“Everywhere in the media and in the halls of power, we hear that Israel has a right to self-defense. But when it comes to the question of whether Palestinians suffering under brutal occupation have the right to defend themselves, those same voices are conspicuously silent.”

Read the article here.

CEOs of arms manufacturers and their investors are confident about their prospects, regardless of which candidate wins the election.

Read the article here.

We must stop our government from treating Libya like its own private battleground.

Read the article here.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has missed its first deadline for annexing part of the West Bank, but this Trump-backed scheme for land theft is still firmly on the table. The goal of Netanyahu and his US sponsors is simple: they want to liquidate Palestinian national aspirations.

Read the article here.

Corporate media is laying the ideological groundwork for a new cold war with China, presenting the nation as a hostile power that needs to be kept in check.

Read the full article here.

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Greg Shupak, media studies teacher at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto and author of the book, “The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media,” to talk about his new article on FAIR, “Corporate Media Setting Stage for New Cold War With China,” the ongoing attempt by the Trump administration to shift the blame for the pandemic to China and the World Health Organization, and where Mitt Romney’s recent op-ed painting China as “uniquely predatory” fits into the centuries-long history of ‘yellow peril’ racism in the US.

Listen to the full interview here.

US Sanctions Must End Now

Sanctions are war. They may not instantly shred flesh the way bombs and bullets do, but they kill and maim nonetheless.

Subjecting people to such cruelties is indefensible in ordinary times: in the pre-COVID-19 world, America’s economic warfare was killing cancer patients in Iran, keeping Syrian children with cancer from getting necessary medicines, and, according to an estimate by two US economists, killing perhaps forty thousand Venezuelans. But collectively punishing entire populations during a global pandemic is perhaps an even more ruthless form of barbarism.

Read the full op-ed here.

Attacking Palestine’s future

Traveling across Palestine, as I did to give lectures earlier this year, means following a perpetually fresh trail of repression.

Omnipresent are the prison guard towers, the barbed wire, the Israeli soldiers with their massive guns and the separation wall.

The day before an event at which I was speaking in Beit Sahour, a small town adjacent to Bethlehem, residents held a funeral for Sajid Mizher, a 17-year-old volunteer medic Israeli soldiers had just shot dead in Dheisheh refugee camp despite his wearing an identifying vest.

The night before my talk at Birzeit University near Ramallah, a group of undercover Israeli forces broke into its campus and kidnapped three Palestinian students.

Persecuting students in this manner is part of a larger pattern as is Israel’s routine killing and maiming of Palestinian children, 44 of whom it shot on 25 October in Gaza.

Read the full article here.

News media’s ‘both sides’ framing distorts events in Israel’s favor

The first Times editorial on Protective Edge was on July 7th 2014 and, in assessing responsibility for the violence, it deploys the “both sides” frame. The article discusses the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinians in the West Bank and the subsequent kidnapping and killing of a Palestinian teenager by Israelis. The editors write that these incidents could lead to a full-blown war and that “It is the responsibility of leaders on both sides” to stop that from happening. The editors then assert that the “hostilities and recriminations began with the kidnapping and murder” of the three Israeli teenagers. The claim that this round of antagonisms “began” with the abduction of the Israeli youth is dubious even if one sets aside the broader context of Israeli colonialism in which these events played out.

Read the full excerpt here.

Greg Shupak on how the repression of BDS shows just how deeply enmeshed the the American and Israeli ruling classes really are

The first bill to be considered by the 2019 U.S. Senate defends Israel by giving American state and local governments the legal authority to punish U.S. companies that are participating in the Palestinian-led boycott against Israel. According to the legal advocacy organization Palestine Legal, 26 states have adopted anti-boycott measures. The federal bill strengthens the legal basis to defend those Israel-protecting laws from constitutional challenges.

Alarmingly, the bill could be used to punish individuals, given that, as The Intercept recently explained, because “individual contractors often work for state or local governments under the auspices of a sole proprietorship or some other business entity.”

The bill would also codify a 2016 deal between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government guaranteeing Israel $38 billion in “security” assistance over 10 years, a provision that would undermine any current or future president’s ability to undo the arrangement. Such a move would hamstring what passes for American democracy by obstructing the population’s ability to stop participating in the mass murder of Palestinian civilians should it wish to do so.

Observers could be forgiven for wondering why the U.S. government goes to these lengths to suppress support for Palestinian liberation. In the following essay adapted from my book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, & The Media, I explain why the U.S.-Israeli alliance is so deep and durable.

Read the full article here.