Israel, like all settler colonial projects, is built on lies – the lie that the land historically belongs to the colonizers, the lie that Palestinians have no national identity, the lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the lie that a peaceful settlement is thwarted by the Palestinians rather than the Israelis.
how interesting that these 2 rogue countries, Israel and USA, are pretending to be Democracies. The enormous propaganda machines of both countries are devastating to chances of peace in the world and too bad the gullible, uninformed, misinformed, disinformed and the extremists believe it all.
Much of the MSM know full well that what they write is lies, but they also know what kinds of "reporting" will further one's career and get you plum assignments, and what kinds of reporting will get you assigned to cover allegations about corruption in the bidding of latrine cleaning services in North Dakota or something.
Very enlightening interview, especially the sections in which Abunimah discusses specific examples of how "hasbara" influences US media like the NY Times, ensuring readers receive a grotesquely-distorted image of reality.
The question is how to fight back against such a monster ...
For goodness sake, we must all know by now how Israelis lie. Nothing they say can be trusted and it is a terrible shame on those countries who believed their lies about beheaded babies, about raped women, about tunnels, about Hamas infiltration without proof in UNWRA, and whatever else they use for an excuse to kill the people who have rightful ownership of the land Israel occupies. Not to mention the right to fight against occupation of those lands and being called "terrorists" for doing what is their right in international law. Here's the truth: Israel + Zionism + USA = TERRORISM. Agree or not, read enough to know it true.
A very important and depressing interview....and it does underline the situation we find ourselves in today........in the imperial west, and in the world at large. Unless you seek out uncontaminated sources, and there aren't that many, and they are in many ways also under fire, you may have no inkling of the degree to which our democracies are failing or have already failed.
There are many dots we need to connect, and quickly. That Hilary Clinton is backing Israeli propaganda...even when it is patently unbelievable, says something I didn't realize in 2016.......about one more reason why Trump won. Trump makes up the truth as he goes along.....but there may well not have been any real truth opposing him.
When the elites in the first world are so into foreign policies that justify all kinds of lies...the lie about the Venezuelan election a few years ago.....the nonsensical story of Juan Guido being the legitimate president of a country that had just elected Maduro with a majority western leaders can only dream of.....comes to mind, what is an ordinary citizen to do??
If you only read msm...and then often only the headlines....how would you ever discover the duplicity that masquerades as media coverage ....or the economic imperialism that passes as concern for victim countries such as Haiti???
What's worse, once you do begin to see the pattern behind so much of the proxy wars and ideological lies that pass for news, how to you begin to counter the official narratives.......or continue to live comfortably in what looks to be the belly of a very nasty killer whale???
Thank you Chris and Ali. I don't know how you get the courage and energy to continue telling truth in the face of all this horror, but I'm glad you're there. And you're right about the CBC.......if I hear one of our broadcasters say "the Hamas run hospitals' one more time, I might have to shoot my television. Everywhere, dead eyed spokespersons for the Israeli position get interviewed.....everyday Neten yahoo promises to keep seeking vengeance for Oct 7, the innocent people die and nothing changes.
We likely already live in a police state, we may learn to what degree that is so sooner than we imagine.
There must be a permanent ceasefire in Gaza in order to comply with the ICJ ruling. Not with Palestinians suffering under oppressive conditions, but as a place where all live with peace and equality. It is time for Pope Francis to do more than talk. He must go to Gaza and make a stand for peace and freedom.
Let us also support UNRWA. If our governments won’t act in accordance with humanity, then we will. https://www.unrwausa.org/donate Let us do it to honor Aaron Bushnell, or in memory of Hind Rajab.
Let us call for a No Fly-Zone over Gaza!
These are a few small things we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
It is such a pity that we have to spend (waste) time listening/viewing activities of low-level non-humans who have claimed for so long that they are on top of the pyramid of humanity. We believed them and bought their salad. We even allowed them to steal beautiful Palestine.
