In an era when images can circle the globe in seconds and newsrooms claim to uphold universal humanitarian principles; one might expect the killing of 165 schoolgirls inside a primary school to dominate international headlines.

One would expect emergency debates, moral outrage, and relentless coverage.

Yet in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab — where Israeli-American strikes obliterated classrooms filled with children — the world’s most influential media institutions have responded with something far more revealing than condemnation: they have responded with silence.

These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead.

In seconds, that ordinary school day turned into a massacre. Desks became splintered wreckage, classrooms collapsed into dust, and rows of coffins replaced rows of pupils.

Yet the names of these girls — 165 lives extinguished before they truly began — barely entered the global conversation.

This omission is not the product of oversight. It reflects something far more structural: the hierarchy of victims that governs much of the contemporary information order.

In theory, modern Western media institutions present themselves as defenders of human rights and guardians of moral accountability. In practice, their editorial priorities often mirror geopolitical interests with striking precision.

Human rights losing integrity
When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.

When tragedies reinforce established narratives about adversarial states, they are amplified, dramatised, and transformed into global moral spectacles.

But when tragedies expose the human cost of the military actions carried out by Western powers or their closest allies, they are quietly displaced from the front page —if they appear at all.

The massacre in Minab illustrates this logic with devastating clarity.

The deaths of 165 Iranian schoolgirls do not fit comfortably within the dominant geopolitical storyline that portrays Israel and its strategic partners as defenders of stability and order in a turbulent region.

Acknowledging such an atrocity would inevitably raise difficult questions: about the legality of strikes on civilian infrastructure, about the ethics of military escalation, and about the widening humanitarian toll of ongoing Israeli-American attacks across the region.

It is therefore far easier to look away.

Minab not isolated tragedy
But Minab is not an isolated tragedy. Across Lebanon, relentless bombardments have repeatedly struck civilian neighbourhoods, reducing homes and streets to rubble.

Across Palestine, entire communities have endured cycles of destruction that claim the lives of children whose only battlefield was the ground beneath their feet. Hospitals, schools, and residential blocks have all entered the expanding geography of devastation.

These events do not occur in a vacuum. They form part of a broader pattern in which military power operates alongside narrative power. Missiles shape the physical battlefield, while selective reporting shapes the battlefield of perception.

What emerges is not merely a media bias but a form of narrative engineering. Certain victims are elevated as symbols of universal suffering, while others — often far more numerous — are rendered invisible. Compassion itself becomes curated, distributed unevenly according to political convenience.

For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection. The credibility of humanitarian discourse depends on consistency.

The girls of Minab deserved the same recognition afforded to any victims of violence anywhere in the world. They deserved to have their stories told, their lives acknowledged, and their deaths confronted with the seriousness such an atrocity demands.

Instead, they encountered a second form of erasure.

First came the missiles that ended their lives. Then came the silence that followed.

Selective visibility needs reflection
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection.

In the contemporary information age, propaganda rarely announces itself openly. It often operates through absence — through the stories that never reach the front page, the victims whose names remain unspoken, and the tragedies that disappear before the world has time to notice.

The massacre in Minab therefore stands as more than a local catastrophe. It exposes a deeper crisis in the global information order — one in which the value of human life appears disturbingly contingent on political context.

And if the deaths of 165 schoolgirls in their classrooms fail to trigger universal outrage, the question is no longer about geopolitics alone.

It becomes a question about the credibility of the moral system that claims to defend humanity itself.

Dr Hana Saada is an Algerian university lecturer and journalist, and editor-in-chief of the English edition of Dzair Tube. She holds a PhD in media translation and writes on geopolitics, media narratives, and international affairs. This article is republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Australia’s two federal combating antisemitism bills, the New South Wales laws providing the means to shutdown street protests and move on stationary public assemblies, along with the envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism and the Royal Commission into the same prejudice, have all been set in place following two ISIS-fuelled killers murdering 15 people at Bondi Beach six weeks ago.

While some of these measures were drafted in a hurry immediately post-Bondi in a theatrical attempt to prevent what had already occurred, much of the “combating antisemitism” smorgasbord of laws that serve to clamp down on free speech and the right to political communication in general, appear to have been waiting in the wings for the right political moment to enact.

These dramatic changes that have been foisted upon the country’s public square have been central to a broad campaign that the Zionist lobby has been progressing both locally and throughout the Western world, which is difficult to pin down as most of this advocating takes place behind closed doors, while when featured in the media, these positions are increasingly reflected as the norm.

The Zionist lobby is also known as the Israel lobby. Political Zionism advocates for the establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian land, which is today Israel.

A key outcome of the doctrine of Zionism is the displacement and genociding of Palestinians. And it is these truths, and the fact that the Gaza genocide is in progress, that make it necessary to progress the lobby’s agenda right now.

But while the Albanese government is implementing the envoy’s plan and a Royal Commission into antisemitism, which both include a definition of antisemitism that serves to block criticism of Israel at the behest of the lobby, the scope of the federal hate laws further reveal desperate Labor and Liberal parties attempting to shore up power in the face of a drastically shifting political climate.

McCarthyite Zionism
While the Israel lobby has long been understood to have an excessive influence upon the US political establishment, the sway of the Zionist lobby in Australia had not been common knowledge among the broader public until Gaza, as over the past 26 months of the mass slaughter and starvation programme, the lobby’s propaganda machine has been actioned in an attempt to hide this.

As the internet filled with footage of Israeli state actors perpetrating horrific acts in the Gaza Strip in late 2023, the Australian public sphere became a place to attack constituents for speaking out about this worst atrocity since the genociding of Jewish people during the Second World War, and the key way to silence these critics was to charge them with antisemitism — the hate that stoked the Holocaust.

The central target of the local Zionist lobby has been the Palestine solidarity movement, which has been a loud secular voice sprung from a diverse constituency.

Yet, federal and state Labor leaders have been labelling these people, who have been calling for an end to the practice of exterminating humans to obtain land, as outright antisemites and further implied they’re somewhat terroristic.

Assisting in the progression of the Zionist lobby’s hasbara mission, a documentary about rising antisemitism was aired last year, then a series of staged antisemitic crimes swept Sydney streets, rallies against Israel’s barbarity in Gaza have been framed as antisemitic, Jewish voices decrying Israel have been labelled self-hating, while attempts to remove Palestinian voices are underway.

According to US professors Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, the Israeli state and the Zionist lobby commenced framing criticism of Israel as antisemitic in the late 1960s.

This idea is predicated upon Israel being a Jewish state. It denies the fact that many Jewish people globally don’t adhere to the doctrine of Zionism. And it rests on a flimsy link that only holds because of the force of the lobbyists.

Getting our hasbara on
The Zionist lobby got a foot in the door when PM Anthony Albanase appointed arch-Zionist Jillian Segal to the newly created position of Australian Special Envoy on Antisemitism in July 2024.

This had appeared to be spurred by the moral panic around antisemitism, however it has since come to light that the envoy programme exists across the Western world, with the first US envoy appointed in 2004.

Segal released her Plan to Combat Antisemitism in July 2025. Albanese implemented it straight after Bondi.

At its heart, the plan inserts the IHRA definition of antisemitism that blocks criticism of Israel into every level of Australian government and all its institutions. Further aspects involve the monitoring of tertiary institutions and the media for antisemitism or rather, anti-Israel sentiment.

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism comprises of two lines and 11 examples of hatred towards Jewish people, seven of which involve criticising Israel.

The body that produced it has never officially adopted it. However, as one of its drafters has been warning over the past decade, the Zionist lobby has been weaponising the definition to silence anti-Israel criticism globally.

The determination to hold a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is the result of an all-pervasive campaign to see it established post-Bondi massacre, with the suggested reason being to understand how such a terrorist action was able to come to fruition.

Further moral panic
However, the criminal case against one shooter rules this out, so the inquiry will likely serve to stoke further moral panic.

The NSW government commenced seriously stamping out protest in April 2022.

So, the blanket ban on protests, or the public assembly restriction declaration regime rolled out post-Bondi, can be understood as not only placating the Zionist lobby, via the silencing of Palestine solidarity rallies on Gadigal land in the Sydney CBD, but it’s also as a continuation of the closing of the public sphere.

