Stephen Lendman

Propaganda wars precede hot ones. Conflicts and other forms of violence are glorified in the name of peace. Doublespeak duplicity claim it. Wars are waged to prevent it. Ongoing ones assure more ahead. Unconscionable death counts rise. America, Israel, key NATO partners, and regional allies bear full responsibility. Humanity hangs in the balance. Humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect (R2P) mask ravaging one country after another. Slaughter and mass destruction are called liberating struggles. Plunder is for economic development. Exploitation and dominance are called democracy building.

Media scoundrels invert truth for public support. When America goes to war or plans them, they march obediently in lockstep. Administration, congressional and Pentagon propaganda get reported as news and information. Big Lies make headlines. They're repeated ad nauseam. Media scoundrels are so addicted to lying, perhaps their employment contracts mandate misinformation, deceit and distortion while avoiding truth at all cost. What better way to explain scoundrel journalism. Fundamental good reporting principles are spurned. Ethical standards are ignored. The history of sensationalism, yellow journalism, and lying about what matters most in America is long and sordid. It dates back centuries. Accurate reporting is most important when lives, human welfare, and perhaps humanity are on the line.

Television is worst of all. In a June 1950 commencement address, Boston University President Daniel Marsh said, "If the (television) craze continues....we are destined to have a nation of morons." Famed comedian Ernie Kovacs (1919 - 1962) once called it a medium because it's neither rare or well done. He'd be horrified by what goes on now. It fails on all counts.

So do scoundrel print media. They give news, information, and opinion reporting bad names. Long before television arrived, journalist Walter Lippmann called the public "the bewildered herd." In policy matters, they're considered "spectators," not "participants." "The common interests elude public opinion entirely," he said. That's how it should be, he added.

America's privileged class alone should manage policy. Only they need proper education and training. Treat others like mushrooms - well-watered and in the dark. Distract them with bread and circuses. Misinform them with managed and junk food news. Media scoundrels betray the reading and viewing public. They're best served by walking away, tuning out, and choosing credible sources for what they most need to know. Greater numbers now do it. One day perhaps everyone will.

Juan Cole

A Palestinian man kisses the hand of a dead relative in
the morgue of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Palestinian leaders are responding to the aggressive policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, deploying new legal strategies, and, in Gaza, a mass rally reminiscent of Arab Spring protest tactics. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is reportedly considering taking Israel to the International Criminal Court over Netanyahu’s recent announcement that Israel will build 3,000 new dwellings for settlers in the E-1 area of the West Bank. Abbas indicated that this step would be a last resort, but it is a threat to be taken seriously.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal joined a celebration of tens of thousands in Gaza over the weekend and repeated his long-standing opposition to ever giving up an inch of Palestinian land to Israel. Israeli politicians condemned him for refusing to recognize, and wanting to destroy, the Israeli state. Israeli opposition leader Shaul Mofaz of the Kadima Party said that Meshaal should have been assassinated while in Gaza. None of the Israeli leaders who condemned the Hamas leader seemed to grasp that the real threat to Israel comes not from tiny, impoverished Gaza, but from the policies of Israel’s increasingly right-wing politicians.

By denying the Palestinians a state, Israelis are actively destroying the Palestine they agreed to create in the Oslo Accords that Israel signed in 1993.

Israelis prevent Gaza from exporting most of what it makes. The territory is denied an airport or seaport, and severe restrictions are placed on imports, plunging many of the Palestinians there into food insecurity and creating high incidences of anemia. In the West Bank, Israeli authorities are resorting to an ever more robust Israeli apartheid, which the world is signaling it will not accept.

James Petras

Introduction: For the past forty-five years the state of Israel has been dispossessing millions of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, confiscating their lands, destroying homes, bulldozing orchards and setting-up ‘Jews-only’ colonial settlements serviced by highways, electrical systems and water works for the exclusive use of the settlers and occupying soldiers.

The process of Israeli territorial expansion throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem has greatly accelerated in recent years, converting Palestinian-held territory into non-viable isolated enclaves – like South Africa’s Bantustans – surrounded by the Israeli soldiers who protect violent settler-vigilantes as they assault and harass Palestinian farmers at work in their fields, beat Arab children on their way to school , pelt Palestinian housewives as they hang their laundry and then invade and defecate in Palestinian mosques and churches.

The Rage and Rape of Gaza and its Apologists

Israel’s strategic goal is to impose ‘Greater Israel’ on the region: to take over all of historical Palestine, expell the entire non-Jewish population and subsidize ‘Jews-only’ settlements (for settler-immigrants, often from the US and former USSR). While bulldozers and tanks have dispossessed Palestinians in the West Bank for decades, the launching of thousands of missiles and bombs have become the ‘weapons of choice’ for uprooting and eliminating the Palestinians in Gaza. In just eight days, Israel’s latest blitzkrieg resulted in the killing of 168 Palestinians (42 children and 100 civilians), the wounding of 1,235, the destruction of over 1,350 buildings and the further traumatizing of over 1.7 million children, women and men fenced in the world’s largest concentration camp. According to the Israeli Defense Minister, the Jewish State dropped “a thousand times more bombs onto Gaza” than the Palestinians fired back into Israel.

The current Israeli offensive began with the gruesome assassination of a prominent Hamas leader, Ahmed Jabari, and immediately escalated into an assault on the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Secure in the knowledge that the Palestinians had no capacity to retaliate with similar weaponry, the Israeli High Command ordered the systematic destruction of civilian life, workplaces and densely populated neighborhoods. Over 75% of the casualties have been non-combatants; almost half are children, women and elders.