As usual, we find Spengler's views intriguing and compelling, but we do not quite align with some of his broader political and economic perspectives. In any case, this essay may be good news to those who fear the ability of the US to organise another massive belligerent counter-revolutionary bloc, even if, at the end of the day, the only thing that counts is America’s nuclear muscle and whether the oligarchy in command will go for Armageddon or not.
It isn’t just poor Joe Biden who has aged ungracefully. The wealthy nations of the world are aging and the consequences will be far more painful than the passing humiliation of one Western leader.
Instead of cringing at the president’s agonizing attempts to prove his mental competence, we should look hard in the mirror. Dante couldn’t have invented a denizen of the Inferno who better metonymizes the senescence of the West.
Without an unprecedented (and practically impossible) sea-change in fertility, the working-age population of the high-income countries of the world (above US$16,000 in per capita GDP) will shrink by 20% during the present century. This will have disruptive economic consequences over time. It is already having disruptive consequences in global strategy.
Countries without children are indifferent to their future and apathetic about their present.
Graphic: Asia Times
As Grant Newsham reported on this site July 9, Japan failed to recruit half the military personnel it required last year. Colonel Newsham wrote: “The JSDF has never fought an actual war, but it suffered a crushing defeat last year – missing recruitment targets by 50%. The year before it was a 35% miss. And for years it has had 20% shortfalls. Thus, JSDF is something of an old, undermanned and overworked force.”
The Japanese don’t want to fight. Neither do the Germans, whose armed forces have shrunk since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Europeans and Japanese don’t want to fight. Why should they? Who will lay down his life for future generations, if there aren’t going to be any future generations?
In 2015, the Gallup Poll asked citizens of more than sixty countries whether they were willing to fight for their country. Japan came in dead last with an affirmative rate of just 11%. By no coincidence, Japan ranks close to the bottom in terms of fertility. Israeli Jews, with a fertility rate of three children per female, are the sole instance in the upper-right-hand quadrant of the chart below.
There is a strong relationship between fertility and fighting spirit among the world’s industrial nations.
Graphic: Asia Times
The Ukraine war engages a few hundred thousand combat troops on the same land where millions fought during World War II. When the Soviets recaptured Kharkov in 1943, they threw 1.2 million men at the city and lost 200,000 of them. Russia has perhaps a hundredth of that number around the city today.
For all the demands on America’s NATO allies to bulk up their armies, the opposite is happening. Japan and Germany, the American allies with economies big enough to make a difference in defense spending, are quietly abandoning their commitments to higher defense outlays.
Japan pledged 43 trillion yen (US$272 billion) in defense spending through 2027, mainly in the form of procurement of US F35s and other expensive foreign hardware. But Japan calculated its procurement costs at an exchange rate of 108 yen to the dollar, compared with around 160 yen currently. That implies a drastic cut in actual procurement.
Germany’s budget negotiations last week, meanwhile, eliminated most of the planned increase in the German defense budget. “I got much less than I signed up for,” complained defense minister Boris Pistorius, “and that really aggravates me.” Germany’s armed forces have shrunk since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 1989, the country had 12 combat-ready divisions. Today it can’t field one.
China shrank its military as fertility fell. Including reservists and paramilitary police, its armed forces total 4 million, versus 3.4 million active duty, reservists and civilian employees for the US, which has a quarter of China’s population.
But China has reduced the size of its land-based army by half while bulking up its missile capacity, navy and air force. Never again will China launch mass infantry attacks as during the Korean War. It has too few sons and cannot afford to expend them. It prefers the kind of war that’s conducted at a computer terminal in a bunker.
In this case, the Chinese are right. All the cajoling in the world won’t persuade the Europeans to sacrifice their depleted young manhood in land wars.America’s NATO allies will promise to spend more and recruit more soldiers, and their plans will dissolve before the ink is dry.
Japan already has an old-age dependency ratio of 50. That is, there are 50 elderly for every 100 working-age Japanese. Europe will get there by 2035, China by 2055, and the United States by 2075.
Japan has attempted to ease its way into a collective dotage by investing its savings overseas, building a net international asset position of $3.5 trillion (America has a net international position of negative $18 trillion).
China, with more planning and foresight, seeks to harness the labor of hundreds of millions of young workers in the Global South by building infrastructure and exporting its technology. The United States has no plan at all.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. Follow him on X at @davidpgoldman
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
I'm watching my son drink water nervously. It's my water and there seems to be more backwashing than forward drinking. Then I feel nauseous, not because of that, because of all the children that aren't drinking clean water at all. Gaza is the epicenter of a global epic. The rise and fall of White Empire. It was genocide all the way up, and all the way down. Genocide is the worst because it's the killing of everything, so everything human empathetic feeling is poisoned. We also have families and homes and don't like seeing our children's heads blown off. These are not hard feelings to have. But, by Allah, these feelings are hard.
I was watching a baby girl running across the play area, crying about something. The boy next to me said he was going to hit whoever made her cry, which roused his father from his phone call. “No hitting! No hitting!”“Good fellow,” I thought to myself. Then I thought about the children that have something to really cry about. The kids whose mothers won't sweep them up and make it all right. The mothers who can't do that for their children. That's the thing about a genocide. If you have a heart, it gets you right in the heart.
Drinking water, eating food, going to the bathroom, kids need all of that stuff constantly. My kids are constantly eating, drinking, or pooping and peeing, and everything has to be clean behind the scenes. This is a difficult task when we're travelling through hotels, but it's impossible when you're refugees inside a sealed concentration camp. The mind boggles, the heart shudders, the eyes bleed. Kids always need something, and Palestinian kids are kids like yours and mine. They also have basic needs, which are denied by America's most basic bitch 'Israel'.
Above all, kids need peace. There are parents in Gaza who can't do the most simple things for their children and, worst of all, they are physically and psychologically shattered themselves. When my wife and I are even a little bit stressed it effects everything in the household. I can't imagine what these families are going through, except I can. This is the trauma America and 'Israel' have inflicted on the entire global population. These fuckers had meetings about massacres, and then meetings about the media strategy after that, and then adjusted their stock portfolios accordingly. I feel so much fury. I wish my pen was a Yassin 105, truly.