The 50 pages of hate crime laws the Albanese government whipped out of its back pocket last week, appeared so broad that the suggestion is the measures were in the works long before the antisemitic attack in Bondi on 14 December 2025.

ASIO boss Mike Burgess hinted at a need for these last year, so as to stamp out groups, like the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network and Islamic group Hitz ut Tahrir, as they had both been understood to be hovering just beneath the threshold of criminal activity.

So, broad is the reach is the new listing prohibited hate group regime that the major concern right now is that they might be applied to stamp out pro-Palestinian sentiment and protest in the public square to again placate the Zionist lobby.

But further, these laws sitting on the books could likely be used by a future “true blue” führer, so that their opposition can be eradicated on taking office.

The fallacy of necessitated free speech denial
NSW premier Chris Minns’ favoured mantra over the period of the Gaza genocide — or the rise in antisemitism in Australia if one is being “politically correct” — has been along the lines of “the reason NSW does not have free speech protections like they do in the United States, is that this state has a multicultural society and therefore, divergent voices must be tempered”. Yet, this is a lie.

During the 1890s drafting of the Australian Constitution, those involved determined not to enshrine rights in the founding document, as it might result in discriminatory laws already on the books that specifically applied to First Nations people and Chinese people becoming invalid, former High Court Justice Micheal Kirby has noted on occasion.

This was just prior to the 1901 federation of Australia, which was when various pieces of legislation were passed in order to progress the White Australia policy. So, rights were initially denied in this country to maintain a form of white supremacy.

The premier is not only progressing this line when the moral panic around antisemitism is in full flight, but he is also suggesting that the right to free speech should not be protected in NSW, over and over again, after NSW MP Jenny Leong introduced the Human Rights Bill 2025 last October, which seeks to protect free speech, or “freedom of opinion and expression”, among other rights.

The failure to protect free speech in this country was initially about maintaining power when attempting to establish an ethnostate. But the ongoing denial of rights protections since Australia embraced multiculturalism commencing in the 1970s, has really been about politicians maintaining power, and not an attempt to save various ethnic groups living here from annihilating each other.

The idea progressed by Minns is that the broad free speech protections in the United States, which are contained in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, would be a problem in our community because it is multicultural.

However, while the US has traditionally been understood to have been a melting pot of different ethnicities, what is operating as societies in both countries today are based upon multiethnicities, and they’re pretty much the same.

The progression of the “combating antisemitism” laws and policies right now is all about placating the Zionist lobby, while Israel takes as many pounds of flesh as it desires upon occupied Palestinian territory, in order to prevent the ongoing mass civil society outcry over this ethnic cleansing, the mass starvation and mass murder, along with the genocidal tactics that are ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

Yet, the federal listing of prohibited hate group regime also provides the ability to the major parties to criminalise their political opponents as hate groups — think, the Greens — at a point in time when the long-term capture of holding government office by the majors is now under threat.

Paul Gregoire is a Sydney-based journalist and writer. He is the winner of the 2021 NSW Council for Civil Liberties Award For Excellence In Civil Liberties Journalism. Prior to Sydney Criminal Lawyers®, Paul wrote for VICE and was the news editor at Sydney’s City Hub.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

There was another IDF massacre in Gaza on Saturday, reportedly killing dozens of Palestinians.

Israel as usual claimed it was responding to a ceasefire violation by Hamas, but of course there’s absolutely no evidence for this to be found. AP reports that according to the IDF the strikes were launched after a Hamas fighter “shot at troops in southern Gaza,” but that “no soldiers were hurt” in this alleged attack.

Not so much as a scratch. So I guess we’re just expected to take Israel’s word for it.

Now check out these Western media headlines about the massacre and notice the disgusting spin they are placing on the narrative to normalise the continued slaughter of Palestinians:

Do you see what they’re doing here?

The Western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they’ll go, “Gosh I sure hope this doesn’t lead to any violations of the ceasefire!”

When Israel violates Trump’s ceasefire, the mainstream media calls it “testing” the ceasefire.

There is no circumstance in this or in any other universe in which Hamas could kill 24 Israelis and the media would reduce it to Hamas “testing” the ceasefire. https://t.co/QfaJh2N8bR

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 22, 2025

It’s never a ceasefire violation to commit mass murder against Palestinians. It’s only ever a “test” of the ceasefire, or something that happens “amid a fragile ceasefire”.

If Hamas suddenly attacked and killed dozens of Israelis, these empire propagandists wouldn’t be saying “Hmm I sure hope the fragile ceasefire holds up amid this challenging test.” They’d just call it what it is. And it would be the main news story in the world.

You don’t hate the mass media enough     Audio/video: Caitlin Johnstone

The imperial media have been framing Israel’s ceasefire violations like this the entire time. Just the other day NBC News ran a report about a different IDF massacre in Gaza titled “Israeli airstrikes kill 25 Palestinians in Gaza, rattling fragile ceasefire”. Last month CNN ran a headline claiming “US-brokered ceasefire appears to survive first major test” after Israel killed at least 44 people, when Israel had been violating the ceasefire every single day up to that point.

The mass media have been running egregiously misleading headlines throughout this entire genocide, which has an overwhelmingly distorting effect on public perception in an information environment where skim-reading has become the norm and most social media users share news stories after just reading the headline.

Killing Palestinians is so normalized and accepted as a baseline expectation in the western press that CNN calls this the “first major test” of the ceasefire after Israel killed people in Gaza every single day since the ceasefire agreement was signed. https://t.co/wTSEKzsDCN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 19, 2025

It almost feels silly to point out that the mass media are wildly biased in favor of Israel two years into a genocide which they’ve actively run propaganda cover for in brazen acts of journalistic malpractice from the very beginning.

But we can’t let it slip from our attention how evil these imperial spinmeisters are. How racist they are. How mendacious and manipulative they are. However much you hate them, you don’t hate them enough.

These are the people who are informing Western perspectives about what’s going on in our world. They aren’t just deceiving the public with dishonest headlines and precipitously slanted reporting which gets loudly amplified by Silicon Valley algorithms, they are writing the stories which get used and cited by AI chatbots and online platforms like Wikipedia which people are increasingly turning to for information about world events.

They are polluting the entire information ecosystem with a deluge of propaganda they are churning out day after day, year after year.

These freaks are attacking our minds. They are attacking humanity’s ability to understand its waking reality. They are continuously indoctrinating the public into an ignorant, Western supremacist worldview which only values human life when it lives in the correct part of the world, speaks the correct language, practises the correct religion, has the correct skin color, and aligns with the correct geopolitical agendas.

They make everything worse. It’s impossible to have enough disdain for these mass media propagandists.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

An Al Jazeera journalist who has documented Israel’s trail of atrocities for almost the past two years has condemned Western news agencies covering the war on Gaza as treating Palestinian reporters like “robots”.

“You see how Palestinian journalists are treated. There’s no protection when they are alive,” Hind Khoudary told Al Jazeera from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

“And after they are killed, no one even mentions them.”

She said today was a “very, very angry morning” after five journalists were killed yesterday among at least 21 people, including medical workers, at al-Nasser Medical Centre in a “double tap” strike by the Israeli military.

The slain news professionals have been named as Hossam al-Masri, a freelance photographer for the Reuters news agency; Mariam Abu Daqqa, freelance journalist for The Independent and the Associated Press (AP); Moaz Abu Taha, correspondent for the American broadcasting network NBC; Mohamad Salama, press photographer for Al Jazeera; and Ahmed Abu Aziz, freelance journalist working for Middle East Eye and the Tunisian radio station Diwan FM, who died later from his injuries.

“Palestinian journalists do not know how to mourn their five colleagues and there’s a wave of anger at the international news agencies.

“Many news outlets [that the killed journalists worked for] did not even mention their contributors. The Reuters news agency did not mention in their headline their cameraman who had been working for them for months.

“In their article, they simply described him as a Reuters ‘contractor’.

‘Not mentioned’
As for Moaz Abu Taha [another journalist killed in the Nasser medical centre attack], not a single news organisation that he was working for said he was working for them,” she said.

