The Biden Administration has just published its proposed budget, generating copious commentary, much of it displaying a commensurate degree of misunderstanding, especially regarding our gargantuan national security spending. To get at the truth of the matter, I consulted my friend Winslow Wheeler, who has been observing the insalubrious intricacies of the budget process over the past fifty years as a senior aide to Senators from both parties as well as a senior analyst for the General Accounting Office and directing the Center for Defense Information.
The defense budget has just been posted by the administration is being described as approaching a trillion dollars. Is that accurate? :
No. It’s actually a lot more than that. In fact it’s beginning to inch up on $2 trillion.
How so?
The problem is that when most people look at the defense budget, they don’t count everything that we spend even for the Pentagon. But in addition to that, there are hundreds of billions of dollars outside of the Pentagon’s budget that we spend for national security. Things like the nuclear weapons activities in the Department of Energy; that’s $37 billion; $26 billion for retired military pensions and healthcare and $12 billion for the Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile, and a strange and suspicious looking category for the international activities of the FBI in something called “Defense Related Activities.”
Do we have any idea what that last one is for?
It has always been classified. In the 50 years I’ve been watching the defense budget, it’s never been explained other than some occasional hints. One year they admitted to a lot of money being spent by the FBI in, wait for it, Taiwan, and so it’s very unclear exactly what this is, but it’s always counted as part of so-called defense related activities.
The expenses that I have just been describing come to $970 billion, but that leaves out a lot.. Add in about $800 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the State Department and its associated agencies, the Department of Homeland Security. And we know now from our Republican friends that border protection is a dire national security issue. Add all that together. Then you can calculate the share for the interest on the debt that we pay each year. All those activities I’ve just described come to 21% of all federal spending. Calculating in that percentage as a the amount it contributes to the debt burden gives you $254 billion.. And so you add all of that up together and you get $1.767 trillion.
Jesus Christ. What about CIA and other intelligence spending?
All the intelligence agencies are in the Pentagon budget except for the intelligence agencies for the State Department, Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security. Those are the few other things that are not in the Pentagon budget that are distributed in the other agencies that I’ve described. When they last published the total amount for the intel budget it was over $120 billion, but it’s all embedded in these various agencies.
Since the budget was published, there’s been some wailing and lamentation that because of irksome spending restraints, this budget actually represents a cut or at least restraint on defense spending. What’s your view on that?
Well, last yea the budget deal that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated with the Democrats for the Pentagon allowed only a 1% increase in defense spending. But because of the screwy way that we actually calculate things, if you put together everything we spent just for the Pentagon without all those other items I mentioned, last year, it looks like we will have spent $968 billion, while for 2025, Biden’s requesting $921 billion. So yes, that’s a cut. But that doesn’t include the supplementals that Biden will request later this year for the Pentagon, for Ukraine, Israel, God knows what, that will get us back into competition with 2024. The reason why 2024 is higher than the Biden request is because it had 60 billion worth of emergency supplementals that Congress is about to approve and that money is counted in my total. But because of the broken accounting rules that we use for the budget, that money’s not counted when you calculate the deal that McCarthy made with the Democrats, and that’s emergency money that doesn’t count on budget cap.
For years we had the Overseas Contingency Operations defense spending, the so called war budget, which was the extra money the military got for actually fighting wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Are we getting back to that?
Yes. The politically-derived budget caps don’t apply to that money. And it’s a lot more than just for the wars; lots of billions for goodies for everybody added each year there. It’s all part of the hocus pocus ways that Congress allows itself to appropriate money so it can pretend that it’s using restraint, but actually is exploiting all kinds of loopholes to increase whatever cap or restraint they pretend that they’ve added to the defense budget.
What’s the next budgetary legislative stage that we’re going to endure?
:We haven’t finished with 2024 yet, because Congress has gotten into this habit of never passing budgets on time. And it also helps the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate discipline members so they don’t get out of the line on things. We do these things called continuing resolutions that keep the money flowing but only at the level approved in the previous year. And we’re in that situation for the Defense Department for 2024. Next week or the week after, they’re going to resolve that and pick a final total for 2024, which will include most, but probably not all of the emergency supplemental that Biden requested for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and defense industrial base spending. So that number will become final in two or three weeks. We have barely begun on the 2025 consideration in Congress that will take the next three, four months and we’ll have another continuing resolution because they won’t pass things in time for the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1st, and we’ll go through this charade once again. And because this is an election year, it’ll be all that more sloppy, painful, and unappealing to observe.
Then when they do it, Chuck Schumer and whoever is the Speaker of the House will pat themselves on the back and say, ‘well, we’ve done a great job. Who says we can’t do anything. We just got the budget finally passed.’ But that will be months late yet again.
Are there items tacked onto the defense bills that have nothing to do with defense?
Yes. There’s two bills. One is the National Defense Authorization Act, which is the bill that goes to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. That’s a policy bill. It doesn’t make money actually available to be spent, but it pretends it does. It has lots of numbers in it; it’s a tar baby for all kinds of crazy stuff or politically driven stuff because the legislative process is so broken. Members don’t have an opportunity to do stuff on the floor of the House and Senate and especially in the Senate because the Majority Leader exploits the rules to make amendments impossible. The National Defense Authorization Act is one of those bills where they actually get a chance to do amendments and they do all kinds of crazy stuff, lots of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with national defense. Last year they had 600 amendments for that bill.
Whew.
But they don’t really get debated. This is yet another way that the Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, controls things. If you’re a Senator, you have to supplicate Schumer to get him to accept your amendment. That will then will get into a package that he’s blessed and it’ll be adopted wholesale by the Senate with perfunctory debate and members giving staff-written speeches about ‘this is a wonderful bill. It includes my important amendment to increase ice block cutting in Minnesota’ and all kinds of other crazy stuff. Every one of these will have been approved by Schumer or his agents as politically acceptable. If you are a dissenter and have a problem with how things are done in the Pentagon or anywhere else, you will not get Schumer’s blessing and your amendment will not be added to his package to be dumped into the National Defense Authorization Act, and you’ll be out in the cold. We go through essentially the same process with the appropriations bill, which is the one that actually makes the money available to all these agencies. Yet again, Schumer controls the process where if he likes the smell of your amendments and it’s okay with the prevailing political dogma that week or that month or for the last decade, it’ll get included. And if you have something that that Chuck Schumer doesn’t like, your amendment will be out in the cold.
Was it always like this?
