upside-down image can be observed in the dichotomous journalism of Western media on Palestine and Ukraine. 

By legal and international definitions, Gaza and Ukraine bear many unquestionable similarities to one another — from suffering daily air strikes to the bombardment of civilian targets and the obstruction of humanitarian aid by an authoritarian power that seeks control over both respective territories. In Ukraine’s case, the West and its media newsrooms instantly and unanimously came to the support of Ukrainians and the vilification of Russia. Yet, in Palestine’s case, Western leaders, supported by their legions of media outlets, have practically condemned everyone from Hamas to Iran but have continuously refused to hold Israel accountable for any of its actions. 

In actuality, many Western media outlets keep on insisting that Ukraine and Israel are the victims that share similar aggressions from unlawful and heinous invaders. This narrative is sponsored by many Western leaders such as the United States President Joe Biden and the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who have both attempted to paint Ukraine and Israel as two democracies in a struggle against evil. How is Western media creating this narrative and why is it invested in spreading it?

In Western countries, much of the public has been taken in by this media narrative, especially during the first stages of the war on Gaza. According to Amer Aroggi, a Palestinian residing in Ukraine, while Ukraine and Gaza were both under air strikes from Russia and Israel, many Ukrainians showed their support and empathy towards Israel instead of Gaza. Aroggi argues that it was due to “massive propaganda.” 

While it seems incredible that media propaganda could distort reality to such an extent, the conclusion also seems unavoidable. In an interview on Sky News, Palestinian journalist Yara Eid confronted the Sky News reporter for her double standard and selective reporting on topics such as the aggression committed daily against Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. There is nothing new about Western media’s tunnel vision. Back in 2008, throughout Israel’s Cast Lead operation, a study found that although Palestinians died at a rate “106 times greater than Israelis”  “the New York Times engaged in a practice of media bias that resulted in coverage of only 3% of Palestinian deaths in the headlines and first paragraphs.”

Other features of Western media coverage are decontextualization and overgeneralization. In his second interview on the Piers Morgan Show, Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef criticized Western media on two major grounds — first, for their failure to contextualize events in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Without this context, Palestinians come across as simple aggressors who abruptly choose to attack Israel. Second, he lambasted the press for their attempt to depict Palestinians as mere generic Arabs who should seek refuge in other Arabic countries like Egypt and Jordan, denying them their peoplehood.

Piers Morgan Uncensored Video: “Piers Morgan vs Bassem Youssef Round 2 | Two-Hour Special Interview”

Yet another characteristic of journalistic malpractice has to do with sanitizing language. In 2021, many journalists came together to publish an open letter condemning American news outlets for their refusal to use terms such as “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “genocide” to describe Israeli actions in Palestine. According to the letter, experts agree that these terms are appropriate to describe what’s happening in Palestine, but editors avoid them.

And no wonder. Chris McGreal at The Guardian reported this week that the American cable news channel CNN has for years essentially allowed the Israeli government to censor and shape its coverage of the Mideast, to the extent that professional correspondents working at the channel privately accuse it of “journalistic malpractice.”

The Hill Video: “CNN Staffers REVOLT Over ‘PRO-ISRAEL’ Slant Amounting to ‘JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE’: Report”

It isn’t only CNN. At the end of 2023, almost 1500 journalists from different newsrooms signed another open letter condemning the killing of journalists in Gaza by the Israeli military and the censorship and biased coverage of the war on Gaza by Western media. In this letter, journalists blame Western media outlets for biased reporting and spreading misinformation that, in their words, have “undermined Palestinian, Arab and Muslim perspectives, dismissing them as unreliable and have invoked inflammatory language that reinforces Islamophobic and racist tropes.”

All this isn’t even to take into account the way media shapes perceptions by simply not reporting important stories. Israeli indiscriminate bombing can kill hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza in a 24-hour period but this news may simply be ignored on channels such as CNN. If only 50% of Americans feel that Israel has gone too far in killing some 27,000 Palestinians after an attack that left a little over 1100 Israelis dead, it is in part because the 50% who do not feel this way watch channels such as Fox and CNN and have not seen the daily, intensive carnage, which is clearly visible on social media outlets such as TikTok favored by younger viewers.

These journalistic practices have distorted the conversation surrounding Gaza. But to say so still begs the question, why? What is the reasoning behind backing Ukraine and demonizing Palestinians?

To answer this question, we must revisit Chomsky and Herman’s book, where they claim that the Western media is conditioned to “Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.” Hence, media outlets are not just reporters of what’s happening but “are subjective co-creators of the shifting global order in a bigger game of geopolitics”.

So as Eva Połońska-Kimunguyi points out,

“When the aggressor is Russia, the pronounced enemy of the liberal West, the media message generates anger at the atrocities committed, sympathy and solidarity towards the victims. When the liberal West drops bombs on Middle Eastern and African towns and populations, information silence descends on the media”.

In this case, when Israel, the ally of the US and the West in the Middle East commits war crimes, editors at the big media corporations seem to feel that their job is to paper over these atrocities to protect an ally. Let’s not forget that old video showing President Joe Biden proclaiming in the Senate “[Israel] is the best 3 billion dollar investment [the United States] made…were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region (Middle East).”