“Palestinian journalists have been risking their lives for 23 months now, and after they are killed, they are not even mentioned in headlines.

“In the end, they are mentioned as ‘contractors’, as ‘freelancers’ – while, when they were alive, they were working 24/7 to produce, fix and document for these news outlets.

“This is how most Palestinian journalists feel — that we’re just being used as robots to report on what’s going on because there are no foreign journalists.

“We get killed and then everyone forgets about us.”

Gaza’s silenced voices.     Video: Al Jazeera

RSF ‘fiercely condemns’ killings
The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) “fiercely condemned” the latest killings, saying they came after the murder of Khaled al-Madhoun on Saturday, 23 August 23.

This was a toll of six journalists killed in two days. It follows the killing of six other journalists two weeks ago on August 10.

According to RSF information, all were deliberately targeted. RSF again called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to “end this massacre of journalists”.

Thibaut Bruttin, director-general of RSF, said: How far will the Israeli armed forces go in their gradual effort to eliminate information coming from Gaza? How long will they continue to defy international humanitarian law?

“The protection of journalists is guaranteed by international law, yet more than 200 of them have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza over the past two years.

“Ten years after the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2222, which protects journalists in times of conflict, the Israeli army is flouting its application.

“RSF calls for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to ensure this resolution is finally respected, and that concrete measures are taken to end impunity for crimes against journalists, protect Palestinian journalists, and open access to the Gaza Strip to all reporters.”

‘Suicide drone’
According to Al Jazeera, the first strike on the live broadcast post that killed Hossam al-Masri was carried out using a loitering munition — also known as a “suicide drone” — typically equipped with a camera and an explosive charge.

A Reuters article also confirmed the death of its contractor, Hussam al-Masri.

The second strike 8 minutes later targeted the hospital yet again after rescue teams and journalists had arrived.

The Al-Nasser complex is a well-known gathering place for displaced journalists in Gaza who, since October 2023, have been living in tents around the hospital to access information on injured and deceased patients, as well as available facilities.

Targeted Murder. This is what israeli nazis do.. pic.twitter.com/RL8mc1YCMW

— Ali (@MerruX) August 25, 2025

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

If you imagined Western politicians and media were finally showing signs of waking up to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, think again.

Even the decision this week by several Western states, led by the UK, to ban the entry of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, is not quite the pushback it is meant to seem.

Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway may be seeking strength in numbers to withstand retaliation from Israel and the United States. But in truth, they have selected the most limited and symbolic of all the possible sanctions they could have imposed on the Israeli government.

Their meagre action is motivated solely out of desperation. They urgently need to deter Israel from carrying through plans to formally annex the Occupied West Bank and thereby tear away the last remnants of the two-state comfort blanket — the West’s solitary pretext for decades of inaction.

And as a bonus, the entry ban makes Britain and the others look like they are getting tough with Israel on Gaza, even as they do nothing to stop the mounting horrors there.

Even the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper’s senior columnist Gideon Levy mocked what he called a “tiny, ridiculous step” by the UK and others, saying it would make no difference to the slaughter in Gaza. He called for sanctions against “Israel in its entirety”.

“Do they really believe this punishment will have some sort of effect on Israel’s moves?” Levy asked incredulously.

2500 sanctions on Russia
Remember as Britain raps two cabinet ministers on the knuckles that the West has imposed more than 2500 sanctions on Russia.

While David Lammy, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, worries about the future of a non-existent diplomatic process — one trashed by Israel two decades ago — Palestinian children are still starving to death unseen.

The genocide is not going to end unless the West forces Israel to stop. This week more than 40 Israeli military intelligence officers went on an effective strike, refusing to be involved in combat operations, saying Israel was waging a “clearly illegal” and “eternal war” in Gaza.

Yet Starmer and Lammy will not even concede that Israel has violated international law.  

What is clear is that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s sighs of regret last month — expressing how “intolerable” he finds the “situation” in Gaza — were purely performative.

Starmer and the rest of the Western establishment have continued tolerating what they claim to find “intolerable”, even as the death toll from Israel’s bombs, gunfire and starvation campaign grow day by day.

Those emaciated children — profoundly malnourished, their stick-then legs covered by the thinnest membrane of skin — aren’t going to recover without meaningful intervention. Their condition won’t stabilise while Israel deprives them of food day after day. Sooner or later they will die, mostly out of our view.

Parents must risk lives
Meanwhile, desperate parents must now risk their lives, forced to run the gauntlet of Israeli gunfire, in a — usually forlorn — bid to be among the handful of families able to grab paltry supplies of largely unusable, dried food. Most families have no water or fuel to cook with.

As if mocking Palestinians, the Western media continue to refer to this real-life, scaled-up Hunger Games — imposed by Israel in place of the long-established United Nations relief system — as “aid distribution”.

We are supposed to believe it is addressing Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis” even as it deepens the crisis.

On the kindest analysis, Western capitals are settling back into a mix of silence and deflections, having got in their excuses just before Israel crosses the finishing line of its genocide.

They have readied their alibis for the moment when international journalists are allowed in — the day after the population of Gaza has either been exterminated or violently herded into neighbouring Sinai.

Or more likely, a bit of both.

Truth inverted
What distinguishes Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is this. It is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre, a spectacle in which every truth is carefully inverted.

That can best be achieved, of course, if those trying to write a different, honest script are eliminated. The extent and authorship of the horrors can be edited out, or obscured through a series of red herrings, misdirecting onlookers.

Israel has murdered more than 220 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past 20 months, and has been keeping Western journalists far from the killing fields.

Like the West’s politicians, the foreign correspondents finally piped up last month — in their case, to protest at being barred from Gaza. No less than the politicians, they were keen to ready their excuses.

They have careers and their future credibility to think about, after all.

The journalists have publicly worried that they are being excluded because Israel has something to hide. As though Israel had nothing to hide in the preceding 20 months, when those same journalists docilely accepted their exclusion — and invariably regurgitated Israel’s deceitful spin on its atrocities.

If you imagine that the reporting from Gaza would have been much different had the BBC, CNN, The Guardian or The New York Times had reporters on the ground, think again.

The truth is the coverage would have looked much as it has done for more than a year and a half, with Israel dictating the story lines, with Israel’s denials foregrounded, with Israel’s claims of Hamas “terrorists” in every hospital, school, bakery, university, and refugee camp used to justify the destruction and slaughter.

British doctors volunteering in Gaza who have told us there were no Hamas fighters in the hospitals they worked in, or anyone armed apart from the Israeli soldiers that shot up their medical facilities, would not be more believed because Jeremy Bowen interviewed them in Khan Younis rather than Richard Madeley in a London studio.

Breaking the blockade
If proof of that was needed, it came this week with the coverage of Israel’s brazen act of piracy against a UK-flagged ship, the Madleen, trying to break Israel’s genocidal aid blockade.

Israel’s law-breaking did not happen this time in sealed-off Gaza, or against dehumanised Palestinians.

Israel’s slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre

Israel’s ramming and seizure of the vessel took place on the high seas, and targeted a 12-member Western crew, including the famed young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. All were abducted and taken to Israel.

Thunberg was trying to use her celebrity to draw attention to Israel’s illegal, genocidal blockade of aid. She did so precisely by trying to break that blockade peacefully.

The defiance of the Madleen’s crew in sailing to Gaza was intended to shame Western governments that are under a legal — and it goes without saying, moral — obligation to stop a genocide under the provisions of the 1948 Genocide Convention they have ratified.

Western citizens wring hands
Western capitals have been ostentatiously wringing their hands at the “humanitarian crisis” of Israel starving two million people in full view of the world.

The Madleen’s mission was to emphasise that those states could do much more than tell two Israeli cabinet ministers they are not welcome to visit. Together they could break the blockade, if they so wished.

Britain, France and Canada — all of whom claimed last month that the “situation” in Gaza was “intolerable” — could organise a joint naval fleet carrying aid to Gaza through international waters. They would arrive in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza.

At no point would they be in Israel territory.

Any attempt by Israel to interfere would be an act of war against these three states — and against Nato. The reality is Israel would be forced to pull back and allow the aid in.

But, of course, this scenario is pure fantasy. Britain, France and Canada have no intention of breaking Israel’s “intolerable” siege of Gaza.

