Skip to main content

End of the Free Ride?

The American media, poor at the best of times, has given so much slack and leeway that any so-called "reporting" or analysis from and on the Middle East has been one-sided pro Israel.

As The Guardian headlines in a piece by Michelle Goldberg in Comment is Free "Israel's free ride ends":

"As Israel pulverises Gaza, questions and doubts about Israeli policy are becoming more prominent in the American media"

Goldberg writes:

"No doubt, some of Israel's most aggressive partisans are going to be alarmed by this sudden shift in the American discourse. They're used to dismissing the world's criticism of Israel as the mutterings of antisemites and bien-pensant third-worldists. The US has been a cocoon that protects Israel and its advocates from facing harsh judgments. But Israel has been ill served by America's endless indulgence. What is happening in Gaza endangers, first and foremost, the benighted people who live there and who are dying by the hundreds. It also endangers Israel itself, pushing already elusive prospects for peace ever more out of reach.

An American media that turned a blind eye to Israeli expansionism and human rights abuses ultimately made the Jewish state less, not more, secure. Without the US putting pressure on Israel to dismantle the settlements and loosen the blockade in Gaza, leaders there had neither the incentive nor the political cover to do so. Now that the American press is displaying a bit of courage in facing an unfolding catastrophe abetted by American leadership, perhaps our politicians will have room to do the same."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more