“It’s Israel’s way of intimidating and controlling news,” said one critic.

By Julia Conley | –

( Commondreams.org ) – CNN has long been criticized by media analysts and journalists for its deference to the Israeli government and the Israel Defense Forces in its coverage of the occupied Palestinian territories, and the cable network admitted Thursday that it follows a protocol that could give Israeli censors influence over its stories.

A spokesperson for the network confirmed to The Intercept that its news coverage about Israel and Palestine is run through and reviewed by the CNN Jerusalem bureau—which is subject to the IDF’s censor.

The censor restricts foreign news outlets from reporting on certain subjects of its choosing and outright censors articles or news segments if they don’t meet its guidelines.

Other news organizations often avoid the censor by reporting certain stories about the region through their news desks outside of Israel, The Intercept reported.

“The policy of running stories about Israel or the Palestinians past the Jerusalem bureau has been in place for years,” the spokesperson told the outlet. “It is simply down to the fact that there are many unique and complex local nuances that warrant extra scrutiny to make sure our reporting is as precise and accurate as possible.”

The spokesperson added that CNN does not share news copy with the censor and called the network’s interactions with the IDF “minimal.”

But James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, said the IDF’s approach to censoring media outlets is “Israel’s way of intimidating and controlling news.”

A CNN staffer who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity confirmed that the network’s longtime relationship with the censor has ensured CNN‘s coverage of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and attacks in the West Bank since October 7 favors Israel’s narratives.

“CNN’s Jeremy Diamond points toward Israeli military hardware in a field near Israel’s border with Gaza.
(Photo: screenshot/CNN)

“Every single Israel-Palestine-related line for reporting must seek approval from the [Jerusalem] bureau—or, when the bureau is not
staffed, from a select few handpicked by the bureau and senior management—from which lines are most often edited with a very specific nuance,” the staffer said.

Jerusalem bureau chief Richard Greene announced it had expanded its review team to include editors outside of Israel, calling the new policy “Jerusalem SecondEyes.” The expanded review process was ostensibly put in place to bring “more expert eyes” to CNN‘s reporting particularly when the Jerusalem news desk is not staffed.

In practice, the staff member told The Intercept, “‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words. Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”

Meanwhile, reporters are under intensifying pressure to question anything they learn from Palestinian sources, including casualty statistics from the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The Ministry of Health is run by Hamas, which controls Gaza’s government. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said in October, as U.S. President Joe Biden was publicly questioning the accuracy of the ministry’s reporting on deaths and injuries, that its casualty statistics have “proven consistently credible in the past.”

Despite this, CNN‘s senior director of news standards and practices, David Lindsey, told journalists in a November 2 memo that “Hamas representatives are engaging in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda… We should be careful not to give it a platform.”

Another email sent in October suggested that the network aimed to present the Ministry of Health’s casualty figures as questionable, with the News Standards and Practices division telling staffers, “Hamas controls the government in Gaza and we should describe the Ministry of Health as ‘Hamas-controlled’ whenever we are referring to casualty statistics or other claims related to the present conflict.”

Newsroom employees were advised to “remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of Israeli civilians” on October 7.

At least 22,600 people have been confirmed killed in Gaza and 57,910 have been wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. Thousands more are feared dead under the rubble left behind by airstrikes. In Israel, the death toll from Hamas’ attack stands at 1,139.

Jim Naureckas, editor of the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, noted that the Israeli government is controlling journalists’ reporting on Gaza as it’s been “credibly accused of singling out journalists for violent attacks in order to suppress information.”

“To give that government a heightened role in deciding what is news and what isn’t news is really disturbing,” he told The Intercept.

Meanwhile, pointed out author and academic Sunny Singh, even outside CNN, “every bit of reporting on Gaza in Western media outlets has been given unmerited weight which not granted to Palestinian reporters.”

“Western media—not just CNN—has been pushing Israeli propaganda all through” Israel’s attacks, said Singh.

It would take a multi-volume book to detail all the horrible and catastrophic things Murdoch has done to the world. In Informed Comment, which is a sort of sprawling Great American Blog, Murdoch has appeared again and again as a villain, as Ernst Stavro Blofeld repeatedly showed up in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.

Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.

Murdoch’s response to the dangers of sea level rise, which could amount to six feet in this century? “We should all move a little inland.” (Reported in Informed Comment 2014.) Some 240 million to 400 million people now living along sea coasts will be displaced over the next 80 years, and Murdoch made a little joke of it. You can almost hear him say, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Murdoch’s billions have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general. He backed the Iraq War and that backing may help explain why Tony Blair joined in Bush’s quixotic misadventure in Mesopotamia. Murdoch told an Australian outlet as the Iraq War was building, “Bush is acting very morally, very correctly… The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” He observed at a business conference, like the sociopath he is, ”There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months.”

The war Bush launched against Iraq in 2003 was not really over until at least 2018, and it went on creating collateral damage all that time, i.e., hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed. As for petroleum prices, they were about $36 a barrel when Murdoch made his prediction and they went on up to $140 a barrel in 2008, fluctuating after that.