None of them has any intention of doing anything but watch Israel starve the population to death, then describe it as a “humanitarian catastrophe” they were unable to stop.

The Madleen has preemptively denied them this manoeuvre and highlighted Western leaders’ actual support for genocide — as well as let the people of Gaza know that a majority of the Western public oppose their governments’ collusion in Israel’s criminality.

‘Selfie yacht’
The voyage was intended too as a vigorous nudge to awaken those in the West still slumbering through the genocide. Which is precisely why the Madleen’s message had to be smothered with spin, carefully prepared by Israel.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued statements calling the aid ship a “celebrity selfie yacht“, while dismissing its action as a “public relations stunt” and “provocation”. Israeli officials portrayed Thunberg as a “narcissist” and “antisemite”.

When Israeli soldiers illegally boarded the ship, they filmed themselves trying to hand out sandwiches to the crew — an actual stunt that should appall anyone mindful that, while Israel was concern-trolling Western publics about the nutritional needs of the Madleen crew, it was also starving two million Palestinians to death, half of them children.

Did the British government, whose vessel was rammed and invaded in international waters, angrily protest the attack? Did the reliably patriotic British media rally against this humiliating violation of UK sovereignty?

No, Starmer and Lammy once again had nothing to say on the matter.

They have yet to concede that Israel is even breaking international law in denying the people of Gaza all food and water for more than three months, let alone acknowledge that this actually constitutes genocide.

Instead, Lammy’s officials — 300 of whom have protested against the UK’s continuing collusion in Israeli atrocities — have been told to resign rather than raise objections rooted in international law.

Bypass legal advisers
According to sources within the Foreign Office cited by former British ambassador Craig Murray, Lammy has also insisted that any statements relating to the Madleen bypass the government’s legal advisers.

Why? To allow Lammy plausible deniability as he evades Britain’s legal obligation to respond to Israel’s assault on a vessel sailing under UK protection.

The media, meanwhile, has played its own part in whitewashing this flagrant crime — one that has taken place in full view, not hidden away in Gaza’s conveniently engineered “fog of war”.

Much of the press adopted the term “selfie yacht” as if it were their own. As though Thunberg and the rest of the crew were pleasure-seekers promoting their social media platforms rather than risking their lives taking on the might of a genocidal Israeli military.

They had good reason to be fearful. After all, the Israeli military shot dead 10 of their predecessors — activists on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza — 15 years ago. Israel has killed in cold blood American citizens such as Rachel Corrie, British citizens such as Tom Hurndall, and acclaimed journalists such as Shireen Abu Akleh.

And for those with longer memories, the Israeli air force killed more than 30 American servicemen in a two-hour attack in 1967 on the USS Liberty, and wounded 170 more. The anniversary of that crime — covered up by every US administration — was commemorated by its survivors the day before the attack on the Madleen.

‘Detained’, not abducted
Israel’s trivialising smears of the Madleen crew were echoed uncritically from Sky News and The Telegraph to LBC and Piers Morgan. 

Strangely, journalists who had barely acknowledged the tsunami of selfies taken by Israeli soldiers glorifying their war crimes on social media were keenly attuned to a supposed narcissistic, selfie culture rampant among human-rights activists.

As Thunberg headed back to Europe on Tuesday, the media continued with its assault on the English language and common sense. They reported that she had been “deported” from Israel, as though she had smuggled herself into Israel illegally rather than being been forcibly dragged there by the Israeli military.

But even the so-called “serious” media buried the significance both of the Madleen’s voyage to Gaza and of Israel’s lawbreaking. From The Guardian and BBC to The New York Times and CBS, Israel’s criminal attack was characterised as the aid ship being “intercepted” or “diverted”, and of Israel “taking control” of the vessel.

For the Western media, Thunberg was “detained”, not abducted.

The framing was straight out of Tel Aviv. It was a preposterous narrative in which Israel was presented as taking actions necessary to restore order in a situation of dangerous rule-breaking and anarchy by activists on a futile and pointless excursion to Gaza.

The coverage was so uniform not because it related to any kind of reality, but because it was pure propaganda — narrative spin that served not only Israel’s interests but that of a Western political and media class deeply implicated in Israel’s genocide.

Arming criminals
In another glaring example of this collusion, the Western media chose to almost immediately bury what should have been explosive comments last week from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He admitted that Israel has been arming and cultivating close ties with criminal gangs in Gaza.

He was responding to remarks from Avigdor Lieberman, a former political ally turned rival, that some of those assisted by Israel are affiliated to the jihadist group Islamic State. The most prominent is named Yasser Abu Shabab.

The Western media either ignored this revelation or dutifully accepted Netanyahu’s self-serving characterisation of these ties as an alliance of convenience: one designed to weaken Hamas by promoting “rival local forces” and opening up new “post-war governing opportunities”.

The real aim — or rather, two aims: one immediate, the other long term — are far more cynical and disturbing.

More than six months ago, Palestinian analysts and the Israeli media began warning that Israel — after it had destroyed Gaza’s ruling institutions, including its police force – was working hand in hand with newly reinvigorated criminal gangs.

Israel’s immediate aim of arming the criminals — turning them into powerful militias — was to intensify the breakdown of law and order. That served as the prelude to a double-barrelled Israeli disinformation campaign.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals

Prime looting position
These gangs were put in a prime position to loot food from the United Nations’ long-established aid distribution system and sell it on the black market. The looting helped Israel falsely claim both that Hamas was stealing aid from the UN and that the international body had proven itself unfit to run humanitarian operations in Gaza.

Israel and the US then set about creating a mercenary front group — misleadingly called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — to run a sham replacement operation.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals.

They are located in a narrow strip of territory next to the border with Egypt. Palestinians are forced to ethnically cleanse themselves into a tiny area of Gaza — if they are to stand any hope of eating — in preparation for their expulsion into Sinai.

They have been herded into a massively congested area without the space or facilities to cope, where the spread of disease is guaranteed, and where they can be more easily massacred by Israeli bombs.

An increasingly malnourished population must walk long distances and wait in massive crowds in the heat in the hope of small handouts of food. It is a situation engineered to heighten tensions, and lead to chaos and fighting.

All of which provide an ideal pretext for Israeli soldiers to halt “aid distribution” pre-emptively in the interests of “public safety” and shoot into the crowds to “neutralise threats”, as has happened to lethal effect day after day.

Repeated ‘aid hub’ massacres
The repeated massacres at these “aid hubs” mean that the most vulnerable — those most in need of aid — have been frightened off, leaving gang members like Abu Shabab’s to enjoy the spoils.

On Wednesday, Israel massacred at least 60 Palestinians, most of them seeking food, in what has already become normalised, a daily ritual of bloodletting that is already barely making headlines.

And to add insult to injury, Israel has misrepresented its own drone footage of the very criminal gangs it arms, looting aid from trucks and shooting Palestinian aid-seekers as supposed evidence of Hamas stealing food and of the need for Israel to control aid distribution.

All of this is so utterly transparent, and repugnant, it is simply astonishing it has not been at the forefront of Western coverage as politicians and media worry about how “intolerable the situation” in Gaza has become.

Instead, the media has largely taken it as read that Hamas “steals aid”. The media has indulged an entirely bogus Israeli-fuelled debate about the need for aid distribution “reform”.

And the media has equivocated about whether it is Israeli soldiers shooting dead those seeking aid.

Of course, the media has refused to draw the only reasonable conclusion from all of this: that Israel is simply exploiting the chaos it has created to buy time for its starvation campaign to kill more Palestinians.

Calibrated warlordism
But there is much more at stake. Israel is fattening up these criminal gangs for a grander, future role in what used to be termed the “day after” — until it became all too clear that the period in question would follow the completion of Israel’s genocide.

It comes as no surprise to any Palestinian to hear confirmation from Netanyahu that Israel has been arming criminal gangs in Gaza, even those with affiliations to Islamic State.

It should not surprise any journalist who has spent serious time, as I have, living in a Palestinian community and studying Israel’s colonial control mechanisms over Palestinian society.

