This is systematic in Western media, a concerted effort to cover up and minimise Israel's litany of crimes. The BBC first published the horrifying story of Mohammad Bhar (the Palestinian man with Down's syndrome that was mauled to death by an IDF handled 'combat' dog) with the appalling headline "The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome" and it was only after an outcry that it was changed to "Gaza man with Down's syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC."
Even the second headline obfuscates just how savage, how gruesome this ghastly crime was. Only after reading the article (available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9drj14e0lo) does it becomes clear that the 'most moral' army in the world acted deliberately. In light of this, a more fitting headline would "Nobody is safe: disabled Gaza man bleeds to death after IOF unleashes attack dog on him."
I'm delighted to see this news item. I also follow Assal on X. The vague,
vacuous headlines provided by NYT and other newspapers /news outlets, very effectively cover up the targeted intentional genocide being carried out by Israel. These headlines, in attempting to not give offense or to arouse strong feelings or hostility towards Israel in fact effectively lie and mislead their readers - they effectively collude in the coverup
The sheer thoroughness of the NYT's efforts to push the Israeli narrative and to dehumanize Palestinians shows that this is intentional and systematic. Assal Rad could already write an entire book on this dishonesty, and we still have no end in sight. I hope, against all odds, that someday these decisions will be investigated as propaganda in knowing support of this genocide.
We cancelled our subscription to the NYT as we couldn’t stand its reporting on the Israelis and their merciless attacks and killings of the people in Gaza. The NYT has become the US version of the Russian newspaper Pravda.
The only newsite, beside Zeteo, worth listening to now is Democracy Now! as they continue to list casualties and give daily updates on the peril Palestinians find them themselves in due to the violence committed against them by the Israeli government, the IDF in Gaza and by extention also in the West Bank where, in addition to the IDF, settlers are given free rein on their Palestinian neighbors.
Ditto for what others have said. I no longer subscribe to or read either the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. I no longer watch CNN or MSNBC (I never watched Fox).
Here are some alternative news sources to consider.
● The Guardian (a UK-based newspaper)
● Democracy Now (national and international news by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez)
● NPR World News (National Public Radio) (U.S. based but world-focused public affairs news)
● BBC (British Broadcasting Company) (UK-based TV and online news source)
● Al Jazeera (Qatari-based Arab-focused TV and online news source)
● YES! online (“YES! Media is a nonprofit, independent publisher of solutions journalism for building a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world”)
● Dr. Robert Reich Newsletter (free, but you must provide e-mail) (Daily newsletter exposing where power lies — and how it's used and abused)
● OUT-FM broadcasting Tuesdays from WBAI 99.5FM (queer, intersectional, progressive public affairs radio program) Full Disclosure: I am a co-founder and intermittent producer
In my quest to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian war, I had to actively disengage from news sources that be they the New York Times, the Huffington Post, MSNBC, were focused on daily, the exact same point of view.
I had to diversify to news sources that were not American based.
No matter how “progressive” the American news source, you are getting a story tainted by a myopia largely partial to Israel that excludes language that calls a genocide a genocide. This is especially true if that program depends largely, if not exclusively, on advertising dollars from corporations that have been firing people who reasonably disagree with Israel’s disproportionate response that is a textbook genocide in the making.
Benjamin Netanyahu literally tried to get rid of the entire Israeli Supreme Court, which had ruled the Israeli Defense Force is not allowed to target citizens to hunt down their enemy .
It might behoove President Biden to rethink his “love” (yes, that’s the exact word he used) for Bibi.
And listen, I am not naïve.
I know Biden’s approach is right out of the playbook of many negotiators—call him friend in public and be brutally honest in private—but let’s be clear—
Joseph Robinette Biden has more than once libeled anyone who disagrees with his policies as anti-Semitic.
Israel/Palestine. (Biden)
United States/Afghanistan. (Bush then Obama then Trump)
Rwanda.
Serbia/Bosnia.
Armenia/Turkey.
Russia.
Japan.
China.
Syria.
El Salvador.
Nicaragua.
Venezuela.
Chile.
Italy.
Germany.