Hat tip Trading Economics

What brought oil prices down was the 2008 financial crash (to $40 a barrel) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they really did briefly hit $20 a barrel. Two years later, and despite Iraq’s production of 4.23 million barrels a day, prices were back up to $112 a barrel, and they’re hovering around $90 now.

Murdoch, despite his undeniably mastery of dirty tricks and sharp practices, whereby he has built semi-monopolies, seems actually to know very little about how the world works, being blind to the dangers of climate change and over-estimating the role one country like Iraq could play in a world that produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day globally and in which countries of the global south are increasingly adopting automobile transportation in the place of bicycles and donkey carts.

So maybe Iraq’s oil wasn’t worth all that collateral damage after all.

I pointed in 2011 to News Corp’s involvement in illegally tapping into people’s phone messages and wondered whether Rupert’s media conglomerate is a cult, working by blackmail and intimidation.

I don’t have space to go into Fox’s promotion of white grievance and its racism toward minorities, including Muslims, or its promotion of toxic masculinity and its backlash against gains in women’s rights. I once observed of Roger Ailes’s molestation of his bevy of blonde anchors that they appear to have been not so much hired as trafficked.

Nor can I treat at length here the way Murdoch held his nose and built up Trump, or how his organization is partly to blame for the big lie and the insurrection of January 6. I wish a special counsel would look into that.

The only sliver of good news is that Murdoch’s Fox News has largely discredited itself with anyone under about 70 years old, and its brand has become so toxic that one wonders if it can survive.

News Corp owns Dow Jones & Company, the latter’s Wall Street Journal, News UK (publisher of the Times of London and a raft of scurrilous tabloids), News Corp Australia, Realtor.com and publisher HarperCollins. Most of Murdoch’s film and television properties were spun off in 2013 and purchased by Disney in 2019. The exception was the television news channel, owned by Fox News, of which Murdoch retained control. His plan to merge News Corp and Fox News was foiled by the opposition of News Corp executives who viewed Fox News as a toxic brand that would sully their name.

That’s right, when Murdoch’s media empire was broken up into three in 2013, one of the three successor companies was the skunk at the party. Fox Cable News had become known as a dirty rotten liar of a television channel, with which even Murdoch’s own colleagues feared to be associated.

Their good judgment was borne out last April, when Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems to avoid a damaging public libel trial. The anchors of Fox Cable News, which is owned by Fox News and ultimately by Murdoch, had repeatedly alleged that Dominion voting machines delivered inaccurate ballot counts, allowing Joe Biden to claim the presidency even though Donald J. Trump had actually won. This rank falsehood did plausible damage to Dominion’s business, and it seems likely that the company would have won at trial and been awarded even greater damages. Smartmatic, another voting machine manufacturer, has launched a similar suit, and Fox turned over thousands of pages of discovery in April.

Murdoch allegedly believed that he could plead the First Amendment, which attests to a dismal level of knowledge about US law. The First Amendment protects individuals from the US government, it doesn’t give people carte blanche to destroy the reputations of others with malicious lies. And while courts seek a high bar for libel cases in the US because of the First Amendment pledge of free speech, unlike in the UK, they haven’t set them aside entirely, and there have been recent landmark libel cases. I’m only hoping that Dominion opened a floodgate, and that further suits against Fox are forthcoming. It is a cancer in the body politic, of deliberate lies, hatemongering and warmongering on behalf of big capital, and we desperately need to be cured of it as a nation.

To quote Bond, “Welcome to hell, Blofeld.”

I did a similar search for the Titan submersible which disappeared the same week in the North Atlantic. That kludged-together pseudo-submarine was taking four wealthy men and the 19-year-old son of one of them to view the ruins of the famed passenger ship, the Titanic. They all died when the Titan imploded shortly after it dove. That Google search came up with 79.3 million search results in less than half a second.

Guardian journalist Arwa Mahdawi wrote a powerful column about the different kinds of attention those two boats received. As she astutely pointed out, we in the anglophone world could hardly help but follow the story of the Oceangate submersible’s ill-fated journey. After all, it was the lead news story of the week everywhere and commanded the attention of three national militaries (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) for at least five days.

The Adriana was quite another story. As Mahdawi pointed out, the Greek Coast Guard seemed preoccupied with whether the migrants on that boat even “wanted” help, ignoring the fact that many of those aboard the small trawler were children trapped in the ship’s hull and that it was visibly in danger.

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On the other hand, few, she pointed out, questioned whether the men in the submersible wanted help — even though its hull was ludicrously bolted shut from the outside prior to departure, making rescue especially unlikely. Glued to the coverage like many Americans, I certainly didn’t think they should be ignored, since every life matters.

But why do people care so much about rich men who paid $250,000 apiece to make what any skilled observer would have told them was a treacherous journey, but not hundreds of migrants determined to better their families’ lives, even if they had to risk life itself to reach European shores? Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in the very different reasons those two groups of travelers set out on their journeys and the kinds of things we value in a world long shaped by Western military power.

An American Preoccupation with the Military

I suspect that we Americans are easily drawn to whatever seems vaguely military in nature, even a “submersible” (rather than a submarine) whose rescue efforts marshaled the resources and expertise of so many U.S. and allied naval forces. We found it anything but boring to learn about U.S. Navy underwater rescue ships and how low you can drop before pressure is likely to capsize a boat. The submersible story, in fact, spun down so many military-style rabbit holes that it was easy to forget what even inspired it.

