Smalltown Newspapers Struggling to Exist & Readerships Dwindling ... So Don't Rock the Boat . . .
British media organisations and journalists working for them have struggled for decades to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accurately and impartially. Supporting what we all observed with our very own eyes and ears, research has demonstrated categorically over the years how Israeli narratives and viewpoints dominate the Middle East output of most mainstream media organisations in Britain, leading to the silencing, erasure and dehumanisation of the Palestinians.
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Here, a piece that may not end up in the rag.
They Are Children; Propaganda Can’t Redefine ‘Genocide’
By Paul Haeder
For some of us journalists and teachers who have friends and connections to Gaza, to Palestine, we are not easily dissuaded by the mainstream narrative around Hamas and the Zionist State of Israel. We are still heartbroken by the carnage.
It’s not a Pearl Harbor moment for Israel, and ironically, Dec. 7 is the start of Hanukah. We are approaching Christmas and Kwanzaa, too, and for Muslims, December is a holy month: Eid al-Fitr is often celebrated with feasts, gifts, and special prayers. Other important December holidays for Muslims include the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, known as Mawlid al-Nabi, and the Day of Ashura, which is a day of fasting and reflection.
Ironically, we have human rights day December 10 and International Solidarity Day December 20. I write this on the day we see a more concerted form of sadism in the genocide: On November 18, the Israeli military delivered on the promises made by the country’s leaders to render Gaza uninhabitable for its 2.3 million Palestinian residents, most of them refugees.
“Civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” the head of the World Food Program said on Thursday, with the organization adding that Gaza’s “entire population is in desperate need of food assistance.
It makes sense that people in the USA are not just misinformed, but miseducated and basically drawn & quartered by the mainstream media’s incredible bias and stenography for “government sources.” The press illiteracy of the average and not-so-average citizen is disheartening for me, a journalist through and through.
I’m not citing extreme experts, authors and journalists who give a much different perspective on what happened on Dec. 7 and the context of what led up to the Hamas attacks. We have ten thousand known bombed to death, and we have disease, dysentery, gut ailments killing many; water and refrigeration cut off? No bread to eat (Israel bombed all of Gaza’s bakeries).
It’s dangerous to me and the rest of the informed world how uneducated and fascistic our leaders are, these so-called elites with Yale, Harvard and big university degrees. They have no excuse for ignorance, and propaganda is like a virus which rears its temperature-spiking head constantly. The facts are there, even coursing through the algorithms of Google, Facebook and Bing.
You want to read a Jewish man’s position on the genocide Israel is perpetrating? He had a stake in arguing for Israel to return those occupied territories stolen after 1967. Moshé Machover is the last surviving signatory of the statement below, published on 22nd September 1967 in Haaretz, Israel’s leading progressive Zionist newspaper.
“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation leads to foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression. Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”
Inform yourselves, please. I have decades under my belt as a journalist – even landed a degree in newspaper journalism and I’ve worked over decades for many newspapers, magazines and one radio station. The media illiteracy and dumb-downing are atrocious, even among “college educated folk” who turn a blind eye to history, to off-the-mainstream-discourse, to outlets and independent journalists actually working in these “areas” of the world.
Look up Beirut-based journalist Rania Khalek, host at BreakThrough News, and see the hundreds of interviews she’s conducted with dozens of amazingly smart and in-the-know folk. You want to hear Abby Martin, an American journalist, who just interviewed Roger Waters from Pink Floyd? Martin’s gut wrenching story “Gaza Fights For Freedom” can give you a primer to the atrocities of Israel against this open air prison they “created” for 2.3 million Palestinians. Gaza is a five mile by 25 mile hell hole.
This newspaper will run letters, and certainly we might get a “counter” Viewpoint to mine. There is no other side to what the IDF is doing to Gaza. It’ss dropping USA bombs on a completely closed, 125 square mile home to children, old people, schools, almost a dozen hospitals, and adults.
They are not combatants, the children that have died in hospitals because the electricity and fuel and medicines and food have been cut off.
Three prominent Palestinian human rights groups said that the full force of one of the world’s most powerful militaries is being unleashed against a “captive civilian population … under the voyeuristic gaze of the international community.”
Go to the Electronic Intifada and watch their roundtables covering this atrocity. Read. Search this out on the web.
Ian Pappé is a leading critic of the Israeli occupation, a professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His books include “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” “A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples” and “The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge.”
Please, find his interviews and books, so you can educate yourself, your neighbors and vapid representatives.
“This is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing, of depopulation,” says Pappé.
