How Western media bias allows Israel to getaway with murder in Gaza

Ramzy Baroud

An Israeli attack on Gaza was imminent, and not because of any provocations by Palestinian groups in the besieged, impoverished Gaza Strip. The Israeli military escalation was foreseeable because it factors neatly in Israel’s contentious political scene. The war was not a question of “if”, but “when”.

The answer came on November 12, when the Israeli military launched a major strike against Gaza, killing an Islamic Jihad Commander, Bahaa Abu al-Ata, along with his wife Asma.

More strikes followed, targeting what the Israeli military described as Islamic Jihad installations. However, the identities of the victims, along with damning social media footage, pictures, and eyewitness accounts indicate that civilians and civilian infrastructure were bombed and destroyed as well.

As of November 14, when a truce was announced, 32 Palestinians have been killed and over 80 wounded in the Israeli aggression.

What truly frustrates any meaningful discussion on the horrific situation in Gaza is the feeble response, whether by international organisations that exist with the sole purpose of ensuring world peace or by Western mainstream media, that ceaselessly celebrates its own accuracy and impartiality.

A most disappointing response to the Israeli violence was offered by Nickolay Mladenov, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.

Mladenov, whose job should have long been deemed pointless considering that no “peace process” actually exists, expressed his “concern” about the “ongoing and serious escalation between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel”.

Not only Mladenov’s statement creates a moral equivalence between an occupying power, which instigated the war in the first place, and a small group of a few hundred armed men, it is also dishonest.

“The indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars against population centres is absolutely unacceptable and must stop immediately,” Mladenov elaborated, putting great emphasis on the fact that, “there can be no justification for any attacks against civilians”.

A destroyed house seen in Gaza, after Israeli airstrikes hit the building in Khan Yunis, Gaza on November 13, 2019 [Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency]

Shockingly, Mladenov was referring to Israeli, not Palestinian civilians. At the time that his statement was released to the media, there were already dozens of Palestinian civilians that had been killed and wounded, while Israeli media reports spoke of few Israelis who had been treated for “anxiety”.

The European Union did not fare any better. The EU parroted the same American knee-jerk response by condemning “the barrage of rocket attacks reaching deep into Israel”.

“The firing of rockets on civilian populations is totally unacceptable and must immediately stop,” a statement by the European bloc read.

Is it not possible that Mladenov and top EU foreign policymakers do not truly comprehend the political context of the latest Israeli onslaught  –  that embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using military escalation as a way of fortifying his weakening grip on power.

Considering this, what is one to make of the poor media coverage, the inept analyses and the absence of balanced reports in major Western news media?

In a report published by the BBC on November 13, the British broadcaster referred to “cross-border violence between Israel and militants in Gaza”.

But Gaza is not an independent country and, per international law, it is still under Israeli occupation. Israel declared Gaza a “hostile territory” in September 2007, arbitrarily establishing a “border” between it and the besieged Palestinian territory. For some reason, the BBC finds this designation acceptable.

CNN, on the other hand, reported on November 13 that “Israel’s military campaign against Islamic Jihad” is entering its second day, while emphasizing the UN condemnation of the rocket attacks.

CNN, like most of its American mainstream counterparts, reports on Israeli military campaigns as a part and parcel of some imagined “war on terror”. Therefore, analyzing the language of US mainstream media with the purpose of underlining and emphasizing its failures and biases, is a useless exercise.

Sadly, US bias regarding Palestine has extended to mainstream media in European countries that were, to some degree, fairer, if not somewhat sympathetic, with the Palestinian peoples’ situation.

El Mundo of Spain, for example, spoke of a number of Palestinians – making sure to emphasize that they were “mostly militants”, – who “died” as opposed to “were killed” by the Israeli military.

“The escalation followed the death of Gaza’s armed branch leader,” El Mundo reported, failing once more to pinpoint the culprits in these seemingly mysterious deaths.

La Repubblica, which is perceived in Italy as a “leftist” outlet, sounded more like a rightwing Israeli newspaper, in its description of the events that led to the death and wounding of many Palestinians. The Italian newspaper used a fabricated timeline that only exists in the mind of Israeli military and decision-makers.