When the Senate described itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body back in the 1970s and eighties, it would have a process where a bill would come up on the floor in the Senate, and the Senate took great pride in the fact that it had unlimited amendments, and you could offer an amendment on anything you wanted to all of these bills, whether it’s the National Defense Authorization Act or the FAA Authorization Act, and there would be a proper debate, and then the Senate would vote and the majority of those senators present in voting would prevail.
Today it’s a fundamentally broken process because of the automatic filibuster, which allows the party leaders to totally control things. Unless a Senator can somehow put together sixty votes to override a filibuster, Schumer and McConnell can simply prevent your amendment from even coming to the floor, let alone get debated. It’s also a corrupt process because if you legislate in ways that Chuck Schumer, or whoever is the leader, doesn’t like or your idea is a pain in the ass for the Democratic, or Republican, caucus, you will be on the outs. Furthermore, Schumer, and McConnell control a large portion of the money that you need for your reelection campaign. And if you don’t behave yourself, you’ll be on the outs, not just on getting your amendment adopted, but you’ll be on the outs so far as getting any of his money is concerned. And for the money that he doesn’t directly control, he’ll be sending the message to the big political donors, ‘don’t give anything to Senator So and So. He’s not one of us; he’s not a good boy.’ That’s the way we do business these days.
Getting back to the defense bill, I saw an item this morning that the Navy is saying they all have to cut back Virginia class submarine production from two to one next year because of their terrible financially straitened circumstances. How do we read that?
There’s two things going on there. One is that the Navy has requested a gigantic ship-building budget, something like $45 billion. The problem is that navy ships are so expensive these days that you can’t fit much dirt into that bag. Those submarines are about $3 billion apiece. Aircraft carriers, and we’re paying for two more, are about $13 billion apiece. They have a brand new ‘low cost’ frigate that’s getting into production this year. Those come in at $1 billion apiece. When you have ships that cost these amounts, even with a gigantic budget, like $45 billion, you can’t buy many of them. The second thing that’s going on is the Navy is tickling the system. They’re saying, ‘Oh dear, we can only afford one sub this year because we’re so stretched running. And isn’t that just terrible?’ So they’re tickling Congress where it feels good, and they’re saying, ‘okay, when you add money, add money for another submarine.’
So does that mean the budget will grow beyond what the President has asked for?
The Biden request is a floor, not a ceiling.
And the other game that goes on is they are actually limited in a relative sense in the billions of dollars that they can add on each year. So the staff on the appropriations committee and the two armed services committees, they go looking for things to cut in the accounts in the Pentagon budget where nobody’s paying much attention. So they can then plow that money back into the stuff that the Navy wants for these submarines, or that Senator X, Y, or Z wants for a research and development program that just happens to be performed in his, or her, state and just happens to be from that company that gave him a healthy political contribution last year. One of the things the staffs love to cut is training money for the Air Force and others, because they’ll declare the request to have been excessive. They’ll add that few hundred million dollars to the pot for goodies that members of Congress want. An added problem, of course, is that the Air Force is already way, way behind on trending hours for pilots, and that account needs more money, not less money. There are all kinds of other games that the staff at these committees play to pretend they’re taking out unuseful money, and paying for the oh, so wonderful ideas that members of Congress want for their special requests.
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.
Liberal democracy is not what it seems.
It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.
But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?
Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.
What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?
And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.
The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.
The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.
Depravity on show
The West is desperately trying to cope. When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.
They are given a name. It is Russia. It is Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. It is China. And right now, it is Hamas.
There must be an enemy. But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry – a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years – that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore. The excuses are hard to swallow.
Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter? Does the West really believe that the attack of 7 October warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?
To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things. First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look. And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.
Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.
Starved by Israel
To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage – especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.
How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians? After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.
A headline in the New York Times, for example, told readers last month, “Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children”, as if this were a famine in Africa – a natural disaster, or an unexpected humanitarian catastrophe – rather than a policy declared in advance and carefully orchestrated by Israel’s top echelons.
The Financial Times offered the same perverse framing: “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza”.
But starvation is not an actor in Gaza. Israel is. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children. It renews that policy each day afresh, fully aware of the terrible price being inflicted on the population.
As the head of Medical Aid for Palestinians warned of developments in Gaza: “Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”
Last week Unicef, the United Nations children’s emergency fund, declared that a third of children aged under two in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished. Its executive director, Catherine Russell, was clear: “An immediate humanitarian cease-fire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering.”
Were it really starvation doing the stalking, rather than Israel imposing starvation, the West’s powerlessness would be more understandable. Which is what the media presumably want their readers to infer.
But the West isn’t powerless. It is enabling this crime against humanity – day after day, week after week – by refusing to exert its power to punish Israel, or even to threaten to punish it, for blocking aid.
Not only that, but the US and Europe have helped Israel starve Gaza’s children by denying funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, the main humanitarian lifeline in the enclave.
All of this is obscured – meant to be obscured – by headlines that transfer the agency for starving children to an abstract noun rather than a country with a large, vengeful army.
Attack on aid convoy
Such misdirection is everywhere – and it is entirely intentional. It is a playbook being used by every single Western media outlet. It was all too visible when an aid convoy last month reached Gaza City, where levels of Israeli-induced famine are most extreme.
In what has come to be known by Palestinians as the “Flour Massacre”, Israel shot into large crowds desperately trying to get food parcels from a rare aid convoy to feed their starving families. More than 100 Palestinians were killed by the gunfire, or crushed by Israeli tanks or hit by trucks fleeing the scene. Many hundreds more were seriously wounded.
It was an Israeli war crime – shooting on civilians – that came on top of an Israeli crime against humanity – starving two million civilians to death.
“The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off”
The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off. It has been repeated several times, though you would barely know it, given the paucity of coverage.
The depravity of using aid convoys as traps to lure Palestinians to their deaths is almost too much to grasp.
But that is not the reason the headlines that greeted this horrifying incident so uniformly obscured or soft-soaped Israel’s crime.
For any journalist, the headline should have written itself: “Israel accused of killing over 100 as crowd waits for Gaza aid.” Or: “Israel fires into food aid crowd. Hundreds killed and injured”
But that would have accurately transferred agency to Israel – Gaza’s occupier for more than half a century, and its besieger for the last 17 years – in the deaths of those it has been occupying and besieging. Something inconceivable for the Western media.
So the focus had to be shifted elsewhere.
BBC contortions
The Guardian’s contortions were particularly spectacular: “Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks”.
The massacre by Israel was disappeared as mysterious “food aid-related deaths”, which in turn became secondary to the Guardian’s focus on the diplomatic fallout.