I’m a Navy spouse and my family, which includes my partner, our two young kids, and various pets, has been moving from one military installation to another over the past decade. In the various communities where we’ve lived, during gatherings with new friends and extended family, the overwhelming interest in my spouse’s career is obvious.

Typical questions have included: “What’s a submarine’s hull made out of?” “How deep can you go?” “What’s the plan if you sink?” “What kind of camo do you wear?” And an unforgettable (to me at least) comment from one of our kids: “That blue camo makes you guys look like blueberries. Do you really want to hide if you fall in the water? What if you need to be rescued?”

Meanwhile, my career as a therapist for military and refugee communities and as a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which might offer a strange antiwar complement to my spouse’s world, seldom even makes it into the conversation.

Aside from the power and mystery our military evokes with its fancy equipment, I think many Americans love to express interest in it because it seems like the embodiment of civic virtue at a time when otherwise we can agree on ever less. In fact, after 20 years of America’s war on terror in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, references to our military are remarkably widespread (if you’re paying attention).

In our militarized culture, we seize on the cosmetic parts like the nature of submarines because they’re easier to talk about than the kind of suffering our military has actually caused across a remarkably wide stretch of the planet in this century. Most of us will take fancy toys like subs over exhausted servicemembers, bloodied civilians, and frightened, malnourished migrants all too often fleeing the damage of our war on terror.

Migration During Wartime

We live in an era marked by mass migration, which has increased over the past five decades. In fact, more people are now living in a country other than where they were born than at any other time in the last half-century.

Among the major reasons people leave their homes as migrants are certainly the search for education and job opportunities, but never forget those fleeing from armed conflict and political persecution. And of course, another deeply related and more significant reason is climate change and the ever more frequent and intense national disasters like flooding and drought that it causes or intensifies.

The migrants on the Adriana had left Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, and Pakistan for a variety of reasons. Some of the Pakistani men, for instance, were seeking jobs that would allow them to house and feed their desperate families. One Syrian teenager, who ended up drowning, had left the war-torn city of Kobani, hoping to someday enter medical school in Germany — a dream that was unlikely to be realized where he lived due to bombed-out schools and hospitals.

In my mind’s eye, however, a very specific shadow loomed over so many of their individual stories: America’s forever wars, the series of military operations that began with our 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (which ended up involving us in air strikes and other military activities in neighboring Pakistan as well) and the similarly disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. It would, in the end, metastasize into fighting, training foreign militaries, and intelligence operations in some 85 countries, including each of the countries the Adriana’s passengers hailed from. All in all, the Costs of War Project estimates that the war on terror has led to the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.

The route taken by the Adriana through the central Mediterranean Sea is a particularly common one for refugees fleeing armed conflict and its aftermath. It’s also the most deadly route in the world for migrants — and getting deadlier by the year. Before the Adriana went down, the number of fatalities during the first three months of 2023 had already reached its highest point in six years, at 441 people. And during the first half of this year alone, according to UNICEF, at least 289 children have drowned trying to reach Europe.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned — even if on a distinctly small scale — as a therapist in military and refugee communities, it’s this: a painful history almost invariably precedes anyone’s decision to embark on a journey as dangerous as those the migrants of that ill-fated ship undertook. Though I’m sure many on it would not have said that they were fleeing “war,” it’s hard to disentangle this country’s war on terror from the reasons so many of them made their journeys.

One Syrian father who drowned had been heading for Germany, hoping to help his three-year-old son, who had leukemia and needed a treatment unavailable in his devastated country, an area that the U.S. invasion of Iraq first threw into chaos and where war has now deprived millions of healthcare. Of course, it hardly need be noted that his death only ensures his family’s further impoverishment and his son’s possible death from cancer, not to mention what could happen if he and his mom were forced to make a similar journey to Europe to get care.

Pakistan’s War Story

As many as 350 migrants on the Adriana were from Pakistan where the U.S. had been funding and fighting a counterinsurgency war — via drones and air strikes — against Islamist militant groups since 2004. The war on terror has both directly and indirectly upended and destroyed many lives in Pakistan in this century. That includes tens of thousands of deaths from air strikes, but also the effects of a refugee influx from neighboring Afghanistan that stretched the country’s already limited resources, not to speak of the deterioration of its tourism industry and diminished international investments. All in all, Pakistan has lost more than $150 billion dollars over the past 20 years in that fashion while, for ordinary Pakistanis, the costs of living in an ever more devastated country have only increased. Not surprisingly, the number of jobs per capita decreased.

One young man on the migrant ship was traveling to Europe to seek a job so that he could support his extended family. He had sold 26 buffalo — his main source of income — to pay for the journey and was among the 104 people who were finally rescued by the Greek Coast Guard. After that rescue, he was forced to return to Libya where he had no clear plan for how to make it home. Unlike most of the other Pakistanis on the Adriana, he managed to escape with his life, but his is not necessarily a happy ending. As Zeeshan Usmani, Pakistani activist and founder of the antiwar website Pakistan Body Count, points out, “After you’ve sacrificed so much in search of a better life, you’d likely rather drown than return home. You’ve given all you have.”

