John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO ANOTHER COMMENT IN THE INDEPENDENCE

Reader comment:

“It has done nothing but kill people for 65 years, having invaded every neighbor that it has, many of them two or three times.”

Israel was attacked in 48, 67 and 73 by armies (variously) from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Israel risked being annihilated in all these wars.

Read some history – don’t parrot what you’ve read on far-left hate sites.”

Your comment is arrogant and uninformed. It simply repeats the David and Goliath myths manufactured by the Israeli Ministry of Truth for American consumption.

It is you who should read some history.

The 1967 War was engineered by Israel. Yes, some Arabs attacked, but only after an elaborate series of aggressive and provocative acts by Israel. It was what Israel wanted because its government had made an elaborate calculation ahead and was sure it would win fairly quickly. The prize was all of Palestine and part of Syria.

In the War, Israel also betrayed its best allies.

De Gaulle, a defender of young Israel, warned that he wouldn’t support conquest, but he was ignored.

The United States told Israel not to turn their armor north after defeating Egypt, but that’s just what Israel did because the entire intent of that war was to conquer what Israel still occupies to this day. Just ask yourself why else it still holds millions of people captive and has worked so hard to make their lives miserable as an incentive for their leaving?

In order to turn the armor in the Sinai quickly, Israel had to eliminate its Egyptian prisoners, and that is what it did. It shot hundreds of POWs, much as WWII Germans sometimes did.

To cover this up from the United States and to cover up turning armor north, it attacked the American surveillance ship, USS Liberty, trying desperately for two hours to sink it with everything the pilots had. This was not an error as Israel claimed later, the ship was not only well-marked, Israel had been told of its presence, and the Israeli attack pilots who first buzzed the ship waved to the waving crew.

As to 1948, well, please, it was Israel who was slaughtering Palestinians, driving them out of their own land to seize their farms, homes, and villages – all re-named afterward. There were several documented mass atrocities by people like the Stern Gang, Irgun, and other Jewish terror organizations. Hundreds of civilians were shot and Palestinian women were raped. The hope was that all Palestinians would simply run away as the rumors spread. I should hope some Arab states responded with anger, but they made only a half-hearted effort.

1973 was indeed an attack by Egypt against Israel, but it happened in light of all I’ve written above and far more.

Israel has demonstrated not an ounce of ethics in its 65 years. Duplicity and killing have been the chief features of Israeli policy over the entire period. Let’s not forget several invasions of Lebanon, killing tens of thousands, creating a years-long occupation (against which Hezbollah was formed, an army of genuine freedom-fighters, not terrorists), and using such horrible weapons as large numbers of cluster bombs on civilians.

And then America invaded Iraq, largely on Israel’s behalf, killing a million. Now Israel and America have terrorists doing the same thing in Syria.

It has been a completely destructive and destabilizing history.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

The New York Times is very much like American foreign policy.

On the outside, it’s all lip service to truth and integrity.

On the inside, it’s exactly and precisely the opposite.

The paper has a long history of prejudices and bad intentions and twisted journalism and work for the secret services while pompously trumpeting its superior merits.

It is, literally, as sick an institution as the State Department, no matter who happens to be serving at its head.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

You really do not need new evidence about the hopeless state of the news at BBC.

Every perceptive reader of BBC’s Internet site knows what a patchwork of half-truths and public relations puke BBC News has become.

It is just painfully obvious in the selection of stories, the selection of descriptive words, the images selected, and what is missing.

I check it daily just to see what games they are playing on any particular day.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO A STORY IN RINF

A man once said there is only freedom of the press if you own one.

Of course, he was absolutely right, but a broader interpretation of his words gives us a more complete meaning.

The freedom that the press exercises includes the freedom to publish rubbish and disinformation of every kind, and that is just what it does and what it has always done.

Going back to America’s early days, the press worked in exactly the same fashion.

Each party owned a paper or papers and stuffed them with rubbish and even outright lies. Thomas Jefferson was an expert at this dark work and hired unscrupulous people to do his bidding, but he was not alone.

“Yellow journalism” was a feature early in the 20th century, especially with W. R. Hearst and his large chain of newspapers. So, too, The Chicago Tribune and its unpleasant and extremely biased owner, Colonel McCormick. Today we have the impossibly pompous, and regularly dishonest, New York Times presenting itself as the authoritative word in news when in fact its history is strewn with dishonesty, propaganda, fraudster journalists, and extreme prejudice.

You just cannot expect the truth about the really important issues from the establishment press because it has vital interests in maintaining high government contacts for leaks and leads, the friendship of great corporate leaders, and the patronage of corporate advertisers.

There is no way out of the conundrum. State press has proven how feeble it is in recent years, examples being the BBC and CBC, both disgraces as news services many times in recent years because they fear cuts in funding from their political bosses.

We always have a smart maverick or two like Seymour Hersh, but such genuine investigative reporters have trouble securing steady outsets of importance for their discoveries, and generally their printed stuff does not raise even a faint echo in the mainstream press which is what affects the thinking of most of the population.

The notion of a free press is pretty much a game, and all the rules and best practices taught at journalism schools are largely meaningless noise. The situation is not unlike the pretence that the United States maintains in the political sphere that it is a democracy. Elections between two money-drenched parties whose candidates are each carefully vetted and selected by the very establishment supplying the money really are not all that different to the old Soviet ballots with one candidate.

Most Americans live in a kind of fairy world when it comes to the hard-headed realities of journalism and government, and they mechanically repeat words they have heard repeated thousands of times such as democracy and a free press without ever examining their meaning.

By the way, the establishment has learned that it can afford to have the odd maverick voice such as Seymour Hersh, just as it can afford the odd independent political candidate. The fact is, money gives access to the press, and these people don’t have much of it. They represent the journalistic and political equivalents of an established marketing reality we all see regularly, a small local bottler of soda pop having a couple of feet of shelf space in a supermarket’s huge aisle overwhelmingly filled with the products of just two massive and wealthy companies.

As a last note, all of the prizes in journalism are close to meaningless, much like the Nobel Peace Prize often given to scoundrels. The Pulitzer Prize, which the writer cites for Hersh, has a terrible record of being awarded to undeserving and even fraudulent journalists. That is not a reflection on Hersh, but a statistical statement of the general conditions.

Like the silly and grossly biased Academy Awards, the Pulitzers are marketing tools and a way for the industry to slap itself on the back annually. Good God, Thomas Friedman, the most dishonest and manipulative columnist in the United States, has at least two of them.

Once in a while, again like the Academy Awards, a worthy recipient manages to slip through.