He’s Jewish, Israeli and had served in Israel’s military. Secure the release of the more than 200 hostages held by Hamas is to agree to an all-for-all swap for the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel, including many women, children and elderly people.
“This is the only way to release the people who were taken.”
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I sent the above to the local newspaper where I have gotten traction with my viewpoints. I know the editor. I’ve done special and free work for them. I am not sure it will run. Here, some archived stuff. Then do this in Google-Gulag: Paul Haeder Newsport News Times.
I have to pussyfoot around issues in the local rag. Newport has some of those LGBTQA backers, and lots of smart (PhD sorts) living here because of the marine scinces and NOAA and the place to retire. Do they lean toward Biden-Harris. Sure, and then you have Trump-Pence leaners. Both side of the same coin, for sure.
But calling for a Ceasefire is what all high school teachers should be highlighting for their youth. It’s the non-violent option. But calling for more bombing, straffing, white phosphorous dumping? That would seem like a Virginia Tech situation, no?
Here’s what runs in the rag, and I’ve written about this sad sack of a “teacher” and whatever else he labels himself as, but this is one of several prompts for me to write something counterveilling the stupid and the hate:
A ceasefire creates perverse incentives
In a recent piece published in the News-Times (“Gaza: ceasefire now!” Nov. 3 edition), Newport resident Gilbert Schramm called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza as a solution to the terror attack that claimed the lives of over 1,400 Jews in Israel on Oct. 7.
On its face, this solution seems like a logical one. We are told, after all, that a ceasefire is the only way to end the “cycle of violence.” Sadly, calls for an immediate ceasefire create no lasting peace — only perverse incentives. A real, lasting peace comes only with the complete destruction of Hamas.
Schramm argues that Hamas is urging Palestinians to stay in Gaza to prevent their “ethnic cleansing” by Israel. This is patently false. Hamas instructs Palestinians to ignore Israeli pleas to flee Gaza because the continued presence of innocent civilians is all that prevents the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) from eviscerating Hamas tomorrow. This is because Israel specifically takes actions to avoid collateral damage.
The headquarters for Hamas leadership was deliberately constructed under the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for this purpose. Hamas knows that any attack on their headquarters will claim the lives of thousands of innocent Palestinians — an attack that would be used in thousands of TikTok videos as evidence that Israel is actually the genocidal party. Those calling for a ceasefire draw moral equivalence between a democratic state that takes active measures to limit civilian casualties in their attacks on military targets, and a terror state, which deliberately targets civilian areas in an attempt to maximize casualties.
Schramm laments the deaths of more than 7,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. We should all mourn these deaths. But we must lay blame at the feet of the party most responsible: Hamas. Protocol I of the Geneva Convention expressly prohibits the use of human shields. Indeed, the entire purpose of the Geneva Convention is to maximize the protection of innocent civilians in war.
Recently, TikTok and Instagram were awash with news that an IDF aircraft destroyed a Gazan ambulance, allegedly killing 15 — if totalitarian terror state Hamas is to be believed. Unsurprisingly, Hamas has been using ambulances to smuggle combatants in and out of warzones, which is prohibited under Rule 29 of Customary International Humanitarian Law. Under such circumstances, an ambulance is therefore a lawful target. The decision to put women and children in front of genocidal, Jew-hating terrorists is not Israel’s. A ceasefire only incentivizes Hamas to use more Palestinians as human shields and only invites more casualties. If the goal is fewer Palestinian deaths in Gaza, then Hamas must be forcefully excised.
Most Americans are well-meaning in their desire to see the conflict in Gaza come to an end. But Israel’s retaliatory response to the horrific rape and murder of 1,400 Israelis is not perpetuating a “cycle of violence.” It is justifiable self-defense against a genocidal terror state hellbent on the total eradication of the world’s Jews. Anything less invites more of the same by Hamas.
Ben Ryan is a social studies teacher at Newport High School. He also serves as the Lincoln County Education Association’s west area director.
And so here we are with this fucking fool teaching high school and then some fucking LC director of an education association he lists as well.
What a piece of human agnotology. And as a TEACHER, who doesn’t understand what Nakba is, what genocide is, and his history is so threadbare, I wonder if he’d even be able to sit and listen to a high school student rebut his ignorance and his call to kill people in hospitals and schools.
Yep, millions across the world calling for a ceasefire are all wrong, man.
This miseducator is attacking another resident’s simple and non-radical commentary and call for ceasefire:
Gaza: ceasefire now!