Rest Stops in a Militarized World

We certainly learned much about the heady conversations between the Titan’s OceanGate CEO, his staff, and certain estranged colleagues before that submersible embarked on its ill-fated journey, and then about the dim lighting and primitive conditions inside the boat. Barely probed in media coverage of the Adriana, however, was what it was like for those migrants to make the trip itself.

What particularly caught my attention was the place from which they left on their journey to hell and back — Libya. After all, that country has quite a grim history to be the debarkation point for so many migrants. A U.S.-led invasion in 2011 toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country’s remote beaches even less policed than they had been, while Libya itself was divided between two competing governments and a collection of affiliated militias.

In such a chaotic setting, as you might imagine, conditions for migrants transiting through Libya have only continued to deteriorate. Many are kept in warehouses by local authorities for weeks, even months, sometimes without basic needs like blankets and drinking water. Some are even sold into slavery to local residents and those lucky enough to move on toward European shores have to deal with smugglers whose motives and practices, as the Adriana’s story reminds us, are anything but positive (and sometimes terrorizing).

Onward, to the sea itself: When, some 13 hours after the first migrants called for help, the Greek Coast Guard finally responded, it sent a single ship with a crew that included four armed and masked men. The Guard alleges that many of the migrants refused help, waving the men away. Whether or not this was the case, I can imagine their fears that the Greeks, if not smugglers, might at least be allied with them. They also might have feared that the Guard would set them and their children, however young, on rafts to continue drifting at sea, as had happened recently with other migrant ships approached by the Greeks.

If that sounds far-fetched to you, then consider how you would feel if you’d been adrift at sea, hungry, thirsty, and fearful for your life, when men in another boat armed and wearing masks approached you, further rocking a boat that was already threatening to capsize. My guess is: not good.

Uncounted War Deaths

It would be far-fetched to count people like the migrants on the Adriana as “war deaths.” But framing many of their deaths as in some sense war-related should force us to pay attention to ways in which fighting in or around their countries of origin might have impacted their fates. Paying attention to war’s costs would, however, force us Westerners to confront the blood on our hands, as we not only supported (or at least ignored) this country’s wars sufficiently to let them continue for so long, while also backing politicians in both the U.S. and Europe who did relatively little (or far worse) to address the refugee crises that emerged as a result.

To take language used by the Costs of War Project’s Stephanie Savell in her work on what the project calls “indirect war deaths,” migrants like the drowned Syrian teenager seeking an education in Europe could be considered “doubly uncounted” war deaths because they weren’t killed in battle and, as in his case and others like it, their bodies will not be recovered from the Mediterranean’s depths.

When we see stories like his, I think we should all go deeper in our questioning of just what happened, in part by retracing those migrants’ steps to where they began and trying to imagine why they left on such arduous, dangerous journeys. Start with war-gutted economies in countries where millions find slim hope of the kind of decent life that you or I are likely to take for granted, including having a job, a home, health care, and safety from armed violence.

I’ll bet that if you do ask more questions, those migrants will start to seem not just easier to relate to but like the planet’s true adventurers on this planet — and not those billionaires who paid $250,000 apiece for what even I could have told you was an unlikely shot at making it to the ocean floor alive.

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Trump is a would-be dictator, as his attempt to derail the 2020 election results and his whipping up of the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection demonstrates. That is, he wanted to do to the US Constitution what he did to Ms. Carroll.

Trump can be depended on to fund-raise on his conviction, and the scarily irrational MAGA base will ignore it.

Chris Licht’s right-leaning CNN has even thrown caution to the winds and offered to televise a Trump “town hall” in prime time. Licht came to CNN from entertainment television in part — having been a show-runner on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, and in entertainment TV it is thought unwise to alienate half your audience by taking partisan political stands. We saw Taylor Swift warned by her handlers about losing 50% of her concert attendees over opposing Sen. Marsha Blackburn. That’s how they think in show biz. It is why there are no union member characters on American television shows. (Ironically, Colbert himself rejects this warped logic and has had great success nevertheless.)

So Licht applied the same yardstick to CNN, and made the anchors stop calling Jan. 6 an insurrection and stopped them from referring to the phony conspiracy theory Trump put about that the 2020 election was rigged as “the big lie.”

And now he’s bringing Trump into America’s living rooms unfiltered. If the American Republic goes the way of the Roman, it will be enablers like Licht who are to blame.

In contrast, the US media never had anything good to say about other dictators who were serial sex abusers. Take Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. He was renowned for having a female personal guard. But guess what? Five of them alleged that he had raped them. Gaddafi, like Trump, was a monster.

Too bad his own people overthrew and killed him, or Chris Licht could give Gaddafi a live town hall on CNN, too.

Or there was Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose minions killed tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. He is admired in Trumpian circles — Trump consigliere Steve Bannon slavers over Il Duce as a role model. Mussolini, too, was a vicious rapist, according to Yale University Press author RJB Bosworth.

One of Mussolini’s letters is quoted in that book describing his assault on a young virgin: “I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind a door and made her mine. She got up weeping and humiliated, and through her tears she insulted me.”

Creep.