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians – if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland – has been of carefully calibrated warlordism

Palestinian academics have understood for at least two decades — long before Hamas’ lethal one-day break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023 — why Israel has invested so much of its energy in dismantling bit by bit the institutions of Palestinian national identity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The goal, they have been telling me and anyone else who would listen, was to leave Palestinian society so hollowed out, so crushed by the rule of feuding criminal gangs, that statehood would become inconceivable.

As the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada observes of what is taking place in Gaza: “Israel is NOT using [the gangs] to go after Hamas, they’re using them to destroy Gaza itself from the inside.”

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians — if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland — has been of carefully calibrated warlordism. Israel would arm a series of criminal families in their geographic heartlands.

Each would have enough light arms to terrorise their local populations into submission, and fight neighbouring families to define the extent of their fiefdom.

None would have the military power to take on Israel. Instead they would have to compete for Israel’s favour — treating it like some inflated Godfather —  in the hope of securing an advantage over rivals.

In this vision, the Palestinians — one of the most educated populations in the Middle East – are to be driven into a permanent state of civil war and “survival of the fittest” politics. Israel’s ambition is to eviscerate Palestinian social cohesion as effectively as it has bombed Gaza’s cities “into the Stone Age”.

Divinely blessed
This is a simple story, one that should be all too familiar to European publics if they were educated in their own histories.

For centuries, Europeans spread outwards — driven by a supremacist zealotry and a desire for material gain — to conquer the lands of others, to steal resources, and to subordinate, expel and exterminate the natives that stood in their way.

The native people were always dehumanised. They were always barbarians, “human animals”, even as we — the members of a supposedly superior civilisation — butchered them, starved them, levelled their homes, destroyed their crops.

Our mission of conquest and extermination was always divinely blessed. Our success in eradicating native peoples, our efficiency in killing them, was always proof of our moral superiority.

We were always the victims, even while we humiliated, tortured and raped. We were always on the side of righteousness.

Israel has simply carried this tradition into the modern era. It has held a mirror up to us and shown that, despite all our grandstanding about human rights, nothing has really changed.

There are a few, like Greta Thunberg and the crew of the Madleen, ready to show by example that we can break with the past. We can refuse to dehumanise. We can refuse to collude in industrial savagery. We can refuse to give our consent through silence and inaction.

But first we must stop listening to the siren calls of our political leaders and the billionaire-owned media. Only then might we learn what it means to be human.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

If there is one thing we can thank US President Donald Trump for, it is this: he has decisively stripped away the ridiculous notion, long cultivated by Western media, that the United States is a benign global policeman enforcing a “rules-based order”.

Washington is better understood as the head of a gangster empire, embracing 800 military bases around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been aggressively seeking “global full-spectrum domination”, as the Pentagon doctrine politely terms it.

You either pay fealty to the Don or you get dumped in the river. Last Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was presented with a pair of designer concrete boots at the White House.

The innovation was that it all happened in front of the Western press corps, in the Oval Office, rather than in a back room, out of sight. It made for great television, Trump crowed.

Pundits have been quick to reassure us that the shouting match was some kind of weird Trumpian thing. As though being inhospitable to state leaders, and disrespectful to the countries they head, is unique to this administration.

Take just the example of Iraq. The administration of Bill Clinton thought it “worth it” – as his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, infamously put it — to kill an estimated half a million Iraqi children by imposing draconian sanctions through the 1990s.

Under Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, the US then waged an illegal war in 2003, on entirely phoney grounds, that killed around half a million Iraqis, according to post-war estimates, and made four million homeless.

Those worrying about the White House publicly humiliating Zelensky might be better advised to save their concern for the hundreds of thousands of mostly Ukrainian and Russian men killed or wounded fighting an entirely unnecessary war — one, as we shall see, Washington carefully engineered through Nato over the preceding two decades.

Henchman Zelensky
All those casualties served the same goal as they did in Iraq: to remind the world who is boss.

Uniquely, Western publics don’t understand this simple point because they live inside a disinformation bubble, created for them by the Western establishment media.

Henry Kissinger, the long-time steward of US foreign policy, famously said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Zelensky just found that out the hard way. Gangster empires are just as fickle as the gangsters we know from Hollywood movies. Under the previous Joe Biden administration, Zelensky had been recruited as a henchman to do Washington’s bidding on Moscow’s doorstep.

The background — the one Western media have kept largely out of view — is that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US tore up treaties crucial to reassuring Russia of Nato’s good intent.

Viewed from Moscow, and given Washington’s track record, Nato’s European security umbrella must have looked more like preparation for an ambush.

Keen though Trump now is to rewrite history and cast himself as peacemaker, he was central to the escalating tensions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2019, he unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That opened the door to the US launching a potential first strike on Russia, using missiles stationed in nearby Nato members Romania and Poland.

He also sent Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, a move avoided by his predecessor, Barack Obama, for fear it would be seen as provocative.

Repeatedly, Nato vowed to bring Ukraine into its fold, despite Russia’s warnings that the step was viewed as an existential threat, that Moscow could not allow Washington to place missiles on its border, any more than the US accepted Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba back in the early 1960s.

Washington pressed ahead anyway, even assisting in a colour revolution-style coup in 2014 against the elected government in Kyiv, whose crime was being a little too sympathetic to Moscow.

With the country in crisis, Zelensky was himself elected by Ukrainians as a peace candidate, there to end a brutal civil war — sparked by that coup — between anti-Russian, “nationalistic” forces in the country’s west and ethnic Russian populations in the east. The Ukrainian President soon broke that promise.

Trump has accused Zelensky of being a “dictator”. But if he is, it is only because Washington wanted him that way, ignoring the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians.

Reddest of red lines
Zelensky’s job was to play a game of chicken with Moscow. The assumption was that the US would win whatever the outcome.

Either Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff would be called. Ukraine would be welcomed into Nato, becoming the most forward of the alliance’s forward bases against Russia, allowing nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to be stationed minutes from Moscow.

Or Putin would finally make good on his years of threats to invade his neighbour to stop Nato crossing the reddest of red lines he had set over Ukraine.

Washington could then cry “self-defence” on Ukraine’s behalf, and ludicrously fearmonger Western publics about Putin eyeing Poland, Germany, France and Britain next.

Those were the pretexts for arming Kyiv to the hilt, rather than seeking a rapid peace deal. And so began a proxy war of attrition against Russia, using Ukrainian men as cannon fodder.

The aim was to wear Russia down militarily and economically, and bring about Putin’s overthrow.

Zelensky did precisely what was demanded of him. When he appeared to waver early on, and considered signing a peace deal with Moscow, Britain’s prime minister of the time, Boris Johnson, was dispatched with a message from Washington: keep fighting.

That is the same Boris Johnson who now breezily admits that the West is fighting a “proxy war” against Russia.

Hmm, maybe someone can help me.

How was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine entirely ‘unprovoked’, when the British leader in charge at the time, Boris Johnson, now admits Nato viewed Ukraine as the battlefield for a ‘proxy war’ against Russia? 🤯 pic.twitter.com/VS6jRE03gH

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 24, 2025

His comments have generated precisely no controversy. That is particularly strange, given that critics who pointed this very obvious fact out three years ago were instantly denounced for spreading “Putin disinformation” and Kremlin “talking points”.

For his obedience, Zelensky was feted a hero, the defender of Europe against Russian imperialism. His every “demand” — demands that originated in Washington — was met.

Ukraine has received at least $250 billion worth of guns, tanks, fighter jets, training for his troops, Western intelligence on Russia, and other forms of aid.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have paid with their lives — as have the families they leave behind.

Mafia etiquette
Now the old Don in Washington is gone. The new Don has decided Zelensky has been an expensive failure. Russia isn’t lethally wounded. It’s stronger than ever. Time for a new strategy.

Zelensky, still imagining he was Washington’s favourite henchman, arrived at the Oval Office only to be taught a harsh lesson in mafia etiquette.

Trump is spinning his stab in the back as a “peace agreement”. And in some sense, it is. Rightly, Trump has concluded that Russia has won — unless the West is ready to fight World War III and risk a potential nuclear war.

Trump has faced up to the reality of the situation, even if Zelensky and Europe are still struggling to.