Kids always need something, and Palestinian kids are kids like yours and mine. They also have basic needs, which are denied by America's most basic bitch 'Israel'.
All this while my daughter was home with her grandparents. Yesterday when I ran out of snacks, I went to their great-grandparents, who will always feed them. Honestly, I think they'd like to eat them. We live in a big extended family, like Palestinians. And 'Israel' has wiped out entire families, bombing shared apartment buildings, shelling them with tanks, or sniping them in the street. No family is intact in Gaza. Every house is damaged and every household bleeds. For those left, life is a fate worse than death. The individual is a lie, and the destruction of the family is death, truly. When you lose someone close to you, you know what it feels like. Now imagine losing everyone close to you. This is a living death for the survivors. May Allah compensate them so generously, their souls are martyred already. Such terrible things are really just a reflection of every good thing in life. Palestine has held up a mirror to the world and it's ugly.
Every good thing is poisoned by this genocide, because genocide is the destruction of everything. Every moment of peace is defiled by this total war. Every little experience is bitter because you know what's underneath. Obviously I forget it all the time, I forget a lot of things all the time, being an adult is mostly forgetting. But then I remember and it all turns to ashes in my mouth. I wonder what my eyes look like now. After Dinesh Anna was murdered, his siblings' eyes never looked the same. Have mine changed? I don't look in the mirror much, besides the black mirror, constantly. And therein I see 10 people murdered before breakfast. Am I fucked up now? Aren't we all? We don't talk about it, which I agree with. I hate talking about feelings. But I still have them.
To be honest, the same genocide that is happening to Gaza was happening to Iraq and Afghanistan before, America has killed at least 4.5 million people since 2001, each of them a whole universe. Genocide is the destruction of people in whole or in part, and America has been on the warpath against Muslims since 9/11. It's been so constant that it's just become background noise, but it's a genocide by any historical definition. America has displaced over 37 million in its War Of Terror, and that's just one theatre in their horrorshow. Gaza is the end of this long genocide, not the beginning at all.
Multimillionaire celebrity comics never bite the hand that feeds them, they only pretend to. With his phoney truthful news, Jon Stewart & Co. fooled a whole generation.
But, to be awful, I was there the whole time, and I didn't say anything. I didn't know. For most of those years I read the New York Times and Slate and watched Jon Stewart and thought I was informed. It was infernal. They missed some really important points, like the genocide that was going on the whole time. They called it Mess O'Potamia on the Daily Show and laughed. We can see it clearly now, the horror, but it was horrible back then too. Genocide was happening to 4.5 million souls during all those 'good' years, but that was buried more thoroughly than their bodies. The truth is that the White Empire was always evil, and the best liberal within it is actually your worst enemy. They waste your time, they waste your mind, and the earth turns to a wasteland while they're publishing reports. As the saying goes, a liberal opposes every war but the current war, and supports every civil rights movement but the current one. As Malcolm Anna said, it's the fox you have to worry about, not the wolf. No offense to foxes.
I grew up around foxes and I grew up thinking things that were positively genocidal like it was completely normal. I thought it was completely normal that America was invading Iraq, Saddam Hussein was bad, wasn't he? Wasn't he hanging out with the Devil in the South Park movie? I laughed. I thought America's enemies were obviously bad, and I had very strong opinions about random countries. I thought it was my business to discuss overthrowing governments and bombing them. I thought of these ideas myself. What the fuck was I thinking? What were so many people thinking? I was an entirely 'normal' person, and genocide was entirely normal!
That's the absolute mindfuck of this moment. For kids born this century it's pretty obvious that America is evil, but people that remember the 90s, we remember America being the good guys. Very few of us were Noam Chomsky (shout out to the OG haters), we were just normal chumps. I was. Just a fish flopping around in the historical stream of consciousness, not realizing that I was swimming in blood. It was all a bad dream, obviously a nightmare now, but we can't wake up. Now we can see everything happening around us, we can feel our bodies, but we can't move a finger. We're trapped in the American Dream. It's a waking nightmare now.
“No mere mortal can resist, the evil of the Thriller”
—Vincent Price
But back to my kids, because they don't quit. I've got to send the kids to school tomorrow, someplace these Palestinian children haven't gone for nine months now, there's another reflection in the horrorshow mirror again. I see the schools turned into shelters and the shelters bombed to bits. Palestinian lives are a reflection of mine and I can see everything clearer through it. And everything is bloody awful. My own perceptions, my own past, my own children. Everything is corrupted and worse, complicit.
Now I've been through the looking glass and I can't get out, actually. Smashed through it, completely, and there's blood everywhere, some of it mine I feel. Now I've seen things I can't unsee. If you have empathy you have to feel something and, if you don't, go fuck yourself. They say having a kid is like wearing your heart outside your body and I really feel it. I can't watch scary movies anymore, I just watch PG-13 Tamil romances and Chinese soap operas. If anything mildly bad is happening to a kid I turn it off immediately. But I can't turn off the news, can I? I never turn the news on at all, but it seeps in everywhere. There's so much blood, it can't be contained. How many dead children do you see before breakfast? I see a lot.
This is a repost showing that in the elites' media world truth is an unpleasant guest. The NYTimes has been running interference for Israel for generations.
This report refers to a previous depraved Israeli attack on Gaza, but it reads as fresh as if it was describing events concerning the ongoing genocide.
The New York Times’ reporting on Israel’s latest assault on Gaza has been a rollercoaster. Unfortunately the high points have been few, short and quickly followed by dizzying and prolonged plunges back into a morass of lazy, credulous recitations of Israeli government talking points, and efforts to portray balance and symmetry in a dramatically unbalanced situation, all permeated by an absence of skepticism and critical analysis, and a failure to explain context. Though Israel has slaughtered over 1000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza and only three civilians have been killed in Israel, in The Times’ upside down world, every Palestinian weapon is a major threat, while Israeli weapons are either defensive or non-existent.