Not only Nazis invoke terror though the Nazis in 20th century were one of the most efficient in their quest to rid the world of peoples—Jews, gays, and others—in the name of religion.
Leaders who know better—Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Benjmain Netanyahu, Mohammed Deif (Hamas military leader), Ismail Haniyeh (political leader of Hamas)—offer comfort to those who target innocents ostensibly claiming a moral high ground NONE OF THEM can claim.
And what of our responsibility?
We can speak of wanton killing, massacre, genocide, ethnic cleansing throughout the 20th and 21st centuries where folks acted too late.
None of us escape structural racism. It is structured and pervasive because powerful institutions make sure race dominates not only in America but the world.
None who live in Israel escape Zionism. And none affected by Israel and its allies escape it either.
Why?
Because it is oppression based on defining statehood and the right to statehood based on a religion.
Religious states around the world are those most susceptible to kill others based on the fact they don't follow that religion.
In Israel—and, more broadly given the realpolitik of The Middle East—what is valued most in the region is Judaism and who therefore is most valued? Those following the precepts of Judaism and who self identify as Israeli Jews.
Why is that?
Mostly because the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union dictate NATO—and thus dominate world institutions in the region in a way that only Russia, China, and India can counterbalance them.
Neither Russia, China nor India choose to do so.
Neither nation is willing to challenge Israeli hegemony due to NATO's dominance.
And so it is, the following also is true.
Based on a religious statehood in which, de facto, in order to be most valued in Israel and Palestine, you must be Jewish—no matter be you Zionist or loathe to Zionism (and yes, there are some Jews that exist in Israel that are loathe to Zionism and its religionist based racism).
Not only must you be Jewish to be most valued, but you must be validated as worthy of God (and thus can claim equanimity) only by residing in Israel proper outside the geography of Gaza and the West Bank, which are separate and unequal.
The Frankensteinish amalgamation of religion, land, and artificially drawn boundaries that make Israel/Palestine perennially warring was defined by a World politic nearly a century ago in which a diaspora of Jews (mostly European and Germanic) were placed atop Palestinians in a region that FOR TIME IMMEMORIAL has been home to Semitic peoples of all faiths yet largely tended by caretakers who called their home Palestine, one of many nations in a region of many faiths—with each of those faiths connected to a prophet named Abraham.
Be they Jew, Christian, or Muslim, in reality Abrahamic faiths—though distinct—are sourced by the exact same monotheistic precept embraced by peoples whose DNA is so nearly exact that together they were called Semites.
* * *
In North America, no U.S. citizen is untouched by Islamophobia or antisemitism.
Neither is any American citizen untouched by the hegemony of a Judeo-Christian ethos more Christian than Judeo. Why Islamophobia? Why antisemitism? Because, in the US, Christians—be they conservative or liberal—are dominant.
The power of any non-Christian in America pales in the shadow of a religionist paradigm that can and will hate upon Jews, Hindis, Muslims, indigenous spiritualists, agnostics, and atheists more than it targets like-minded Christians.
*
And what of the power of Islam to hate the proverbial "other"?
Few who both live a politicized Islam and who call themselves Christian, Hindi, Jew, Atheist, or partial to any other creed are deemed equal to those who call themselves Muslim.
When Islam is politicized, Islamists, too, move like Christian Nationalists and Zionists.
*
It is madness!
Why?
They all are considered Abrahamic faiths connected to the same prophet peripherally or centrally.
In essence they worship different versions of the same God.
Yet each religion's prophets and adherents were human and still are.
All humans are fallible.
None are immune to hubristic myopia.
Sourced by prophets who believed in different versions of the same God, the monotheistic faiths of the region mostly are clannish, myopic, and turn blind belief to a power where the intentional murder of innocents is justifiable.
*
I am clear about the problem.
Largely it is those who believe their God(s) is (are) the only solution.
That everyone else is wrong.
That is, no doubt, empirically untrue.
Yet people believe only their God is The Truth.
The result? People who traffic in hate are more alike than they believe.
