MEDIA SCUM

MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY—It is important to note that Julian Assange from the outset was supported by the mainstream media, which was involved in releasing selected and redacted versions of the leaks. And despite Assange’s arrest and imprisonment, Wikileaks continues to release compromising US diplomatic cables, the latest of which (reported by McClatchy, April 17, 2019) pertains to “evidence that US troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians” including a 5-month-old infant. 

At the outset of the Wikileaks project, the mainstream media including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Economist praised Julian Assange. The British elites supported him. Assange became a personality. It was a vast Public Relations campaign. It was a money-making undertaking for the corporate media.

JON. COOK—The discovery, for example, of a mass grave last week in northern Gaza, the victims handcuffed and with signs that they had been tortured before execution, has been buried by the Western media.

As Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, wondered in a tweet: “Why isn’t this a bigger story?” Who can doubt it most certainly would have been, were the bodies Ukrainian and were Russia, not Israel, in the frame?

There is a pattern of omitting evidence that contradicts Israel’s official narrative, and one that began with the events of 7 October – supposedly the vital, immediate context CNN executives claim needs constantly emphasising as the “cause of this current conflict”.

PATRICK LAWRENCE—ISRAEL is a psychologically diseased nation that boasts as it inflicts this suffering on The Other that obsesses it. The world is invited—the ultimate in perversity, this—to partake of Israel’s sickness and said, in a Hague courtroom two weeks ago, “No.”   

Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now. The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart—its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities—and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself.

JAY JANSON—[The Hamas document] was sending a message to the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Hamas should not be judged solely by the events of October 7 without examining Israel’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza over the past decades.

Hamas pointed to the historical origins of the conflict, saying “the battle of the Palestinian people against occupation and colonialism did not start on October 7, but started 105 years ago, including 30 years of British colonialism and 75 years of Zionist occupation.”

DAVID WALSH—The disproportionate attention paid to Perry was a transparent effort to divert public attention from one of the greatest war crimes committed since the end of World War II, a war crime being carried out in the manner of the Nazis. The political and media establishment is terrified of the widespread public opposition to the mass death and destruction and that opposition’s increasing depth and breadth within the population. The establishment is desperate to find ways and means of keeping the reality from reaching the public.