Or there is the ex-dictator of Gambia in West Africa, Yahya Jammeh, who “handpicked” women for rape during his 22-year reign of terror. After it was over he tried to bribe them with gifts.

Rapist dictators are a dime a dozen. Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Hissene Habre of Chad.

Trump now formally joins their ranks, having at last been publicly found liable for just one of his many alleged assaults on women (some of them, again allegedly, having been minors). Ugh.

And many Americans would blithely put this ogre back in the highest office of the land.

US politicians are always going on about how things happen abroad that just wouldn’t be tolerated in a “civilized society.”

But it turns out, not so much. We, like the Chadians, Gambians, Libyans and Dominicans, have had a sexual predator-president who sought to be president for life.

Maybe that conceit of being a “civilized society” so different from others is unwarranted. Or maybe the phrase has a genuine content and we just don’t fit that bill.

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – David Folkenflik at NPR reports that Fox Cable News on Monday ousted inflammatory racist anchor Tucker Carlson. Carlson had revealed in court depositions for the Dominion libel suit that he did not believe virtually any of the bilge he squirted between his lips at millions for years at Fox. He was the subject of a workplace harassment suit and in emails had badmouthed his bosses, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In what Joy Ann Reid called Carlson’s “White Power Hour,” the smarmy anchor had promoted the racist and antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory without the slightest remorse.

The most common version of this whiny idea of the “Great Replacement,” imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French Right wing, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid white workers. Notoriously, the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 against the removal of Confederate statues chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

The shooter who killed 11 Jewish Americans at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 espoused the idea of the “great replacement.”

The hateful ideology is shamelessly promoted by Fox Cable News, the CEO of which is Lachlan Murdoch, with the worst offender being the Lord Haw-Haw of the twenty-first century, Tucker Carlson, who exposed his audience to the great replacement excrement hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in recent years.

Republican legislators across the US have been putting in laws against the teaching of critical race theory, which helps us understand the hold and the effect of ideas like the great replacement, and which hasn’t killed anyone. They don’t seem to be as eager to legislate against Nazi ideas. (It is a Nazi idea.)

The racist notion of the “great replacement” originated in Europe and had many exponents of various stripes. Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, however, the phrase itself was not coined by Maurice Barres in early twentieth-century France, though he certainly believed in the ideas behind it.

The phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957), who served during WW II in The Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French collaborators. You don’t get more fascist than that– the Charlemagne Brigade were the last troops to defend Hitler’s bunker before his suicide, and staged a failed, desperate fight against the Soviet army’s advance into Berlin.

Binet fulminated after the war against “the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols,” by which he meant Americans and Soviets. He saw Americans as an impure mestizo “race” (he was a biological racist). He also launched diatribes against unbridled capitalism and the ways in which Jews were allegedly using it to abet the replacement of civilized white Europeans. (They weren’t.)

So this supposedly far right American nationalist idea actually originated in hatred for Americans and a denigration of their supposed “whiteness” by the European Right, which did not see Russians as “white” either.

It is worth noting that unlike cowardly boot-lickers like Binet, the true patriots were the multi-cultural French. The French Army and then De Gaulle’s Free French Army included thousands of riflemen (Tirailleurs) from Senegal. History.net explains: “During World War II the French recruited 179,000 Tirailleurs; some 40,000 were deployed to Western Europe. Many were sent to bolster the French Maginot Line along its border with Germany and Belgium during the German invasion in 1940—where many were killed or taken prisoner. After the fall of France, others served in the Free French army in Tunisia, Corsica, and Italy, and in the south of France during the liberation.”

I had two uncles who served in WW II, one at the Battle of the Bulge. In my family, we are not in any doubt that it was the Allies who were the good guys. And, yes, the Allies were multi-racial. They included the Tuskegee Airmen, who bombed Nazi targets, The Allies were the diverse American rainbow, and it was their diversity that gave them the strength to prevail.

People like Tucker Carlson are pitifully ignorant of history and so are wielding an anti-American, highly unpatriotic notion for the sake of their television ratings. Ironically, Tucker’s intellectual forebear, Binet, would have considered him a mongrel “Negro.” As defenders of illiberalism and implicitly of hatred of Jews, these useful idiots of the far right are symbolically still deployed around Hitler’s bunker, defending it from the approaching Allies.

Turkish lawmakers approved a bill on October 13 purportedly meant to combat fake news and disinformation, but local civil society organizations describe the bill as an underhanded censorship or disinformation bill which will be used to squash dissent and criticism. Critics of the bill say the 40-article legislation passed by Turkey’s parliament is a threat to freedom of speech and could have disastrous consequences ahead of Turkey’s 2023 election.

There are a number of concerning new restrictions in the bill — mandatory content removal, violations of user privacy, further platform regulation measures, and more — though one of the most worrying articles is Article 29, according to which “anyone publicly distributing false information on Turkey’s domestic and external security, public order and welfare could face between one and three years in jail for instigating concern, fear and panic in society, faces imprisonment from one and up to three years.” The new restrictions went into effect on October 18.

In response to the bill, an international coalition of 22 press freedom organizations said the bill, “with its vaguely-formulated definition of disinformation and ‘intent’, overseen by Turkey’s highly politicized judiciary, will put millions of internet users at risk of criminal sanction and could lead to blanket censorship and self-censorship in the run up to the 2023 elections.” Turkey is scheduled to hold a general election in June 2023.