*
The leaders of Hamas in Gaza, a sub division of the nation-state Palestine, believed they had the right to execute people at a festival of Jewish culture instead of targeting military—and—
A leader who held Zion high believed he could march Palestinians at gunpoint or execute them in the dead of night, removing them from lands they've occupied for millennia—and—
A democratically elected leader turned despot in Turkey, a NATO state, denies that nation's march in the name of Islam to eradicate apostolic Armenians that claimed Jesus.
And, in the U.S., Protestant imperialists easily massacred 60-90% of those Native to America convinced by a manifest destiny where Protestantism justified murder.
*
Need I go on?
*
Too many need purity tests.
Too many cloak themselves in rigidity tied to propagandists.
We all are guilty here.
None of our hands are clean.
—Racism?
—Islamophobia?
—Antisemitism?
—Sexism?
—Cis-genderism?
—Heterosexism?
—Other-ism?
*
None of us escape repression, yet we each pick another to dominate if not eradicate.
Any "-ism" connected to the power of the state or religion or economic hegemony can pervasively be repressive such that few if any escape its power.
That is why it is called an -ism.
*
But we need not remain trapped by oppression, no matter its source.
Repression exists but does not preclude human defiance and the capacity of individuals NOT to be dominated by one viewpoint.
*
What is important about what the BBC and The Guardian both do that American journalists tend not to do?
Each features diverse viewpoints clear about genocide in Gaza.
In America, the politic is reflexively pro Israel and that particular bias infiltrates nearly every aspect of corporate-sponsored journalism in the United States.
It does not mean there is not pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian bias prevalent in UK media.
I appreciate British journalists more than Americans call out genocide in ways that are direct and that challenge those on air who defend it and that it is done more often.
A boot on the neck that crushes your wind pipe feels the same whether you are Israeli or Palestinian. Phosphorus munitions set fire to the skin whether you are Semitic of Judaic faith or Islamic Faith. One ton bombs do not distinguish between Israeli and Palestinian unless they are dropped only upon Palestinians.
*
Finally, please know one thing about me: I am not a propagandist. Nor do I believe I have all the answers.
What I know for sure? None of our hands are clean. Not mine. Not yours. None of us.
*
I struggle to name an institution in the the world unaffected by either a Judeo, or Islamic or Hindi or Christian dominance, or a White dominance, or a State-driven dominance connected either to China, Russia, the US, the UK, the EU, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Japan, or other world powers.
This is a human problem, not solely a White, Christian, Islamic, Hindi, or Jewish problem.
In Gaza, even Arab/Islamic nations today fail Palestinians:
● Egypt rejects refugees leaving Gazans to twist in the wind, closing borders after its leaders crushed that nation's own Islamic democratic revolution.
● Saudi Arabia is silent partner more to Israel—less to Palestine—as its Crown Prince executes and chops up journalists who critique him.
● Iran? Largely feckless as protector. The winds shift in Iran blown by prelates hawking a sham democracy dependent upon those who hold power as a manifestation of God incarnate.
*
It's also an intra-Palestinian problem (Hamas v Fatah).
Certainly, Gaza is ruled by a dictatorial Hamas that for two decades has refused to allow Gazans to vote on its civil/political leadership.
Hamas took up arms threatened in 2006 by Fatah's unexpected strength (41% to Hamas' 45%) in Palestinian elections local to Gaza.
Months later, Hamas invoked armed civil street conflict against a Fatah that via the ballot not the bullet threatened Hamas' hegemony.
Today, neither Hamas nor Israel dare hold elections in Gaza.
[Yes I know the Israeli government would not have allowed elections anyway.]
But my point is that, as led by Hamas, Gaza is a democracy in name only.
It's authoritarian.
*
Too many demand purity tests that require others be perfectly aligned with religionist or capitalist or socialist or communist dogma demanding blind faith in institutions.
This makes it easier for them to crush those blinded who in turn judge others based on human characteristics none have the power to control: gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, creed tied inevitably to circumstance of birth in a nation or as a descendant of immutable ethnicity in turned tied to dictatatorial religionist belief tied to blind faith within a nation.
*
Too many are convinced they are right 100% of the time about everything, especially if "they believe."
Assured their faith is supreme, they invoke God in the name of war because what is aspirational—namely their God—was created by humans as a manifestation of what they could not achieve.
