Gideon Rachman provides a clear picture of Israel’s goal of a new order in the Middle East (Opinion, September 30). He has also entered the contest for understatement of the year when he says Israel “is losing the battle for international public opinion”.

Across the globe younger generations in particular are appalled at the seeming indifference towards innocent Arab lives lost and systematic degradation of Palestinians’ ability to live their lives. Israel may succeed in creating a new order, but it seems Israel’s methods will end its historic moral authority.

Bob Walsh
Millbrook, ON, Canada

What seemed unthinkable days ago is happening: a major Eurozone bank plans to acquire another in a different member state. UniCredit, Italy’s second lender, says it holds contingent derivative instruments which would give it effective control of Commerzbank, the second-biggest bank in Germany by market capitalisation (“The trouble with UniCredit’s interest in Commerzbank”, Opinion, September 30).

The two banks are a good match. After years of draconian clean-up and restructuring, UniCredit recently outperformed most European peers by net returns and market valuation. Now worth twice what Commerzbank is worth, it is an internationally diversified group, experienced in restructuring itself and other banks. It already owns an important mortgage unit in Germany, which would generate synergies. Commerzbank, by contrast, with a cost ratio well above UniCredit’s and profits about a tenth of the size, may benefit from some internal cure. Both banks have sound capital and liquidity positions.

In its recent report on European competitiveness, Mario Draghi called for banking integration in the Eurozone, even suggesting special legislation is needed to bring it about. This deal would mark a remarkable step in the right direction.

But within Germany, it is fiercely opposed by the political establishment and trade unions, fearing loss of control and job cuts.

At the time of writing, the only obstacle seems to be authorisation by the European Central Bank, on prudential grounds. Its supervisory board, chaired by former Bundesbank vice-president Claudia Buch, includes top officials from the Bundesbank and BaFin, Germany’s financial watchdog. All of them are bound by statute to act independently in the sole interest of the EU bloc and not take instructions from governments or any other bodies.

The UniCredit-Commerzbank deal is a test case for the ECB, which will reverberate into the future, and be a golden opportunity for its supervisory board to uphold its independence.

Ignazio Angeloni
Senior Policy Fellow, SAFE, Goethe University Frankfurt; Non-resident Fellow, Institute for European Policymaking, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

2.5K

The Official Project Censored Show

Media Censorship and Attacks on Press Freedoms: Genocide in Gaza, Julian Assange

Play Episode


Pause Episode

Mute/Unmute Episode


Rewind 10 Seconds

1x

Fast Forward 30 seconds

Advertisement

00:00
/

Advertisement

Advertisement

Mickey’s first guest, journalist Abby Martin of The Empire Files, explains how corporate media has carefully avoided presenting the full atrocity of the Israeli attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and the years of oppression in both Gaza and the West Bank. She also discusses the tragic consequences, which so often go unreported in the Western press. Then in the second half of the program, Kevin Gosztola, author of Guilty of Journalism, shares an update on legal and political developments around Julian Assange’s extradition case, reminds us what it portends for press freedoms worldwide, and evaluates recent coverage of the Assange story in major media.

Notes:
Abby Martin is an award-winning independent journalist and filmmaker, and founder of The Empire Files and Media Roots. She has reported extensively on imperialism and Palestine, and produced a documentary, Gaza Fights For Freedom, in 2019. Her new film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, will be out next year. Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of the news web site Shadow Proof, and lead writer at The Dissenter. He has covered the WikiLeaks and Julian Assange legal proceedings in the UK from their beginning, as well as other major press-freedom and whistleblower cases. His latest book is Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.

Mickey Huff: Welcome to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Today on the program, we are honored to welcome back to the show, Abby Martin. Abby Martin is likely no stranger to our audience. Abby is an independent anti imperialist journalist, host of the Empire Files and Media Roots Radio.

She’s also a filmmaker of Gaza Fights for Freedom and the forthcoming Earth’s Greatest Enemy. Perhaps we’ll get into some of that later in our conversation, but we’ll certainly be dedicating an entire segment to that new film when it comes out earlier next year. Abby Martin, welcome back to the Project Censored Show.

Abby Martin: It’s great to be on. Thank you so much for having me, Mickey.

Mickey Huff: It’s always a pleasure to catch up with you, and you, you’re always doing so much in, in the area of independent journalism and around anti-imperialist initiatives and efforts, and of course, your film Gaza Fights for Freedom is, very, very much, addressing a topic that’s on a lot of people’s minds right now.

I might preface the rest of this by suggesting that had more people seen your film and had more people been familiar with the very history of these struggles, we could be in a very different place than we might, you know, we are, right now and perhaps Palestinian people could be in a, in a better place, but a big part of that challenge has been Western propaganda.

Certainly unilateral support for right wing Israeli policies has been going back for decades. Abby, you have a lot of connections to the topic and of course, your film Gaza Fights for Freedom, you work with people that live there that are there.

And one of the distinct differences between the kind of journalism you do is that you really do grassroots journalism, literally talking to people who are in the middle of the middle. They’re experiencing the very things that they’re talking about and describing. They’re not, in this case, they’re not on NPR at some Tony Hotel in Jerusalem, you know, phoning in and talking about whatever’s happening when they actually have no idea what’s happening with real people on the ground in places like Gaza.

So, Abby Martin, maybe you can share with us a little bit of, the information you have about the people that, you know, and, and some, some about this, this, this horrible tragedy as it continues to unfold.

Abby Martin: Yes, Mickey, so Gaza Fights for Freedom for those who haven’t seen it. I definitely recommend everyone check it out.

Gazafightsforfreedom.Com. It’s available in tons of different languages for free to watch. It provides an essential crucial context to what is happening right now because of course,

both of us know history did not start on October 7th. There’s a lot of crucial context and no, it’s not complicated.

It’s not an age old battle over religion and it’s not a war between two equal entities. It is it’s actually Israel waging a war against a people that they are imprisoning. It’s fascinating the way that the Western media has interpreted this and analyzed it.

You know, Gaza is a place that consists of refugees largely that are forbidden to travel from their own ancestral lands that are right across this fortified border fence that Israeli authorities have authorized themselves to shoot to kill if you wander too close to the fence, they control what goes in and out, and that is why you saw Israeli ministers say, now we’re going to turn this 17 year illegal blockade where they already only allow a certain amount of fuel, water and food to go in day to day.

Now they’re going to have a complete siege of Gaza because quote, “they are human animals. And we need to act accordingly,” end quote. So

you see a lot of genocidal intent, a lot of genocidal, explicit genocidal rhetoric laid bare. But you’ll see a lot of placating from American politicians pretending like this is not exactly what Israeli officials have, have clearly laid it out to be.

And when you juxtapose that with the actual actions, bombing densely populated areas where they know massive amount of civilians are when Hamas is actually underground in the tunnel system. And so they’re bombing hospitals, mosques, refugee camps, shelters and schools in a completely barbaric way strategically to create a second Nakba, where they want to terrorize everyone into fleeing and just expel everyone out of Gaza so they can recolonize it. That is the reality of what’s happening. In Gaza Fights for Freedom we saw what happens when Palestinians peacefully protest, their imprisonment and we saw tens of thousands of people going to that artificial border fence and they were mowed down by Israeli snipers.

By the thousands, 200 over 213 Palestinians lost their lives throughout those several months of the Great March of Return. They were targeting disabled people, children, medics and journalists. And this is just the playbook with Israel, I mean, people don’t understand how, you know, a sniper can put a child in their crosshairs and pull the trigger.

Well, this is what happens when you completely dehumanize a population that you are subjugating your entire life. I mean, this propaganda goes, from birth until death. My friends and colleagues who are on the ground in Gaza who cannot leave. All of which who work, all of whom, excuse me, who worked on the documentary, it’s harrowing what’s happening to them, Mickey. I mean, one of them, and I, and I actually, one of them wants to remain anonymous, and that’s why I’m putting up his texts and messages to me anonymously, because as we know, Israeli authorities are literally targeting and assassinating journalists alongside their entire families.

That is what’s happening right now. Over 50 over 50, actually over 60 have been assassinated and their families

Mickey Huff: Well that numbers nearly doubled in a week.