The bill also comes on the heels of a recent revelation about the government’s Bilgi Teknolojileri ve İletişim Kurumu (the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, BTK) collecting private user data in a massive breach of user privacy since 2021. One MP, Onursal Adiguzel, from the opposition Republican People (CH) party, described the findings as “the biggest tapping scandal in the history of the Republic.”

Via Pixabay..

The bill was proposed by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party and its ally, the Nationalist Movement (MH) Party members, and has been in the works since last year. The two parties claim the bill is similar to existing legislation in Europe, such as the German NetzDG, but critics disagree. It has been criticized for its opaque legal definitions, and for weaponizing unclear terms such as disinformation, fake news, baseless information, distorted disinformation, security, public order, and public peace.

In an interview with The Guardian, Emre Kizilkaya, head of the International Press Institute’s Turkey branch, said the bill “criminalizes what the authorities call disinformation without defining what that actually means. A judge will decide how to define disinformation and intent, which really gives arbitrary powers to the government to criticize journalism.”

The fierce opposition to the bill was also voiced by opposition political party members. Ahead of the bill’s adoption, one member of the parliament, Burak Erbay, smashed his phone with a hammer during his speech at the parliament. “Break your phones like this, you will not need to use it,” Erbay said ahead of the vote.

On October 14, another lawmaker said Turks may be heading into polls come election month without Twitter, Facebook, or WhatsApp. “This censorship law allows the state to shut down Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp,” said MP Garo Paylan referring to the bill authorizing prosecutors and the BTK to shut down platforms if they do not comply with government requests to provide data on users.

Paylan called on the Constitutional Court to reverse the bill. “Yesterday the parliament adopted the disinformation bill. I am ashamed of this as a member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly […] The parliament could not stop the bill, but the Constitutional Court can. If there are still judges at the Constitutional Court, they must stop this bill that is clearly against the Constitution,” said Paylan.

On October 18, the main opposition People’s Republic (CH) Party officially requested the Constitutional Court overturn the bill, specifically Article 29.

Censoring the media and beyond

The bill does not only concern journalists. Its vague definitions may also hold users accountable for any post they share. “Any social media platform user will be held liable within the premises of this law for any post/tweet/share,” explained Emre Ilkan Saklica, the head of editorial at the fact-checking platform Teyit.org in an interview with DW Turkish. Scientists and independent economists may also face consequences over their projections and analysis.

On October 19, over 200 renowned Turkish writers issued a statement condemning the new bill, writing that it “will plunge the country into a deep darkness.”

And there are more restrictions, such as removing hashtags according to article 34 of the newly adopted bill if they are found to violate the law. This article comes atop of already existing legal punishments for various offenses. According to Article 299 of the Penal Code, any person who insults the president can face up to four years behind bars. So far, students, artists, journalists, lawyers, and average citizens, have been prosecuted or faced trial. Meanwhile, Articles 36 and 37 require communication apps such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Skype to appoint local representatives. The new law also obligates these platforms to provide personal user data upon government requests.

The control over social media platforms “represent a draconian new chapter ahead of elections in 2023,” said Sarah Clarke, Head of Europe and Central Asia at Article 19 in a joint statement with Human Rights Watch. According to Yaman Akdeniz, Law Professor and founder of the Freedom of Expression Association, “social media threatens the government’s control of media in general” given they serve as the only remaining avenues for people to access information and express themselves.

Ahead of the 2015 elections in Turkey, the state intensified the crackdown on media by resorting to “information campaigns and physical intimidation.” A violent mob organized by the AKP parliamentary deputy and leader of the AKP Youth, Abdurrahim Boynukalın, attacked the headquarters of Hurriyet Daily News, a left-leaning newsroom. Boynukalın was not punished at the time, and seven years later, he successfully secured a court order issued by a criminal judgeship of peace to block access to any news items about his involvement in the attack, on the grounds that it violated his personal rights. Following the court order, more than 100 news items that mentioned his name were blocked online.

Turkey’s very own Ministry of Truth

These recent measures are just the tip of the iceberg. In August, the Directorate of Communication established a “Center for Combating Disinformation.” Similar to the vague terminology referred to in the October 13 bill, there was little transparency around the center’s purpose and procedures. In a statement issued by the International Press Institute at the time, the international organization expressed concern and questioned the center’s mandate as a government body to “combat ‘disinformation.’” The statement read:

The establishment of the centre should be seen in the context of the government’s recent attempts to control the information environment as the country heads towards the next elections.

That context includes the newly adopted disinformation bill, amendments to the Press Code of Ethics introduced by the Press Advertising Agency (BİK) in July 2022, a social media bill, and other online restrictions. So far, the center has published two weekly bulletins that list news items the center describes as fake news of the week. In the second bulletin, the center referred to the devastating coal mine blast at a state-run facility that killed 41 workers. It claimed that news reports of the blast holding the state institutions for failing to implement better safety measures were fake and that the state has taken measures to prevent such incidents.