Readers were steered by the headline into assuming that the true victims were not the hundreds of Palestinians killed and maimed by Israel but the Israeli hostages whose chances of being freed had been “complicated” by “food aid-related deaths”.
The headline on a BBC analysis of the same war crime – now reframed as an author-less “tragedy” – repeated the New York Times’ trick: “Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza”.
Another favourite manoeuvre, again pioneered by the Guardian, was to cloud responsibility for a clear-cut war crime. Its front-page headline read: “More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy”.
Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene. In fact, worse, the crime scene was removed too. Palestinians “died” apparently because of poor aid management. Maybe UNRWA was to blame.
Chaos and confusion became useful refrains for media outlets keener to shroud culpability. The Washington Postdeclared: “Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame”. CNN took the same line, downgrading a war crime to a “chaotic incident”.
But even these failings were better than the media’s rapidly waning interest as Israel’s massacres of Palestinians seeking aid became routine – and therefore harder to mystify.
A few days after the Flour Massacre, an Israeli air strike on an aid truck in Deir al-Balah killed at least nine Palestinians, while last week more than 20 hungry Palestinians were killed by Israeli helicopter gunfire as they waited for aid.
“Food aid-related” massacres – which had quickly become as normalised as Israel’s invasions of hospitals – no longer merited serious attention. A search suggests the BBC managed to avoid giving significant coverage to either incident online.
Food-drop theatrics
Meanwhile, the media has ably assisted Washington in its various deflections from the collaborative crime against humanity of Israel imposing a famine on Gaza compounded by the US and Europe de-funding UNRWA, the only agency that could mitigate that famine.
British and US broadcasters excitedly joined air crews as their militaries flew big-bellied planes over Gaza’s beaches, at great expense, to drop one-off ready-made meals to a few of the starving Palestinians below.
Given that many hundreds of truckloads of aid a day are needed just to stop Gaza sliding deeper into famine, the drops were no more than theatrics. Each delivered at best a solitary truckload of aid – and then only if the palettes didn’t end up falling into the sea, or killing the Palestinians they were meant to benefit.
The operation deserved little more than ridicule.
Instead, dramatic visuals of heroic airmen, interspersed with expressions of concern about the difficulties of addressing the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, usefully distracted viewers’ attention not only from the operations’ futility but from the fact that, were the West really determined to help, it could strong-arm Israel into letting in far more plentiful aid by land at a moment’s notice.
The media were equally swept up by the Biden administration’s second, even more outlandish scheme to help starving Palestinians. The US is to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coast so that aid shipments can be delivered from Cyprus.
The plot holes were gaping. The pier will take two months or more to construct, when the aid is needed now. In Cyprus, as at the land crossings into Gaza, Israel will be in charge of inspections – the main cause of hold-ups.
And if the US now thinks Gaza needs a port, why not also get to work on a more permanent one?
The answer, of course, might remind audiences of the situation before 7 October, when Gaza was under a stifling 17-year siege by Israel – the context for Hamas’ attack that the Western media never quite finds the space to mention.
For decades, Israel has denied Gaza any connections to the outside world it cannot control, including preventing a sea port from being built and bombing the enclave’s only airport way back in 2001, shortly after it was opened.
And yet, at the same time, Israel’s insistence that it no longer occupies Gaza – just because it has done so at arm’s length since 2005 – is accepted unquestioningly in media coverage.
Again, the US has decisive leverage over Israel, its client state, should it decide to exercise it – not least billions in aid and the diplomatic veto it wields so regularly on Israel’s behalf.
The question that needs asking by the media on every piece about “starvation stalking Gaza” is why is the US not using that leverage.
In a typical breathless piece titled “How the US military plans to construct a pier and get food into Gaza”, the BBC ignored the big picture to drill down enthusiastically on the details of “huge logistical” and “security challenges” facing Biden’s project.
The article revisited precedents from disaster relief operations in Somalia and Haiti to the D-Day Normandy landings in the Second World War.
Credulous journalists
In support of these diversionary tactics, the media have also had to accentuate the atrocities of Hamas’ 7 October attack – and the need to condemn the group at every turn – to contrast those crimes from what might otherwise appear even worse atrocities committed by Israel on the Palestinians.
That has required an unusually large dose of credulousness from journalists who more usually present as hard-bitten sceptics.
Babies being beheaded, or put in ovens, or hung out on clothes lines. No invented outrage by Hamas has been too improbable to have been denied front-page treatment, only to be quietly dropped later when each has turned out to be just as fabricated as it should have sounded to any reporter familiar with the way propagandists exploit the fog of war.
Similarly, the entire Western press corps has studiously ignored months of Israeli media revelations that have gradually shifted responsibility for some of the the most gruesome incidents of 7 October – such as the burning of hundreds of bodies – off Hamas’ shoulders and on to Israel’s.
Though Western media outlets failed to note the significance of his remarks, Israeli spokesman Mark Regev admitted that Israel’s numbering of its dead from 7 October had to be reduced by 200 because many of the badly charred remains turned out to be Hamas fighters.
Testimonies from Israeli commanders and officials show that, blindsided by the Hamas attack, Israeli forces struck out wildly with tank shells and Hellfire missiles, incinerating Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives indiscriminately. The burnt cars piled up as a visual signifier of Hamas’ sadism are, in fact, evidence of, at best, Israel’s incompetence and, at worst, its savagery.
The secret military protocol that directed Israel’s scorched-earth policy on 7 October – the notorious Hannibal procedure to stop any Israeli being taken captive – appears not to have merited mention by either the Guardian or the BBC in their acres of 7 October coverage.
Despite their endless revisiting of the 7 October events, neither has seen fit to report on the growing demands from Israeli families for an investigation into whether their loved ones were killed under Israel’s Hannibal procedure.
Nor have either the BBC or the Guardian reported on the comments of the Israeli military’s ethics chief, Prof Asa Kasher, bewailing the army’s resort to the Hannibal procedure on 7 October as “horrifying” and “unlawful”.
Claims of bestiality
Instead, liberal Western media outlets have repeatedly revisited claims that they have seen evidence – evidence they seem unwilling to share – that Hamas ordered rape to be used systematically by its fighters as a weapon of war. The barely veiled implication is that such depths of depravity explain, and possibly justify, the scale and savagery of Israel’s response.
Note that this claim is quite different from the argument that there may have been instances of rape on 7 October.
That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.
To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.
But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.
Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.
But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.
More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.
‘Conspiracy of silence’
The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.
However, under questioning from the Intercept, a spokesperson for the New York Times readily walked back the paper’s original certainty, conceding instead that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” [emphasis added] Even that appears too strong a conclusion.
