EDITOR—A few days ago Congressional inquisitors dragged three Ivy League university presidents before a special committee with the squalid purpose of jawboning them into compliance with restrictions on free speech in the name of protecting Jews from an imaginary genocide when a real one, but of Palestinians, is actually being conducted by the Israelis in broad daylight. The interrogation of the university administrators was uniformly rude, cynical, and McCarthyesque, but no one seemed to note, and no one, including the humiliated uttered a single word in defense of the First Amendment, which the political hacks conducting the inquisition were clearly running roughshod over.
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SAYED HASAN—Norman Finkelstein refuses to accept that the people of Gaza, or Hamas militants themselves, are “legitimate targets” of extermination. “It is so appalling, it’s not just the despiriting, it’s so appalling, the reaction of all of these cowards and careerists and scum who use their microphones called Twitter to just denounce the Hamas attack. Most of the Hamas militants, probably the ones who broke through the fence, it’s their first time out of Gaza because you assume they’re mostly in their 20s. The blockade has gone on now for 18 years. They grew up in a concentration camp. They want to be free…”
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DAVID EDWARDS: Contrary to the belief of some of our critics, we don’t hate to see positive examples of this kind that appear to contradict the thesis that state-corporate media function as a propaganda organ for powerful interests. In fact, we are only too pleased, because we have hoped for two main outcomes from our work. While our key aim has always been to increase public awareness and participation empowering progressive alternatives to ‘mainstream’ journalism, we have also hoped to encourage ‘mainstream’ journalists to improve their performance as far as they are able within the severe limits set by state-corporate media.
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JIMMY DORE SHOW—The DIve host Jackson Hinkle recently appeared on British network TalkTV’s “James Whale Unleashed” to discuss the Israeli-Hamas conflict, and the results were both shocking and hilarious. The show’s hosts mostly went back and forth between spreading Israeli government propaganda and bickering with one another, only briefly stopping to express exasperation at Hinkle for failing to agree with their stale talking points.
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DAN COHEN/ MINTPRESS NEWS—Filmed during the attack and in the days following the ceasefire, the documentary tells the story of how Gaza’s armed resistance groups outwitted the vastly superior Israeli military and established their ability to intervene against Israeli ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and provocations at the al-Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem. “The Palestinian military capabilities are not highly sophisticated and destructive, but it becomes so effective when it’s used by smart Palestinian youths who believe in their rights and freedom,” a masked al-Qassam commander says.