Abby Martin: I mean, it is unfathomable that the entire journalistic community of the world is not standing together in complete horror, speaking out against Israel. It’s either passive voice, or people are too cowardly, or there’s somehow a deep-seated denial that this is actually happening.

That the occupied territories are actually the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist operating. And the fact that the entire world journalistic community is not completely outraged says a lot.

Mickey Huff: And aren’t we seeing both sides in here? We know this one of the one of the we’ve been trying to approach this, of course, with a critical media literacy lens.

And when we’re talking about this, and some of the things that we put out at the Project, we’re focusing a little bit more on the means by which the messages are framed and shaped. Right. And that’s so significant and important here. But even when we’re trying to focus on on media, we can’t get away from well, if you say anything that’s remotely critical about the Israeli government, you you slide into those that weird anti Semitic trap, right, that these folks won’t let you get out of number one and two.

Folks will really quickly shoot back and say, well, you didn’t say anything about the 4 journalists that were killed Israeli journalists that are killed. And, you know, so it gets into that both sides journalism where it starts to turn into like, well, what about and well, this side does it and they did this and you didn’t say that.

And I mean, at the core of this, and you said this earlier, but this is why I’m kind of going back to this, when you set this up, you were saying, this is not really a war. It’s not really a conflict in this way. It’s a completely unbalanced assault on people that are, have, have really no means by which to do much about it or even go elsewhere.

No, exactly. I mean, these people are, in a cage, they, Hamas has no air force. They have no military vehicles. They don’t have an official army with high tech weaponry. So when you’re talking about a war, it’s cartoonish to actually depict what Israel is doing as a war. Israel’s just carpet bombing and flattening a 25 strip mile strip of land with a million children living in it.

I mean, with high tech weaponry that the US government is giving them hellfire missiles in the thousands that they are knowingly dropping on massive apartment structures that are full of kids. It’s crazy, Mickey. And, and what, what my friends are telling me, this is absolutely insane. So Ahmed Artema, who was the, one of the lead organizers of the Great March of Return.

Israel has a complete database of everyone who lives in Gaza. They have spies on the ground. They know, they, they know infrastructurally what every building is. That’s why they target what they claim to be Hamas targets, right? And they, that’s what they tell us when it’s really not, it’s really just civilian infrastructure or press offices or whatever they deem as, you know, Hamas affiliates, which is really anything that’s infrastructurally government services within Gaza.

My friend, Ahmed Artema, his house was targeted and bombed. His 10 year old child was murdered and he’s sitting in the hospital with second degree burns with his other two kids. That’s one of the, that’s, that’s the Palestinian Gandhi. Where’s the, where are the nonviolent Palestinian protesters? Well, you’re systematically murdering them as well as all the journalists because you don’t want the truth to be told.

And then when you see the other two videographers who worked on the film, they’re both rendered homeless. One of them’s two brothers were murdered and they have nowhere else to go. They’re just aimlessly wandering around. And Israeli snipers are perched up everywhere shooting people who try to go back to the north.

So it is the most disproportionate lopsided reality that we are being told and the uniformity of the Western press to be to act as stenographers. Despite the horrors that we are addressing, despite the targeted assassinations of journalists, despite the fact that more UN workers have been killed than Hamas commanders, what does that tell you about the reality of the situation and this passive voice that’s used by the media?

Oh, the, the other is dropping dead. Let’s get into dropping

dead.

Mickey Huff: Right. Yes. And, and young people versus children. Some people just seem to die for no reason, others are killed. Like, the language and the framing of it is very intentional. So maybe talk a little bit more about that, because past here is prologue, the idea that, you know, the notion people can maybe have a hard time wrapping their heads around, like, they’re targeting journalists, you just said, right?

True story, many of them, and now almost indiscriminately, like, on purpose, but like, their whole families. I can’t help but think of Shireen Abu Akleh, victim of the IDF last year, just last year, 25 year veteran of Al Jazeera, American Palestinian, right? A Palestinian American reporter was targeted specifically and assassinated.

So, I mean, again, past is prologue. I mean, I get that the fog of war and the Hamas attack of October 7 has incensed, has sort of riled up the masses and, but this kind of stuff has been going on for a long, long time. It’s, it’s, it’s deliberate. It’s targeted. I mean, the fact that they haven’t killed 15, 000 Palestinians, in, you know, eight weeks as a matter of course, you know, every eight weeks, it doesn’t change the fact that these policies have been in place for a long time, whether it’s the Hannibal directive, or the idea of shooting at journalists or targeting children.

I mean,

Abby Martin: They’re a completely rogue state. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s like, you can talk about anti-Semitism all day, but it doesn’t really ring true anymore. It will never ring true. That was just the playbook to try to deflect and put everyone on the defense who are like anti racists and anti bigots, especially there are real anti Semites.

Of course, there’s real anti Semites.

Mickey Huff: And this takes away from the focus, right? I mean, they’re blaming the wrong people

Abby Martin: to paint all Palestine solidarity demonstrators and activists and concerned citizens with a broad brush as anti Semites, for the longest time, it made everyone shut up and be on the defense and say, Oh, no, no, no, I’m, I’m, I actually care about justice and human rights and it doesn’t really stick anymore.

Mickey, especially when you see that so much of the contingent of pro Palestine activists today are Jewish. People, secular and religious. We see them doing the most direct, a lot of the direct actions around the country saying not in my name, never again. Never again means now.

And so, when you have Avi Mayer, the editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, writing op eds about how you’re no longer Jewish, recant your Judaism, denounce your Judaism because you are participating in these protests, that’s how, that, that is the level of desperation from the Israeli government, that they’re the ones who have conflated a beautiful, peaceful religion with a horrific settler colonial state that is based on ethnic cleansing. That’s really unfortunate. And unfortunately, antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise. That’s undeniable, but this is not what this is. And we see the punishment of actually Jewish activists on campus to try to ban some of these groups, because that’s what it really is.

Groups like the ADL, that’s what it is. It’s about protecting Israel. It’s not about combating antisemitism. And it’s grotesque because there is real antisemitism. But doesn’t that needs to be combated?

Mickey Huff: Yeah. And again, you’re no stranger to that issue because a few years ago we were writing about the protest of what had happened at a media literacy conference of all places around BDS issues, but boycott, divestment, sanction issues in Georgia.

And you ended up at least partially winning a legal case, right, against the boycott issue. I wanted to just bring that up briefly, because you have a history of dealing with this kind of bias and these kinds of charges of anti Semitism.

Abby Martin: 100%. Yeah, I mean, they’ve, they’ve put BD anti PDS laws and over half the states in this country because they wanted to preemptively tamp down on the, the tide of justice that they know is inevitable.

And it’s undeniable that it’s coming. Right. And that’s why Israeli government officials consulate officials have gone. Door to door for all of these state legislatures to try to lobby to put these laws in place and the conflation of anti semitism with pro, with Palestinian liberation has scared a lot of people as well as the heavy influence of the APAC lobby, because that’s what politicians care about is power and money.

So when you take, when you dangle those things in front of politicians, it’s not that hard to understand why they’ve all been scared into submission. With this kind of cartoonish notion that, chanting to the river to the sea means, you know, whatever the hell the Israeli lobby wants to say it does instead of just explicit calls for the freedom of oppressed people.

It’s outrageous. Mickey, when you see the detachment from the ruling class to the constituency of this country, when the overwhelming majority of both parties want a permanent ceasefire. And it’s just completely not reflected. And that is why you see so many direct actions, so many protests and this giant upswell of, of, mobilizing because there has to be dramatic actions because no one is, is taking it seriously and the media is not doing its job.

So people are doing a lot to try to put this information out there and putting their bodies on the line, to try to do what’s right and to move the needle.

Mickey Huff: Abby Martin, so before we move into some of the other things that you’re working on, I want to at least give people an opportunity to hear about a couple of the other things that you’ve been working on before we end the segment here today. But let’s go back to, of course, Gaza Fights for Freedom.