At its worst The Times’ reporting on this crisis has reminded some readers of Judy Miller’s and Michael Gordon’s enthusiastic shilling for the US attack on Iraq. There is so much that could be written about these failures, but I’ll focus on a few highlights – The Times’ failure to examine Hamas’ involvement in kidnappings or the manipulation of information about Israeli teens’ deaths, The Times’ failure to explain basic context about Gaza, Times’ explainers that grossly distort reality, and the papers’ hyping of Palestinian military capacity, in contrast to the invisibility of Israel’s massive arsenal.
Failure to Examine Hamas’ Involvement in Kidnappings or the Manipulation of Information about Israeli Teens’ Deaths
The stage was set early by The Times’ reporting on the development of the current crisis. When the Israeli government launched a crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank, blaming Hamas for the abduction of three Israeli teens in early June, The Times generally repeated Israeli government claims of Hamas responsibility for the kidnapping, while also occasionally introducing some uncertainty about Hamas involvement, and at least once quoting Hamas denials of those claims. But The Times never published a piece examining the suspicious lack of clear evidence that Hamas was responsible, unlike Shlomi Eldar on Al Monitor or Sheera Frenkel on Buzzfeed. And in the last weeks, as some Israeli authorities have been quoted saying that they had concluded that Hamas was not responsible for the abductions and killings, The Times has not looked back. The growing consensus that the Israeli government based the escalation against Hamas that led directly to the current fighting in Gaza on false claims seems not to interest The Times.
Even more damning, however, The Times’ Jerusalem-based reporters never examined the revelation that the Israeli government likely knew from day one that the three teens were killed by their kidnappers within hours, even as the Israeli government launched a massive manhunt and PR campaign for their freedom, and claimed they were operating on the presumption that the teens were alive. Gunshots could be heard followed by a groan in an audiotape of a call from one of the teens to the police that was circulating in Israel. Additionally, shell casings, blood and DNA found in an abandoned car suggested the teens were killed there. The Israeli government placed this information under a gag order, but the rumor of gunshots on the audiotape were reported on social media almost immediately, and later detailed by outlets like this site on June 23.
The existence of the audiotape was brought to the attention of Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren on June 24 on skype by Mondoweiss reporter Allison Deger. Deger tweeted at Rudoren, “I’m sure @rudoren can find out about the emergency call details for herself if she wants to dig…” The seemingly out of it Rudoren responded on twitter to the series of tweets, “What recording?” Rather than seeking a scoop that might have contradicted the Israeli government narrative, The Times didn’t report on the recording until July 1, after the Israeli government lifted the gag order on the audiotape. Rudoren’s report on the call was minimal, and included no examination of the fact that the Israeli government very likely knew almost immediately that the teens were dead, though they told the public for weeks that they presumed them to be alive.
It was left to Times blogger Robert Mackey to publish a July 10 piece that did not make it into the print newspaper. Mackey questioned whether
“keeping salient facts of the investigation secret for weeks allowed a government-backed social-media campaign to channel outrage over the abductions to grow, but also set the public up for crushing disappointment once the bodies were discovered.”
That outrage, fed by the unexamined, dubious accusations against Hamas, led directly to overwhelming Israeli support for a brutal attack on Gaza. Times readers who did not read between the lines, read this Robert Mackey blog post, or seek out other sources of information were left largely in the dark about these key facts.
Failure to Explain Basic Context in Gaza
Times readers also probably lack an understanding of the broader context of the events in Gaza, again due to the paper’s poor reporting. In the run-up to Israel’s current assault on Gaza, The Times had neglected the Gaza Strip. According to my repeated searches of The New York Times’ website (which while thorough still could miss stories), Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza only one time during the 16 month period between December 2012 and April 2014. Rudoren defended this in a March 2014 email exchange with Mondoweiss by saying “we rely on our excellent Gaza-based stringer,” and noting some of the stories that they published. But it seems from the content of the articles that Fares Akram is not given much latitude in his reporting. During one seven-month period when Rudoren was completely absent from Gaza (8/13 – 3/14), I counted 27 New York Times stories reported from Gaza. Only five focused on the difficulties of life in Gaza, though those difficulties are severe.
My review of recent Times articles shows that the paper has generally failed to explain the basics: that most of Gaza’s residents are refugees from the area from which Israel launches attacks on Gaza, that Gaza remains under Israeli military occupation and a siege, and that Gaza is increasingly unlivable. The Times very infrequently uses the words occupation, siege and blockade to describe Gaza, and when it does they are most often in quotes from Palestinians. Over the last four weeks, The Times has noted a handful of times in a brief paragraph Israel’s control of land, sea and airspace around Gaza, and broached the words occupied and siege.
UN report was published that the UN has predicted that Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, may be unlivable by 2020 due to deteriorating drinking water quality, inadequate electricity supply and infrastructure, growing population and the impacts of Gaza’s isolation from the world. Finally, while The Times has reported on some of Israel’s attacks on and killing of Gazans throughout the ceasefire of the last two years, it has failed to explain that, “even when rocket fire comes to a halt as called for by the cease-fire agreement, Israel continues its violations with total impunity,” as documented by Yousef Munayyer at the Palestine Center.
Two Times’ “Explainers” that Grossly Misrepresent Reality
For the last 24 days The Times has published an online summary of “The Toll in Gaza and Israel, Day by Day” that depicts a completely false sense of near parity between Palestinian and Israeli military attacks. As of August 1, 2014 the summary notes “3,834 targets in Gaza struck by Israel” versus “2909 rockets launched at Israel by Gaza,” a ratio of 1.32 to 1. The showcasing of these figures, implying near parity, is suggestive of a desperate effort by The New York Times to provide a counter to the only other figures in “The Toll in Gaza and Israel” that show a stunning disparity between the number of Palestinian than Israeli deaths.
A series of July 30 tweets at Jodi Rudoren by Amnesty USA’s Middle East and North Africa Advocacy Director Sunjeev Bery explained that The New York Timescomparison between targets struck and rockets launched is misleading. Both figures come from the Israeli army, which has an interest in spinning the numbers. Also, the statistic on targets struck by Israel neglects “scale of IDF munitions.”One “target” in Gaza can be hit by multiple Israeli strikes of munitions of varied sizes. Plus, Israeli bombs and shells are on average significantly heavier than the small Palestinian rockets. Bery’s tweets of concern about these Times statistics wereseconded on twitter by Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson.