Today we see that they are not who they claimed to be which allowed them to continue their abominations to this day for the world to see.
Only now is the planet awakening to the lies, cheating, dyshonesty of these fake jews.
I had the good fortune to live in Israel for a few years some 40 yrs ago and was honored to get to know Palestinians & Israelis and I don't believe any of the atrocities the fake journalists/soldiers are reporting about the Arabs.
I strongly believe in reincarnation as I have enough proof of it. I have had a few lives in the Middle East (which has worsen for the past 80 years because of the Israelis). It should be promoted more. You kill someone, you will come back again in a similar environment to give your life to save that life you destroyed previously.
A soul is pure and is in the image of the All Mighty. It starts its many incarnations at the bottom of the ladder and climbs up life after life learning, growing, shining towards the All Mighty because we are in his image.
Killing innocent people the way so many Israeli soldiers relish doing is the worst and lowest crime anyone can do. And those journalists that relish in exagerating and making up atrocities just for a bit of notoriety, I shudder just knowing what they will have to go through to correct their original gestures. For a lot of them they will be born on another planet that is not as evolved as Earth.
Our beautiful blue/green planet will not allow any of them to be reborn here until they have repayed those lives they had taken un-necessarily.
One of the best programs normally but this one is "the best of the bests". I was absolutely amazed listening to Ali Abunimah, his fluency, coordinated facts and the depth of his knowledge were just amazing. If you want to know the truth then this program is a must.
All the "tactics" used by Israel to discredit and sow doubt are plays from the Honest Don method of discourse. And, no, I give DJT no credit for any original thought, just making a point that there seems to be a lot of "accuse 'them' of what I just did before they get the jump on me."
I love Ali Abunimah and watch anything he is on because he can give an analysis on anything in a very clear way
One aside: I don’t understand why Chris Hedges have to put The Intercept in the same basket as the Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc.
Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain have been doing great reporting and interviews. In the same way that Chris spent all those years in the Times still being a great journalist, The Intercept also has great journalists doing great work
Really disappointed on his generalization, seemingly based on his own personal relationship with one or the other journalist in that publication
I find in incredible that in 2023 any 'thinking human' could possibly not understand why a real journalist such as Chris Hedges would not consider the Billionaire owned & controlled Intercept to be anything other than a worthless outlet for pseudo-leftist propaganda which it most certainly is. When it first began publishing I read the rag, chiefly because Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill were its founding journos.
However I quickly discovered its editorial angle was rather weak on vital issues. This wasn't in articles written by the founding journos but background and opinion pieces written by others that appeared to agree that Julian Assange was a sexual miscreant or that H Clinton was the 'lesser evil'. Hmm. So my perusal of the intercept became less frequent.
Then 2017 the Reality Winner tale surfaced; where the intercept had deliberately told US intelligence that an employee of a sub-contractor, Reality Winner her name, had leaked an intelligence report concerning alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election to the Intercept.
Even though this woman appeared to be clearly on the opposite side from what I knew to be true, in that she was trying to provide supporting evidence for the Russiagate deception, I along with many others believe that a media organisation should never betray its sources. The paper could choose not to publish, suggest a more amenable outlet but any media outlet which informed on its sources was clearly not practicing serious journalism or even feigning objectivity.
After that I stopped reading the Intercept, when I heard that the fishwrap had fired Glenn Greenwald for the 'sin' of wanting to provide context and actual y'know facts about Hunter Biden's Ukraine antics I was totally unsurprised because they had already fired Laura Poitras for her criticism of their handling of Reality Winner plus a number of intercept 'scoops' had demonstrated that the paper aped the contemporary democratic party in claiming to be somehow 'of the left' but actually being 100% supportive of soppy sellout liberalism.
As Greenwald said his job at intercept had unbelievably good pay and conditions unmatched anywhere else but he could no longer accept the pieces of silver in exchange for his soul. He was at pains to point out that he had no criticism of Scahill because people had to make their own decisions based on their own life.