Humans created God largely defined as Unconditional Love because they aspired to something other than a tendency to massacre one another in the name of faith.
Then—
They used God to do just that—massacre one another.
*
You don't have to agree.
These days too many of us are 100% sure what we today believe is—and always will be—right.
Great read thanks. An additional note in using 'religion' as the instigator on the war on Gaza, it's not. The suppression, dehumanising, censorship, Israeli (= West as Israel is a modern day American colony) control etc., are the main factors for the Hamas attack on October 7th. Religion is used so often as the reason for war e.g., Rwanda, WWII (the West continues to forget to highlight non-Jewish groups e.g., brown, black, LGBTQ, Slavs, Communists, Romanians, academics, Poles, disabled, mental health people who were murdered, and in their millions!) etc., this war started for a different reason.
It's been some time since I've taken anything as fact from the NYT. It used to be a reputable paper. I rarely watch anything north American now because they omit facts or simply lie which drastically changes the narrative. I've seen it over and over again. Watch multiple 'non North American' news and/or independents to get the real stories now.
The NYT has a long record of passive headlines in which no entity is responsible. This goes back to the early years of this century in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. In the NYT, Israel only acts in self-defense, and every atrocity is clouded in mystery as to who is responsible. It's grotesque but such is the state of corporate media.
This is why I’m a paid subscriber. The Times in particular and the M$M in general can no longer be relied upon to accurately report the news, leaving that core responsibility to those for whom reporting is not synonymous with repeating. Thank you.
This is precisely why I cancelled my NYT subscription.
+1
The same for me. Much better spending it on Zeteo rather.
This is why I canceled my NYT subscription too! Thank you for such a clear analysis
This is systematic in Western media, a concerted effort to cover up and minimise Israel's litany of crimes. The BBC first published the horrifying story of Mohammad Bhar (the Palestinian man with Down's syndrome that was mauled to death by an IDF handled 'combat' dog) with the appalling headline "The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome" and it was only after an outcry that it was changed to "Gaza man with Down's syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC."
Even the second headline obfuscates just how savage, how gruesome this ghastly crime was. Only after reading the article (available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9drj14e0lo) does it becomes clear that the 'most moral' army in the world acted deliberately. In light of this, a more fitting headline would "Nobody is safe: disabled Gaza man bleeds to death after IOF unleashes attack dog on him."
Thank you for your comment for the world to understand and find the truth.
Speaking out against the catastrophe (Nakba) that's befallen the Palestinians for 76 years and counting is the least I can do.
These headlines clearly highlight the New York Times' consistent and systematic bigotry towards Palestinian.
I'm delighted to see this news item. I also follow Assal on X. The vague,
vacuous headlines provided by NYT and other newspapers /news outlets, very effectively cover up the targeted intentional genocide being carried out by Israel. These headlines, in attempting to not give offense or to arouse strong feelings or hostility towards Israel in fact effectively lie and mislead their readers - they effectively collude in the coverup
The sheer thoroughness of the NYT's efforts to push the Israeli narrative and to dehumanize Palestinians shows that this is intentional and systematic. Assal Rad could already write an entire book on this dishonesty, and we still have no end in sight. I hope, against all odds, that someday these decisions will be investigated as propaganda in knowing support of this genocide.
We cancelled our subscription to the NYT as we couldn’t stand its reporting on the Israelis and their merciless attacks and killings of the people in Gaza. The NYT has become the US version of the Russian newspaper Pravda.
We canceled NYT and WaPo.
The only newsite, beside Zeteo, worth listening to now is Democracy Now! as they continue to list casualties and give daily updates on the peril Palestinians find them themselves in due to the violence committed against them by the Israeli government, the IDF in Gaza and by extention also in the West Bank where, in addition to the IDF, settlers are given free rein on their Palestinian neighbors.
Journalism today takes courage. Medhi Hassan has shown us what courage looks like.
I had always heard the charge of Zionist/AIPAC control of the US institutions, both Government and private but had never believed it to such extend.
I thought we were freeing Palestinians, it is in fact the Palestinians that are freeing us.
Ditto for what others have said. I no longer subscribe to or read either the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. I no longer watch CNN or MSNBC (I never watched Fox).