By Gilbert Schramm
(Information stated was current as of Oct. 26)
A few days ago, an Israeli army spokesman uttered one of those absurdly ironic statements that are typical in the current conflict. He argued that Israel “had to attack Hamas” because they were “living on Israel’s doorstep.” When you steal someone’s house and evict them with brutal violence, it is not surprising to find them on your doorstep. Does that justify exterminating them or justify driving them into a different neighborhood? Most civilized people would say not.
Egypt is getting roundly criticized for not opening their Rafah border crossing. Their reasons are quite clear. First, they don’t want 2 million Palestinian refugees living on their border with Israel, and they don’t want to have continued Palestinian resistance staged from within their borders. That would inevitably lead to another Israeli/Egyptian war. Their second reason is perhaps more principled — they refuse to collaborate in the further ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. This is why Hamas itself is urging residents of Gaza to remain. It is largely why they do remain.
In 1948, Israel brutally ethnically cleansed the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. For years, Israel claimed that Arab authorities told Palestinians to flee. Israel claimed that their flight made the land Israel’s by default. There is no clear record of Arabs telling Palestinians to leave, but no Arab government wants to open themselves to the same false claims or manipulation.
There have been a lot of comparisons to 9/11 with regard to the Hamas attack and the Israeli response. It might give some much-needed perspective to rely on comparisons with smaller numbers. During a 10-year period in the mid 2000s, Palestinian rockets killed about 20 Israeli civilians. That is around two people a year. That is about how many Israeli people are killed yearly by snake bites. It is less than the number killed in the U.S. by fireworks as we celebrate Fourth of July (a single day). No one has ever called on the U.S. Air Force to stop Fourth of July celebrations. One credible article I just read said the recent number of deaths caused by Palestinian rocket fire was about one per 142 rockets. The number of rockets in 2011 was about 1,483 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/13/faq-hamas-missiles/). The situation is getting worse but is hardly an “existential threat” as Israel claims, and it certainly doesn’t justify the horrific force Israel is bringing to bear on Gaza.
Recently, a lone gunman in a small town in Maine killed about 18 local residents with a legally purchased gun. It would have taken 2,556 Hamas rockets to kill all those people in Maine. The gunman did in an hour what it would have taken 10 years of Hamas rockets to accomplish. Yet there are no U.S. airstrikes in Maine. That would be madness!
Meanwhile, the death toll inflicted on Palestinian civilians in Gaza continues to grow astronomically. Over 7,000 Palestinians are now dead. Apparently, over 3,000 children are among them (dismembered somewhere in the rubble). How many more victims need to die before Israel reaches its mysterious “redemption point?” It is time to stop this madness.
The U.S. and Israel argue that a ceasefire would “only help Hamas.” The truth is it would mostly help the civilian population of Gaza, most of whom had nothing to do with the horrific Hamas attack. It would also help the hostages and the countries they come from by giving their negotiators time to arrange their release. It would even help Israel by giving their people time to hold back before committing their nation to a horrific, historic mistake.
In recent days, most of the leaders of Israeli intelligence and the military have taken responsibility for their failures. The exception is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. He has led Israel for 13 years. His aggressive policy has been an abject failure and has probably created far more extremists than he ever eliminated. There is no sane reason the US should continue to support this approach.
It is time to let humanitarian aid into Gaza and to enforce a ceasefire now. A serious long-term peace deal should quickly follow. Period.
Gilbert Schramm is a resident of Newport.
That high school Gestapo boy, Gentle Ben, what a typical example of the bad “educator” in the Gulag of K12.
Listen up welfare cheat, Mister Ryan.
Oh, those stupid Americans: What’s this idiot talking now, Tuesday, to his youth about National Day of Mourning for Turtle Island? Klanada? He going to scoff at this?
LINK.
Jew kids in the Jewish State of Occupied Palestine?
Fucking LA: local gun shop owners say concerns fueled by the bloody conflict have led to a surge in sales in Southern California, with many Jewish people arming themselves for the first time.
Jewish himself, Charles Jasper, Director of Aegis Private Security which also provides gun training, told KTLA’s Jennifer McGraw that his business has doubled since the war began.
“The idea that people can go door-to-door, terrorists can go door-to-door with impunity and not face hard resistance is something difficult to process, especially as an American,” he said.
In Studio City last week, the home of a Jewish family was broken into by a man threatening to kill them while hurling anti-Semitic insults. The victim, who is nine months pregnant, told KTLA that the intruder first kicked in the door to their master bedroom. Her husband fought with him while she called 911.
Officers arrived and found him armed with a kitchen knife, Key News reported. He was taken into custody without further incident and shouted, “Free Palestine” and “Brown Lives Matter” as he was cuffed and placed in a police cruiser, Key News video shows.