That also means that we as readers should also make our own decisions about what we choose to read. I no longer regard Scahill as a serious journalist and struggle to understand how anyone familiar with the circumstances of the intercept and billionaire Pierre Omyidar's politics would think that any article written by any intercept employee could possibly be "just the facts ma'am just the facts". And yes I do acknowledge the irony implicit in linking those two statements.
I don't know if the Reality Winner story is true but my point still stands. Even if you are 100% right about what some journalists in the Intercept might have done, what you say about the publication is no different than what one could say about the Times. And my point is that their coverage of Gaza - which was where the Chris's criticism landed - has been really good.
Fortunately neither I nor anyone else has control over what you choose to believe. However if you read this article from equally slimy neolib cesspool Rolling Stone here:
You will learn what Winner herself thinks about the Intercept. It also contains Betsy's mealy mouthed squirming as she attempts to wriggle outta responsibility for what happened to Winner.
It seems to me that when orange man was prez support for Winner among dim lovers was great yet once sleepy joe took over that gig and became obama like in his determination to stop unsanctioned leaks (sanctioned leaks being those you read in nyt or wapo), As a human who finds both dim & rethug prez's beneath contempt I have to say that as biden has been much more rigorous in catching & prosecuting leakers , it is interesting his liberal supporters quickly forgot about Winner probably so as not to seem the hypocrites which they are.
There are plenty of far more trustworthy sources of info about the actions of the apartheid settler state than the intercept, in fact wasn't Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone ( a reliable source) pissed just a week or so ago at the way the intercept had reprinted all the information he, electronic intifada & mondoweiss had run about the Oct 7 sexual violence deceits coming outta the zionists and how the intercept hadn't credited them as their sources?
As for your continual reference to The NY Times it cannot escape your notice that Chris included them on the list of media propagandists along with the intercept. Chris' hassles with editorial management at the NYT went on for years, show me that Scahill is doing the same at the Intercept up to the point where he gets fired & maybe I'll consider reading his work again.
It is sociopathic careerism by politicians, corporate drones and media flunkies which has got our world in such a mess, I have no time for such types myself, if you choose to not comprehend that reality fine, but don't be fooled into thinking that many of us do not understand the way greedies have wrecked so much of this world.
I am not going to try and change anyone’s mind about one publication or the other, nor am I interested in the particulars of Chris’ fight with the Times, as I am not interested in what Winner thinks.
I am not going to “investigate” what Jeremy Scahill or any other journalist does or does not inside the intercept.
I listen to the podcast, I read an article, I can make my judgement based on what I listen to or read
So far, concerning this genocide, I haven’t seen anything that any of the independent journalists would call biased in Israel’s favor and this is something that I have seen since way before October when it comes to Scahill’s coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian issue
I am not a Groupie nor disgruntled reader. I just try to get the best information I can and in this case, I think Chris is off the mark
Absolutely correct. The Intercept has been very consistent in its Israel-Palestine coverage - and consistent in naming Israel's genocide - in many, many articles. In this instance, Chris is simply wrong to lump them into MSM.
I just want to report that your interview with Noura Erakot has been blocked for weeks by the process you describe here as part of Hasbara. I would love to see it if you could repost it.
US Liberty FINALLY Explained – the false flag attack was organized by the US government -- to blame Egypt and its president Gamal Abdel Naser whom CIA hated passionately !!
BUT the heroic sailors prevented ship from sinking – Scott Ritter – Ask the Inspector – March 15, 2024:
how interesting that these 2 rogue countries, Israel and USA, are pretending to be Democracies. The enormous propaganda machines of both countries are devastating to chances of peace in the world and too bad the gullible, uninformed, misinformed, disinformed and the extremists believe it all.
I would like to say one thing here and I think it is important.
I am still on Washington Post mainly because I can comment and ask questions to people who have NO idea what is going on.