Here are some alternative news sources to consider.
● The Guardian (a UK-based newspaper)
● Democracy Now (national and international news by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez)
● NPR World News (National Public Radio) (U.S. based but world-focused public affairs news)
● BBC (British Broadcasting Company) (UK-based TV and online news source)
● Al Jazeera (Qatari-based Arab-focused TV and online news source)
● YES! online (“YES! Media is a nonprofit, independent publisher of solutions journalism for building a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world”)
● Dr. Robert Reich Newsletter (free, but you must provide e-mail) (Daily newsletter exposing where power lies — and how it's used and abused)
● OUT-FM broadcasting Tuesdays from WBAI 99.5FM (queer, intersectional, progressive public affairs radio program) Full Disclosure: I am a co-founder and intermittent producer
In my quest to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian war, I had to actively disengage from news sources that be they the New York Times, the Huffington Post, MSNBC, were focused on daily, the exact same point of view.
I had to diversify to news sources that were not American based.
No matter how “progressive” the American news source, you are getting a story tainted by a myopia largely partial to Israel that excludes language that calls a genocide a genocide. This is especially true if that program depends largely, if not exclusively, on advertising dollars from corporations that have been firing people who reasonably disagree with Israel’s disproportionate response that is a textbook genocide in the making.
Benjamin Netanyahu literally tried to get rid of the entire Israeli Supreme Court, which had ruled the Israeli Defense Force is not allowed to target citizens to hunt down their enemy .
It might behoove President Biden to rethink his “love” (yes, that’s the exact word he used) for Bibi.
And listen, I am not naïve.
I know Biden’s approach is right out of the playbook of many negotiators—call him friend in public and be brutally honest in private—but let’s be clear—
Joseph Robinette Biden has more than once libeled anyone who disagrees with his policies as anti-Semitic.
Israel/Palestine. (Biden)
United States/Afghanistan. (Bush then Obama then Trump)
Rwanda.
Serbia/Bosnia.
Armenia/Turkey.
Russia.
Japan.
China.
Syria.
El Salvador.
Nicaragua.
Venezuela.
Chile.
Italy.
Germany.
Not only Nazis invoke terror though the Nazis in 20th century were one of the most efficient in their quest to rid the world of peoples—Jews, gays, and others—in the name of religion.
Leaders who know better—Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Benjmain Netanyahu, Mohammed Deif (Hamas military leader), Ismail Haniyeh (political leader of Hamas)—offer comfort to those who target innocents ostensibly claiming a moral high ground NONE OF THEM can claim.
And what of our responsibility?
We can speak of wanton killing, massacre, genocide, ethnic cleansing throughout the 20th and 21st centuries where folks acted too late.
Let’s not repeat that history.
Are the BBC and the Guardian better than the NYT and the Washington Post? All are owned and/or run by Zionist individuals and regimes.
Yes. They are.
None of us escape structural racism. It is structured and pervasive because powerful institutions make sure race dominates not only in America but the world.
None who live in Israel escape Zionism. And none affected by Israel and its allies escape it either.
Why?
Because it is oppression based on defining statehood and the right to statehood based on a religion.
Religious states around the world are those most susceptible to kill others based on the fact they don't follow that religion.
In Israel—and, more broadly given the realpolitik of The Middle East—what is valued most in the region is Judaism and who therefore is most valued? Those following the precepts of Judaism and who self identify as Israeli Jews.
Why is that?
Mostly because the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union dictate NATO—and thus dominate world institutions in the region in a way that only Russia, China, and India can counterbalance them.
Neither Russia, China nor India choose to do so.
Neither nation is willing to challenge Israeli hegemony due to NATO's dominance.
And so it is, the following also is true.
Based on a religious statehood in which, de facto, in order to be most valued in Israel and Palestine, you must be Jewish—no matter be you Zionist or loathe to Zionism (and yes, there are some Jews that exist in Israel that are loathe to Zionism and its religionist based racism).
Not only must you be Jewish to be most valued, but you must be validated as worthy of God (and thus can claim equanimity) only by residing in Israel proper outside the geography of Gaza and the West Bank, which are separate and unequal.