Store owners said they’re seeing an influx of Jewish and Israeli Americans, many of them women, arming up in case they’re the next target here at home.
“We’re having a gun. That’s the only way I feel I will be safe in my house now,” one woman, who did not want to be identified or appear on camera, told McGraw.
The woman, who said she fears for her family, has been anti-gun until now.
“I mean, in the past, the thought would’ve never crossed my mind,” she said. “Now it’s not only do I want my husband to figure this out, but I think we’re all going to be trained on how to use the gun. I don’t want history to repeat itself. I want my family here. I want my kids here. I want my kid’s kids to be here.”
At Burbank Ammo & Guns, manager Eric Fletcher said they’re up 75% in firearm safety certification tests, selling near 200 this year so far, compared to just 45 at this time last year.
Guns for the Palestinians?
So, yet another shit letter in the News Times:
You can’t ignore the terrorism and atrocities
Gilbert Schramm frequently writes columns that represent only the far Oregon left and another reason much of the state wants a divorce from Portland-type liberals.
His column on Gaza (“Gaza: ceasefire now!” Nov. 3 edition) is typical of so many other liberal voices who ignore the terrorism and atrocities Hamas inflicted. Babies that were beheaded and women and children that were intentionally targeted, yet do gooder liberals say stand down.
Israel is right in doing everything it can to terminate Hamas, and it does not need others telling it what to do.
Greg Brown, Newport
The right to EVERYTHING?
These people and the lies, and then this do-gooder liberal shit, and anti Portland shit? Oh, the Un-United $nakes of AmeriKKKa-IF.
Do these racists wake up just with the hate hate hate embedded inside? Then a fucking High School teacher, what’s his game? He going to broach this book, since it is social studies and dealing with high school aged youth’s lives?
The horror of childhood under occupation
Harrowing —
Dreaming of Freedom begins with the story of 14-year-old Yazan al-Shrbati, one of the most harrowing narratives in the book.
Yazan lives on Shuhada Street in Hebron, formerly the commercial heart of Hebron’s Old City but now severely restricted to Palestinians for the benefit of Israeli settlers. Yazan recounts his brutal assault by Israeli settlers while walking by himself in the street and his subsequent arrest by the Israeli military, despite the fact that he had done nothing to provoke the attack.
Like all the children in the book, Yazan says that his experience of imprisonment has changed him. As well as the physical violence Yazan endured during his arrest, when Israeli soldiers kicked him and hit him in the head, he was subjected to psychological pressure during his detention.
“I was taken to the interrogation room, not knowing why, as I was the victim of an assault,” the boy states. “The interrogator tried to make me say something. I refused, insisting on my innocence. I was still trying to work out how bad my wounds were after the beatings [by] the settlers and the police.”
Human rights laws and norms do not apply under occupation, as these children are painfully aware.
One child describes their home being stormed by Israeli soldiers, another recounts a summons to an interrogation center. Under occupation, no one can ever truly feel secure.
The story of Ayman Abbasi, a 16-year-old from occupied East Jerusalem, is especially poignant.
Ayman was imprisoned several times — the first when he was just in ninth grade — and was released from prison to serve an open-ended house arrest that lasted for 10 months. He was then sentenced to 18 more months in prison and was forced to turn himself over to the prison authorities.
Ayman did not live to the see the publication of Hashim’s book; in November last year, he was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.
Long-term consequences —
Hashim is careful to present her child subjects as honestly as possible rather than idealizing them. Nor does Hashim romanticize the consequences of rebellion against the occupation, for which Palestinians pay a high price.
Ammar Adeli, a child prisoner who took part in numerous acts of resistance against the occupation, drops out of school after repeated arrests. He cannot find a job due to the high unemployment in the West Bank and is isolated from his family.
The long-term impact that arrest and detention has on children — such as dropping out of school, psychological trauma and unemployment — are central themes of their post-prison experiences.
Yet none of the children profiled in Dreaming of Freedom express a desire to leave their homeland. Their shared experiences of arrest and imprisonment, however, reinforce the sense that they are trapped in a system not of their making that dictates the terms and conditions of their lives.
Most amazingly, the children still have hope. When he explains how he coped with imprisonment, Muslim Ouda explains,
“despite the miserable conditions in the cells, I would still try to draw a bright picture of my future, using my innocent imagination, in which there is no occupation.”
Alia Al Ghussain is a British-Palestinian currently based in London.
We do not have many educators left, man, in this warehousing of youth in prison settings called Public Schools, and then the homeschooled Zionists, and then the Charter School CristoAzovZion’s?