Let’s go back to what’s happening with Israel, Palestine and what’s what is, has there been any, increase or spike in attention? To your work or the film Gaza fights for freedom, since, mid October.

Abby Martin: Oh, 100%. Yeah. I mean, it seems like people are really revisiting it with eyes wide open or with just inquisitive minds because they maybe didn’t know enough about the conflict.

And what’s interesting, Mickey, is that, you know, there’s no shortage of films on Palestine, but there is a severe shortage of films on Palestine that show the Palestinian perspectiveonly. Because there’s a lot of tiptoeing around this issue. There’s a lot of both sides and there’s a lot of false equivalencies.

And so if you’re putting a documentary together, typically you’ll see, you know, trying to really gloss over the reality and the horrifying nature of the occupation and the siege on Gaza. And so you have a lot of obfuscation, I would say of, of what the, the, the bare truth is.

And so I’ve, I’ve heard from many people who watch a lot of documentaries on this, that Gaza Fights for Freedom it’s, it’s a great kind of activist tool to awaken people’s minds about what is the Palestinian perspective and what’s the Palestinian story? Because I worked with a group of journalists through the blockade. They filmed, I mean, yeah, I directed what, what we wanted in the interviews, but they filmed themselves the way that they want themselves to be portrayed.

Because whenever you see films, there was also another documentary about the Great March of Return, and it showed Palestinians sitting in the dark shadows, and they picked extreme, you know, extremists from a group of tens of thousands of people to portray the entire march as something that it was completely not, and it was a complete falsehood, and it was egregious, and so this documentary, it, it, it shows resilience, it shows the bravery, the courage.

It has women on the front lines talking, you know, Razan al-Najjar’s story, her mother, a powerful figure in the documentary, just women’s voices that you would never even understand that were so powerful and central to Gazan society. And another thing that I think the film really, articulates well is that it’s not just, you know, not only did Hamas have nothing to do with the Great March of Return, but there’s so many other political factions within Gaza, it’s cartoonishly depicted as just, oh, it’s all Hamas run.

And that’s why you have people like Joe Biden actually not believing things that are coming out of Gaza because he says, oh, it’s the Hamas run health ministry. Well, it’s just the government and they’re, they’ve never been called into question before when it’s talking about death tolls or injuries.

So why are we calling into question now? If anything should be called into question, it’s the Israeli government, the most distrustful, horrible propaganda operation. Yeah, we can get into that. But so, so the, the film like talks about that, it talks about the mosaic of political factions, how there’s a lot of, of different groups there.

It’s not just Hamas. And when you look at the West Bank, Mickey.

The West Bank. There is no governance of Hamas there. It’s a collaborative entity. The PA that that is working hand in hand with the Israeli government. And that’s just in one small sliver of the West Bank.

The vast majority of the West Bank is under a police state military occupation where you cannot hold up a flag.

There was one girl who was just released in the prisoner exchange that was in prison for three years because she posted a Palestinian flag on Facebook. These are the restrictions. These are the political restrictions that Palestinians are living under. Three million living in the West Bank that cannot be proud of being Palestinian.

They can’t celebrate being Palestinian. In fact, the Israeli authorities, when they released the 100 or so, I forget how many prisoners that they already released, but the ones that they did release, they, they forbade any celebrations from their family because they said that would be an incitement for terrorism and they already executed one teenager for, I guess, celebrating too much, and they have sniped dead multiple, Palestinians over the course of the last several days for doing nothing.

I mean, there’s video footage of just them standing out in front of their homes and being sniped at. And then Israeli authorities won’t let the ambulances reach their bodies. So, even though they did release prisoners and the vast majority of those were never charged because Israel is the only country in the world that has administrate that has military courts for children and the children, they don’t even go through, like, actual.

It’s rare to even go through like a military tribunal and be charged and convicted, and those are kangaroo courts, there’s a 99 percent conviction rate, but the ones who weren’t, they just languish in something called administrative detention, where you can renew it arbitrarily every six months, and you can just be in prison for years and years as a five year old child for throwing a stone.

And if you’re convicted, you can actually be sent to prison for 20 years for the crime of throwing a stone. That’s the kind of cruel, oppressive nature that we’re talking about in the West Bank, where there’s no Hamas, where the Israeli military has free reign to do what it wants. It’s about humiliation and control.

Mickey Huff: So, yeah, so many points there that, you know, we could, we could go from, one coming up too, you know, and again, because of what your film Gaza Fights for Freedom shows many people, particularly people that have steady diets of, of, you know, Western quote news media, you know, which is very much propagandistic around issues in the Middle East and Israel.

It’s, it’s very, it’s incredibly one sided. There have been some cracks in that in the last month or so. There have been some of the major papers and major news outlets in the U. S. that are doing more coverage about what’s happening to Palestinians than they certainly have historically, but since they were doing so little, that’s, that’s not a lot, really, and it’s certainly nowhere near the kind of coverage that the American public needs in order to understand the history, right?

That’s sort of all memory hold. There was a couple stories really quickly. Just again, because this kind of examples that you give are they’re they’re horrible examples, but we want people to understand that these aren’t just constructs of Hamas propaganda. These are things that are happening to people.

The story that Electronic Intifada had was pretty riveting, on the children’s chorus or children singing about Israel, annihilating everyone in Gaza. It kind of dovetails with the quote you rattled off earlier about some of the more genocidal kind of quotes that we’re hearing. I mean, granted, I’m not going to pretend that everybody living in a country has those ideas and shares them.

But, I mean, the fact that these things are making their way around and we are seeing and we’re seeing high level government officials, of course, say these incredibly, well, these incredibly awful things, insightful things. What are, what do you think we we might do as journalists here to really get people to understand these complex again I’m using the word complex in a different way per se. Not that if you look at the issue, you should be able to figure it out. I’m talking about the complexity of people being steeped in so many decades of certain narratives. That anything that looks different is suspicious to them, and that’s not wildly unreasonable.

But how do we then break that down? How do we talk to the very people that we need to in order to get them to understand where they might be misinformed seriously about these issues?

Abby Martin: Well, I mean, I was awakened to the kind of like how deep Israeli propaganda goes just as someone who studied propaganda for 15 years.

And I, and I’ve studied, you know, deep state propaganda, the way that the U S empire kind of deploys propaganda around the world to paint its, its enemies and allies a certain way. And Israeli propaganda was folded into that. And I remember the Gaza flotilla was what really woke me up to like, oh, this is really egregious and really interesting. That, you know, you have us corporate media across the board, just playing like IDF delivered videos showing that they were actually justified in exterminating a lot of people that were just peace activists, bringing aid to Gaza on a ship in international waters, Israeli commandos come down on the ship and just execute several people.

And then they painted those people on the ship, trying to fend off the Israeli commandos that they just saw assassinate their friends with tables and chairs, and they circled them saying, like, these were weapons. And I remember looking at that footage in 2010, and I was like, this is very bizarre. And so ever since then, I’ve really paid careful attention to how this all operates, Mickey.

And it, you know, it’s done really insidiously. I mean, whether it’s a passive voice, like, for example, the prisoner exchange, you look at something as simple as saying Israeli children. Right. Israeli children are held hostage. Horrible. All the hostages should come home, of course. And then it said people aged 17 and under on the Palestinian side.

And it was like, wait, are those not children? Or are they also children? So it’s it’s so insidious. You might just skip over it if you didn’t kind of take a double right. Look at it. You’re thinking, oh my God.

Mickey Huff: Go see your R rated movie.

Abby Martin: Right. Or like, or for example, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, they published a report saying, yes, Israel is deliberately targeting and killing journalists.

They are trying to appeal to the ICC or whatever, deliver an official criminal complaint. The Washington Post actually ran that report and in the tweet behind a paywalled article, it didn’t even mention. Who was killing the journalists? It just said this journalist yes, was according to this organization.

They were targeted. It’s like by who? Name names. What are you talking about? So, so it’s that kind of stuff. It’s very passive and it doesn’t want to. It doesn’t want to name what the entity is that’s killing the journalists who who’s doing this and Mickey I think the most egregious example that was the most offensive to me.