Holes in the Times’ reporting quickly proved so glaring that its popular daily podcast pulled the plug on an episode dedicated to the story after its own fact check.
The rookie reporter assigned to the task, Anat Schwartz, has admitted that despite scouring the relevant institutions in Israel – from medical institutions to rape crisis centres – she found no one who could confirm a single example of sexual assault that day. She was also unable to find any forensic corroboration.
She later told a podcast with Israel’s Channel 12 that she viewed the lack of evidence to be proof of “a conspiracy of silence”.
Instead, Schwartz’s reporting relied on a handful of testimonies from witnesses whose other easily disprovable assertions should have called into question their credibility. Worse, their accounts of instances of sexual assault failed to tally with the known facts.
One paramedic, for example, claimed two teenage girls had been raped and killed at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. When it became clear nobody fitted the description there, he changed the crime scene to Kibbutz Beeri. None of the dead there fitted the description either.
Nonetheless, Schwartz believed she finally had her story. She told Channel 12: “One person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random.”
Schwartz got further confirmation from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organisation, whose officials were already known to have fabricated Hamas atrocities on 7 October, including the various claims of depraved acts against babies.
No forensic evidence
Interestingly, though the main claims of Hamas rape have focused on the Nova music festival attacked by Hamas, Schwartz was initially sceptical – and for good reason – that it was the site of any sexual violence.
As Israeli reporting has revealed, the festival quickly turned into a battlefield, with Israeli security guards and Hamas exchanging gunfire and Israeli attack helicopters circling overhead firing at anything that moved.
Schwartz concluded: “Everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place. How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like – it is impossible. Either you hide, or you – or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”
But Schwartz dropped her scepticism as soon as Raz Cohen, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, agreed to speak to her. He had already claimed in earlier interviews a few days after 7 October that he had witnessed multiple rapes at Nova, including corpses being raped.
But when he spoke to Schwartz he could only recall one incident – a horrific attack that involved raping a woman and then knifing her to death. Undermining the New York Times’ central claim, he attributed the rape not to Hamas but to five civilians, Palestinians who poured into Israel after Hamas fighters broke through the fence around Gaza.
Notably, Schwartz admitted to Channel 12 that none of the other four people hiding in the bush with Cohen saw the attack. “Everyone else is looking in a different direction,” she said.
And yet in the Times’ story, Cohen’s account is corroborated by Shoam Gueta, a friend who has since deployed to Gaza where, as the Intercept notes, he has been posting videos of himself rummaging through destroyed Palestinian homes.
Another witness, identified only as Sapir, is quoted by Schwartz as witnessing a woman being raped at Nova at the same time as her breast is amputated with a box cutter. That account became central to the Guardian’s follow-up report in January.
Yet, no forensic evidence has been produced to support this account.
Story invented
But the most damning criticism of the Times’ reporting came from the family of Gal Abdush, the headline victim in the “Screams without Words” story. Her parents and brother accused the New York Times of inventing the story that she had been raped at the Nova festival.
Moments before she was killed by a grenade, Abdush had messaged her family and made no mention of a rape or even a direct attack on her group. The family had heard no suggestion that rape was a factor in Abdush’s death.
A woman who had given the paper access to photos and video of Abdush taken that day said Schwartz had pressured her to do so on the grounds it would help “Israeli hasbara” – a term meaning propaganda designed to sway foreign audiences.
Schwartz cited the Israeli welfare ministry as claiming there were four survivors of sexual assault from 7 October, though no more details have been forthcoming from the ministry.
Back in early December, before the Times story, Israeli officials promised they had “gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas”. None of those testimonies has materialised.
None ever will, according to Schwartz’s conversation with Channel 12. “There is nothing. There was no collection of evidence from the scene,” she said.
Nonetheless, Israeli officials continue to use the reports by the New York Times, the Guardian and others to try to bully major human rights bodies into agreeing that Hamas used sexual violence systematically.
Which may explain why the media eagerly seized on the chance to resurrect its threadbare narrative when UN official Pramila Patten, its special representative on sexual violence in conflict, echoed some of their discredited claims in a report published this month.
The media happily ignored the fact that Patten had no investigative mandate and that she heads what is in effect an advocacy group inside the UN. While Israel has obstructed UN bodies that do have such investigative powers, it welcomed Patten, presumably on the assumption that she would be more pliable.
In fact, she did little more than repeat the same unevidenced claims from Israel that formed the basis of the Times and Guardian’s discredited reporting.
Statements retracted
Even so, Patten included important caveats in the small print of her report that the media were keen to overlook.
At a press conference, she reiterated that she had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.
She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she conceded it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on 7 October was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.
All of that was ignored by the media. In typical fashion, a Guardian article on her report asserted wrongly in its headline: “UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages”.
Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.
As the US Jewish scholar Normal Finkelstein has pointed out, Patten also relied on open-source material: 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence. Or as Patten phrased it: “No tangible indications of rape could be identified.”
She admitted she had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and had not met a single survivor of rape or sexual assault.
And she noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”.
Collusion in genocide
If anything has been found to be systematic, it is the failings in the Western media’s coverage of a plausible genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Last week a computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives, even as the death-toll ratio showed that 30 times as many Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza than Hamas had killed Israelis on 7 October.
The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.
In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.
A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.
Faced with a plausible case of genocide – one being televised for months on end – even the liberal elements of the Western media have shown they have no serious commitment to the liberal democratic values they are supposedly there to uphold.
They are not a watchdog on power, either the power of the Israeli military or Western states colluding in Israel’s slaughter. Rather the media are central to making the collusion possible. They are there to disguise and whitewash it, to make it look acceptable.
Indeed, the truth is that, without that help, Israel’s allies would long ago have been shamed into action, into stopping the slaughter and starvation. The Western media’s hands are stained in Gaza’s blood.
If war is politics by other means, Washington’s ongoing wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe are meant to buttress its global influence on the one hand and undermine its competitors on the other. But the question is: how is this politics by other means working out for Washington? Not so good. Russia’s recent military victories in Ukraine and China’s expansive inroads into the Middle East alongside the growing anti-Americanism in the region (due to Washington’s support for Israel and its inability to prevent a genocide of the Palestinians) indicate an overall American inability to shape global geopolitics in unilateral ways to the exclusive advantage of Washington and its allies in Europe and elsewhere.
Russia’s recent military gains in Ukraine, for example, have very clearly established its military credentials as a power that has been able to withstand the combined military strength of the US and its European allies assembled in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). What does this mean for Washington’s policies in Central Asia? Most certainly, Washington cannot simply present Russia as a ‘weak’ military power that can be simply ‘isolated’. But more than that, Russia is utilising its victories over NATO in various ways.