It 'hurts' going on there because most of the news/editorials are lies.
I think if you want to fight MSM you go on there and comment until your fingers drop off!
I watch each week to see if my comment has been deleted....mostly they have not done this.
Much of the MSM know full well that what they write is lies, but they also know what kinds of "reporting" will further one's career and get you plum assignments, and what kinds of reporting will get you assigned to cover allegations about corruption in the bidding of latrine cleaning services in North Dakota or something.
Very enlightening interview, especially the sections in which Abunimah discusses specific examples of how "hasbara" influences US media like the NY Times, ensuring readers receive a grotesquely-distorted image of reality.
The question is how to fight back against such a monster ...
For goodness sake, we must all know by now how Israelis lie. Nothing they say can be trusted and it is a terrible shame on those countries who believed their lies about beheaded babies, about raped women, about tunnels, about Hamas infiltration without proof in UNWRA, and whatever else they use for an excuse to kill the people who have rightful ownership of the land Israel occupies. Not to mention the right to fight against occupation of those lands and being called "terrorists" for doing what is their right in international law. Here's the truth: Israel + Zionism + USA = TERRORISM. Agree or not, read enough to know it true.
Thanks, for very informative, interesting interview concerning Israeli misinformation methods!
A very important and depressing interview....and it does underline the situation we find ourselves in today........in the imperial west, and in the world at large. Unless you seek out uncontaminated sources, and there aren't that many, and they are in many ways also under fire, you may have no inkling of the degree to which our democracies are failing or have already failed.
There are many dots we need to connect, and quickly. That Hilary Clinton is backing Israeli propaganda...even when it is patently unbelievable, says something I didn't realize in 2016.......about one more reason why Trump won. Trump makes up the truth as he goes along.....but there may well not have been any real truth opposing him.
When the elites in the first world are so into foreign policies that justify all kinds of lies...the lie about the Venezuelan election a few years ago.....the nonsensical story of Juan Guido being the legitimate president of a country that had just elected Maduro with a majority western leaders can only dream of.....comes to mind, what is an ordinary citizen to do??
If you only read msm...and then often only the headlines....how would you ever discover the duplicity that masquerades as media coverage ....or the economic imperialism that passes as concern for victim countries such as Haiti???
What's worse, once you do begin to see the pattern behind so much of the proxy wars and ideological lies that pass for news, how to you begin to counter the official narratives.......or continue to live comfortably in what looks to be the belly of a very nasty killer whale???
Thank you Chris and Ali. I don't know how you get the courage and energy to continue telling truth in the face of all this horror, but I'm glad you're there. And you're right about the CBC.......if I hear one of our broadcasters say "the Hamas run hospitals' one more time, I might have to shoot my television. Everywhere, dead eyed spokespersons for the Israeli position get interviewed.....everyday Neten yahoo promises to keep seeking vengeance for Oct 7, the innocent people die and nothing changes.
We likely already live in a police state, we may learn to what degree that is so sooner than we imagine.
There must be a permanent ceasefire in Gaza in order to comply with the ICJ ruling. Not with Palestinians suffering under oppressive conditions, but as a place where all live with peace and equality. It is time for Pope Francis to do more than talk. He must go to Gaza and make a stand for peace and freedom.
Please sign the petition and share widely.
https://chng.it/CRQ7qw4Gzn
Code pink
https://www.codepink.org/cnngaza?utm_campaign=12_15_pali_update_alert_3&utm_medium=email&utm_source=codepink
Let us also support UNRWA. If our governments won’t act in accordance with humanity, then we will. https://www.unrwausa.org/donate Let us do it to honor Aaron Bushnell, or in memory of Hind Rajab.
Let us call for a No Fly-Zone over Gaza!
These are a few small things we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
It is such a pity that we have to spend (waste) time listening/viewing activities of low-level non-humans who have claimed for so long that they are on top of the pyramid of humanity. We believed them and bought their salad. We even allowed them to steal beautiful Palestine.