It’s the playbook to overcomplicate something with the cartoonish kind of depraved level of Hasbro that they deploy, which is the Ahli Arab hospital bombing the hospital that was the largest death toll in any Israeli attack in Palestinian history, which was the 500 people that were massacred by the Israeli airstrike, at the Ahli Arab hospital. And so, because international outrage was mounting after we understood the death toll, they immediately blamed it on an errant missile from Islamic jihad and without going into the evidence, the overwhelming amount of evidence that actually shows that it was Israel. Everyone just started talking about, oh, who really shot the, who really did it?

Was it Islamic? Yeah. So it was basically to overcomplicate it to make it seem like Palestinians have the capacity to kill that many people, which in the history of. Yeah, fog of war. Oh, well, they’re just killing each other, Mickey. So I guess we really can’t know what’s going on on the ground. And then what does Israel do?

Because they just can’t help themselves? They released a doctored audio recording of Islamic jihad militants speaking to each other, which was proven to be fake by channel four. So my question is, look, they could have probably gotten away with completely pretending like this was an errant missile because of all the over because of the acquiescent Western press just running with these claims, but they couldn’t stop themselves.

So just like the flotilla massacre, when they released the doctored audio recording, pretending like the people on the ship were antisemitic and they deserve to be executed, which was proven to be fake, they did the same thing here. So it doesn’t matter what other evidence exists. Why would they produce doctored audio recordings that are fake?

If they’re in the right. If it really was an errant missile. So this just shows you the playbook. It’s the same with the Al Shifa hospital releasing these giant 3D renderings that look like the Torah Bora complex of Osama bin Laden when Donald Rumsfeld unfurled on Tim Russert show the giant map of Osama bin Laden’s fortress.

It was really harkened back to that. Yeah, it really harkened back to that because I was like, oh, Netanyahu himself, they’re releasing this giant CD, CGI rendering, trying to preemptively justify why they’re going to invade and bomb a hospital.

Mickey Huff: Sorry, not photos, artistic renderings.

Abby Martin: Sorry, not photos, Mickey.

It was, yeah, no drawings. Yeah, it was a cartoon.

Mickey Huff: Yeah. Well, you know, again, see again, past is prologue. Perhaps you and I aren’t surprised that there’s this extraordinary level of effort that goes into controlling narratives and producing propaganda. But it is the case that this is also something that’s very hard to convince other people because one of the things that you have to do first is try to convince them that you’re not part of the propaganda campaign.

You know, like, because again, it’s too easy to say, well, you have that argument. You’re clearly with them. I mean, again, it wasn’t just the Biden minister Biden himself, but his whole administration going to the secretary of state and Blinken. Where he, he, it was painful to even watch. It was amazing to see the White House, the sort of Washington press corps, like people from CNN, like James Acosta, it looked almost painful to him to have to ask people like Blinken, like, dude, we know that there’s a bunch of people that are dead, like, you can’t even deny it.

It so what’s the deal with the Hamas said so and it’s not true of Hamas said so I mean, watching even that exchange was bizarre because, you know, the US lapdog press is often like right there right there right there feeding the softballs and going along with the narrative, but this has gone so off the rails.

That they’re having to acknowledge things that historically they didn’t, they weren’t pushed to acknowledge per se. And so that in and of itself to me is, is telling of something that if even these other groups that have historically been in lock, stock and barrel for all this propaganda, and they’ve been happily producing it.

The fact that there’s cracks in it suggests that there’s some possible shift. And so I know our segments out of time. But I would at least like to hear if you have a few thoughts on the possibilities of that shift and widening some of those cracks in public perception in order to get people to see more clearly what’s happening and stop, so much carnage and so much tragedy.

Abby Martin: It is true. It is true that organizations like the CNN, which I mean, look, I, I can’t even stomach watching them,

but I do see inklings of truth coming out on social media. And it does give me hope. I mean, at least a glimmer of it because even CNN, you know, they’re all embedded with the IDF and every package that they run, they have to say this was all pre approved by the IDF.

Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to run it. And when this Al Shifa hospital was raided, and when Israeli soldiers invaded a hospital and tried to basically sniping dead people in the ICU units and then just made all the patients flee or else they told us that there would be this huge command center and that it justified everything that was going on.

And even CNN had to admit that the weapons. Looked like they were staged in part and even you had CNN journalists asking, hey, this tile looks like it’s actually from the hospital. Like, is this is this the tunnel system that you were talking about? Like, it’s almost the incredulity of, like, even journalists themselves knowing that it’s all BS.

Like they are actually being lied to real time. I mean, there might, again, be some deep seated denial and fear the fact that they know peripherally that Israel is just like killing journalists like with impunity. So I think that that does play a role, especially when you’re like with the IDF, like in a way, you know, that they could get away with it, that they kill you too.

But at the same time, you do see the cracks coming through and you do see these people kind of inquisitively like Christiane Amanpour interviewing the former Israeli prime minister. And he was like, well, we actually built the bunker under the Al Shifa hospital back in the nineties. And she was like, wait, repeat that you guys built the bunker.

So it’s like, yeah, it’s like Israeli officials don’t try to, you know, they don’t try to hide the nature of what they’re doing. It’s, it’s the American journalists that are trying to like twist themselves in knots with the mental gymnastics to try to apologize for them. So when you have Israeli officials sometimes slip and say something that they didn’t really mean to say to an American audience, it it’s amazing to see those moments.

But I think Mickey, I think the bigger thing is. What can people do? You know, Gen Z and Millennials, you see that this huge shift going on conscious, the consciousness is shifting completely. And the distrust of corporate media is completely severed. I mean, there, there’s no trust whatsoever in the institutional media or the political establishment.

And, and, and I think that that’s, that’s where the hope lies is the youth in this country, and we’ve seen the media lies into war for the last, you know, forever, but it’s gotten so bad and that’s kind of become a meme where it’s like media lies us into war since Iraq and today. So why would they tell the truth today?

And that’s what we just have to keep telling ourselves. Usually when there’s uniformity in the corporate media, this subsidized by defense contractors, usually. The truth somewhere is on the other side, right? And so it’s up to us to follow those independent media organizations like Electronic Intifada, like Mondoweiss, like journalists like David Sheen, who live within Israel and are translating real time, the racist media fervor and incitement in Israeli media.

It’s up to us. We have to become media literate and seek out these sources because that’s all we can do. I think that there there is no hope within the corporate media apparatus. Yeah, it’s great that that some truth is getting out, but that’s not we can’t depend on the morality or the credibility of them to do their job is because we know what they what their purposes and who they serve and they serve the ruling class.

And they’re just an appendage of the ruling class. So so that’s where our job comes in. Right? Mickey.

That’s where our job comes in as independent grassroots journalists who have to tell the perspective of the Palestinians, but with the advent of social media, they’ve been doing a pretty good job and, and, you know,

They’re filming their most vulnerable moments for us so we can see the horrors unfolding because when our government sits up there and has the audacity to tell us that this isn’t true, they have to, they have to show their dead children to the camera and say, look.

This is what’s happening. And how sick is that? How depraved is that? That we, that they have to do that. They can’t even bury their dead in peace and quiet. They have to show the world because we have our government saying, we don’t believe you. So it’s up to us, Mickey. And, and people are waking up every day.

Although I have to say in the words of my friend, who is a refugee from Gaza, he said, look, it does give me hope that people are waking up and there’s so many tens of millions of people on the street. He said, but by the time enough people wake up to stop this all Palestinians will be dead. And, and that, that, it’s sad because it’s happening so slowly that there has to be a massacre of this magnitude for such a swell of consciousness to spread.

I just want it to end. I just want the violence to end. I it’s non-negotiable. These people need human rights and the violence will continue and continue and continue, and the tinderbox is just gonna be sparked again and again. Mickey, if we deny people basic human rights.

Mickey Huff: Absolutely. That’s independent journalist Abby Martin, head of the Empire Files, host there, also Media Roots, filmmaker of Gaza Fights for Freedom, and forthcoming, your latest documentary is going to be Earth’s Greatest Enemy, and just really quickly to tease people, what’s going, this is a, this is going to be an amazing film, I, I know what it’s about, and it’s a very important, subject, and it’s no surprise that you’re tackling it because most people, most others won’t.