On October 18, after filing a motion with the Constitutional Court to overrule the new bill’s Article 29, deputy chair of the opposition CHP Engin Altay called the new law a “Stalin law,” saying that the new bill allows the state, “to present their own lies as truth.”

The parallels between Stalin and the new bill are not surprising. After all, it was Stalin himself who coined the term “Dezinformatsiya” [disinformation], elevating it “to its own government agency, aggressively spreading lies against political opponents and misleading citizens with bogus propaganda on a mass scale.” Fast forward to present-day Turkey, and the unfolding events attest to what Stalin and others did decades ago, but this time on an unprecedented scale.

This post is part of Advox, a Global Voices project dedicated to protecting freedom of expression online. All Posts

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

Members of the protest group Just Stop Oil recently threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in London. The action once again triggered debate about what kinds of protest are most effective.

After a quick clean of the glass, the painting was back on display. But critics argued that the real damage had been done, by alienating the public from the cause itself (the demand that the UK government reverse its support for opening new oil and gas fields in the North Sea).

Supporters of more militant forms of protest often point to historical examples such as the suffragettes. In contrast with Just Stop Oil’s action, when the suffragette Mary Richardson went to the National Gallery to attack a painting called The Rokeby Venus, she slashed the canvas, causing major damage.

However, many historians argue that the contribution of the suffragettes to women getting the vote was negligible or even counterproductive. Such discussions often seem to rely on people’s gut feelings about the impact of protest. But as a professor of cognitive psychology, I know that we don’t have to rely on intuition – these are hypotheses that can be tested.

The activist’s dilemma

In one set of experiments researchers showed people descriptions of protests and then measured their support for the protesters and the cause. Some participants read articles describing moderate protests such as peaceful marches. Others read articles describing more extreme and sometimes violent protests, for example a fictitious action in which animal rights activists drugged a security guard in order to break into a lab and remove animals.

Protesters who undertook extreme actions were perceived to be more immoral, and participants reported lower levels of emotional connection and social identification with these “extreme” protesters. The effects of this kind of action on support for the cause were somewhat mixed (and negative effects may be specific to actions that incorporate the threat of violence).

Overall, these results paint a picture of the so-called activist’s dilemma: activists must choose between moderate actions that are largely ignored and more extreme actions that succeed in gaining attention, but may be counterproductive to their aims as they tend to make people think less of the protesters.

Activists themselves tend to offer a different perspective: they say that accepting personal unpopularity is simply the price to be paid for the media attention they rely on to “get the conversation going” and win public support for the issue. But is this the right approach? Could activists be hurting their own cause?

Hating protesters doesn’t affect support

I’ve conducted several experiments to answer such questions, often in collaboration with students at the University of Bristol. To influence participants’ views of protesters we made use of a well-known framing effect whereby (even subtle) differences in how protests are reported have a pronounced impact, often serving to delegitimise the protest.

For example, the Daily Mail article reporting the Van Gogh protest referred to it as a “stunt” which is part of a “campaign of chaos” by “rebellious eco-zealots”. The article does not mention the protesters’ demand.

Our experiments took advantage of this framing effect to test the relationship between attitudes to the protesters themselves and to their cause. If the public’s support for a cause depends on how they feel about the protesters, then a negative framing – which leads to less positive attitudes toward protesters – should result in lower levels of support for the demands.

But that’s not what we found. In fact, experimental manipulations that reduced support for the protesters had no impact on support for the demands of those protesters.

We’ve replicated this finding across a range of different types of nonviolent protest, including protests about racial justice, abortion rights and climate change, and across British, American and Polish participants (this work is being prepared for publication). When members of the public say, “I agree with your cause, I just don’t like your methods,” we should take them at their word.

Decreasing the extent to which the public identifies with you may not be helpful for building a mass movement. But high publicity actions may actually be a very effective way to increase recruitment, given relatively few people ever become activists. The existence of a radical flank also seems to increase support for more moderate factions of a social movement, by making these factions appear less radical.

Protest can set the agenda

Another concern may be that most of the attention obtained by radical actions is not about the issue, focusing instead on what the protesters did. However, even where this is true, the public conversation opens up the space for some discussion of the issue itself.

Protest plays a role in agenda seeding. It doesn’t necessarily tell people what to think, but influences what they think about. Last year’s Insulate Britain protests are a good example. In the months after the protests began on September 13 2021, the number of mentions of the word “insulation” (not “Insulate”) in UK print media doubled.

Some people don’t investigate the details of an issue, yet media attention may nevertheless promote the issue in their mind. A YouGov poll released in early June 2019 showed “the environment” ranked in the public’s top three most important issues for the first time.

Pollsters concluded that the “sudden surge in concern is undoubtedly boosted by the publicity raised for the environmental cause by Extinction Rebellion” (which had recently occupied prominent sites in central London for two weeks). There’s also evidence that home insulation has risen up the policy agenda since Insulate Britain’s protests.

Dramatic protest isn’t going away. Protagonists will continue to be the subject of (mostly) negative media attention, which will lead to widespread public disapproval. But when we look at public support for the protesters’ demands, there isn’t any compelling evidence for nonviolent protest being counterproductive. People may “shoot the messenger”, but they do – at least, sometimes – hear the message.

Colin Davis, Chair in Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.