Today we see that they are not who they claimed to be which allowed them to continue their abominations to this day for the world to see.
Only now is the planet awakening to the lies, cheating, dyshonesty of these fake jews.
I had the good fortune to live in Israel for a few years some 40 yrs ago and was honored to get to know Palestinians & Israelis and I don't believe any of the atrocities the fake journalists/soldiers are reporting about the Arabs.
I strongly believe in reincarnation as I have enough proof of it. I have had a few lives in the Middle East (which has worsen for the past 80 years because of the Israelis). It should be promoted more. You kill someone, you will come back again in a similar environment to give your life to save that life you destroyed previously.
A soul is pure and is in the image of the All Mighty. It starts its many incarnations at the bottom of the ladder and climbs up life after life learning, growing, shining towards the All Mighty because we are in his image.
Killing innocent people the way so many Israeli soldiers relish doing is the worst and lowest crime anyone can do. And those journalists that relish in exagerating and making up atrocities just for a bit of notoriety, I shudder just knowing what they will have to go through to correct their original gestures. For a lot of them they will be born on another planet that is not as evolved as Earth.
Our beautiful blue/green planet will not allow any of them to be reborn here until they have repayed those lives they had taken un-necessarily.
Paragraph 4 - "vicious" not "viscous".
One of the best programs normally but this one is "the best of the bests". I was absolutely amazed listening to Ali Abunimah, his fluency, coordinated facts and the depth of his knowledge were just amazing. If you want to know the truth then this program is a must.
This has to be discussed and known to us citizens
All the "tactics" used by Israel to discredit and sow doubt are plays from the Honest Don method of discourse. And, no, I give DJT no credit for any original thought, just making a point that there seems to be a lot of "accuse 'them' of what I just did before they get the jump on me."
I love Ali Abunimah and watch anything he is on because he can give an analysis on anything in a very clear way
One aside: I don’t understand why Chris Hedges have to put The Intercept in the same basket as the Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc.
Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain have been doing great reporting and interviews. In the same way that Chris spent all those years in the Times still being a great journalist, The Intercept also has great journalists doing great work
Really disappointed on his generalization, seemingly based on his own personal relationship with one or the other journalist in that publication
I find in incredible that in 2023 any 'thinking human' could possibly not understand why a real journalist such as Chris Hedges would not consider the Billionaire owned & controlled Intercept to be anything other than a worthless outlet for pseudo-leftist propaganda which it most certainly is. When it first began publishing I read the rag, chiefly because Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill were its founding journos.
However I quickly discovered its editorial angle was rather weak on vital issues. This wasn't in articles written by the founding journos but background and opinion pieces written by others that appeared to agree that Julian Assange was a sexual miscreant or that H Clinton was the 'lesser evil'. Hmm. So my perusal of the intercept became less frequent.
Then 2017 the Reality Winner tale surfaced; where the intercept had deliberately told US intelligence that an employee of a sub-contractor, Reality Winner her name, had leaked an intelligence report concerning alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election to the Intercept.
Even though this woman appeared to be clearly on the opposite side from what I knew to be true, in that she was trying to provide supporting evidence for the Russiagate deception, I along with many others believe that a media organisation should never betray its sources. The paper could choose not to publish, suggest a more amenable outlet but any media outlet which informed on its sources was clearly not practicing serious journalism or even feigning objectivity.
After that I stopped reading the Intercept, when I heard that the fishwrap had fired Glenn Greenwald for the 'sin' of wanting to provide context and actual y'know facts about Hunter Biden's Ukraine antics I was totally unsurprised because they had already fired Laura Poitras for her criticism of their handling of Reality Winner plus a number of intercept 'scoops' had demonstrated that the paper aped the contemporary democratic party in claiming to be somehow 'of the left' but actually being 100% supportive of soppy sellout liberalism.
