John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Three dead and hundreds injured as protests on Gaza border turn violent

Total killed now stands at 41 since unrest started in March”

 

A ridiculous headline because of its ambiguity.

From the start, Israel’s response has been violence, extreme violence.

The protests are noisy and unpleasant, but they have not really “turned violent.”

The demonstrators are unarmed, but Israeli snipers keep shooting batches of them, killing, among others, two well-marked journalists and some children. Something in the neighborhood of a thousand have received wounds from guns.

Israel’s only real purpose here is not in protecting itself from violence but to make the demonstrators feel the utter futility of their efforts, to demonstrate, yet again, Israel’s overwhelming military strength and its readiness to kill on very little provocation and without compunction.

It’s all stuff we knew, but this brutal state never tires of showing us again.

This week-long event is only rightly termed the Passover Massacre.

__________________________

Response to a comment, “Israel was established largely to provide a safe haven for oppressed Jewish people”:

Yes, as to why, in part, Israel was re-created, but the great tragedy of it is that it was always something of an unrealistic project, bound to be a moral and ethical failure in the face of millions of Palestinians whose towns and farms were stolen as well as the notion that Israel must have only one kind of people. I know there are a fair number of non-Jewish citizens, but their presence was an accident of 1948, and important Israeli leaders do not regard them as either desirable or permanent. More than a few have advocated their expulsion.

As for the many more Palestinians in the occupied territories, they aren’t going anywhere, no matter what horrors Israel inflicts on them. And just where would they go anyway? Who in the region is offering to take millions of refugees? Who anywhere is ready to take millions of refugees? The United States, whose grotesquely unbalanced support of Israel prevents a decent solution, isn’t ready to take even a limited number of refugees from its own bombing campaigns in places like Libya and Syria.

General Dayan, back in the days of the 1967 War, said Israel would have to make the Palestinians miserable enough to want to leave. And that’s just what Israel has never stopped working toward, just with highs and lows in the harshness of the effort. But they are not leaving. The ugly sniper killings plus countless other incidents show Israel’s violent frustration with this reality.

In a way, the demonstrations and Israel’s extreme brutality towards them hide something far larger and more fundamental and ongoing: conditions in Gaza, home to 1.5 million, are approaching the level of not being able to sustain human life, and that’s entirely Israel’s doing, its deliberate and immoral doing.

It is stunning that the world can sit back and watch this all happening. Virtually all of our Western press and politicians just shut their eyes. And even the press that does cover it in the smallest degree, often uses euphemisms to describe things.

It is simply the greatest single shame on earth at this time.

The men who lead Israel seem to have learned, from the suffering of their European ancestors under the Nazis, only how to be extremely brutal and vile themselves.

 

 

NOTE: While the deaths in Gaza appear to be reasonably consistently reported, the wounded are not. It is difficult to get a fix on the number, which, in any case is very high. Looking at different sources, one finds different numbers. The UN, in its latest rather ineffectual call for an end to the violence, cited more than 5,500 having been injured by gunshots.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

In today’s advanced world, if you do not receive press coverage, you effectively do not exist, and your words are like whispers in a deep forest.

Owing to a period of intense corporate consolidation, only about a half dozen companies control most of what Americans learn about events.

This small number of corporations are not friendly to any kind of iconoclast. You must be well vetted and approved by the power establishment to get generous or even proper coverage.

There is a tight establishment of power in America – large corporations, special interest political donors, and the massive military-security establishment whose job is to protect and advance them.  The press supports and re-inforces that establishment, always. Indeed, since the press itself consists of a few massive corporations, it is just part of the ruling structure, and it knows well what its job is.

After all, the press is in many ways dependent upon that establishment, dependent for advertising revenue, for access to officials, for leaks, and just for the right to keep their privileged little club going. They are not about to upset things.

Hillary, from the beginning, was blessed as the establishment’s choice. She’s everything they want, including ruthless in the use of power, immensely practiced at lying, and compromised a hundred times over in her frenetic pursuit of power, even having blood on her hands already.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are both unexpected and unwanted wild cards in a political structure designed to deliver the goods with a fair appearance of democratic process.

The recent Harvard School of Government study showed how the press played games with Bernie. At key points, his voice just disappeared. We saw the last big such effort with the AP story on the eve of the huge California primary that Hillary had clinched the nomination. She had not, but the story undoubtedly discouraged voters, as it was intended.

And now that Trump is a really serious candidate and not just an interesting and curious phenomenon, the press will use the same tactics on him.

Well, at least he has an endless supply of money with which to buy advertising, that is, if the television networks accept his ads, something which is another game that they can play.

An excellent concise example of what the press can do may be seen in Britain with the newspaper, The Guardian. The Guardian has an old reputation for supporting labor and progressive affairs, but its current management does not live up to that old reputation at all. They have a different agenda which they try to camouflage with fluffy columns, here and there, about social issues such as various prejudices in society. When it comes to what matters, political power, they are total supporters of Tony Blair’s awful crowd, a group not much different in substance from the Conservatives.

In recent months, The Guardian has conducted a huge and complex operation at attacking the British Labour Party’s newly-elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a decent and truly anti-establishment man, and at getting a “remain” result from the ill-conceived EU referendum, an event which was stupidly called by a virtually incompetent Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.

There was only the slightest pretense at balance with the odd column by someone advocating for Corbyn or someone advocating for “leave.”

Set against those tokens to balance was an absolute onslaught, ranging in tone from dire warnings to silly special pleadings and even to efforts at humor or pathos – all of it generated and published to discredit Jeremy Corbyn and to make “remain” seem like the only rational choice. So overwhelming was the effort, one sometimes smiled at an Internet page embarrassingly littered with such stories.

So, it was especially pleasing that the British people went their own way in the EU vote, and indeed almost certainly would have given a larger “leave” majority if it hadn’t been for the unfortunate murder by a lunatic of MP Jo Cox (who was campaigning for “remain” when killed), an act which was relentlessly exploited in stories and pictures day after day. The polls visibly shifted as a result.

In the case of Corbyn’s leadership, they have now scented blood and are busy trying to run their prey to ground, knowing full well that after the “leave” vote and David Cameron’s shameful resignation, Corbyn’s party might have had an opportunity for victory.

Thus the free and fair press in Britain, guided by high journalistic principles, and the situation in the United States is even worse and more overwhelming. Journalism when it comes to politics is a game, a rather dirty one much resembling some of America’s dark operations abroad in foreign affairs, which is itself a topic virtually never touched by the press except to pretend everything is normal.

John Chuckman

COMMENT TO CBC RADIO CONCERNING AN INTERVIEW ON SUNDAY EDITION WITH GIDEON LEVY

As liberal-minded and decent-spirited as your Israeli journalist guest of March 29, may be, why can’t the Palestinians speak for themselves?

Are the Palestinians such hopeless children or primitives that they cannot speak for themselves?

Your program has given voice to scores of Israelis and apologists for Israel over the years with barely a sound from the Palestinians, who have many articulate and educated spokespeople.

The bias, extreme bias, just couldn’t be clearer. Even when speaking of the grief Israel has imposed on five million people for half a century, and in violation of countless international laws and agreements and norms, pretty much only Israelis are deemed qualified to comment.

Actually your interview today could be seen as a new form of reverse-propaganda in that it advertises reasonableness amongst Israelis, telling people: So don’t worry about the endless abuse and injustice, such good folks in Israel will make things right, eventually, and you can feel good just knowing they are there.

Michael, despite your general liberal-mindedness, your broadcasting practices on this terrible, longstanding issue of utterly-debased human rights makes you part of the problem, not the solution.