For instance, when the NATO-backed Russia-Ukraine military conflict began, most reports in the mainstream US media began to spread false messaging about Central Asia potentially moving itself out of the so-called ‘Russian clout’. The US saw in it an opportunity to push itself into the region. But this has turned out to be a fiasco. When the US imposed sanctions on Russia, many Russian companies began to relocate their businesses to Central Asia, directly contributing to Central Asia’s impressive 4.8 percent growth rate in 2023. According to the findings of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the region is forecast to register an even more impressive level of growth at almost 5.7 percent in 2024-25.
In other words, thanks to Washington’s sanctions, the Russian political economy is now more deeply connected with Central Asia than it was before February 2021, which is also strengthening the Eurasian Economic Union. Now that this integration is working for the advantage of Central Asia means that the latter have little to no incentive to pay too much attention to Washington and/or the imperatives of moving decisively to Washington. It means that not only has the Biden administration’s policy of NATO expansion via Ukraine failed so far in Ukraine itself, but the ‘new’ Central Asia policy it inaugurated in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has also failed to make any impact on the ground. Russia defeated US design also by approaching relations with the Central Asian States in ways that gave them enough space to stay neutral in the conflict. While the West saw this neutrality as a sign of Russian weakness in the region and the Central Asian States’ growing assertiveness, it failed to read how this was part of Russia’s strategy to cultivate its ties in a more balanced way. This balance is also pretty evident in the ways Russia has not objected to, or even resisted, China’s growing footprint in the region, although reports in the Western media often see China’s role in Central Asia at the expense of Russia. But the West seems to have been misreading this region.
As far as Washington’s war in the Middle East is concerned, its military support for Israel plus its inability to stop genocide has eroded its credibility. Suppose Washington has been supporting Israel to maintain its dominance in the Middle East. In that case, Washington’s excessive support is now derailing its objectives, since the Middle East is now exercising a lot more strategic autonomy vis-à-vis Washington than was the case until a few years ago.
In the past few months, a flurry of Chinese activity indicates it much more clearly than anything else. China has convened leadership summits, met with Arab delegates, supported their stance vis-à-vis Israel, and held joint military exercises with one of the US’ most important allies in the region (Saudi Arabia). The UAE, otherwise a close US ally and one of the first states to sign the Abraham Accords to recognise Israel and establish diplomatic ties with it, actually withdrew from the US-led naval task force in May 2023, indicating policy and interest-based differences.
The UAE is also a country in the Middle East that has over 100,000 Chinese living there and involved in many businesses. But when it comes to the Middle East itself, and the fact that many countries in the region are involved in China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), we see the region’s trade with China registering an overall growth of almost 45 percent in 2021 and 27 percent in 2022.
Given the economic integration, the Middle East is turning out to be a region where Washington’s clout is receding fast, without any signs of recovery in the immediate future at least. Although US strikes in the Red Sea on the Houthis are meant to indicate Washington’s willingness to offer a security umbrella to the Gulf states (against Iran-backed groups), the region appears to be past the point where it must have the US on its side to ensure security. Gulf states’ perceptions of Iran as an enemy are changing, thanks to Beijing’s mediation.
As far as Washington’s support for Israel is concerned and as far as the threat of a wider war in the region it is posing, Gulf states are on the edge of a conflict that might directly undermine their modernization programmes – development projects that mainly involve China in various capacities.
Therefore, if Washington’s involvement in the Israel war was meant to bring back the era of US dominance, the exact opposite is happening, both in the Middle East and Central Asia, which happen to be two of the world’s most energy-rich regions.
Humanity doesn’t just need to escape from the mental prison of imperial indoctrination. It needs to escape from the heart prison as well.
I’m always talking here about the need to fight empire propaganda to help the public awaken to the fact that everything we’ve been trained to believe about the world is a lie, because that insight taking root in sufficient numbers would be the first step toward the revolutionary changes our world so desperately needs.
But large numbers of people opening their eyes to the reality of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful would by itself be insufficient, because people need not only to see the truth — they also need to care.
Realizing the depravity and immense human suffering the US-centralized empire is responsible for creates an opportunity to respond to this insight with horror and begin resisting it — but it is only an opportunity. At that juncture it’s still possible for someone to realize that we’re not being told the truth about what’s happening in the world, but decide to play along with the lies anyway, either because the existing world order has made them wealthy, or because they are too indoctrinated with support for western power structures, or because they ideologically support Israel, or because they’re afraid of the changes and upheaval that would come with an overturning of the status quo, or because they are intellectually and morally lazy, or some other selfish reason.
Realizing that you’ve been indoctrinated into accepting a pernicious status quo unlocks an important door within yourself, but just because that door is opened doesn’t mean you have to walk through it. Walking through it requires another kind of awakening — an awakening of the heart.
Really no amount of knowledge or intellectual insight will ever set us free as a species in and of itself. You could upload the sum total of human knowledge into the brain of everyone on earth — including even government secrets that aren’t public knowledge — but unless this is accompanied by a collective opening of the heart, it wouldn’t make any difference. Unless people can find it within themselves to care deeply about the horrific things our rulers have been doing to our fellow human beings, no amount of knowledge about those things will catalyze real change.
And there are plenty of people who know but don’t care. The most powerful government agencies in the world are run by people who know terrible secrets about our ruling power structures that we ordinary members of the public are not allowed to know, but because their loyalty is to the empire and not to humanity, they don’t care about the moral implications of what they know or the human suffering the empire is responsible for.
So the demand of this moment in history is not just to understand, but to care. Not just to know what’s wrong with the world, but to feel it. Not just to awaken on the level of the head, but to awaken on the level of the heart as well. Not just to value our own personal understanding, but to value humanity as a whole.
Knowledge of the truth can lead to a profound compassion for the victims of the globe-spanning power structure which rules over us and a determination to oppose its cruelty — that’s why said power structure pours so much energy into keeping everyone propagandized. But it doesn’t necessarily need to lead to such compassion. The light of truth can stop its expansion at the gates of the heart, unless there’s some willingness from somewhere deep inside us to throw those gates open.
Ultimately humanity just needs to wake up, on every level. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of propaganda. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles on our hearts. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the ego. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the dualistic perspective which obfuscates the oneness of all of reality from our vision.
That’s what’s being asked of us at this juncture. To wake all the way up and become a conscious species. That’s the only way we’ll ever be able to move about on this planet in a healthy and harmonious way.