“Violence continued. Several rockets were thrown towards Israel by Gaza’s Islamic Jihad (militants), breaking the brief truce, according to (rightwing Israeli newspaper) The Jerusalem Post and to the Israeli army”.

It remains unclear what “truce” La Repubblica was referring to.

France’s Le Monde followed suit, reporting the same deceptive and cliched Israeli lines and emphasizing statements by the Israeli military and government. Interestingly, the death and wounding of many Palestinians in Gaza did not deserve a place on the French newspaper’s homepage. Instead, it chose to highlight a comparatively irrelevant news item where Israel denounced the labeling of illegal settlement products as “discriminatory”.

Maybe, one could have excused these across-the-board journalistic and moral failings if it were not for the fact that the Gaza story has been one of the most covered news topics anywhere in the world for over a decade.

It is obvious that the West’s “newspapers of record” have maintained their blindspot on fairly reporting on Gaza and intentionally kept the truth from their readers for many years so as not to offend the sensibilities of the Israeli government and its powerful allies and lobbies.

While one cannot help but bemoan the death of good journalism in the West, it is also important to acknowledge with much appreciation the courage and sacrifices of Gaza’s young journalists and bloggers who, at times, are targeted and killed by the Israeli army for conveying the truth on the plight of the besieged but tenacious Strip.

The Kurds may well have ‘no friends but the mountains’, but they do have Israel

Omar Ahmed

There is an old saying that “the Kurds have no friends but the mountains”. Poetic, poignant and tragic; but not quite true. Despite the mainstream Western media lamenting the latest “betrayal” of Kurdish allies by the US government, there has been one ally who has had a consistent relationship with the Kurds: Israel.

A day after Turkey launched Operation Peace Spring on 9 October, following reports of US President Donald Trump announcing a withdrawal of US troops from north-eastern Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “strongly condemned” the Turkish invasion against the “gallant Kurdish people” and warned of ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu also said that Israel was prepared to extend humanitarian aid to the Kurds. However, as Haaretz has noted, there has been a deafening silence from Netanyahu about Trump effectively abandoning the Kurds to their fate at the hands of the second largest army in NATO.

Israeli-Kurdish relations

The relationship between the Kurds and Israel is no mystery. Ties between the two go back to the 1960s, with Israel providing military and humanitarian aid until 1975. The arrangement ended abruptly after the accord signed between Iraq and pre-Islamic Republic Iran, following the latter’s support for Iraqi-Kurdish separatists under the pro-West Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who also enjoyed close ties with Israel. Relations resumed discretely thereafter, becoming more prominent following the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, in the form of an Israeli base used to facilitate the training of Kurds; Israel had a strategic interest in supporting Kurdish forces, as a counterweight to Sunni and Shia groups in Iraq. Involvement in the region also gave Israel better access to intelligence from Syria and Iran. Iraqi Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani once said of Israel, “There is no other country to which we Kurds owe so much.” He also told an Israeli emissary that “only the Jews cared about the Kurds.”

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In his prison journal, the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan says that it was Israel's Mossad that "built the clandestine network for surveillance of the PKK." #Turkey

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It is no surprise, then, that Israel has been so vocal in its support for an independent Kurdistan state, primarily to act as a buffer against Arab adversaries and arch-rival Iran, which has its own Kurdish population. It is, however, easy to forget that there was a time when the most important ally for Israel in the region was Turkey, which was the first Muslim majority country to recognise the nascent Zionist state in 1949. This relationship, as with pre-revolutionary Iran’s, was established in more secular times, when Ataturk’s ideology was entrenched in Turkish politics and society. Turkey has increasingly become less secular (although some polls suggest otherwise) and eastward facing under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AK Party. The relationship took a downward turn with the assault on the Mavi Marmara Flotilla massacre in 2010, when Israeli commandos killed nine humanitarian activists (a tenth died later of his wounds) taking aid to the besieged Gaza Strip, and injured many more. Yet to maintain ties with Turkey, Israel has taken the same view as the US and the EU, and designated the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation.

It thus becomes problematic when the US State Department declares that the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, which include the Syrian Kurdish militia group the YPG, are the “Syrian offshoot of the PKK”. Washington did, after all, rebrand the Syrian Kurdish militia and encourage it to change its name in order to disassociate itself from the PKK.