Trump’s overt ‘genocidal’ warning over Gaza.   Video: TRT World News

But his plan for Ukraine is actually just a variation of his other peace plan — the one for Gaza. There he wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and, on the bodies of the enclave’s many thousands of dead children, build the “Riviera of the Middle East” — or “Trump Gaza” as it is being called in a surreal video he shared on social media.

In telling the “people of Gaza”, they will be “DEAD” if the hostages aren’t released – something they can’t decide – Trump is expressing clear genocidal intent. He’a also sending the arms to make that genocide possible.

He needs to be in the ICC dock alongside Netanyahu. pic.twitter.com/eomkGP6eWe

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 6, 2025

Similarly, Trump now sees Ukraine not as a military battlefield but as an economic one where, through clever deal-making, he can leverage riches for himself and his billionaire pals.

He has put a gun to Zelensky and Europe’s head. Make a deal with Russia to end the war, or you are on your own against a far superior military power. See if the Europeans can help you without a supply of Washington’s weapons.

Not surprisingly, Zelensky, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron huddled together at the weekend to find a deal that would appease Trump. All Starmer has revealed so far is that the plan will “stop the fighting”.

That is a good thing. But the fighting could have been stopped, and should have been stopped, three years ago.

Money, not peace
It is deeply unwise to be lulled into tribalism by all this — the very tribalism Western elites seek to cultivate among their publics to keep us treating international affairs no differently from a high-stakes football match.

No one here has behaved, or is behaving, honourably.

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately.

An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

Zelensky now understands this. He knows that he, and the people of Ukraine, have been scammed. That is what tends to happen when you cosy up to the mafia.

If anyone doubts Washington’s insincerity over Ukraine, look to Palestine for clarity.

In his earlier presidency, Trump tried to bring about what he termed the peace “deal of the century” whose centrepiece was the annexation of much of the Occupied West Bank.

The hope was that the Gulf states would ultimately fund an incentivisation programme — the carrot to Israel’s stick — to encourage Palestinians to make a new life in a giant, purpose-built industrial zone in Sinai, next to Gaza.

That plan is still simmering away in the background. At the weekend, Israel received a green light from Washington to revive its genocidal starvation of Gaza’s population, after Israel refused to negotiate the second phase of the original ceasefire agreement.

The Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now spinning their own bad faith as Hamas “rejectionism”.

They and the echo chamber that is the Western media are blaming the Palestinian group for refusing to be gulled into an “extension” of what was never more than a phoney ceasefire — Israel’s fire never ceased. Israel wants all the hostages back, without having to leave Gaza, so that Hamas has no leverage to stop Israel reviving the full genocide.

The people of Gaza are still being fed into the Washington mafia’s meatgrinder, just as the Ukrainian people have been.

Trump wants them out of the way so he can develop a Mediterranean playground for the rich, paid for with Gulf oil money and the so-far untapped natural gas reserves just off Gaza’s coast.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t pretend that Ukraine and Gaza are anything more than geostrategic real estate for Washington.

The big shakedown
Zelensky’s shakedown did not come out of the blue. Trump and his officials had been flagging it well in advance.

Two weeks ago, the industrial correspondent for Britain’s Daily Telegraph wrote an article headlined “Here’s why Trump wants to make Ukraine a US economic colony”.

Trump’s team believes that Ukraine may have rare-earth minerals under the ground worth some $15 trillion — a treasure trove that will be critical to the development of the next generation of technology.

In their view, controlling the exploration and extraction of those minerals will be as important as control over the Middle East’s oil reserves was more than a century ago.

And most important of all, the US wants China, its chief economic — if not military — rival excluded from the plunder. China currently has an effective monopoly on many of these critical minerals.

Or as the Telegraph puts it, Ukraine’s “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.

A draft of the plan seen by the Telegraph would, in its words, “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity”.

Washington wants first refusal on all deposits within the country.

At their Oval Office confrontation, Trump reiterated this goal: “So we’re going to be using that [Ukraine’s rare earth minerals], taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI, and including weapons, and the military. And it’s really going to very much satisfy our needs.”

All of this means that Trump has a keen incentive to get the war finished as quickly as possible, and Russia’s territorial advance halted. The more territory Moscow seizes, the less territory is left for the US to plunder.

Self-sabotage
The battle against China over rare-earth minerals isn’t a Trump innovation either — and adds an additional layer of context for why Washington and Nato have been so keen over the past two decades to prise Ukraine away from Russia.

Last summer, a Congressional select committee on competition with China announced the formation of a working group to counter Beijing’s “dominance of critical minerals”.

The chairman of the committee, John Moolenaar, noted that the current US dependence on China for these minerals “would quickly become an existential vulnerability in the event of a conflict”.

Another committee member, Rob Wittman, observed: “Dominance over global supply chains for critical mineral and rare earth elements is the next stage of great power competition.”

What Trump appears to appreciate is that Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has, by default, driven Moscow deeper into Beijing’s embrace. It has been self-sabotage on a grand scale.

Together, China and Russia are a formidable opponent, and one at the centre of the ever-growing Brics group — comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They have been seeking to expand their alliance by adding emerging powers to become a counterweight to Washington and Nato’s bullying global agenda.

But a deal with Putin over Ukraine would provide an opportunity for Washington to build a new security architecture in Europe — one more useful to the US — that places Russia inside the tent rather than outside it.

That would leave China isolated — a long-time Pentagon goal.

And it would also leave Europe less central to the projection of US power, which is why European leaders — led by Keir Starmer — have been looking and sounding so unnerved over the past few weeks.

The danger is that Trump’s “peacemaking” in Ukraine simply becomes a prelude to the fomenting of a war against China, using Taiwan as the pretext in the same way Ukraine was used against Russia.

As Moolenaar implied, US control over critical minerals — in Ukraine and elsewhere — would ensure the US was no longer vulnerable in the event of a war with China to losing access to the minerals it would need to continue the war. It would free Washington’s hand.

Trump may be behaving in a vulgar manner. But the gangster empire he now heads is conducting the same global shakedown as ever.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

A media studies professor at Qatar’s Doha Institute for Graduate Studies has completed empirical studies examining Western media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza — and his findings have been highly critical.

Professor Mohamad Elmasry found that Western media have failed to do much more than “parrot Israeli propaganda regarding al-Shifa Hospital [in Gaza City] and the war more generally”.

Western news outlets, such as BBC, CNN, Sky News, MSNBC, Fox News — and others that are frequent sources of news in New Zealand — “tended to rely overwhelmingly on Israeli and pro-Israeli sources,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Palestinian sources were mostly neglected as were pro-Palestinian sources.

“It’s not a conspiracy; it’s not as though journalists are showing up to work and saying, ‘we’re really going to make the Israelis look good today’.

“But there is a structural problem [in the media] today,” Dr Elmasry added.

“Western news organisations simply do not get Israel-Palestine right.”

US ‘scoffs’ at international law
In a separate interview yesterday, Dr Elmasry blamed the United States for ignoring international law to lead the world to “where we are” over the ongoing Gaza genocide with no end in sight.

“About 95 percent of Israel’s weapons come from the United States and Germany, so as long as those countries scoff at the idea of international law, we won’t get anywhere with the calls for an arms embargo against Israel,” Dr Elmasry said.

Professor Mohamad Elmasry on why there is a stalemate over Gaza genocide. Video: Al Jazeera

“There has been a suggestion that there might be a draft resolution put forward at the United Nations Security Council,” he added.

“There is no question in my mind that nearly all of the countries on the Security Council would support that resolution”.

All countries except for the US, Dr Elmasry added.

“There is also no question in my mind that the United States would veto it, so one of the reasons why we are where we are is because of the United States.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA are working in top newsrooms across the United States, writing and producing America’s news — including on Israel-Palestine, reports a new investigation.

These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News, says the MintPress News inquiry written by Alan MacLeod.

“Some of these former lobbyists are responsible for producing content on Israel and Palestine — a gigantic and undisclosed conflict of interest,” MacLeod writes.

“Many key US 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 MintPress News investigation is part of a series detailing Israel’s influence on American media.

An earlier report exposed the former Israeli spies and military intelligence officials working in US newsrooms.