Closer analysis shows that Israel has probably shot and dropped more than five times the tonnage of ordnance that Palestinians have fired at Israel. As of July 16th, Human Rights Watch, reported, Israeli officials said that Israeli attacks in Gaza had “delivered more than 500 tons (1 million lbs) of explosives in missiles, aerial bombs, and artillery fire.” The New York Times “toll in Gaza” shows that 1274 rockets had been launched from Gaza at Israel by that date. Using the 65 kg (143 lbs) weight of a grad rocket frequently fired from Gaza as an average for a rocket from Gaza, Palestinians would have fired approximately 182,182 lbs of ordnance at Israel by that date. Thus Israel had fired approximately 5.49 times as much ordnance at Gaza as Palestinians had fired at Israel as of July 16th. This disparity has likely increased since then as Israel has intensified its attacks, including very heavy shelling. Furthermore, fired Palestinian ordnance is extremely inaccurate compared to targeted Israeli ordnance and thus far less likely to hit anything, and some Palestinian rockets are shot down by Israel’s “Iron Dome.”
Though the comparison between “targets in Gaza struck by Israel” and “rockets launched at Israel by Gaza” is inappropriate and deceptive, The New York Timeshas persisted in using it, even after the issue was raised with the paper by a number of people.
In contrast, in summarizing the Israel’s Operation Cast Lead which began in 2008, The Institute for Middle East Understanding notes, “a situation of relative quiet prevailed in and around Gaza until November 4, when Israeli soldiers staged a raid into the Strip, killing six members of Hamas. The attack… ended the ceasefire and led to an escalation of hostilities culminating in Cast Lead the following month.” The New York Times’sown report from November 4, 2008 explained, “Israel carried out an airstrike on Gaza on Tuesday night after its troops clashed with Hamas gunmen along the border in the first such confrontation since a cease-fire took effect in June. Five militants were killed…”
Robert Wright reported a detailed 2012 timeline developed by Emily Hauser. It included the November 4, 2012 killing of a mentally-disabled Palestinian, the November 8 killing of a Palestinian boy, the November 12 killing of four Palestinian fighters, Palestinian rockets fired into Israeli on November 11th, and then Israel’s assassination Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari and eight other Palestinians.
The most recent conflict can be traced back to the Israeli government’s aim of breaking up the new Fatah-Hamas endorsed Palestinian authority, the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens and then one Palestinian teen, and Israel’s crackdown against Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
To top off the misrepresentation that Hamas started the three conflicts, the “explainer” includes a graphic depicting “cumulative rockets fired at Israel from Gaza.” Perhaps realizing late in the game that “targets struck in Gaza by Israel” is fatally flawed, the new explainer thus depicts military attacks in the conflict as only by Palestinians. In summary, the explainer suggests that Palestinians started the conflict and implies that only Palestinians launch attacks.
The Hyping of Palestinian Military Capacity and the Invisibility of Israel’s Massive Arsenal
The same narrative emphasizing Palestinian rockets dominated The New York Times early reporting on both sides’ military capacity in this 2014 conflict, before Palestinian tunnels evolved to become a second focus. In the first weeks The Times published two stories detailing Palestinian rockets – “A Growing Arsenal of Homegrown Rockets Encounters Israel’s Iron Dome” and “From Gaza, an Array of Makeshift Rockets Packs a Counterpunch.” The only Israeli military weaponry that garnered any attention in those articles was Israel’s defensive “Iron Dome,” despite the fact that Israel was wiping out entire Palestinian families with bombs dropped from F16s, with shells from tanks, rockets fired from drones, and shells and rockets fired from gunboats. Even The Times explainer described above never names an Israeli weapon, instead noting passively “targets struck.”
Tunnels Lead Right to the Heart of Israeli Fear.” Avoiding any mention of the fact that no Israeli civilian has been injured or killed in an attack from a tunnel to date, as noted by Greg Mitchell and others, Rudoren’s article included a breathless, overblown narrative about the terror tunnel threat, saying, “In cafes and playgrounds, on social-media sites and in the privacy of pillow talk, Israelis exchange nightmare scenarios that are the stuff of action movies: armed enemies popping up under a day care center or dining room, spraying a crowd with a machine gun fire or maybe some chemical, exploding a suicide belt or snatching captives and ducking back into the dirt.”
Then, sounding practically like an Israeli spokesperson, Rudoren continued on The Takeaway and CNN to sell the threat of the tunnels to American audiences. In contrast, Anne Barnard’s US media appearance that I was able to locate lacked this type of one-sided tone.
Despite all the attention paid to rockets and tunnels, including four New York Times articles in three weeks, no Israeli civilians have ever been killed in an attack from a tunnel, and Palestinian rockets and mortars have killed a total of 40 Israelis since 2001, six during this current 2014 conflict. On the other hand, I can’t remember ever seeing a New York Times article focusing on Israel’s huge military arsenal which has killed over 8000 Palestinians since 2000. Lethal Israeli F16s, drones, tanks and gun boats that are tearing apart hundreds of Palestinian children seem non-existent and invisible to the paper.
The angle that the US provides billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and that many of Israel’s weapons are made in the US doesn’t evoke any interest from The Times either. Even the US government’s recent decision to resupply Israel with mortars and grenades at the same time that the US government was criticizing Israel’s shelling of a UN school was not deemed newsworthy enough by The Timesto break its silence on Israeli weapons.