The current alliance between the YPG and the Syrian government is pragmatic, given that the Kurds have no one to protect them against the Turkish offensive intended to establish a safe zone for refugees in the border area, yet they have proven time and again to be very politically fickle throughout the Syrian civil war. In the summer of 2016, and not for the first time in the conflict (the earliest known clashes occurred in 2012), the YPG clashed in Aleppo with the so-called Free Syria Army (the FSA), which is supported by Turkey. The rebels accused the YPG of collaborating with the Syrian government against them, whereas in 2014, the YPG and FSA had launched a joint operation command in Kobane in a bid to combat the then emerging threat of Daesh.

We now have a situation where the FSA — which includes jihadists in its ranks, since its rebranding as the “Syrian National Army” — are leading the ground offensive against the YPG. At the time of writing, a shaky five-day ceasefire is in place to allow the YPG to withdraw, although reports claim that this has been violated.

Trump gets a lot of criticism in the mainstream media but at times he has revealed rare gems of raw truth. Like the time that he said that the Saudi royal family won’t last two weeks without US protection, for example. Now he has pointed out that the Kurds “are not angels”, which goes against the message in the mainstream media as establishment figures fall over themselves to express dismay at the betrayal of the Kurds. Almost nonchalantly, Trump said that the PKK is worse than Daesh. He may be right, given that the Syrian chapter of the movement is willing to release its Daesh prisoners, knowing full well the possible impact of such a move. The Kurds have also committed crimes in Arab villages in areas under their control and persecuted local Christians.

Following the Iraqi Kurdish retreat from Kirkuk in 2017, it became clear that the international community was not interested in an independent state of Kurdistan. Not only are the Kurds scattered in Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria — two of the region’s natural hegemons are in that list – but they also have affiliations with Israel and just about anyone else with whom any close links are convenient at the time. This renders a possible Kurdistan politically untrustworthy.

A complete withdrawal of the US from Syria would be disastrous for the documented Zionist plan for the Balkanisation of Syria and the wider Middle East, which is why Israel has demanded that the US base near the Jordan border remains open, so as to serve as an obstacle between the Iran-Syria-Lebanon corridor. Crucially, in another of Trump’s slip-ups, the US is still holding on to the Syrian oil fields in the east. Despite the US President’s acknowledgement that they still are in control, the likelihood of a US pull-out is inevitable as the Syrian army retakes its territory with Russian support, leaving Washington’s position unsustainable.

Furthermore, maps reveal that the Kurdish population in Syrian territory has claimed vastly more land east of the River Euphrates than the land which is their historic region. We have seen this sort of thing before in the region, and continue to do so to this day.

As the Kurds navigate through a myriad of short-term alliances – often with false promises of statehood or autonomy ringing in their ears, or even protection from an existential threat — they are likely to be betrayed. Unfortunately for them, they are once again being used by the West as pawns against the perceived bogey of the day in an imperial project gone wrong.

Nevertheless, the one constant which they can count on is support from Israel. Hence, a state of Kurdistan is only ever going to be an Israeli proxy, as the fragmentation of Arab states serves the Yinon Plan for Greater Israel with the hope that, “sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation”.

Why Iran and Britain are heading for a crash

Mahan Abedin

Warship belonging to British Navy, allegedly sent to the Strait 

of Hormuz is seen passing through the Bosphorus in Istanbul, 

Turkey on July 12, 2019. 

The decision by the Gibraltar authorities to release supertanker Grace 1 will slightly ease tensions between Britain and Iran, but not for long.

Relations between the two states have been steadily deteriorating for the past eight months and the fear is that they will collapse altogether, as they have done repeatedly in the past.

The steady drift to the break down in Anglo-Iranian relations comes at a sensitive time and unfolds against a backdrop of a sharp escalation of tensions between Iran and the United States across the Middle East.

One reason why the capture of Grace 1 by British Royal Marines so infuriated the Iranians – and prompted the seizure of the British-flagged tanker Stena Impero in the Strait of Hormuz two weeks later – was because the British action had been carried out at the behest of the Americans.