As Greenwald said his job at intercept had unbelievably good pay and conditions unmatched anywhere else but he could no longer accept the pieces of silver in exchange for his soul. He was at pains to point out that he had no criticism of Scahill because people had to make their own decisions based on their own life.
That also means that we as readers should also make our own decisions about what we choose to read. I no longer regard Scahill as a serious journalist and struggle to understand how anyone familiar with the circumstances of the intercept and billionaire Pierre Omyidar's politics would think that any article written by any intercept employee could possibly be "just the facts ma'am just the facts". And yes I do acknowledge the irony implicit in linking those two statements.
I don't know if the Reality Winner story is true but my point still stands. Even if you are 100% right about what some journalists in the Intercept might have done, what you say about the publication is no different than what one could say about the Times. And my point is that their coverage of Gaza - which was where the Chris's criticism landed - has been really good.
Fortunately neither I nor anyone else has control over what you choose to believe. However if you read this article from equally slimy neolib cesspool Rolling Stone here:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/reality-winner-interview-prison-nsa-1261844/
You will learn what Winner herself thinks about the Intercept. It also contains Betsy's mealy mouthed squirming as she attempts to wriggle outta responsibility for what happened to Winner.
It seems to me that when orange man was prez support for Winner among dim lovers was great yet once sleepy joe took over that gig and became obama like in his determination to stop unsanctioned leaks (sanctioned leaks being those you read in nyt or wapo), As a human who finds both dim & rethug prez's beneath contempt I have to say that as biden has been much more rigorous in catching & prosecuting leakers , it is interesting his liberal supporters quickly forgot about Winner probably so as not to seem the hypocrites which they are.
There are plenty of far more trustworthy sources of info about the actions of the apartheid settler state than the intercept, in fact wasn't Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone ( a reliable source) pissed just a week or so ago at the way the intercept had reprinted all the information he, electronic intifada & mondoweiss had run about the Oct 7 sexual violence deceits coming outta the zionists and how the intercept hadn't credited them as their sources?
As for your continual reference to The NY Times it cannot escape your notice that Chris included them on the list of media propagandists along with the intercept. Chris' hassles with editorial management at the NYT went on for years, show me that Scahill is doing the same at the Intercept up to the point where he gets fired & maybe I'll consider reading his work again.
It is sociopathic careerism by politicians, corporate drones and media flunkies which has got our world in such a mess, I have no time for such types myself, if you choose to not comprehend that reality fine, but don't be fooled into thinking that many of us do not understand the way greedies have wrecked so much of this world.
I am not going to try and change anyone’s mind about one publication or the other, nor am I interested in the particulars of Chris’ fight with the Times, as I am not interested in what Winner thinks.
I am not going to “investigate” what Jeremy Scahill or any other journalist does or does not inside the intercept.
I listen to the podcast, I read an article, I can make my judgement based on what I listen to or read
So far, concerning this genocide, I haven’t seen anything that any of the independent journalists would call biased in Israel’s favor and this is something that I have seen since way before October when it comes to Scahill’s coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian issue
I am not a Groupie nor disgruntled reader. I just try to get the best information I can and in this case, I think Chris is off the mark
Absolutely correct. The Intercept has been very consistent in its Israel-Palestine coverage - and consistent in naming Israel's genocide - in many, many articles. In this instance, Chris is simply wrong to lump them into MSM.
I just want to report that your interview with Noura Erakot has been blocked for weeks by the process you describe here as part of Hasbara. I would love to see it if you could repost it.
I M P O R T A N T
US Liberty FINALLY Explained – the false flag attack was organized by the US government -- to blame Egypt and its president Gamal Abdel Naser whom CIA hated passionately !!
BUT the heroic sailors prevented ship from sinking – Scott Ritter – Ask the Inspector – March 15, 2024:
https://rumble.com/v4iwz1o-ask-the-inspector-ep.-144.html