* * *
With a few exceptions, The Times reporting on Israel’s ongoing assault in Gaza has been dreadful and deserves condemnation. The paper has deliberately obscured or lazily failed to examine key events and realities, and presented information in a way that attempts to portray a balanced conflict where both sides are suffering similarly, rather than the reality of a one-sided Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians. The Times has omitted key facts in a way that hypes threats to Israel while obscuring Israel’s overwhelming power, and control over and brutal repression of Palestinians. All this seems aimed at shielding Israel and the US, Israel’s most dedicated and uncritical backer, from facing the troubling realities that most of the rest of the world now sees. The New York Times has taken on the role of comforting powerful Israeli and US elites, while afflicting the comparatively powerless and brutalized Palestinian people, and obfuscated Israeli war crimes. In all these respects The Times is little different from other US mainstream media outlets, but it is perhaps more important because it is seen as a leader that other US media and US elites follow.
Do I think The New York Times’ coverage is likely to improve following criticism? Unfortunately, after observing The Times’ reporting on Israel and Palestine closely for more than ten years, I don’t think more than marginal change is likely, because these biases seem deeply entrenched at many levels within the paper. What seems more likely is that continued coverage of this sort will further discredit the paper, and more people will turn to alternative sources for their information.
An analysis of last month of New York Times articles reveals that references to occupation are a stock phrase for the West Bank. The articles are almost devoid of any context of what Palestinians are experiencing in East Jerusalem, and readers are left with the sense that there is simply a conflict over holy sites.
BEFORE YOU GO – The mainstream media has reached a new low as it uncritically repeats government lies to justify the Israeli assault on Gaza. Mondoweiss has been there from the start, pushing back against this campaign to manufacture consent for genocide.
We are fighting the biased reporting and dehumanizing rhetoric by building a platform for Palestinians to tell their stories in their own words.
We need to do more. All of us. Will you join us in the fight against media bias and help us report the truth about Palestine?
Rainbow of Death—THE PROBLEM WITH THE HOLLYWOOD DIVERSITY MOVEMENT
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Garland Nixon
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From the all-white 1950s/60s TV to the all-BUT-white programming in the age of wokery, the propaganda pendulum has swung 100%, and the stupid and shameless manipulators expect us to swallow this repulsive switch. As usual, just like in the "Eisenhower years", when everyone was white and middle class, to our new age in which whites are hard to find even in TV commercials, poverty and the homeless are nowhere to be seen, and everyone is blissfully "diverse", the pretension is that America is a model of fairness and the world's foremost bastion of human rights. Garland is justifiably nauseated by the hypocrisy, the relentless virtue signalling, while the same influential crowd seems deaf and blind to the sickening depravity of Israeli crimes in Gaza and the proliferation of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine and beyond, not to mention the US-led global slide toward nuclear war.
RAINBOW OF DEATH - THE PROBLEM WITH THE HOLLYWOOD DIVERSITY MOVEMENT
Garland Nixon Social and geopolitical critic Garland Nixon dissects the many levels of hypocrisy and unrelenting virtue signaling permeating US culture at present, with the political class, Hollywood and the rest of the media trying to convince the world that America is a land of impeccable non-racist "diversity" and a robust bastion of human rights and democracy—all of this while Biden is busy propping up the Empire by shoveling ghastly weapons and money to Neonazi Ukraine and the depraved Israeli regime.
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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CNN Reports Israel’s Centers for Torturing Gazans
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Eric Zuesse
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IDF soldiers in the field.
On May 11th, CNN published a harrowing report based on satellite photos, courageous Israeli whistleblowers, and some surviving Gazans, describing various forms of torture by Israel’s Government, against captured Gazans. Since the report was badly written and edited, it failed to say anything about why they had been selected for torture, but, even if all of them were from the 20 thousand or so members of the strictly Palestinian organization Hamas (though some of these torture-victims were doctors from Indonesia and other Muslim countries and were otherwise not credible to have been members of Hamas), Israel here is committing international-war crimes.
CNN spoke to three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp, which holds Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. All spoke out at risk of legal repercussions and reprisals from groups supportive of Israel’s hardline policies in Gaza.
We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.
An Israeli whistleblower recounting his experience at Sde Teiman
According to the accounts,the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gazaare placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapersand fed through straws.
“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one whistleblower, who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital.
“(The beatings) were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” said another whistleblower. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”
Responding to CNN’s request for comment on all the allegations made in this report, the Israeli military, known as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said in a statement: “The IDF ensures proper conduct towards the detainees in custody. Any allegation of misconduct by IDF soldiers is examined and dealt with accordingly. In appropriate cases, MPCID (Military Police Criminal Investigation’s Division) investigations are opened when there is suspicion of misconduct justifying such action.”
That’s one of three such camps.
The Israeli military has acknowledged partially converting three different military facilities into detention camps for Palestinian detainees from Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, in which Israeli authorities say about 1,200 were killed and over 250 were abducted, and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, killing nearly 35,000 people according to the strip’s health ministry. These facilities are Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, as well as Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank.
The camps are part of the infrastructure of Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, an amended legislation passed by the Knesset last December that expanded the military’s authority to detain suspected militants.
So, these are “suspected militants.” So too might be called the students and others throughout the world who are publicly demonstrating (and being punished for it) against what Israel is doing to Gazans. Even if these are authentically “suspected militants,” that does not justify or make legal these tortures. George W. Bush and other extremist far-right persons who claimed to be following the law after invading Iraq on the basis only of his outright lies, might think that the actions of Israel are legal or even necessary, but torture never extracts truth form a detainee and always extracts instead whatever the detainee thinks that the torturer wants him or her to say so as to produce fake ‘evidence’ which the torturing regime wants in order to ‘justify’ itself.
The report goes on to say:
CNN interviewed over a dozen former Gazan detainees who appeared to have been released from those camps. They said they could not determine where they were held because they were blindfolded through most of their detention and cut off from the outside world. But the details of their accounts tally with those of the whistleblowers.
“We looked forward to the night so we could sleep. Then we looked forward to the morning in hopes that our situation might change,” said Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, recalling his detainment at a military facility where he said he endured desert temperatures, swinging from the heat of the day to the chill of night. CNN interviewed him outside Gaza last month.
Al-Ran, a Palestinian who holds Bosnian citizenship, headed the surgical unit at northern Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, one of the first to be shut down and raided as Israel carried out its aerial, ground and naval offensive.
He was arrested on December 18, he said, outside Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, where he had been working for three days after fleeing his hospital in the heavily bombarded north.