And we’ll either rise to the occasion or we won’t. We’ll either wake up, or we’ll destroy ourselves. I believe we have the freedom as a species to go either way.
The concept of time travel is always an interesting one when it’s transferred to screen, and the Japanese film industry has flirted with it just as much as any other. From modern day military units transported to feudal Japan in the likes of G.I. Samurai, to the quirkiness of Summer Time Machine Blues, to of course the countless romantic spins on the genre. What all of them have in common is characters travelling back to the past, whether it be days or decades, and their need to adjust to a different time period or right a wrong. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes also uses time travel as its key theme, however it does so in an arguably more minutiae way than any of its predecessors (and perhaps anything that’ll come after it), dealing with a café owner who realises the monitor in his room is capable of showing 2 minutes into the future.
Played by Kazunari Tosa (Prisoners of the Ghostland, Misono Universe), his character lives in the apartment directly upstairs from the café he runs, and this realisation comes about when he returns home one night and the monitor flickers on, his own face staring back at him from behind the screen. His 2 minutes into the future self is back in the café downstairs, and after explaining the strange phenomenon to his current self, his current self heads back downstairs – completing the loop and setting things in motion. Soon the café’s barista, played by Riko Fujitani (Beautiful Dreamer, Asahinagu), gets in on the action, who proceeds to call up 3 of the cafes regulars to also come around and check it out as well. Before you know it, the group find themselves interacting between their current and 2 minutes into the future selves with all of the inconsequence you’d imagine 120 seconds can bring.
The directorial debut of Junta Yamaguchi, the creative force behind the indie production is actually a theatre troupe called Europe Kikaku based out of Kyoto, of which Yamaguchi is a member, as are most of the other cast and crew. The fact that the majority of talent involved in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes comes from a theatre background makes a lot of sense when you consider that 95% of the punchy 70-minute runtime plays out in a single location – the upstairs and downstairs in a low-rise building. The use of the confined environment enables the 2 minutes plot device to play out via a series of comedic interactions involving the cast talking to themselves through a monitor, a feat which Yamaguchi makes look easy, but had to have taken a substantial amount of precision timed planning behind the scenes.
The plot itself is inspired by scriptwriter Makoto Ueda’s (who also scripted the previously mentioned Summer Time Machine Blues) own self-directed and penned short from 2014, Howling, with the motivation being to stretch out the concept from the shorts 11-minute runtime to a feature length production. Admittedly, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes’ origins do show through on occasion. There can be no denying that the concept is a one-trick pony, and Yamaguchi spends a little too much time with the cafe’s regulars fooling around and being shouty in a slightly aggravating way. The focus initially seems to be on how many comedic vignettes can be pulled off with the concept, not all of which necessarily work, when it would be far more engaging if there was an actual plot to anchor the gimmick off.
As a result, because of the scenes inconsequential nature, topped off with the fact that we have to watch many of them play out twice (current and future), there are moments that feel like padding. Thankfully Yamaguchi has a plot up his sleeve, and once it kicks in it delivers the required narrative thrust just in time, ensuring that the concept alone isn’t left to carry the entire production on its shoulders. Sure it’s nothing we haven’t seen countless times before – a stash of cash with unknown origins and the yakuza who are looking for it – but paired up with the time travel concept it provides a reason for the audience to get behind the characters, as well as some of the biggest laughs.
Yamaguchi goes for the double whammy on the gimmick front, opting for the one-take approach for the 70-minute duration, although he confessed in an interview that it is in fact made up of several 10-minute takes which have then been blended together in post. The authenticity behind the one-take isn’t the important part here though (as opposed to its importance in productions like One Shot and Crazy Samurai Musashi, where the performers endurance is an integral part of enjoying the single take), rather the flow it gives to the time loop allows both the characters and the audience to experience the 2-minute time travel in real time.
As much as the previously mentioned productions are defined by the performers sustained physicality during the continuous takes, here the admiration goes to how skilfully everyone involved has executed a narrative which essentially involves them talking to themselves for extended periods. I had to frequently remind myself while watching Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes that the actors are actually not talking to themselves in real time (it was done with recordings), and the complexity behind creating such a unique character dynamic must have been vast. It’s a testament to the passion of the cast and crew that onscreen not once does it come across as questionable or contrived, and the fact that the complexity only increases as the plot progresses but the illusion never wavers is an outstanding feat.
As the owner of the café Kazunari Tosa makes for a likable protagonist. His realisation that he has a monitor that can see into the future is one of understated (almost disinterested) bewilderment, and his lack of enthusiasm to utilise its potential makes him a relatable character for the audience. The short runtime doesn’t give much room for character development, but his change from a passive observer (in his own café no less!) into a somewhat man of action is a convincing one, spurred on by the chance of a date with the café owner next door, played by Aki Asakura (the most recognisable name in the cast, having featured in the likes of Whistleblower and 2017’s live action Fullmetal Alchemist).
Despite this though, there should be no doubt that the real star of the show in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is the filmmaking technique itself. Whereas just a few years ago saying a movie looked like it was shot on an iPhone would be considered an insult (see my review for 2018’s The Dark Soul), here the entire thing actually was shot on an iPhone, and it looks just fine. In Yamaguchi’s eagerness as a first time director he also took on the role of cinematographer (something which he openly states he likely won’t do again for his next production!), and his commitment to getting certain shots at certain angles can be seen in the behind-the-scenes footage as he scrambles on top of, over, and around tables and various other objects to maintain the integrity of his vision.
While Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has had plenty of labels thrown at it already, from being a time travel movie for the Zoom generation, to One Cut of the Dead comparisons due to its micro budget and one-take approach, in the end both only tenuously relate to the end product that Yamaguchi has crafted. While far from perfect and at times a little too stretched for its own good, ultimately the way such a complex tale has been successfully pulled off from both a technical and story standpoint is difficult not to admire. The fact that some genuine laugh out loud moments are thrown in along the way make its shortcomings easy to overlook, and at just 70 minutes Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes self fulfils its title, not sticking around a minute longer than it needs to.
Besides the Israeli military’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza (the West Bank as well), there have been repressive measures by Israel to silence the dissent of pro-Palestinian voices. In a sane world, Israel would be sanctioned and deprived of U.S. military aid. Its right-wing leaders would be charged by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Unfortunately, the world has been insane at this time in human history.
The Israeli-Palestinian war is something unlike other wars in recent history. (Although the 2003 Iraq War is a close example.) The military actions of Israel in Gaza have ironically been, in intent, similar to Nazi Germany’s herding of Jews into the Warsaw ghetto and attempt to starve them. They haven’t yet tried to totally wipe them out because have killed over 30,000 and displaced tens of thousands more while subjecting them to humiliating and brutal living conditions for many years.