What is Earth’s greatest enemy? Abby Martin.

Abby Martin: Earth’s greatest enemy is the system of U. S. imperialism and more specifically the U. S. military. It has a thousand bases around the world. Every base is a dumping ground that completely pollutes the ecosystem and poisons the local communities. It’s happening here.

It’s happening abroad with complete impunity. This goes beyond just, of course, what happens with direct warfare. It’s everything Mickey and the U S military, needs to be reined in and it needs to be held accountable for its crimes against the earth. And you know, even these global climate conferences every year, the U S military is completely excluded and it’s a complete farce.

So until we address the elephant in the room, we cannot tackle the environmental problems that we face.

Mickey Huff: Indeed. And I’m reminded of the late great folk icon, Utah Phillips, who once quipped that the earth isn’t dying. It’s being killed and the people doing it have names and addresses. And some of them, you know, fall fall well under the, the, the umbrella of the military industrial complex.

Abby Martin, people can find your work at theempirefiles. tv. Anything else you’d like to share with our audience? So people who do not know already, maybe they should, but if they don’t, where can they follow your work? Where can they find the important things that you are doing?

Abby Martin: I’m on social media fababs on instagram at abby martin on twitter check out our channel Empire Files on YouTube, Media Roots Radio on all podcast platforms and please check out gazafightsforfreedom.Com, earthsgreatestenemy. com Mickey it’s always a pleasure can’t wait to come back on thank you so much for everything you and Project Censored do

Mickey Huff: Back at you, Abby Martin. It’s always an honor to have you. Thank you so much for the important work that you’re doing, and we’ll certainly be having you back on earlier next year, and we’ll be talking about Earth’s Greatest Enemy.

Thanks for joining us.

Mickey Huff: Welcome to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Today on the program, in this segment, we welcome back to the Project Censored Show Kevin Gosztola. Kevin Gosztola has spent the last decade reporting on Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks case, and of course the wider war on whistleblowers in general.

Kevin is the curator of the Dissenter Newsletter. He produces and co hosts the weekly podcast, Unauthorized Disclosure. His work has appeared in outlets such as The Nation, Salon, Common Dreams, and Truthout. He’s a featured guest on Democracy Now!, The Real News Network, CounterSpin, and Al Jazeera English.

He is also author of this book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, with a foreword by Abby Martin. This is out by the Censored Press, Seven Stories Press, came out this last spring. It’s pretty much the only book, by the way, in the US that really chronicles the political case against Julian Assange.

Kevin Gosztola, welcome back to the Project Censored Show. It’s been a while.

Kevin Gosztola: Good to be speaking with you. Thanks for having me again.

Mickey Huff: We are, as always, open to your expertise and we have been this year, inviting you back fairly regularly. To give us updates on the case, the extradition case concerning Julian Assange, who is still in Belmarsh prison, in, out of London.

So, Kevin Gosztola, can you give us a couple of quick updates where we are with the extradition case? But we do have a, there are several things that we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about updates on the CIA case, the congressional letter, and recent Australian visit, and a few issues around media.

But Kevin Gosztola, just kick us off with a few updates from the last, Couple months.

Kevin Gosztola: Julian Assange remains in a state of limbo that has defined much of this case. As of now, I can tell you and everyone listening and watching that Julian Assange has been in Belmarsh prison for over four and a half years.

He’s been held there. This is a high security or similar to a maximum security prison. It holds people who are accused of terrorism offenses. People who are accused of violent crimes are there. And he, of course, has been charged with leaking or publishing leaked documents by the United States in violation of the Espionage Act.

They’re enforcing a law against Julian Assange. Who is not an American citizen. He’s an Australian, which is why we’re going to be getting to the Australian prime minister and his visit to, meet with president Joe Biden. But I say all of that just to articulate that we remain in a state of limbo where we don’t know when we’re going to get a decision from an appeals court on whether they will grant him a hearing or just say, shoo, go away.

And then he’ll have to figure out if he can file a complaint with the European court of human rights. And if the European court of human rights, is able to do anything to help them out, that would be fantastic. However, there is a widespread fear that the U S government with the British government as a partner might try to put him on a plane and bring him to the United States for arraignment to begin the espionage act trial. And he wouldn’t be able to protect himself and prevent extradition by going to the European Court of Human Rights. And so that’s where we are.

And I think the activist community that has tried to support Julian Assange, press freedom advocates, journalists like myself who care about this case, have found it hard to maintain our attention because, to keep, you know, with it and stay with it because we do not know what is going to happen next.

Mickey Huff: So, Kevin Gosztola, well put, and it does describe, again, sort of this waiting, this ongoing period of speculation and wondering while simultaneously trying to prepare for what might come next.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, efforts in the U. S., in legislative bodies and Congress, they’ve been pretty slow to, to really mount any kind of, force or any kind of statements in support of Assange or ironically, you know, the Biden administration was, you know, has this year on a number of occasions spoken out in favor of press freedom, but only when decrying practices in Russia or other parts of the world without bothering to look right here at home, where it is the very Biden administration.

That’s the one that’s pushing these kind of this case against, Assange. I mean, this goes back several presidents. So it’s obviously not just any one of the American presidents, but there was a congressional letter and there was a visit from an Australian delegation. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that?

Kevin Gosztola: Yeah. So there was a letter that for the first time had both Democrats and Republicans earlier this year. Rashida Tlaib who’s been, you know, just phenomenal in standing up for Palestinian rights and herself and has come under attack and her freedom of expression has been targeted in the last couple of months.

Simultaneously, she signed on to this letter, but also it was, Jim McGovern in Massachusetts and Thomas Massie, a Republican in Kentucky, who were the figureheads that led this bipartisan letter. And then there were somewhere around 15 or 16 representatives that signed on, they got the first senator to speak up for Julian Assange.

Unfortunately, it’s not Bernie Sanders, it’s not Elizabeth Warren, it’s not anybody who you would think should speak up like a progressive senator or someone who claims to have progressive bona fides. It was Rand Paul who decided to add his name. And support Julian Assange. So credit where credit is due and credit where credit is due to all of the representatives that are on this letter.

However, it is worth putting into perspective that there are 535 individuals, in Congress, 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House of Representatives, and they could all be names on this letter, and they should be if they claim to support the First Amendment. Some of them have had hearings on the weaponization of the US government against individuals, like Jim Jordan, but he’s not on this letter.

And then there are people who, again, have spoken up about freedom of expression, they’ve, they’ve claimed to support free speech and all of that, and they are not present. Like they stood up for black lives matter and other demonstrators when they were standing up against police brutality or police violence.

And they supported the George Floyd uprising and everything. And their voices are not there in defense of Julian Assange when the 1st amendment needs it most. So it’s just worth adding that context. As far as the delegation from Australia. Several weeks ago, probably more than a month, Anthony Albanese came and he is the prime minister of Australia.

He visited Joe Biden, had a meeting and he insisted, or had been open about how he was going to raise this in any of his meetings with the U S government officials. But, I have to say that like a lot of the states that are close allies with the U S government, he’s taken a fairly neutered stance when it comes to challenging Biden.

He’s no. He’s no Obrador in Mexico who is standing up for Julian Assange and has been someone who I think would be fair to describe as a thorn in the side of the Biden White House right now because he and Lula in Brazil have been very outspoken in support of Julian Assange.

But Anthony Albanese has taken a different approach because Australia relies on US military exports and equipment and they have a relationship and they’re supposed to be a player in helping the U S counter Chinese influence in the Asia Pacific region. And so I don’t think there’s a lot that he’s willing to risk as far as the relationship between the US and Australia goes.

So he says these things like, well, I told Joe Biden, but Joe Biden’s not able to interfere in the case against Julian Assange that is being conducted by the justice department, and I understand that he’s not going to interfere in this prosecution, and there’s a problem with that. I know exactly what the White House is doing. The White House has been trying to make it seem like it’s virtuous that Joe Biden won’t stop this case by suggesting that it’s different from Donald Trump, that Donald Trump would meddle in Justice Department cases and there would be like an, there would be no fair justice.