He was stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.
The details in his account are consistent with those of dozens of others collected by CNN recounting the conditions of arrest in Gaza. His account is also supported by numerous images depicting mass arrests published on social media profiles belonging to Israeli soldiers. Many of those images show captive Gazans, their wrists or ankles tied by cables, in their underwear and blindfolded.
Al-Ran was held in a military detention center for 44 days, he told CNN. “Our days were filled with prayer, tears, and supplication. This eased our agony,” said al-Ran.
“We cried and cried and cried. We cried for ourselves, cried for our nation, cried for our community, cried for our loved ones. We cried about everything that crossed our minds.” …
Al-Ran’s account of the forms of punishment he saw were corroborated by the whistleblowers who spoke with CNN. A prisoner who committed an offense such as speaking to another would be ordered to raise his arms above his head for up to an hour. The prisoner’s hands would sometimes be zip-tied to a fence to ensure that he did not come out of the stress position.
For those who repeatedly breached the prohibition on speaking and moving, the punishment became more severe. Israeli guards would sometimes take a prisoner to an area outside the enclosure and beat him aggressively, according to two whistleblowers and al-Ran. A whistleblower who worked as a guard said he saw a man emerge from a beating with his teeth, and some bones, apparently broken. …
Strapped to beds in a field hospital
Whistleblower accounts portrayed a different kind of horror at the Sde Teiman field hospital.
“What I felt when I was dealing with those patients is an idea of total vulnerability,” said one medic who worked at Sde Teiman.
“If you imagine yourself being unable to move, being unable to see what’s going on, and being completely naked, that leaves you completely exposed,” the source said. “I think that’s something that borders on, if not crosses to, psychological torture.”
Another whistleblower said he was ordered to perform medical procedures on the Palestinian detainees for which he was not qualified.
“I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise,” he said, adding that this was frequently done without anesthesia.
“If they complained about pain, they would be given paracetamol,” he said, using another name for acetaminophen.
“Just being there felt like being complicit in abuse.”
The whistleblowers are Israelis who oppose what Israel’s Government is doing. A Reuters news-report on 10 November 2023, just weeks after the start of Israel’s all-out invasion of Gaza started, stated that, “Among Israel’s Jewish majority, 94% feel part of the country,” and that this was a “peak.” So, any such whistleblower would probably be viewed as a traitor by the vast majority of Israelis. On 10 March 2024, the Times of Israel headlined “Poll: 75% of Jewish Israelis back Rafah operation”. This means that very close to 75% of Israeli citizens backed Israel’s invading Raffah. Any such whistleblower would be viewed as a traitor by 75% of Israeli citizens, and any support within Israel that that person would have would need to come only from some of the 25% who dissent, and who have the courage to express publicly that they dissent from what is so popular amongst the other citizens of the country. Perhaps many of those people are already emigrating from Israel. Even if Israel were to ‘win’ in Gaza, the country would be even far more of an international pariah than it has been.
A 2018 study published by the Middle Eastern Policy Council reported (buried deep down in it) that
86
“nothing less than anti-Semitism”) these new poll-findings will become proclaimed to be showing nothing less than soaring anti-Semitism. Yes, there is, now, increasing anti-Semitism among the many people who think in racist categories instead of in individual ones; and, so, they will blame even non-racist Jews; and, so even non-racist Jews will now be suffering anti-Semitism from those individuals who blame even non-racist Jews for the racism of Israel’s government ever since it was founded in 1948. Israel’s founders, Zionists, learned deeply from Hitler and other racist-fascist imperialists, or ‘nazis’, and now they’re copying the Hitlerites virtually 100%, but replacing the victim-category as being Palestinian instead of Jew.
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ADDENDUM This report is being reproduced here to ensure widest possible circulation and as a public service
At a military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, an Israeli working at the facility snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him.
Rows of men in gray tracksuits are seen sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. All appear blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the glare of floodlights.
A putrid stench filled the air and the room hummed with the men’s murmurs, the Israeli who was at the facility told CNN. Forbidden from speaking to each other, the detainees mumbled to themselves.
“We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.”
Guards were instructed “to scream uskot” – shut up in Arabic – and told to “pick people out that were problematic and punish them,” the source added.
A leaked photograph of the detention facility shows a blindfolded man with his arms above his head. Obtained by CNN
CNN spoke to three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp, which holds Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. All spoke out at risk of legal repercussions and reprisals from groups supportive of Israel’s hardline policies in Gaza.
We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.
An Israeli whistleblower recounting his experience at Sde Teiman
According to the accounts,the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gazaare placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapersand fed through straws.
“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one whistleblower, who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital.
“(The beatings) were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” said another whistleblower. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”
Responding to CNN’s request for comment on all the allegations made in this report, the Israeli military, known as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said in a statement: “The IDF ensures proper conduct towards the detainees in custody. Any allegation of misconduct by IDF soldiers is examined and dealt with accordingly. In appropriate cases, MPCID (Military Police Criminal Investigation’s Division) investigations are opened when there is suspicion of misconduct justifying such action.”
“Detainees are handcuffed based on their risk level and health status. Incidents of unlawful handcuffing are not known to the authorities.”
Sde Teiman detention center The military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert is located around 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Gaza frontier.
The IDF did not directly deny accounts of people being stripped of their clothing or held in diapers. Instead, the Israeli military said that the detainees are given back their clothing once the IDF has determined that they pose no security risk.
Reports of abuse at Sde Teiman have already surfaced in Israeli and Arab media after an outcry from Israeli and Palestinian rights groups over conditions there. But this rare testimony from Israelis working at the facility sheds further light on Israel’s conduct as it wages war in Gaza, with fresh allegations of mistreatment. It also casts more doubt on the Israeli government’s repeated assertions that it acts in accordance with accepted international practices and law.
CNN has requested permission from the Israeli military to access the Sde Teiman base. Last month, a CNN team covered a small protest outside its main gate staged by Israeli activists demanding the closure of the facility. Israeli security forces questioned the team for around 30 minutes there, demanding to see the footage taken by CNN’s photojournalist. Israel often subjects reporters, even foreign journalists, to military censorship on security issues.