Worldwide, there have been the obvious protests against and condemnations of Israel. Voices emphasizing the need for a permanent cease-fire have been loud. But Israel, and its main accomplice, the United States, have not really been listening, or simply don’t care. There have been warnings from the Biden administration for Israel to be more careful, but the United States continues to supply Israel with weapons to use against Palestinians. Thus, Israel is merely getting a soft slap on the wrist in the face of its war crimes.
Among the voices of dissent, the Middle East Studies Association wrote a letter for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Police Commissioner, Yaacov Shavtai and various ministers and university rectors. The letter condemned Israel’s repression against Palestinian students in Israeli universities. This is censorship run amok.
The letter begins as follows:
“We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our deep and growing concern regarding the ongoing attacks against and restrictions on Palestinian citizens of Israel who are students at Israeli institutions. We call upon you in the strongest terms to put an end to what appears to be a targeted repression of freedom of expression and uphold your responsibility to ensure academic freedom.”
The letter further states that MESA previously contacted Israel about “aggressions against Palestinian students” after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. There is a statement that students have been the targets of intimidation and surveillance. Most importantly, MESA writes that these methods of repression have been going on since before October 7, in fact, for about seven decades. Censorship targets Palestinian students and professors for their criticism of Israel’s actions against Gaza and “their solidarity with the innocent people there.”
MESA cites a survey conducted by the Arab Student Movements Union, which represents Palestinian citizens of Israel who attend colleges and universities. The survey found that 85% of the students polled believed that their security was being threatened. Some 71% said that they are experiencing economic hardship because of the war. Because of this hardship, nearly half of the students considered dropping out of schools they attend and/or considered leaving Israel to pursue education elsewhere.
Further, the survey reveals that, after October 7, 2023, about 160 students have been disciplined for being supposed suspects supporting “terrorism.” Nineteen students have been arrested by the Israeli police because of being so-called terrorists and/or supporting a terrorist organization. But, “Typically, these students were expressing their solidarity with fellow Palestinians and with the children, women, and civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Also, after October 7, “nine Palestinian students at the University of Haifa were suspended without a disciplinary hearing by the university’s rector, Gur Alroey, for sharing posts and stories on social media.” Alroey’s excuse was that they could cause “extreme situations” at the university. But the university reversed its position and agreed to mediation “with the students’ legal representation.”
Jewish-Israeli students, however, ignored the ruling and called for the suspension of the nine students without due process. Going further, they protested against the nine students. The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) kept the harassment going, launching a campaign to “eradicate the support of terrorism on campuses.” NUIS, then, did not really use its influence to help provide security for all students. As a result, Palestinians were looked at as outcasts.
In an act of paranoia, universities published guides on how to use firearms. This resulted in a rise in the carrying of guns and rifles at universities. MESA’s letter asserted that “Academic institutions are expected to ensure that the campus climate is not hostile, that public discourse remains respectful, and that all students feel safe. Guns do not belong on university campuses.”
The letter added: “We condemn the circumvention of due process, as well as the prejudicial treatment of and broad incitement against Palestinians students,” portraying all of them as terrorists.
In conclusion, “We therefore call upon you to cease these targeted attacks on the higher education sector and ensure that Israeli campuses are safe for all their students and faculty, including those calling for an end to the war.”
Journalists have also been targets of Israeli aggression, but in a more direct fashion. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gunned down journalists who have been reporting on the front lines of the war. According to Mohamed Mandour, writing for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.” Mandour writes that 25 journalists have been arrested, with the use of “numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.” He adds that 19 of the journalists were still in prison according to the CPJ’s records as of February 14, 2024.
Photojournalist Yasser Qudih suffered the loss of eight family members when four missiles struck their house on November 13, 2023. The CPJ got this information from Reuters and The Guardian. The odds are certain that it was an attack by the IDF. But the group HonestReporting, which monitors the news for supposed anti-Israel bias, inaccuracy and other breaches of journalistic standards, raised questions that Qudih and his family members knew of the October 7 Hamas attack beforehand. This unsubstantiated accusation was rejected and HonestReporting withdrew it the next day.
But the word was out and Netanyahu took advantage of the falsehood. His office tweeted that photographers were complicit in committing “crimes against humanity.” Despite this falsehood, “Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz [said] they should be treated as terrorists. Qudih survived the attack.”
Of course, other attacks occurred, no doubt spurred on by Gantz’s ridiculous claim. Other journalists were either killed or survived attacks; sometimes their family members were killed.
Mandour writes, “CPJ is investigating reports that more than 50 offices in Gaza were damaged, leaving many journalists with no safe place to do their jobs, as they also contend with extensive power and communication outages, food and water shortages, and sometimes have to flee with their families.”
The high risks are obvious as journalists cover the war. The IDF and Israeli police have been barbaric in their treatment of them as they uncover truths and facts for world consumption, contrary to Israel’s attempts to hide truths and facts with bizarre and insane propaganda.
Israel is not the only entity trying to hide the realities of the war. As of this writing, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been considering adopting what amounts to censorship rules on the subjects of Israel and the war. While it has been gathering feedback on the move, there are doubts that Meta will change its mind.
There is a manufactured controversy on the use of the word, “Zionist.” Meta may have the intent to censor the word, along with other terminology that puts Israel in a bad light. Writing forThe Intercept, Sam Biddle quotes Dani Noble, who is part of Jewish Voice for Peace:
“As an anti-Zionist Jewish organization for Palestinian freedom, we are horrified to learn that Meta is considering expanding when they treat ‘Zionism’—a political ideology—as the same as ‘Jew/Jewish’—an ethno-religious identity.” Further, Noble said that such a policy shift “will result in shielding the Israeli government from accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”
Previously, the word Zionist was allowed as long as it was not associated with the words Jew and Jewish. Now, Meta moderators can be more stringent in deciding whether Zionist is allowed or if it is used to promote anti-Semitism. Thus, Meta has a long reach in deciding which comments are allowed when posting the “offending” word.
The moderating (or censoring) of the word Zionist is par for the course for hard-line Israel supporters. While there is an attempt to equate it with anti-Semitism, it really symbolizes a religious form of ultra-nationalism, as evidenced by the right-wing Israeli government’s use of it, along with the right-wing settlers as they attempt to steal more Palestinian land. And one of the objectives on the part of Israeli fascists is to take more land to establish a “Greater Israel.” Thus, the attempt by the IDF to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, and the West Bank.