It would, there wouldn’t, you’d lose that impartiality that’s supposed to exist at the Justice Department. And the problem with that is this is a political case, as I say in the subtitle of my book, it’s a political case. Julian Assange was only charged because of politics. Obama had the opportunity to indict him and did not indict him.

They made a fair and reasoned decision to not charge him at the time. And then when Donald Trump came into office because of politics, they changed the way they approached the legal issues and they charged Julian Assange. And what Biden should recognize is that Obama was correct and Donald Trump was wrong, but thus far he has not.

Mickey Huff: So there’s quite a bit going on there. And as far as, cases surrounding Assange, there’s also the CIA case. And of course you write a lot about the CIA in your book, Guilty of Journalism. But there are updates around, around what’s been happening with the CIA. Can you talk to our listeners about that?

Kevin Gosztola.

Kevin Gosztola: Yeah, there’s a whole chapter in the book that gets into the CIA. Then there’s also a chapter that digs into this contracting group, this UC Global. It’s director David Morales and the role that they played as people who were helping the CIA target Julian Assange, his family, his attorneys, doctors that visited him, journalists and others that visited Julian Assange while he was in the embassy.

And we have a lawsuit that’s unfolding in the Southern District of New York before a judge who has been fairly open to these allegations that have been put forward against the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo, as well as Morales and UC Global, but that’s kind of hard to deal with. So let’s set aside the UC Global and David Morales because they’re not from the US, so I don’t know how they’re going to litigate those claims, but they have been pursuing the CIA.

and Pompeo to seek justice because their privacy rights were violated. These four Americans, their two attorneys, two journalists allege that they were spied upon when they were in the embassy. And quickly, the thing to get to is that this case is one in which they, the CIA is trying to have it dismissed, but What they’re doing in the process of seeking dismissal is making all these arguments that are extraordinary.

Things like, when you leave the United States, the government does not have to get a warrant to target you. You basically lose your privacy rights. And so, so theoretically I could go to any embassy and if the CIA wanted to use that diplomatic that out that building security to try and get to my possessions or whatever that they would be within their right to do.

So,

Mickey Huff: including access data on your phone.

Kevin Gosztola: Yeah. One of the things that the U. C. Global staff did was they would open the phones to get into the physical structure and they would take a photograph of something called the IMEI, which is, it’s not your SIM card, but it is the international mobile equipment identity number.

And I’m just gonna use the description that El pais crafted ’cause it’s very clear if people are like, what’s an IMEI? It is a unique code that identifies a device and it’s one of the most valuable pieces of information for anyone looking to hack a phone. When a cell phone connects to a network this identity number is automatically transmitted.

So why they would want that is because it would be easy to track you with it. If you were the CIA,

Mickey Huff: which they claimed is their right if you’d gone into an embassy and you’re required to relinquish this.

Kevin Gosztola: No, but yeah, yeah, astoundingly, what they’re saying is this is no different than being in a police station being in the embassy.

They are making arguments that these contractors, first off, they’re not confirming or denying any facts, but we have to treat them as true in this case. They do. They have to treat these alleged facts as real in order to overcome the arguments that are being made. And so with that, they’re saying that these UC Global contractors were effectively police.

And in a police station, you do not have privacy rights. And actually that has been recognized in U. S. courts. But the thing is, they’re not the same. Like, the UC Global contractors were not performing a law enforcement function at all there. They were rifling through the belongings of these journalists and attorneys when all these people visiting Assange thought they were doing is giving them their property to sit with and watch while they were in a private meeting with Assange.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, which is riveting. I mean, that’s just absolutely riveting that there’s the argument is that they’re just allowed to, and you use the term rifle through. Just help themselves to that information. I mean, that’s actually extraordinary.

Kevin Gosztola: And then they made dossiers on these people. So these individuals might’ve been labeled priority targets.

And then what that meant is like a file went back to the CIA, had their name, it had the meeting date. It had contents of their conversation and they had a video of them meeting with Julian Assange that would have been shared. And so this judge, John Koeltl, has been appropriately skeptical and open to this, this, this argument that the 4th amendment didn’t have any control over whether or not they were able to engage in this surveillance.

He put to them that he asked, did you get a warrant to target them? And it was pretty offensive. They wouldn’t confirm or deny whether they got a warrant. And he said, well, come on, you just told me that you don’t think you need a warrant. So the answer is that you didn’t get a warrant. So don’t play games with me.

And then, the other thing was they said we were not directing or controlling the UC Global, contractors, and he said, yeah, but wouldn’t it be sufficient to say that you were directing them or had some control because you were getting a live video feed back at Langley where you could watch these.

So, isn’t that like, isn’t your influence being felt by this group of people that are engaged in embassy security? And so I think he was a little bit baffled. The only thing that is defective in the case. In my opinion that there’s going to be a struggle and it’s going to be a struggle to hold Mike Pompeo accountable individually if the CIA gets held accountable, that could that would be fantastic, but they’re having a little difficulty because of case law and the way the Supreme Court has ruled on holding individual U.

S. Government officials accountable and Mike Pompeo might get off scot free. And that’s a little bit disappointing to me because he’s one of the most vitriolic, and bloodthirsty people that was in charge and went after Julian Assange and his family.

Mickey Huff: I’d like to remind our listeners, you’re tuned to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio.

I’m your host, Mickey Huff. We’re speaking with independent journalist and author Kevin Gosztola, his book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, with a foreword by Abby Martin, who was just on the show in the first segment. We’ll be back to talk with Kevin Gosztola with more updates on the case against Julian Assange after this brief musical break.

Stay with

us. Welcome back to the Project Centered Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Today on the program in this segment, we welcome author Kevin Gosztola, his book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. Kevin Gosztola is of course, the founder of the Dissenter Newsletter, he produces and co hosts the weekly podcast, Unauthorized Disclosure.

His work has appeared in many outlets, The Nation, Salon, Common Dreams, and so forth. He has been on Democracy Now!, The Real News Network, Counterspin, Al Jazeera English. He is a regular guest here on the Project Censored Show, giving us updates on the case against Julian Assange, Kevin Gosztola, and again, earlier in the program, we spoke with Abby Martin from the empire files.

Who wrote the forward to this book and again, the book is Guilty of Journalism with illustrations by the great Mr. Fish. This is really the only book, definitive book in, in our view of what’s been happening with the Assange case, specifically, in the U. S. and how it relates to the, well, what we think is a coming extradition.

But as you’ve heard in my conversation with Kevin Gosztola today, folks paying attention are still waiting. Kevin Gosztola, you just updated us before the break on the case with the CIA, Mike Pompeo. Let’s shift gears momentarily. And, there have been some, some other updates in the last, well, since October 7, a lot of the focus that we’ve seen on our program.

And, of course, in other media, let’s has been on Israel Gaza. And there’s some interesting crossover here. We wanted to talk about some of the media silence around the cases around Assange, but there have been a few people in the corporate media in the U. S. who have given some attention to, to to Assange, Kevin Gosztola, which is rare.

So we wanted to talk a little bit about that. And you and I had spoken off air about it. So let’s, let’s get into a little bit about about this case, particularly MSNBC. And, the tabling of journalists there. Kevin Gosztola.

Kevin Gosztola: Yeah. MSNBC has not been a network that I would say regularly covers Julian Assange’s case.

I feel like that’s an understatement, but they haven’t really tried to create hostility toward Assange. They just have omitted and decided that they’re not going to let people know that this person is still languishing in Belmarsh prison and that Joe Biden is trying to extradite him. Ari Melber

Has done a segment or two, but what we really want to discuss here is that MSNBC has canceled the show of Mehdi Hasan and they decided, I think that I guess there is one Arab voice too many because they’re going to have Ayman Mohyeldin’s show, they’re going to expand his to 2 hours and fold Mehdi Hasan into his show, I guess, on the weekend or something like that.

Figure they believe they can control Ayman more than Mehdi Hasan or, or maybe his style. They like his style more. He was seen, questioning an Israeli ambassador who said that, when he was questioned about children that were found dead in Gaza, he said, well, we don’t know how they died. And, that was a pretty stunning moment and Mehdi wasn’t having it.