The Frankensteinish amalgamation of religion, land, and artificially drawn boundaries that make Israel/Palestine perennially warring was defined by a World politic nearly a century ago in which a diaspora of Jews (mostly European and Germanic) were placed atop Palestinians in a region that FOR TIME IMMEMORIAL has been home to Semitic peoples of all faiths yet largely tended by caretakers who called their home Palestine, one of many nations in a region of many faiths—with each of those faiths connected to a prophet named Abraham.
Be they Jew, Christian, or Muslim, in reality Abrahamic faiths—though distinct—are sourced by the exact same monotheistic precept embraced by peoples whose DNA is so nearly exact that together they were called Semites.
* * *
In North America, no U.S. citizen is untouched by Islamophobia or antisemitism.
Neither is any American citizen untouched by the hegemony of a Judeo-Christian ethos more Christian than Judeo. Why Islamophobia? Why antisemitism? Because, in the US, Christians—be they conservative or liberal—are dominant.
The power of any non-Christian in America pales in the shadow of a religionist paradigm that can and will hate upon Jews, Hindis, Muslims, indigenous spiritualists, agnostics, and atheists more than it targets like-minded Christians.
*
And what of the power of Islam to hate the proverbial "other"?
Few who both live a politicized Islam and who call themselves Christian, Hindi, Jew, Atheist, or partial to any other creed are deemed equal to those who call themselves Muslim.
When Islam is politicized, Islamists, too, move like Christian Nationalists and Zionists.
*
It is madness!
Why?
They all are considered Abrahamic faiths connected to the same prophet peripherally or centrally.
In essence they worship different versions of the same God.
Yet each religion's prophets and adherents were human and still are.
All humans are fallible.
None are immune to hubristic myopia.
Sourced by prophets who believed in different versions of the same God, the monotheistic faiths of the region mostly are clannish, myopic, and turn blind belief to a power where the intentional murder of innocents is justifiable.
*
I am clear about the problem.
Largely it is those who believe their God(s) is (are) the only solution.
That everyone else is wrong.
That is, no doubt, empirically untrue.
Yet people believe only their God is The Truth.
The result? People who traffic in hate are more alike than they believe.
*
The leaders of Hamas in Gaza, a sub division of the nation-state Palestine, believed they had the right to execute people at a festival of Jewish culture instead of targeting military—and—
A leader who held Zion high believed he could march Palestinians at gunpoint or execute them in the dead of night, removing them from lands they've occupied for millennia—and—
A democratically elected leader turned despot in Turkey, a NATO state, denies that nation's march in the name of Islam to eradicate apostolic Armenians that claimed Jesus.
And, in the U.S., Protestant imperialists easily massacred 60-90% of those Native to America convinced by a manifest destiny where Protestantism justified murder.
*
Need I go on?
*
Too many need purity tests.
Too many cloak themselves in rigidity tied to propagandists.
We all are guilty here.
None of our hands are clean.
—Racism?
—Islamophobia?
—Antisemitism?
—Sexism?
—Cis-genderism?
—Heterosexism?
—Other-ism?
*
None of us escape repression, yet we each pick another to dominate if not eradicate.
Any "-ism" connected to the power of the state or religion or economic hegemony can pervasively be repressive such that few if any escape its power.
That is why it is called an -ism.
*
But we need not remain trapped by oppression, no matter its source.
Repression exists but does not preclude human defiance and the capacity of individuals NOT to be dominated by one viewpoint.
*
What is important about what the BBC and The Guardian both do that American journalists tend not to do?
Each features diverse viewpoints clear about genocide in Gaza.
In America, the politic is reflexively pro Israel and that particular bias infiltrates nearly every aspect of corporate-sponsored journalism in the United States.
It does not mean there is not pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian bias prevalent in UK media.
I appreciate British journalists more than Americans call out genocide in ways that are direct and that challenge those on air who defend it and that it is done more often.
A boot on the neck that crushes your wind pipe feels the same whether you are Israeli or Palestinian. Phosphorus munitions set fire to the skin whether you are Semitic of Judaic faith or Islamic Faith. One ton bombs do not distinguish between Israeli and Palestinian unless they are dropped only upon Palestinians.
