Israel and the U.S. are falsely claiming that the court ruling gives a green light to continue their mass slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza:
Actually, the court’s ruling states that Israel must “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide convention.”
More specifically, the court ordered Israel to cease: “(a) killing members of the group; ( b ) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and ( d ) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
MULTIMEDIA: photos and videos of today’s reading of the #ICJ Order in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (#SouthAfrica v. #Israel) are available here https://t.co/iF6i9iRiBZpic.twitter.com/Fhr7rCcmce
CNN, one of the largest news outlets in the world, requires all news reporting about Israel to be reviewed in advance by its Jerusalem bureau. And that bureau self-censors all of that reporting to comply with Israel’s military censorship rules:
Update: CNN newsroom staff say that the network’s coverage is biased in favor of Israel to the point of journalistic malpractice. The Guardian newspaper reported that CNN executives’ abuse of their power over the newsroom has resulted in reporting in which “Israeli official statements are often quickly cleared and make it on air on the principle that that they are to be trusted at face value, seemingly rubber-stamped for broadcast, while statements and claims from Palestinians, and not just Hamas, are delayed or never reported.”
CNN even reported unverified claims by Israel’s military that Hamas had decapitated Israeli babies. No evidence was ever produced, and claims of video evidence turned out to be false. But by the time the truth came out, Israel had killed thousands of Palestinian children.
The false reports of Hamas killing babies sound eerily similar to false claims near the beginning of the first U.S.-Iraq war when there was a video of a girl claiming that Iraqi soldiers killed Kuwaiti babies in a clinic. A video was provided to hundreds of news outlets in the U.S. in the form of a video news release, or VNR. Without time to verify the accuracy of the videos, TV outlets ran the video shortly before the U.S. military launched massive attacks against Iraq. A year after the war was over, it was revealed that the fake video was produced by one of the largest public relations firms in New York, and that the PR firm had been paid handsomely by the Kuwaiti government to make it. When the truth was eventually reported, it was too late as the damage had already been done.
The difference between what happened in 1990 and what is occurring now is that CNN has a lot more time to verify the accuracy and context of Israel’s claims about Hamas, and yet the network is instead running Israel’s statements carte blanche without bothering to check them for accuracy or to balance them with statements from Hamas or from Palestinians. And so what CNN is doing now is much worse than the journalistic malpractice that occurred in 1990. In the fog of war, the first casualty is the truth, but CNN is going beyond that problem by intentionally slanting its coverage in favor of Israel.
It is well known that Fox “News” intentionally lies to help push its agenda. Now, it can be understood that CNN does the same.
The self censorship now apparently even applies to CNN’s news reporting from within the U.S.
CNN’s reporting of eight topics was affected by this system.
CNN’s extreme pro-Israel bias should come as no surprise considering that its long-time anchor Wolf Blitzer used to work for shady AIPAC, the rabidly pro-Israel lobby group.
Wolf Blitzer is very pro-Israel, in fact used to be the editor of an AIPAC newsletter. It tells you something that Blitzer sounds totally incredulous, disbelieving, and horrified by the IDF's spokesman's explanation for bombing a refugee camp. https://t.co/9nvLWqTJJg
Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers sing about all Palestinians being guilty as a way to justify slaughtering 23,000 of them, even though most Palestinians just want be left alone to live in peace. And genocidal Israeli legislators openly say they want to “exterminate” all Palestinians.
Israelis have become neo-Nazis.
Gaza genocide @CIJ_ICJ case provides world court historic oppty to consider measures to prevent atrocities, ensure respect for int’l law & scrutinize Israel’s conduct—vitally needed given severity of abuses. Govts should speak out in support of proceedings pic.twitter.com/VzhVAQr22Lhttps://t.co/96wrmQBu4m
Around 20,000 of the 2 million Americans in prison are innocent. Yet, thousands of wrongfully convicted Americans would be executed if conservative Republicans had their way.
“But what about the victims and their families!” Well, do the people who say that want innocent people to be executed so that victims’ families will feel better? This is insane and barbaric.
African Americans are seven times more likely than White people to be wrongfully convicted.
#BREAKING: New @QuattroneCenter report finds error-prone field drug tests lead to the wrongful arrest of more than 30,000 Americans, each year, making it the largest known contributing factor of wrongful arrests and convictions in the United States, to date. VIEW THE REPORT:… pic.twitter.com/tj0XcCDBZr
Ronnie Long, 68, spent more than 44 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The settlement from his civil suit represents one of the largest ever for a wrongful conviction. pic.twitter.com/bTsHQXPm0R
The coronavirus is surging, along with the flu and RSV. Some people are getting combinations of these illnesses. Yet, most people are not wearing masks or getting vaccinations:
Hospitalization numbers are down significantly compared to that of recent years. Weekly deaths, at 1,200, have also dropped to about one eighth the numbers of 2021:
So, infections are surging in recent weeks but serious complications are decreasing.
Hospitalizations have decreased in Riverside County in California.
People who should be most concerned about the coronavirus are the elderly and the immunocompromised. Healthy young and middle-aged people are still at risk of infection, but their risk of serious complications has decreased.
What will 2024 bring? Probably more of the same. And the same in 2025. And every year thereafter, as it will take decades to reign in carbon emissions, for the carbon already in the air to dissipate and for temperatures to fall back to normal.
It’s late, but California finally got around to requiring media literacy classes for K-12. The goal is to ensure that students will know how to distinguish real news from the fake variety that infects social media and propaganda:
It would also be helpful if students are taught how mainstream news media ignore the disgusting spectacle when lobby groups such as AIPAC donate millions of dollars to political parties in the U.S. so that they will do genocidal Israel’s bidding:
Professor and war correspondent Chris Hedges says that Israel’s goal is to slaughter not only lives in Gaza but the very idea of Palestine:
After enduring the Holocaust in Europe, no one should know better than to subject people to immoral genocide than Israel. And yet, this is what Israel is waging in Gaza. Such is the source of heartbreaking irony. Israel, the creation of victims, is now the monstrous bully.
I taught my students that while balance has its place in journalism, more important is reporting the truth. If the truth is that a leader is a heartless rotten scoundrel, then that is how he should be portrayed. And if one country’s leadership is waging horrific genocide, then that is what should be reported. Hedges definitely agrees with that approach to reporting. And he said that his refusal to sell out is the reason that he has been banished from corporate media.
Hedges is among the best of the world’s journalists. And that, ironically, is the reason that he no longer reports for the mainstream news media. Corporate media today will not employ a journalist who reports the unvarnished truth.