And I think the bit of adversarial journalism there was a little too much for certain people who look to MSNBC to tow certain foreign policy lines. And it’s an election year that’s coming and you got to make sure that you close rank and don’t expose Joe Biden to any criticism that would be unwanted, so, and MSNBC is preparing for the 2024 election, but Mehdi had covered Julian Assange, had done a couple segments on it.

I also want to give him a little credit. Again, I don’t think he’s the best journalist.

I don’t think he’s always gotten it right. I’m not going to say he’s free from criticism, but while he has now had his show canceled, it’s important for people to see that he had done segments on people like drone whistleblower, Daniel Hale and reality winner, but in a segment on drone whistleblower, Daniel Hale, who is still in prison, who was convicted of violating the espionage act when he exposed things like how 80 to 90 percent of, drone strikes are killing civilians that, he included me, he included, some of the reporting I had done at the Dissenter, it appeared on screen.

He put the name of my newsletter on screen while he was talking about Daniel Hale and I don’t make it to MSNBC. And that was something where I thought, okay, thank you. I’m glad that you had this platform and you were covering whistleblowers and I’ve been glad that he’s had this platform to challenge Israeli officials when they come on US media networks to speak about war.

And it’s unsettling to me that he’s being censored. I’m sure you would draw the parallel to when Phil Donahue was canned and lost his show in the run up to the Iraq invasion 20 years ago. Yeah. And it seems a lot like this, that MSNBC is preparing for a long conflict in Gaza between Israeli military forces and Hamas militants, and they don’t want Mehdi Hasan on air.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, you know, again, in all fairness, you know, I, I have been critical of Hasan, particularly his, his views on Biden administration censorship, which I disagreed with, but I think it’s extremely important that we do what you do and leading by example, it’s case by case and story by story. And we’re not here to lionize.

You know, personal, you know, accounts of, you know, journalists per se. We’re not, we’re not, we’re not creating fan bases around people. The fan base, if any, should be around the journalistic reporting and the kind of stories that are being told that the public needs to hear about. And when the, the corporate so called mainstream actually does report significantly about key issues, we should acknowledge that.

And I’m glad to hear that you did. And, in this case, it sounds like that we, we’re losing an ally in that, in that platform world of corporate media around some of the perspectives coming out of the Middle East and around whistleblowers. Kevin Gosztola.

Kevin Gosztola: Yeah, I think it was fair to say that if the Espionage Act needed to be called out and the way it was being abused and used to target people like Reality Winner or Daniel Hale or Julian Assange.

Mehdi was somebody you could count on to do a show and state very clearly and do it while recognizing the biases of his liberal progressive audience, you know, knowing that, they don’t like this guy. Cause they’ve been told he’s a Trump supporter. I’m speaking about Assange or they they’ve heard stuff about how Julian Assange helped Russia, and he would deal with that and try to connect with them so they could see, on principle, set all that aside, it doesn’t matter to the case, understand what will happen to freedom of expression and journalism if Julian Assange is prosecuted and put on trial in the U. S.

Mickey Huff: Absolutely Kevin Gosztola, we have a couple of minutes left here, and I’m going to try to do some, some deaf tight rope walking with time. I’m speaking with you December 1st this this program won’t air on Pacifica until after next week and time time changes really quickly. Things change very quickly in some some of these these instances.

So I wanted to let our listeners know that when we spoke number 1 and number 2 on December 9th, which is in the future for us, but will be in the rear view mirror when this airs on the radio. This will be on live. I’m sorry. This will be on YouTube. So video version of it will be on before it airs on the radio.

So I wanted to at least mention here the National Press Club, December 9th in Washington, D. C. is holding the second, Belmarsh Tribunal, Free the Truth. You spoke at the first tribunal for Julian Assange, the first Belmarsh Tribunal, back in January 2023. Again, I apologize to the radio audience.

This is something that happened December 9th. For those people that are seeing this before that, you can find more information about it. The Belmarsh Tribunal in D. C. 2 p. m. December 9th National Press Club. Kevin, can you tell us anything about this?

Kevin Gosztola: Just that this is a kind of series of hearings that have been convened by this organization called Progressive International.

They were in Australia previously, they’ve done one in New York, and there are several individuals who endorsed my book who are speakers that have been part of the Belmarsh Tribunal events. And I wasn’t invited to participate. In this one, but there are a wide array of individuals who are bringing great knowledge and their speaking abilities to defending Assange.

And, and, and it’s important again, I’ll close on this. There will be at the National Press Club a second time, the National Press Club has been muted, if not, completely out to lunch when it comes to the Assange case, and it’s good that this is happening a second time. And now that we have that congressional letter, you’ll probably see more members of Congress or their staff there paying attention.

Mickey Huff: So, Kevin Gosztola, as we wrap up our segment here today, could you please share with our audience? Once again, where they can find your work, where they can follow you online.

Kevin Gosztola: Yeah. So if you go to the dissenter. org and subscribe to that newsletter, you can get my updates on the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange’s prosecution.

And I also cover whistleblowers, government secrecy, and press freedom. So

thank you.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, absolutely. And, Kevin Gosztola, we’re again delighted to, to, be able to tap into your ongoing expertise and your following of the Assange case, which we at Project Censored have found to be, incredibly significant, important, and, and, you know, I don’t want to be hyperbolic or sound hyperbolic, but as we’ve said in almost every segment we’ve had that we’ve talked to you, and I’m really glad that you just said this a couple minutes ago. You reminded our listeners about the significance of the Assange extradition case for the First Amendment and for press freedoms, not just here in the United States, but worldwide.

And I think that that’s one of the most significant parts, the significant messages that comes out of your book. Again, Kevin Gosztola, the Dissenter, you can find his work online. His book is Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. You can learn more about Kevin’s work online.

You can find out about the book at thecensoredpress. org. Kevin, we’ll have you back on again, I imagine, either by the end of the year or early in 2024 to get yet more updates around the case of Julian Assange.

Milo Brett’s letter suggesting that the NHS budget could be enhanced by subsidising no-alcohol drinks (Letters, September 25) and thus reduce alcohol -related treatments in the NHS is wishful thinking.

Roughly 35 per cent of the cost of a litre of petrol and 50 per cent of a litre of Gordons gin goes to tax yet that levy does not seem to deter the James Bond wannabes from driving fast cars and drinking martinis. Subsidising mocktails and electric cars seems unlikely to fuel mass take-up.

Peter Breese
Lauzerte, France

The horrors of October 7 unleashed a wave of antisemitism that, for many of us, was sadly unsurprising. We’ve seen this before.

In May 2021, when Hamas launched an 11-day war against Israel with a relentless barrage of missiles, anti-Jewish hatred quickly resurfaced. Critics seized on the conflict to vilify Israel, questioning its right to self-defense. “Why should Israel defend itself?” they screamed. The disparity in military capabilities was their rallying cry — as though Israel should willingly allow its citizens to become sitting ducks simply because defending them would result in an uneven death toll.

Their warped rationale reframed Israel’s very act of survival as aggression. To them, the lower number of Israeli casualties wasn’t a sign of successful protection but evidence of a moral failing.

The first wave of college campus protests — ostensibly in support of the Palestinians — came just days after October 7. Even as the bodies of massacre victims were still being recovered and identified, and while it remained unclear who had been killed or abducted into Gaza, American students were already gathering on campus lawns, chanting slogans like “Free, free Palestine,” “Palestine is here and proud,” and the infamous “From the river to the sea.”

The anti-Israel campus protests quickly mutated in the days and weeks following October 7. What began as rallies led by familiar groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the ironically named Jewish Voice for Peace soon swelled into broader support from the general student population.

This escalation was enabled by the alarming inaction of college faculty and leadership, who stood by as student mobs commandeered campus quads to set up so-called “Zionist-free” zones. These makeshift encampments, they proclaimed, would remain until university administrations caved to their nebulous demands for “divestment” from companies with tenuous, if any, connections to Israel.

Yet, these student protests and the horrifying displays of antisemitism they showcased brought into sharp focus a long-festering issue that HonestReporting and others have been warning about for years: the pervasive antisemitism on college campuses.

