The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.
Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.
Idk. I’m looking at Iran right now, and I am under the distinct impression that its about to get hella-bullied.
That said, Iran is aligning itself with a Central Asiatic block of states - China, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, maybe Saudi Arabia depending on how things go - that’s going to make it a harder target than in decades past. In much the same way Western conflicts with Russia failed to bring down Vladdy P’s regime, I don’t think simply throwing SWIFT banking sanctions at Iran one more time will do anything to shape their foreign policy or belligerent attitude towards Israel.
Its easy to root for the underdog. I suspect you won’t like them as soon as you see their leaders assuming actual policy-making rules on a global scale. But I also can’t help notice how they’re fighting back against a creeping European fascism in a way we hadn’t seen in the 20th century.
I don’t know if that ends in a new Iron Curtain between the East and West or we go full tilt into WW3. Neither seem particularly good, but the former would see a lot fewer dead children.
In the end, that’s all I can really cheer for. An end to atrocity, and the sooner the better.
WW1 2.0
I agree with most things, but I don’t think Iran’s relations with Turkey and Pakistan are going to become warmer than practical coexistence. Also in Russia that regime was almost supported as something more predictable than imagined communists or neo-nazis.
As the BRI extends through Central Asia, I think you’re going to see a lot more cross-pollination of ethnic groups and business interests. That’s going to bring the block together in the same way rail projects stretching across Europe presaged the EU.
The prime mover behind United Russia’s success is the most rapid improvement in living conditions for native Russians since the collapse of the USSR. It isn’t an imagined outside enemy but a very real inside economic boom. And this, despite a collaboration of Western nations to crash the Ruble and bring the Russian war machine to a grinding halt.
I may agree about Central Asia.
I would also like to see Uzbekistan developing and modernizing, as a counterweight to Turkey and a country with no natural enemies (except China, with Uyghurs and Uzbeks being more or less the same people) and big population.
But still Turkey and Pakistan are simply in another block. They may not like Israel, but that doesn’t mean any fundamental split with NATO, West etc.
About Russia - I meant also that before than boom, after Yeltsin’s election of 1996, it was a popular point of view than even if he cheated, the alternative was communists winning that election. And also - it was, yes, very real, but I am not talking about arguments in favor of Putin inside Russia (not persuading everyone, because most of the improvement happened in Moscow, SPb etc), I am talking about Western institutions confirming Russian elections even as massive protests were happening, and also that talking point that if not Putin, then neo-Nazis would win.
Its been a split that’s widened as Turkey was divided from the EU block and NATO/West interests piled into India after Pakistan kicked out its military dictator, Parvez Musharraf, in 2008. A lot of the post-Cold War alliances have shifted as these military juntas have failed. Egypt would likely be another in the Iran/Iraq/Turkey/Pakistan block if Mohamed Morsi - the replacement for Hosni Mubarak - hadn’t himself been couped back out of power in short order. And you know Qaddafi’s Libya would have been on board, as he’s been a Pan-Africanist since the 70s.
Well, the Communist Party did win the referendum in 1992. The cheating and the rapid privatization were what ultimately fractured and collapsed the Soviet party system. Once they no longer had a patronage system to command broad popular support, there was very little incentive (other than ideological orthodoxy) to continue on. But United Russia absorbed more Soviets than just Putin.
The real failure of Communism as an institution came under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, as economic progress stalled relative to the Western peer nations. That, plus the near-total infiltration and privatization denuded the party of its base of support.
If someone came into the US GOP or Dem parties and stripped them of all their donors, their NGOs, and a huge swath of their state/local leadership positions, neither of them would last very long either. But the members of those parties would continue on in some other configuration.
I meant that in 1996 CPRF were the scarecrow and it was said that even if the results were falsified, they shouldn’t be allowed to win the election.
And later instead of CPRF the scarecrow was some poorly-defined neo-Nazis which would come to power if Putin loses the election (implicitly also saying that falsifications are fine to preserve stability or something).
I don’t know about “poorly defined”. I think they were pretty explicitly calling liberal candidates outside the United Russia party out as puppets of Berlin and DC. And its not like the Christian Democrats of Germany (much less the modern Greens or the AfD) have done an incredible job of purging fascist ideology from their ranks.
Russians were very rightly worried about getting the Yugoslavia treatment if a liberal reformer came in to further balkinize the state. And say what you will about the Balkins before Tito’s death, but it got inundated with far-right ideology as soon as his corpse was safely six feet under.
I don’t mean what Russian state propaganda was saying. I mean what people in the West in appearance unconnected to it would often say. That the alternative to Putin is something dangerous, so let them steal elections and let Russia rot further, if that’s more stable.
And since that stable Russia only became unstable in the direction of Ukraine, I’d say it really was a win for Europe. Not a win for Ukraine.
Anyway, after Artsakh I just want a similar portion of all big European nations (USA included) to burn. I’ll say and think deep and sincere condolences, of course. Maybe donate a few $ for restoration.
Like a few of those nations “sent aid” for accommodation of refugees from Artsakh, a cost of a few fighter jets, maybe? A fraction of what they gain yearly from dealing with Azerbaijan. Naturally being silent about any right of return or about dealing with this like with Kosovo. Being suddenly silent even about things which they were loud about before 19.09.2023 .
And of course no intelligence service was aware that this was going to happen, and they totally weren’t silent intentionally and thus complicit.
And of course the sudden surrender of Artsakh has nothing to do with the rumors of a wholesale massacre of a few villages near Drmbon, which were surrounded by Azeris and I don’t remember any news about new arrivals of refugees from there. By pure coincidence that’s also where a few Russian PK’s were killed “by mistake”, including some officers. Anyway, who can search for those people now when there are like a thousand people still unaccounted for.
The thing is, of course, that nothing of what happened there can be a mystery for USA, for example.
I haven’t seen anything - agg worker riots stretching from Spain to Poland, fascist party membership spikes in the face of Ukrainian refugees, sharp contractions in the German economy over energy shortages - that would define this as a win for any European proles. Maybe a few big arms manufacturers - Rolls-Royce and Lockheed Martin - come out ahead. But the lay European is eating shit right now.
The brutality of war never ceases to shock the conscience and terrify the soul.
But Europeans want this war to drag on because they think its going to “bleed Russia”. Its the old Bushism “Fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here”.