Detained in the desert
The Israeli military has acknowledged partially converting three different military facilities into detention camps for Palestinian detainees from Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, in which Israeli authorities say about 1,200 were killed and over 250 were abducted, and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, killing nearly 35,000 people according to the strip’s health ministry. These facilities are Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, as well as Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank.
The camps are part of the infrastructure of Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, an amended legislation passed by the Knesset last December that expanded the military’s authority to detain suspected militants.
Patrick Gallagher/CNN
The law permits the military to detain people for 45 days without an arrest warrant, after which they must be transferred to Israel’s formal prison system (IPS), where over 9,000 Palestinians are being held in conditions that rights groups say have drastically deteriorated since October 7. Two Palestinian prisoners associations said last week that 18 Palestinians – including leading Gaza surgeon Dr. Adnan al-Bursh – had died in Israeli custody over the course of the war.
The military detention camps – where the number of inmates is unknown – serve as a filtration point during the arrest period mandated by the Unlawful Combatants Law. After their detention in the camps, those with suspected Hamas links are transferred to the IPS, while those whose militant ties have been ruled out are released back to Gaza.
CNN interviewed over a dozen former Gazan detainees who appeared to have been released from those camps. They said they could not determine where they were held because they were blindfolded through most of their detention and cut off from the outside world. But the details of their accounts tally with those of the whistleblowers.
Hear from former detainees held inside Sde Teiman
CNN
“We looked forward to the night so we could sleep. Then we looked forward to the morning in hopes that our situation might change,” said Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, recalling his detainment at a military facility where he said he endured desert temperatures, swinging from the heat of the day to the chill of night.CNN interviewed him outside Gaza last month.
Al-Ran, a Palestinian who holds Bosnian citizenship, headed the surgical unit at northern Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, one of the first to be shut down and raided as Israel carried out its aerial, ground and naval offensive.
He was arrested on December 18, he said, outside Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, where he had been working for three days after fleeing his hospital in the heavily bombarded north.
He was stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.
The details in his account are consistent with those of dozens of others collected by CNN recounting the conditions of arrest in Gaza. His account is also supported by numerous images depicting mass arrests published on social media profiles belonging to Israeli soldiers. Many of those images show captive Gazans, their wrists or ankles tied by cables, in their underwear and blindfolded.
Al-Ran was held in a military detention center for 44 days, he told CNN. “Our days were filled with prayer, tears, and supplication. This eased our agony,” said al-Ran.
“We cried and cried and cried. We cried for ourselves, cried for our nation, cried for our community, cried for our loved ones. We cried about everything that crossed our minds.”
Dr. Mohammed Al-Ran headed the surgical unit at Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, one of the first to be raided and shut down by Israel. From Social Media
Al-Ran is pictured on the day of his release from a detention camp, in a visibly worse physical condition. From Social Media
A week into his imprisonment, the detention camp’s authorities ordered him to act as an intermediary between the guards and the prisoners, a role known as Shawish, “supervisor,” in vernacular Arabic.
According to the Israeli whistleblowers, a Shawish is normally a prisoner who has been cleared of suspected links to Hamas after interrogation.
The Israeli military denied holding detainees unnecessarily or using them for translation purposes. “If there is no reason for continued detention, the detainees are released back to Gaza,” they said in a statement.
However, whistleblower and detainee accounts – particularly pertaining to Shawish – cast doubt on the IDF’s depiction of its clearing process. Al-Ran says that he served as Shawish for several weeks after he was cleared of Hamas links. Whistleblowers also said that the absolved Shawish served as intermediaries for some time.
They are typically proficient in Hebrew, according to the eyewitnesses, enabling them to communicate the guards’ orders to the rest of the prisoners in Arabic.
For that, al-Ran said he was given a special privilege: his blindfold was removed. He said this was another kind of hell.
“Part of my torture was being able to see how people were being tortured,” he said. “At first you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see the torture, the vengeance, the oppression.
“When they removed my blindfold, I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement … I could see the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals.”
A leaked photograph of an enclosure where detainees in gray tracksuits are seen blindfolded and sitting on paper-thin mattresses. CNN was able to geolocate the hangar in the Sde Teiman facility. A portion of this image has been blurred by CNN to protect the identity of the source. Obtained by CNN
Al-Ran’s account of the forms of punishment he saw were corroborated by the whistleblowers who spoke with CNN. A prisoner who committed an offense such as speaking to another would be ordered to raise his arms above his head for up to an hour. The prisoner’s hands would sometimes be zip-tied to a fence to ensure that he did not come out of the stress position.
For those who repeatedly breached the prohibition on speaking and moving, the punishment became more severe. Israeli guards would sometimes take a prisoner to an area outside the enclosure and beat him aggressively, according to two whistleblowers and al-Ran. A whistleblower who worked as a guard said he saw a man emerge from a beating with his teeth, and some bones, apparently broken.
That whistleblower and al-Ran also described a routine search when the guards would unleash large dogs on sleeping detainees, lobbing a sound grenade at the enclosure as troops barged in. Al-Ran called this “the nightly torture.”
“While we were cabled, they unleashed the dogs that would move between us, and trample over us,” said al-Ran. “You’d be lying on your belly, your face pressed against the ground. You can’t move, and they’re moving above you.”
The same whistleblower recounted the search in the same harrowing detail. “It was a special unit of the military police that did the so-called search,” said the source. “But really it was an excuse to hit them. It was a terrifying situation.”
“There was a lot of screaming and dogs barking.”
Strapped to beds in a field hospital
Whistleblower accounts portrayed a different kind of horror at the Sde Teiman field hospital.
“What I felt when I was dealing with those patients is an idea of total vulnerability,” said one medic who worked at Sde Teiman.
“If you imagine yourself being unable to move, being unable to see what’s going on, and being completely naked, that leaves you completely exposed,” the source said. “I think that’s something that borders on, if not crosses to, psychological torture.”
Another whistleblower said he was ordered to perform medical procedures on the Palestinian detainees for which he was not qualified.