For years, Israel’s efforts to defend itself from terrorists seeking its annihilation have been seized upon by college activists, eager to use them as a pretext for antisemitism.

During the 2006 Lebanon war, U.S. college campuses saw a surge in antisemitic incidents. A 2005 briefing by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had already sounded the alarm on how criticism of Israel frequently crossed the line into blatant antisemitism. The usual suspects were named: Columbia University, the University of California at Irvine, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and others. The scenes that unfolded on these campuses mirrored the abhorrent incidents we’ve witnessed in the past year: Holocaust memorials built by students were desecrated, swastikas were carved into tables meant for Holocaust memorial candles, and antisemitic speakers appeared on campus podiums to address crowds of impressionable 18-year-olds, pushing hateful rhetoric like the “Jewish Cracker theory” and warning them to be wary of “arrogant” Jews.

There was the brick thrown through the Hillel building’s windows during Passover, visibly Orthodox Jewish students attacked, and Jewish students reciting the Kaddish at a Holocaust memorial drowned out by their peers praising Palestinian suicide bombers. In yet another vile incident, a three-foot swastika was scrawled alongside the phrase “Die Jews” on a campus wall.

🗣️ Jewish university students share their experiences on campuses in the US.

An important thread🧵 pic.twitter.com/6NooG0XFXm

Advertisement

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 27, 2024

How The Media Became Campus Co-Conspirators

A report released this month by the ADL lays bare the troubling state of American campuses over the past year, documenting a 477% increase in anti-Israel incidents. These incidents have included the promotion of classic antisemitic tropes, such as references to Jewish wealth and control, as well as open expressions of support for terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Jewish student centers like Hillel and Chabad were frequently targeted, with at least 73 incidents directly impacting these organizations, including calls for universities to sever ties with them. Protests outside their buildings and events disrupted Jewish life across numerous campuses.

When college administrators finally took action after months of disruptions—spurred by both their disastrous Congressional testimonies and threats from high-profile donors to pull hefty endowments—university presidents began to fall on their swords and resign. Among those who stepped down were Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Some felt a flicker of hope, believing this might signal a broader recognition of the problem—that institutions were finally waking up to what Jewish students have been voicing for years.

So much easier for @thetimes‘s sub-header to blame “Jewish students and benefactors” for Liz Magill’s resignation rather than her own disastrous and morally bankrupt performance in front of Congress.https://t.co/QyN1jrXGgU pic.twitter.com/jWv688M89E

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 10, 2023

But that hope is misplaced. In truth, college campuses are just a microcosm of a wider problem, where antisemitism is widespread and Israel is uniquely vilified. This issue isn’t confined to academia—it often begins with the journalists covering these conflicts, shaping the public narrative.

The irony is that the media’s coverage of the student protests perfectly demonstrated their own anti-Israel bias. As videos flooded online—showing Jewish students being harassed and pro-terror chants echoing across the manicured lawns of America’s elite institutions—the evidence was clear for millions to see. Yet much of the international media downplayed or excused the protests, reinforcing the very problem they were supposed to report on. Even when they acknowledged the incidents, the coverage was often dismissive, minimizing the severity of the antisemitism on display.

Read More: Coverage of Campus Antisemitism Hearing Exposes Media Blind Spot

Amid its generally supportive coverage of the student protests, The New York Times sent a journalist to file a “dispatch from inside Columbia’s student-led protest”—the same college that later fired faculty over antisemitic posts. It was striking that while the reporter could freely enter the protest and write about it, any so-called “Zionist” student attempting the same would have faced immediate hostility and exclusion.

In the first paragraph of the article, the journalist conveniently witnesses a moment that supposedly proves the Columbia campus demonstrations weren’t on the whole antisemitic. Across the street from the university, a man—clearly not a student—with a large gold cross around his neck, is waving a bloodied Israeli flag and shouting, “The Jews control the world! Jews are murderers!” As if on cue, a “pro-Palestinian” student calmly walks over and tells him, “That is horribly antisemitic. You are hurting the movement, and you are not a part of us. Go away.” The man obliges and leaves.

The Guardian ran a “video guide to the protest movement,” complete with maps and infographics, informing readers that the “war in Gaza [had] unleashed the biggest outpouring of U.S. student activism since the anti-racism protests of 2020.” There it was, in the first sentence—The Guardian’s view was unmistakable: the anti-Israel protests were morally equivalent to anti-racism demonstrations. Students shouting that “Zionist pigs don’t deserve to live” were, in the eyes of the outlet, imbued with a sense of righteousness. The paper’s seal of approval, complete with a guide for others to join in, effectively encouraged more students to intimidate their Jewish peers.

Meanwhile, a glowing feature in The New Yorker hailed the protests as a “national uprising of students to end the war in Gaza and, for some, to end their institution’s financial ties to Israel.” But that was hardly the full extent of their demands. Some college protestors went even further than the official BDS movement, calling for individual Zionists and Israelis to be banned from campuses—a stance that, according to the ADL, breaks with USACBI guidelines, which specifically advocate for “the boycott of Israeli institutions, not individuals” and “[reject] on principle boycotts of individuals based on their identity or opinion.”

For months, the media narrative was unwavering: the students, guided by their unimpeachable moral compasses, were on the side of righteousness. Even when protests veered unmistakably into antisemitism, we were reassured that these were merely isolated incidents—just a few “bad apples.”

The prevailing wisdom, as The New Yorker so confidently asserted, was that the kids were not all right—but only because they weren’t being heard. Even as universities, after much delay, were finally forced to act—dismantling encampments, suspending students, and issuing long-overdue disciplinary actions—the media somehow continued to rally behind a cause that had rapidly devolved into the indefensible.

And now, here we are, with a new academic year just beginning.

Repercussions and Lessons Learned?

Yet, despite the break in protests and leadership resignations, the reality is that we’re likely to see a repeat of last year’s scenes—if not over the current war against Hamas, then certainly the next time Israel makes headlines.

Why? The inadequate and delayed responses from universities only served to embolden the protesters. It’s this hesitancy, coupled with words of approval from university leadership in the early stages, which allowed the demonstrations to persist for as long as they did. In fact, some of the key figures behind the protests have even been rewarded by their institutions.

For example, the Columbia University student who famously demanded “humanitarian aid” and “a glass of water” for protesters—claiming they’d “die of dehydration and starvation” without support from the administration—now teaches a required undergraduate class. At the same institution, Professor Joseph Massad, who openly praised Hamas, still holds his position teaching Middle East studies, facing no consequences. Likewise, at Cornell, the professor who described the October 7 Hamas attacks as “exhilarating” remains unpunished and continues teaching.

Second, and perhaps more troubling, is the fact that many in positions of authority at these academic institutions see no need for punishment—largely because they align with the broader sentiments expressed. The normalization of anti-Israel rhetoric has reached a point where even calls for the deaths of “Zionists” are shrugged off as poor word choice or an excess of passion, while the underlying ideology is tacitly accepted.

It’s difficult to imagine such grotesque views being directed toward the citizens of any other nation, let alone met with the same indifference or rationalization.

At the core of this issue lies the media. In Europe, the press has traditionally been regarded as the “fourth estate”—distinct from the clergy, nobility, and commoners—acknowledging its powerful role in holding other estates accountable and shaping public understanding. However, when it comes to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the surge of antisemitism, the media has abdicated this crucial role. Where it once sought to expose, scrutinize, and challenge, it now falters. Increasingly, journalists position themselves not as impartial purveyors of truth, but as activists, emboldened by employers that sanction such partisanship.

If meaningful reform is to take root in American colleges, it must begin with a renewed commitment from the media. Journalists must reclaim their role as objective arbiters, subjecting issues to rigorous scrutiny rather than ideological alignment. The path forward requires a return to the fundamental duty of their profession: to illuminate the truth, without fear or favor.

Liked this article? Follow HonestReporting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to see even more posts and videos debunking news bias and smears, as well as other content explaining what’s really going on in Israel and the region.

Image credits: JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images, Jimin Kim/SOPA Images via Reuters Connect