But there is a major irony here. Biddle writes, “much of the fiercest political activism against Israel’s war in Gaza has been organized by anti-Zionist Jews, while American evangelical Christian Zionists are some of Israel’s most hardcore supporters.” So, there are Jews who are not only anti-Zionist, but side with the Palestinians.
Biddle provides examples of hypothetical posts in quotes that could be censored by Meta: “Zionists are war criminals, just look at what’s happening in Gaza.” “I don’t like Zionists.” “No Zionists allowed at tonight’s meeting of the Progressive Student Association.”
Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss tried to justify the change in his company’s rules. Biddle quotes him as saying, “We don’t allow people to attack others based on their protected characteristics, such as their nationality or religion. Enforcing this policy requires an understanding of how people use language to reference those characteristics. While the term Zionist refers to a person’s ideology, which is not a protected characteristic, it can also be used to refer to Jewish or Israeli people.”
Chambliss goes on to imply that the new rules are necessary because of tensions relating to the Middle East. But he admitted that the word Zionist is an ideology, not a religion. Besides, tensions are high already, with Israel’s military aggression in Gaza. It seems like Meta is harping on the word while there are more important things to attend to, like opposing the war, and coming to grips with about 29,000 Palestinian deaths. (And, yes, the 1,200 Israeli deaths need attention even though 55% of those killed were members of the IDF.)
Meta did contact 10 Arab, Muslim and pro-Palestinian organizations about the use of the word Zionist and how it could be used in a “dehumanizing way or violent way” if referring to Jews or Israelis, according to Guardian writers Johana Bhuiyan and Kari Paul.
But Linda Sarsour, “the executive director of Muslim advocacy organization MPower Change, said Meta’s director of content policy stakeholder engagement, Peter Stern, provided few details about why the company was revisiting the policy now and how it would be implemented or enforced in a way that doesn’t stifle political expression.” Bhuiyan and Paul quoted Sarsour’s response: “If you already have a policy that’s addressing Zionism as a proxy, then why are we having this conversation? Why is there further consideration to expand this policy?”
Expanding the policy could censor those who post pro-Palestinian comments, as well as facts, in the guise of preventing anti-Semitism. Meta, however, has had a policy that allowed the word Zionist to be used as long there wasn’t an association with the words Jew and Jewish. As Sarsour asks, “Why is there further consideration to expand this policy?”
Censorship, threats, intimidation and even murder cannot stop the tidal wave of opposition worldwide to Israel’s war. In Israel itself, more people are speaking out and opposing the Netanyahu government. And events may lead to the downfall of the Israeli fascists.
Tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.
Cue the rise of protest laws, which take the government’s intolerance for free speech to a whole new level and send the resounding message that resistance is futile.
Weaponized by police, prosecutors, courts and legislatures, these protest laws, along with free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, and a host of other legalistic maladies have become a convenient means by which to punish individuals who refuse to be muzzled.
In Florida, for instance, legislators passed a “no-go” zone law making it punishable by up to 60 days in jail to remain within 25 feet of working police and other first responders after a warning.
Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are sold to the public as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.
It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, no-go zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.
No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.
This is the painful lesson being imparted with every incident in which someone gets arrested and charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers-that-be.
These assaults on free speech are nothing new.
As Human Rights Watch points out, “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”
Journalists have come under particular fire for exercising their right to freedom of the press.
According to U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, the criminalization of routine journalism has become a means by which the government chills lawful First Amendment activity.
Journalists have been arrested or faced dubious charges for “publishing,” asking too many questions of public officials, being “rude” for reporting during a press conference, and being in the vicinity of public protests and demonstrations.
It’s gotten so bad that merely daring to question, challenge or hesitate when a cop issues an order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct.
Philadelphia lawyer Rebecca Musarra was arrested for exercising her right to remain silent and refusing to answer questions posed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. (Note: she cooperated in every other way by providing license and registration, etc.)
These incidents reflect a growing awareness about the state of free speech in America: you may have distinct, protected rights on paper, but dare to exercise those rights, and you risk fines, arrests, injuries and even death.
Unfortunately, we have been circling this particular drain hole for some time now.
More than 50 years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas took issue with the idea that merely speaking to a government representative (a right enshrined in the First Amendment) could be perceived as unlawfully inconveniencing and annoying the police.
In a passionate defense of free speech, Douglas declared:
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet. The situation might have indicated that Colten’s techniques were ill-suited to the mission he was on, that diplomacy would have been more effective. But at the constitutional level speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive.
It’s a power-packed paragraph full of important truths that the powers-that-be would prefer we quickly forget: We the people are the sovereigns. We have the final word. We can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy. We need not stay docile and quiet. Our speech can be disruptive. It can invite dispute. It can be provocative and challenging. We do not have to bow submissively to authority or speak with reverence to government officials.
In theory, Douglas was right: “we the people” do have a constitutional right to talk back to the government.
In practice, however, we live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.
Case in point: Tony Rupp, a lawyer in Buffalo, NY, found himself arrested and charged with violating the city’s noise ordinance after cursing at an SUV bearing down on pedestrians on a busy street at night with its lights off. Because that unmarked car was driven by a police officer, that’s all it took for Rupp to find himself subjected to malicious prosecution, First Amendment retaliation and wrongful arrest.
The case, as Jesse McKinley writes in The New York Times, is part of a growing debate over “how citizens can criticize public officials at a time of widespread reevaluation of the lengths and limits of free speech. That debate has raged everywhere from online forums and college campuses to protests over racial bias in law enforcement and the Israel-Hamas war. Book bans and other acts of government censorship have troubled some First Amendment experts. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments about a pair of laws — in Florida and Texas — limiting the ability of social media companies such as Facebook to ban certain content from their platforms.”
Bottom line: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t resist.
What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
Yet there can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.
What is this language of force?
Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons.Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.
This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.
Unfortunately, this is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to speak freely.
If we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws by voicing our opinions in public or on our clothing or before a legislative body, then we do not have free speech.
What we have instead is regulated, controlled, censored speech, and that’s a whole other ballgame.
Remember, the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to challenge government agents, think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.
Americans are being brainwashed into believing that anyone who wears a government uniform—soldier, police officer, prison guard—must be obeyed without question.
Of course, the Constitution takes a far different position, but does anyone in the government even read, let alone abide by, the Constitution anymore?
The government does not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully. And it definitely does not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Yet by muzzling the citizenry, by removing the constitutional steam valves that allow people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world, the government is creating a climate in which violence becomes inevitable.
When there is no First Amendment steam valve, then frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.
As John F. Kennedy warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Desultory Heroics 