“I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise,” he said, adding that this was frequently done without anesthesia.
“If they complained about pain, they would be given paracetamol,” he said, using another name for acetaminophen.
“Just being there felt like being complicit in abuse.”
Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center
A CNN investigation has uncovered the horrors of a shadowy detention facility where Palestinian prisoners are blindfolded, handcuffed and forced to wear dirty diapers. Watch Matthew Chance’s full report. #CNN#News
See the model CNN has recreated based on eyewitness accounts showing inside Sde Teiman
00:41 - Source: CNN / The Sde Teiman field hospital, with prisoner patients shackled to their beds.
The same whistleblower also said he witnessed an amputation performed on a man who had sustained injuries caused by the constant zip-tying of his wrists. The account tallied with details of a letter authored by a doctor working at Sde Teiman published by Ha’aretz in April.
“From the first days of the medical facility’s operation until today, I have faced serious ethical dilemmas,” said the letter addressed to Israel’s attorney general, and its health and defense ministries, according to Ha’aretz. “More than that, I am writing (this letter) to warn you that the facilities’ operations do not comply with a single section among those dealing with health in the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law.”
An IDF spokesperson denied the allegations reported by Ha’aretz in a written statement to CNN at the time, saying that medical procedures were conducted with “extreme care” and in accordance with Israeli and international law.
The spokesperson added that the handcuffing of the detainees was done in “accordance with procedures, their health condition and the level of danger posed by them,” and that any allegation of violence would be examined.
Whistleblowers also said that the medical teams were told to refrain from signing medical documents, corroborating previous reporting by rights group Physicians for Human Rights in Israel (PHRI).
The PHRI report released in April warned of “a serious concern that anonymity is employed to prevent the possibility of investigations or complaints regarding breaches of medical ethics and professionalism.”
“You don’t sign anything, and there is no verification of authority,” said the same whistleblower who said he lacked the appropriate training for the treatment he was asked to administer. “It is a paradise for interns because it’s like you do whatever you want.”
CNN also requested comment from the Israeli health ministry on the allegations in this report. The ministry referred CNN back to the IDF.
Concealed from the outside world
Sde Teiman and other military detention camps have been shrouded in secrecy since their inception. Israel has repeatedly refused requests to disclose the number of detainees held at the facilities, or to reveal the whereabouts of Gazan prisoners.
Last Wednesday, the Israeli Supreme Court held a hearing in response to a petition brought forward by Israeli rights group, HaMoked, to reveal the location of a Palestinian X-Ray technician detained from Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza in February. It was the first court session of its kind since October 7.
Israel’s highest court had previously rejected writs of habeas corpus filed on behalf of dozens of Palestinians from Gaza held in unknown locations.
The disappearances “allows for the atrocities that we’ve been hearing about to happen,” said Tal Steiner, an Israeli human rights lawyer and executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.
“People completely disconnected from the outside world are the most vulnerable to torture and mistreatment,” Steiner said in an interview with CNN.
Since October 7, more than 100 structures, including large tents and hangars, appeared within these areas of the Sde Teiman desert camp. Planet Labs PBC
Satellite images provide further insight into activities at Sde Teiman, revealing that in the months since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, more than 100 new structures, including large tents and hangars, have been built at the desert camp. A comparison of aerial photographs from September 10, 2023 and March 1 this year also showed a significant increase in the number of vehicles at the facility, indicating an uptick in activity. Satellite imagery from two dates in early December showed construction work in progress.
CNN also geolocated the two leaked photographs showing the enclosure holding the group of blindfolded men in gray tracksuits. The pattern of panels seen on the roof matched those of a large hangar visible in satellite imagery. The structure, which resembles an animal pen, is located in the central area of the Sde Teiman compound. It is an older structure seen among new buildings which have appeared since the war began.
CNN reviewed satellite images from two other military detention camps – Ofer and Anatot bases in the occupied West Bank – and did not detect expansion in the grounds since October 7. Several rights groups and legal experts say they believe that Sde Teiman, which is the nearest to Gaza, likely hosts the largest number of detainees of the three military detention camps.
“I was there for 23 days. Twenty-three days that felt like 100 years,” said 27-year-old Ibrahim Yassine on the day of his release from a military detention camp.
He was lying in a crowded room with over a dozen newly freed men – they were still in the grey tracksuit prison uniforms. Some had deep flesh wounds from where the handcuffs had been removed.
“We were handcuffed and blindfolded,” said another man, 43-year-old Sufyan Abu Salah. “Today is the first day I can see.”
Several had a glassy look in their eyes and were seemingly emaciated. One elderly man breathed through an oxygen machine as he lay on a stretcher. Outside the hospital, two freed men from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society embraced their colleagues.
For Dr. Al-Ran, his reunion with his friends was anything but joyful. The experience, he said, rendered him mute for a month as he battled an “emotional deadness.”
“It was very painful. When I was released, people expected me to miss them, to embrace them. But there was a gap,” said al-Ran. “The people who were with me at the detention facility became my family. Those friendships were the only things that belonged to us.”
Just before his release, a fellow prisoner had called out to him, his voice barely rising above a whisper, al-Ran said. He asked the doctor to find his wife and kids in Gaza. “He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,” said al-Ran. “It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.”
Credits Executive producer: Barbara Arvanitidis Senior investigations writer: Tamara Qiblawi Chief global affairs correspondent: Matthew Chance OSINT reporter: Allegra Goodwin Photojournalist: Alex Platt Reporters: Abeer Salman and Ami Kaufman Gaza journalists: Mohammad Al Sawalhi and Tareq Al Hilou Contributing journalist: Kareem Khadder Visual and graphic editors: Carlotta Dotto, Lou Robinson and Mark Oliver 3D designer: Tom James Photo editor: Sarah Tilotta Video editors: Mark Baron, Julie Zink and Augusta Anthony Motion designers: Patrick Gallagher and Yukari Schrickel Digital editors: Laura Smith-Spark and Eliza Mackintosh Executive editors: Dan Wright and Matt Wells
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Things to keep in mind...
Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.
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