“The fight for control over the Israel-Palestine narrative has been as intense as the war on the ground itself,” writes MacLeod.

Criticised for ‘distinct bias’
“US media have been widely criticised for displaying a distinct bias towards the Israeli perspective.”

However, MacLeod said this new investigation had revealed “not only is the press skewed in favour 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 organisations, 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 US participation in what a wide range of international organisations have described as a genocide.”

The report author, 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 and writes for a range of publications.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says Israel has stepped up systematic attacks on journalists and media infrastructure since the start of its northern Gaza campaign.

Israeli strikes killed at least five journalists in October and Israeli forces began a smear campaign against six Al Jazeera journalists reporting on the north, the global media watchdog said in a statement.

“There are now almost no professional journalists left in the north to document what several international institutions have described as an ethnic cleansing campaign. Israel has not allowed international media independent access to Gaza in the 13 months since the war began,” CPJ said.

“It seems clear that the systematic attacks on the media and campaign to discredit those few journalists who remain is a deliberate tactic to prevent the world from seeing what Israel is doing there,” said CPJ programme director Carlos Martinez de la Serna.

“Reporters are crucial in bearing witness during a war, without them the world won’t be able to write history.”

“The situation is catastrophic and beyond description,” a camera operator for the privately owned Al-Ghad TV, Abed AlKarim Al-Zwaidi, told CPJ.

“We do not know what our fate will be in light of these circumstances.”

Media watchdogs have varying figures on the death toll of Gazan journalists, but the Palestine Media Office reports at least 184 have been killed in the Israeli war on the enclave.

Could not answer questions
The IDF responded on October 31 to CPJ’s email requesting comment on these killings, repeating previous statements it could not fully address questions if sufficient details about individuals were not provided.

The statement reiterated previous comments that it “directs its strikes only towards military targets and military operatives, and does not target civilian objects and civilians, including media organisations and journalists.”

CPJ is also investigating reports that two other journalists were killed during this time in northern Gaza.

Al Jazeera report on the Amsterdam clashes.  Video: AJ

Meanwhile, the UN Special Reporteur on the Occupied Palestine Territories, Francesca Albanese, has called for Western media to be investigated over their coverage of the clashes between Israeli football fans and locals in the Dutch city of Amsterdam.

The call came after some Western media outlets failed to report on or minimised the actions of the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv ahead of and during the confrontations on Friday.

“Once again, Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities,” Albanese said in a post on X.

“In other contexts, international tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other international crimes.”

Once again. Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities. In other contexts, intl tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other intl crimes. https://t.co/YGBA9cpxNW

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) November 9, 2024

In one video from the clashes, Israeli fans were heard singing: “Let the [Israeli army] win, and f*** the Arabs!” while another showed them tearing down a Palestinian flag from a building.

A timeline distributed on social media clearly indicated how the Israeli fans provoked the attack by their own violence, but this was largely ignored by Western media.

We are witnessing the total collapse of journalism. Instead, cognitive dissonance and blatant falsehoods reign supreme. Did anyone expect anything different from Western and Zionist media? pic.twitter.com/7vPP4dnaxm

— red. (@redstreamnet) November 8, 2024

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

The death toll has risen to 12 from Israel’s terror attack in Lebanon on Tuesday which detonated explosive materials hidden in thousands of pagers.

Another 20 people were then killed in another attack the following day with a second wave of explosions, this time using walkie talkies and home solar energy systems.

The total death toll now sits at 32. Two children and four healthcare workers are among the dead. Thousands have been wounded.

As you would expect, Western empire managers are getting really squirmy about this.

White House spokesman John Kirby adamantly refused to answer any questions involving Israel’s responsibility for the attacks during a press conference on Wednesday, despite Israel being widely reported as the responsible party, with outlets like The New York Times citing US officials as their source.

“I’m not gonna speak to the details of these incidents,” Kirby said repeatedly when questioned about Israel’s role and what the US response will be.

It goes without saying that if a government like Russia, China or Iran were even suspected of being responsible for similar attacks, Kirby and his fellow podium people would be not just naming the suspected aggressor but fervently denouncing the attack as an act of terrorism.

Leaked memo
And it is here worth reminding readers that in 2017, a leaked State Department memo explained in plain language that it is standing US policy to overlook the abuses of US allies while denouncing the abuses of US enemies in order to undermine enemies and show other countries the perks of being aligned with the United States.

The memo showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line.

In a remarkable look into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponising them against nations who aren’t.

“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasising good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.

“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote.

“We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

“And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”

Highlight the discrepancies
“It’s tedious going “If Group X did this Western politicians and pundits would condemn it but because Group Y did it they’re fine with it” over and over again, but it’s important to highlight these discrepancies because they show how we’re being deceived.

Westerners are indoctrinated from birth into believing they live in a society that is basically good with governments that, while imperfect, are still far superior to the tyrants and corrupt autocrats of the global south.

In reality the Western power structure centralised around the United States is the single most murderous and tyrannical force on earth by an extremely massive margin, but that obvious fact is always omitted from the indoctrination curriculum.

By pointing out the glaring discrepancies between the way the Western political-media class responds to things like Israel turning electronic devices into thousands of bombs placed throughout civilian populations and the way they respond when other groups detonate explosives among civilians, you’re helping to punch holes in the veil of indoctrination they have cast over our collective understanding of the world.

The more you recognise that you only see your society as good and others as bad because of the way world events are framed by Western news media and politicians, the closer you get to having your “Are we the baddies?” epiphany.

Hypocrisy and contradiction are not great moral evils in and of themselves, but they often run cover for great moral evils. The fact that we are trained to think about the world by people who facilitate great evils perpetrated by their own side when they’d condemn identical evils committed by their enemies shows that they do not stand against evil, and are deeply evil themselves.

Recognising the problems in our world is the first step to solving them. That’s what the propagandists and empire managers work to prevent us from doing, and that’s what we try to do by pointing out the glaring plot holes and inconsistencies in their narratives over and over again.

Mock their denunciations
The correct thing to do when Western leaders talk about human rights or denounce abuses by enemy governments is to mock them and dismiss them. They’re not saying anything true about their actual values and beliefs; if they were there wouldn’t be so much hypocrisy in the way they denounce governments they don’t like for offences they ignore and make excuses for in governments they do like.

They’re never saying what they’re saying to stop human rights abuses or make the world a better place, they’re only saying what they’re saying to undermine their enemies so that the Western empire can rule the world and be the only one administering abuse.

And the same is true of the mainstream Western press. You’ll see them completely ignore the abuses of US-aligned governments while showing immense interest in alleged abuses by empire-targeted groups, often on very flimsy evidence.

Mock them and dismiss them when they act like they care about human rights abuses. They don’t care. They just want to make sure the abusive power structure they conduct propaganda for is the one in charge.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

More than two dozen Palestinian journalists had called for a boycott of the dinner, writing an open letter urging their American colleagues not to attend.

“You have a unique responsibility to speak truth to power and uphold journalistic integrity,” said the letter from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

“It is unacceptable to stay silent out of fear or professional concern while journalists in Gaza continue to be detained, tortured, and killed for doing our jobs.”

‘It hurts our souls’
Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary was one of the signatories of the letter calling for the boycott.

She spoke to the network from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, saying she did not “have the words” to describe what she had been going through.

“This isn’t something that has been ending. It has been continuous every single day for more than 200 days.

“We have been killed, displaced and homeless, and we’re not only reporting on this, but we’re also living it with every single detail.

“We’re living this war in all aspects of life. We have not seen our families as journalists. We have not been able to eat well. We have been dehydrated.

“We have been reporting in one of the harshest conditions any reporter can go through despite losing a lot of colleagues, and it hurts our souls and our hearts every single day.

“We have been constantly targeted by the Israeli air strikes and shelling.

“All of these daily things we have been living as journalists are overwhelming [and] exhausting, but we still continue because there have been at least 100 Palestinian journalists whom I personally know that have been killed since October 7.

“If they were here today with us, they would be reporting, and they would be raising the voice of the voiceless Palestinians.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Mazin Qumsiyeh

It is so hard for me to write today — too many tears. The US-supported Israeli occupation forces’ crimes continue daily but some days are harder than others.