Yeah, that fucking Jewish State of Israel. You think Oct. 7 was bad? The entire Jewish state of Occupied Palestine must be ended.
Mays Abu Ghosh was revising for a college exam during August 2019 when Israeli soldiers broke into her home late at night.
Accompanied by dogs, the troops told her father to wake up the family and gather everyone in one place.
Then they entered Mays’ room and ordered her to switch on her mobile phone and computer. She refused to do so.
After she disobeyed the order, Mays had to get dressed in the presence of some female soldiers. Her bedroom and that of her parents were then ransacked by the troops.
Handcuffed, Mays was brought from her family’s home in Qalandiya refugee camp to the military checkpoint also in Qalandiya – an area separating occupied East Jerusalem from the remainder of the West Bank.
From there she was transported to the Russian Compound, an Israeli detention center in Jerusalem. Mays was held in that center for more than a month, during which time she was repeatedly tortured.
Painful—
“The most severe thing was three days in a row without being allowed to sleep,” Mays, 23, said. “I had to stay in a chair and if I closed my eyes, a soldier would come over and shout at me. I was slapped in the face continuously.”
Mays was forced to stand and bend her knees, with soldiers pressing hard on her shoulders. She had to remain in such painful positions for long stretches of time.
Her shackles were so tight that her hands and feet started to bleed. When Mays got her period, the interrogators “deliberately delayed” giving her sanitary pads, she said.
“I still have various pains – in my back, feet and head – because of the torture,” she recounted.
As well as abusing her physically, Mays’ interrogators subjected her to psychological pressure by threatening that other members of her family would be arrested and that their home would be destroyed.
Mays, a journalism student at Birzeit University in the West Bank, has been persecuted because she refused to accept Israel’s occupation of her homeland.
She was charged with being part of Qutub, a left-wing student group deemed “unlawful” by Israel.
Among the other charges against her were “contact with an enemy.” That related to her participation in a conference held in Lebanon on the right to return of Palestine’s refugees.
Around 50 people – mainly students – were arrested in the West Bank around the same time as Mays.
Some Israeli journalists rushed to label those arrested as “terrorists.” Press stories linked the arrests to a killing next to an Israeli settlement.
Yet as Gideon Levy, a veteran journalist with the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz, wrote, “almost none” of those arrested were suspected of having anything to do with that killing, “not even indirectly.”
“Huge sense of loss”—
After spending 33 days in the Russian Compound, Mays was brought to Damon, a prison located in a forest beside the city of Haifa inside Israel.
She was kept in a cell with six other women.
When it was summer, the heat in the cell was unbearable. During the winter, Mays tried to endure the bitter cold by covering herself with three blankets.
Mays was determined that her imprisonment would not break her spirit. She kept her mind active by reading novels and books on sociology and culture.
Some of the books read by prisoners – particularly those considered political – were confiscated by Israeli guards in Damon.
Mays was held behind bars for 15 months. She was eventually released late last year.
Her release came a month before her 16-month prison sentence expired. But she had to pay a $600 fine in order to be freed from jail.
The Abu Ghosh family has suffered greatly at the hands of Israel’s military occupation.
In early 2016, Mays’ brother Hussein was shot dead by an Israeli security guard. It was alleged that he and another young man who was killed had carried out a stabbing attack, fatally injuring an Israeli woman.
A few months later, the apartment where the family lived in Qalandiya was demolished by Israel in an act of collective punishment. They had to move to an apartment on another floor of the same building as a result.
Another of her brothers, Suleiman, was arrested soon after the 2019 raid in which Mays was taken captive. He was placed under administrative detention – imprisonment without charge or trial.
“My family feels a huge sense of loss and instability,” said Mays. “Even my little sister – a 5-year-old named Iliya – wets her bed because she remembers the time the Israeli army came to raid our home and arrest me.”
Mays is fully aware that there is nothing unique about the way she has been treated. In prison, she met many others who have been locked up for far longer than she was.
Approximately 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested or detained under Israeli military orders over the past five decades.
Thirty-seven Palestinian women were being held in Israel’s prisons or detention centers at the end of January.
Mays is back studying now – although she has to follow her classes online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is hoping to graduate from Birzeit later in 2021. (Amjad Ayman Yaghi is a journalist based in Gaza.)
“Prison was an obstacle to my education and my career,” she said. “But I am still going to work as a journalist. I will not allow my imprisonment to be a dark chapter in my life.”
Fucking Jewish State of Isra-Hell: Tourists!
Darn, that Jewish State of Israel and the JFK assassination?