*
Finally, please know one thing about me: I am not a propagandist. Nor do I believe I have all the answers.
What I know for sure? None of our hands are clean. Not mine. Not yours. None of us.
*
I struggle to name an institution in the the world unaffected by either a Judeo, or Islamic or Hindi or Christian dominance, or a White dominance, or a State-driven dominance connected either to China, Russia, the US, the UK, the EU, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Japan, or other world powers.
This is a human problem, not solely a White, Christian, Islamic, Hindi, or Jewish problem.
In Gaza, even Arab/Islamic nations today fail Palestinians:
● Egypt rejects refugees leaving Gazans to twist in the wind, closing borders after its leaders crushed that nation's own Islamic democratic revolution.
● Saudi Arabia is silent partner more to Israel—less to Palestine—as its Crown Prince executes and chops up journalists who critique him.
● Iran? Largely feckless as protector. The winds shift in Iran blown by prelates hawking a sham democracy dependent upon those who hold power as a manifestation of God incarnate.
*
It's also an intra-Palestinian problem (Hamas v Fatah).
Certainly, Gaza is ruled by a dictatorial Hamas that for two decades has refused to allow Gazans to vote on its civil/political leadership.
Hamas took up arms threatened in 2006 by Fatah's unexpected strength (41% to Hamas' 45%) in Palestinian elections local to Gaza.
Months later, Hamas invoked armed civil street conflict against a Fatah that via the ballot not the bullet threatened Hamas' hegemony.
Today, neither Hamas nor Israel dare hold elections in Gaza.
[Yes I know the Israeli government would not have allowed elections anyway.]
But my point is that, as led by Hamas, Gaza is a democracy in name only.
It's authoritarian.
*
Too many demand purity tests that require others be perfectly aligned with religionist or capitalist or socialist or communist dogma demanding blind faith in institutions.
This makes it easier for them to crush those blinded who in turn judge others based on human characteristics none have the power to control: gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, creed tied inevitably to circumstance of birth in a nation or as a descendant of immutable ethnicity in turned tied to dictatatorial religionist belief tied to blind faith within a nation.
*
Too many are convinced they are right 100% of the time about everything, especially if "they believe."
Assured their faith is supreme, they invoke God in the name of war because what is aspirational—namely their God—was created by humans as a manifestation of what they could not achieve.
Humans created God largely defined as Unconditional Love because they aspired to something other than a tendency to massacre one another in the name of faith.
Then—
They used God to do just that—massacre one another.
*
You don't have to agree.
These days too many of us are 100% sure what we today believe is—and always will be—right.
I am not so sure of myself.
Nor should you be.
None of us should.
Great read thanks. An additional note in using 'religion' as the instigator on the war on Gaza, it's not. The suppression, dehumanising, censorship, Israeli (= West as Israel is a modern day American colony) control etc., are the main factors for the Hamas attack on October 7th. Religion is used so often as the reason for war e.g., Rwanda, WWII (the West continues to forget to highlight non-Jewish groups e.g., brown, black, LGBTQ, Slavs, Communists, Romanians, academics, Poles, disabled, mental health people who were murdered, and in their millions!) etc., this war started for a different reason.
Thanks for this. Loved your perspective.
Thank you, Tony Glover. I plan to share this.
You are kind to do so and to let me know. Thank you, Anita.
It's been some time since I've taken anything as fact from the NYT. It used to be a reputable paper. I rarely watch anything north American now because they omit facts or simply lie which drastically changes the narrative. I've seen it over and over again. Watch multiple 'non North American' news and/or independents to get the real stories now.
The NYT has a long record of passive headlines in which no entity is responsible. This goes back to the early years of this century in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. In the NYT, Israel only acts in self-defense, and every atrocity is clouded in mystery as to who is responsible. It's grotesque but such is the state of corporate media.
This is vital work! How can it be disseminated -- and emulated?
This is why I’m a paid subscriber. The Times in particular and the M$M in general can no longer be relied upon to accurately report the news, leaving that core responsibility to those for whom reporting is not synonymous with repeating. Thank you.