Whilst the tanker issue appears to be on the point of resolution, wider disputes and tensions in the fraught Anglo-Iranian relationship are likely to sharpen in the months ahead as Iran adopts an increasingly strident posture in the face of pressure by the US, UK and Israel.

In view of the emotions invested in the volatile Anglo-Iranian relationship, the breakdown this time could be more dramatic and long-lasting.

An old story

The British-Iranian relationship is one of the most intriguing and enigmatic in international relations. It is highly emotive primarily because of the UK’s former quasi-colonial role in Iran. Whilst Iran could never be colonised, nevertheless a prolonged period of national decline for the better part of the 19th century made the country uniquely vulnerable to the so-called “Great Game”.   

As Britain and Russia intensified their rivalry in the last quarter of the 19th century for influence and control over Central Asia and its periphery, Iran’s embattled Qajar rulers surrendered much of their sovereignty to the encroaching superpowers of the day.

The fact that the British were far more successful than their Russian rivals at penetrating Iranian society – and manipulating Iran’s sclerotic elites – has left a lasting impression on the Iranian psyche. The former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, has aptly captured this enduring Iranian impression of British power in his book, “The English Job: Understanding Iran and Why It Distrusts Britain”.

Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, Tehran has been trying to reset its international relations across the board. The key foreign policy priority has been to rebalance relations with the core Western powers, notably the US and the UK.

To that end, Iran has scored major successes in the past four decades. A brief glance at the Middle East’s geopolitical map in 2019 demonstrates just to what extent Iran has emerged as the region’s dominant power, undermining, and in some cases displacing, American influence.

The struggle against British influence has been no less intense, but much of it has been hidden and thus the resulting shift in the balance of power has been harder to detect. Iran’s main contemporary grievances against Britain revolve around London’s outreach to Iran’s adversaries in the Gulf, in addition to the hopeless British quest of re-establishing a semblance of influence within Iran.

The big breakdown?

Anglo-Iranian relations have been inherently volatile for two centuries, but they became more fraught and unpredictable following the Iranian revolution in 1979. Most importantly, the contemporary relationship has unfolded against a backdrop of a steady, but consistent, shift in the balance of power.

Today, Iran is much stronger than 40 years ago. By contrast, Britain continues to decline, at least in geopolitical terms, as evidenced by the shrunken size of the Royal Navy and broader depletion of military strength.   

Broader indices of national power have shifted too. Iran is a remarkably cohesive society led by an ideologically-driven state determined to not only transform the international balance of power, but equally important to displace the normative values in international relations which have guaranteed Western hegemony for two centuries.

By contrast, Britain is a divided society led by elites who are increasingly unsure of their place in the world. The divisions and polarisation and, by extension, the decline of the British establishment, is set to intensify following Britain’s disorderly exit from the European Union in just over two months.

The bottom line is that Iran seeks to redefine the relationship with Britain, not so much to the point of placing it on an equal footing, but building up sufficient leverage to deter the UK from working closely with Iran’s regional adversaries to Tehran’s disadvantage.

Britain’s whole-hearted support for the Bahraini dictatorship and London’s continuing involvement in the Yemen conflict are two of the most important examples.

But the shift in the balance of power – with Iran now stronger than the UK in some key aspects – does not mean that the British will sit on their hands as Iran continues to redefine the relationship by continually defying and challenging Britain.

Indeed, post-Brexit, some elements of the British establishment may try to soften the political and economic blows by taking sanctuary in the old colonial delusions.

Anglo-Iranian relations have collapsed in a big way on at least two occasions since 1979. The first breakdown occurred in 1989 in the wake of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s Fatwa against the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie.

The late Ayatollah Khomeini’s intervention galvanised the British Muslim community in an unprecedented manner and it may be considered as Iran’s first major interference in Britain’s internal affairs.

The second breakdown occurred in November 2011 after Iranian students stormed the British embassy in Tehran following Britain’s lead role in imposing nuclear-related sanctions on Iran.

The third major breakdown is an inevitability, and may occur sooner rather than later owing to the new British Tory government’s ideological and political proximity to the Trump administration in the US.

But this time around expect the breakdown to be deeper, longer and much harder to resolve.