Shireen Abu Akleh, wearing a blue helmet and vest with “PRESS” written over it has been assassinated by Israeli occupation forces.

All journalists on the scene explained how Israeli snipers simply targeted journalists. The first three bullets were a miss, then a hit on one male journalist (in the back). Then when Shireen shouted that he was hit, she was killed with a bullet beneath the ear.

Shireen was also a US citizen (she was a Bethlehemite Christian who lived in Jerusalem). But that is no protection.

Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli military bulldozer and killed intentionally in Rafah two decades ago and the killers were rewarded. Both killings happened as the world was distracted by other conflicts (Iraq and now Ukraine).

The US government cares nothing about its own citizens because politicians are under the thumb of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Thousands of others were killed and the murderers still roam free and are funded by US taxpayers.

War crimes and crimes against humanity continue daily here. The US government is a partner in crime (just note how the US Ambassador simply hoped for an investigation — why not send the FBI to investigate the murder of countless US citizens). The events and the reaction in Western corporate (“mainstream”) media and Western governments makes us so mad.

Same day murder of teenager
If you are not outraged to act, you are not human. In the same day today the apartheid forces murdered 15-year-old Thaer Alyazouri as he was returning from school.

As we pointed out before, Palestine remains the fulcrum and the litmus test and it exposes hypocrisy and collusion.

It is actually the achilles heel for Western propaganda. Like with South Africa under apartheid, Western leaders’ empty rhetoric of human rights and democracy is exposed by their direct support for apartheid and murder.

May this intentional murder of a journalist finally be the straw that breaks the back of hypocrisy, Zionism and imperialism.

Millions of people mourn this brave journalist murdered by a fascist racist regime. Millions will rededicate themselves to challenge Western hypocrisy and US-supported Israeli crimes against humanity.

The Nakba atrocities
My 90-year-old mother born before the Nakba told me about the atrocities done since 1948 and before by the terrorist Zionist militias in their quest to colonise Palestine. From the first terrorist attack (and yes, Zionists were first to use terrorism like bombing markets or hijacking airplanes) to the 33 massacres during the 1948-1950 ethnic cleansing of Palestine (Tantura, Deir Yassin etc).

We will not forget nor forgive. Justice is key to peace here and justice begins with ending the nightmare called Zionism and prosecuting its leaders and collaborators and funders in real fair trials.

Only then will Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all others flourish in this land of Palestine. Palestine will then retun to be a multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious society instead of a racist apartheid state of Israel.

It is inevitable but we can accelerate it with our actions.

We honour Shireen, Rachel and more than 110,000 martyrs by acting as they did: telling truth, challenging evil deeds, working for justice (which is a prerequisite for peace).

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities. He previously served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee, Duke, and Yale Universities. He and his wife returned to Palestine in 2008, starting a number of institutions and projects such as a clinical genetics laboratory that serves cancer and other patients. Qumsiyeh has been harassed and arrested for non-violent actions but also received a number of awards for these same actions.

Veteran Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israeli forces: Live news https://t.co/5B5gkk1MKI

— El_Grillo (@El_Grillo1) May 11, 2022

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Colleen Murrell in Melbourne

For journalists who cover Afghanistan, the bombing that killed nine local reporters last week in Kabul was a sober reminder of the dangers the media continue to face in the country’s seemingly endless conflict.

The victims were not well-known foreign correspondents, but a group of courageous Afghan photographers, reporters and cameramen who had gone to report on another bomb blast that had exploded about 40 minutes earlier.

They included a photographer from the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), as well as contributors to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and several local media companies.

READ MORE: Free media week killings underscore crimes of impunity against journalists

Elsewhere on the same day, a 10th journalist was shot dead – a reporter for the BBC’s Pashto service, Ahmad Shah.

According to Reporters Without Borders, it was the deadliest single day for journalists in the country since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

-Partners-

The principal way we receive news from conflict zones like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq is via eyewitnesses on social media and the global news agencies – AFP, Associated Press and Reuters. Agency reporters are often the first “media responders” to deadly incidents like suicide bombings and terror attacks. They also negotiate with local reporters on the ground to secure the best pictures, which then get relayed to the thousands of media companies around the world who subscribe to their services.

To feed this beast of global 24/7 news coverage, there is still an expectation that agency journalists will dare to tread where others will not.

Journalists as targets
Increasingly, this has become even more dangerous, as extremist groups like the Islamic State have shifted tactics to specifically target journalists.

The Afghan Journalists Safety Committee warned of “an unprecedented increase in threats and violence against journalists” in a 2017 report:

Increased threats from DAESH to media and journalists have created a new wave of concerns about the security of journalists and media. What is seriously worrying is the group’s direct attacks against media, which in 2017 is responsible for the vast majority of journalists’ deaths.

Reporters Without Borders says 34 journalists and media workers have died in attacks by the Islamic State and Taliban in Afghanistan since the start of 2016. The situation has become so dire that the group has called on the United Nations to appoint a special representative dedicated to protecting the lives of journalists. The proposal has been backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and the German Parliament.

Without adequate security provisions, journalists have also been abandoning countries that have become too dangerous, Reporters Without Borders notes in its 2017 annual report on reporters killed in the line of duty.

AFP continues to operate with a team of two or three foreign journalists in Kabul, backed up by seven full-time Afghan journalists and various stringers working across the country. Reuters employs just one foreign correspondent and one local journalist in Kabul, and AP has two local reporters and two local photographers.

Former BBC journalist Bilal Sarwary, who now works as a freelancer, tells me there are very few Western journalists left in Afghanistan because “Iraq and then Syria have commanded their attention” in recent years. He said The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post still have reporters based in the country, but now rely almost entirely on freelance photographers.

Responding to the new reality
Under global news director Michèle Léridon, AFP has been highly innovative at adapting to news gathering challenges, but also strict in its policy of not being made stooges by terrorists. According to Phil Chetwynd, AFP’s global editor-in-chief, the company is constantly evaluating its security procedures.

We have always been cautious about rushing to the scene of attacks. We have moved our office several times in Kabul to find a better location as the threat level has changed. We have sent security experts to review our procedures and to recommend physical reinforcements and measures to our buildings.

We have also sent reporters on hostile environment courses and sent trainers to Kabul to train all staff including non-journalists. The message to all our reporters remains that security comes first.

Chetwynd notes the suicide bomber who killed the nine Afghan journalists in Kabul last week – a group that included AFP photographer Shah Marai – had apparently been posing as a fellow reporter, a new tactic by terror groups.

“We are already changing and reacting to this appalling new reality,” he says.

It’s clear that all media organisations need to constantly rethink their strategies when it comes to reporting in conflict zones.

Media scholars, too, are tackling the issue. At the upcoming International Communications Association conference in Prague later this month, I will be joining other academics on a panel titled “Voices in journalism: Local news staff producing international news” to discuss the latest research examining the working conditions of stringers, fixers and local journalists.

Researched challenges
One of the panellists, Saumava Mitra, has researched the work of photojournalists in Afghanistan and co-authored an essay last week on the challenges they face:

We have seen that local journalists usually have much poorer access to hostile-environment training, work-hazard insurance or even medical benefits from their employers. They face different threats and risks than those who parachute into the conflict and have nowhere to go if the situation escalates.

They are also much more prone to reprisals. The first step to help prevent their deaths is to acknowledge that the news we consume is often produced by journalists working under precarious conditions in hostile places.

Marai, for one, always knew the dangers of working in Kabul, as his blog on the AFP website so devastatingly shows. In it, he recounts how life changed for the worse when the Taliban returned to stage attacks in Kabul in the mid-2000s:

“I don’t dare to take my children for a walk. I have five and they spend their time cooped up inside the house. Every morning as I go to the office and every evening when I return home, all I think of are cars that can be booby-trapped, or of suicide bombers coming out of a crowd. I can’t take the risk. So we don’t go out.

“I have never felt life to have so little prospects and I don’t see a way out. It’s a time of anxiety.”

Dr Colleen Murrell is undergraduate coordinator for journalism at Monash University, Melbourne, and the author of Foreign Correspondents and International Newsgathering: The role of fixers.This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished on Asia Pacific Report under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz