The Intercept:
"The announcement today that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court are seeking arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, alongside senior officials from Hamas, has triggered a political earthquake amid the ongoing expansion of the Israel offensive in the Gaza Strip. ...

The news sparked immediate outrage from the U.S. government. Warrants against Israeli leaders would mark a new era for international humanitarian law where even close allies of the U.S. can be held to account for their actions.

'The prosecutor’s announcement will likely impact assessments of the legal risks for other states which are supporting or aiding Israel’s war in Gaza,' said Sarah Knuckey, an expert on international law and professor at Columbia Law School. 'If there are reasonable grounds to believe that senior Israeli officials are responsible for war crimes, then countries aiding Israel’s war in Gaza are at risk of complicity in those same crimes. We may see accelerated efforts in other countries to stop them from selling weapons or providing military aid to Israel.' ”
https://theintercept.com/2024/05/20/icc-arrest-warrant-israel-hamas/

-->Our official Pentagon publication, the NYT, doesn't really explore the ramifications of the ICC issuing warrants of arrest. Of course, why wouldn't Biden and Blinken be worried; they have aided and abetted the worst crimes against humanity since the Second World War. Don't look to the NYT to explore these issues.

=====

Common Dreams:
"Just months after mega-billionaire Elon Musk launched what he termed a 'thermonuclear lawsuit' against Media Matters for America, the nonprofit media watchdog outfit announced a round of punishing layoffs Thursday which it in part attributed to the financial strain imposed by the legal battle it now faces.

What triggered Musk's initial outrage in November was MMFA reporting about 'pro-Nazi content' on the social media platform X, owned by Musk, appearing alongside ads by prominent corporations in the content stream shown to users.

In his post threatening the lawsuit, which was later filed in Texas, Musk vowed to target 'Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.' Noting the scope of his retribution, Musk then added: 'Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them…' would be included in the suit's scope."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/elon-musk-media-matters-suit

-->The era of billionaires being able to shut down media outlets is upon us. With unlimited funds for lawyers, Musk can almost bring down any news source he wants. But our major media is not paying attention to this story. Afraid that Musk will take them out as well? And can we ever recover our democracy without dealing with the mega criminals that populate our over 800 billionaires?

=====

Codepink:
"In 2019, Dr. Kuhn, a trusted expert on China, worked with award-winning director Peter Getzels to journey across China and document the methods used to bring over 100 million people out of extreme poverty. The film was an exemplary piece of video journalism meant to spread knowledge and awareness of China’s unprecedented accomplishments alleviating poverty. Not only that, but the film marked a beautiful moment of people to people dialogue, displaying the human benefits of local, bottom-up methodologies.

I am appalled by your continued censorship of this innovative documentary and the divergence from your claim that you are a 'Trusted Window to the World.’ Not only are you stifling the truth, but you have taken away easy access to learning about potential solutions to global poverty. Your censorship in no way 'serves the American public [by] using media to educate, inspire, entertain, and express a diversity of perspectives.' It is clear from your actions that you do not care for displaying a diversity of perspectives, and only those that suit your agenda."
https://www.codepink.org/pbs_liberate

-->PBS doing Pentagon propaganda again? Of course it is. The decision to cancel this documentary is just part of the Pentagon's decades long effort to hide what is really happening in the rest of the world. Shame on you, PBS!

The Independent:
"A high-profile group of financiers, billionaires and executives joined a private WhatsApp group to sway public opinion on the Israel-Hamas war, culminating in some members participating in a Zoom call with New York mayor Eric Adams urging him to use police to deal with protests at Columbia.

A section of the powerful pro-Israel group held a video call with Mr Adams on 26 April, in which it was discussed how to get New York City Police Department officers onto the Ivy League campus in Manhattan where one of the most high-profile pro-Gaza encampments was located, according to The Washington Post.

Members of the group included Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund executive Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik, and real estate investor Joseph Sitt, according to a log of chat messages referencing the meeting obtained by the newspaper. ...

The alleged April meeting was part of larger efforts by members of the WhatsApp group, which reportedly included figures from the very upper echelons of business including former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and investor Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a former Trump administration official.”
https://nz.news.yahoo.com/finance-business-moguls-held-zoom-164551380.html

-->What are all these billionaires doing? Why, they are spending their fortunes trying to shut down criticism of Israel on our nation's campuses. They are also Jewish, a point carefully avoided by the Washington Post and the Independent. The Post calls this fact an "too familiar antisemitic trope." But isn't that using antisemitism again to cover up what really happened? These are Jewish billionaires deciding to attack protesters on our nation's colleges. Trope or no trope; this is what happened.

=====

Common Dreams:
"Advisers for U.S. President Biden reportedly saw Morehouse College, a historically Black men's college in Atlanta where he gave the commencement address Sunday, as a school where the president was unlikely to face protests over his continued support for Israel's assault on Gaza, which has been the subject of mass demonstrations led by students at universities across the country over the past month.

But students and faculty made clear at the ceremony that many of them, like others in higher education, are intent on sending Biden a strong message of disapproval over his Israel policy.

A number of faculty members and students wore keffiyehs, the traditional scarves worn in parts of the Middle East including Palestine, and by some supporters of Palestinian rights to show solidarity with civilians in Gaza. Others displayed the Palestinian flag on their graduation gowns. ABC News White House correspondent Selina Wang reported that while most of the alumni present at the graduation stood up when Biden was introduced, all but a few of the students remained seated."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/biden-at-morehouse

-->Our mainstream media was intent on making Biden's speech at Morehouse a victory for US support of Israel. But the truth was quite different, although one has to go to an alternative news source to get it.

=====

The Intercept:
"Many scholars committed to Palestinian liberation can no longer do their jobs. That’s because many of the professors most supportive of Palestine don’t have jobs anymore.

This is nowhere truer than in the Gaza Strip — where all 12 universities have been reduced to rubble, and more than 90 professors have been reported killed during Israel’s assault on the territory. The gravity of what United Nations experts warn could amount to U.S.-backed 'scholasticide' has no equivalent on American soil.

Yet Israel’s attempted eradication of intellectual life in Gaza echoes far beyond the territory, with U.S. universities ensuring that some professors vocal in their support of Palestine can no longer do their jobs either. Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics in fields including politics, sociology, Japanese literature, public health, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Middle East and African studies, mathematics, education, and more have been fired, suspended, or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech."
https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/university-college-professors-israel-palestine-firing/

-->The full extent of this mass attack on academic freedom never reaches our mainstream media. That's how effective the Israel Lobby has been in our country.

The Guardian:
"Since 7 October, commentators have been ringing the alarm that a growing protest movement in solidarity with Palestine signals not just the end of a 'golden age' for American Jews – as Franklin Foer recently put it in the Atlantic – but for American liberal democracy itself. ...

Foer [is] right that American democracy is imperiled. But as the draconian crackdown on non-violent student protests makes clear, accusations of antisemitism are not themselves evidence of liberal decline, but rather the tip of the spear in a frightening illiberal project serving the agenda of an emboldened, autocratic right wing.

The months since 7 October have seen shocking attacks on freedom of expression and assembly on campus. Even before the stunning display of police brutality in recent weeks, campuses have been home to canceled speakers and events, arbitrary disciplinary hearings, and outright censorship. The University of Southern California has canceled its entire commencement ceremony rather than let its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, deliver a message of Palestine solidarity in her speech.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/11/us-university-protests-antisemitism-free-speech

-->This assault against free speech is not really being covered by the US mainstream media. One must go the a foreign press to read what is really happening here at home. Our media is just too corporate owned to report this story.

=====

The Guardian:
"Three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev desert offered horrifying accounts of the treatment of Palestinians held there, telling CNN that the facility's doctors have amputated limbs due to handcuffing injuries, allowed detainees' wounds to rot, and carried out vicious beatings.

A medic who worked at Sde Teiman's field hospital said that Palestinian detainees there are stripped 'of anything that resembles human beings' and that the harassment and torture are done not to 'gather intelligence' but 'out of revenge' for the October 7 attacks.

Israel has detained thousands of Gaza residents since October, with many of them held under a recently amended law that empowers Israeli authorities to imprison people indefinitely without charge or due process. Human rights organizations have documented Israeli forces' brutal and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees, including women and children.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-torture-palestine

-->Where is this story in the NYT? CNN first reported this abuse of injured Palestinians, but our Zionist newspaper of record didn't think the story was fit to print.

=====

Common Dreams:
" 'What Israel has done over the last seven months is not just gone to war against Hamas—it has gone to war against the entire Palestinian people, and the results have been absolutely catastrophic,' [Bernie Sanders] told NBC.

Sanders went on to outline some of that catastrophe: a death toll that surpassed 35,000 on Sunday, with two-thirds of the dead women and children; the destruction of around 60% of all housing; the devastation of infrastructure such a as water and sewage as well as the healthcare and education systems; and the fact that hundreds of thousands of children are now at risk of starvation.

Sanders referred to Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act: 'Any country that blocks U.S. humanitarian aid is in violation of law and should not continue to receive military aid from the United States,' Sanders explained. 'That is precisely what Israel has done.' "
https://www.commondreams.org/news/sanders-israel-war-palestinian-people

-->The NYT doesn't do Bernie Sanders. Not what he writes or what he says. That is especially true now that Bernie is expressing what most of us feel, that Israel's cruelty and crimes against humanity have gone off the rails.

Freedomflotilla.org:
"On Thursday afternoon, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition was contacted by the Guinea Bissau International Ships Registry (GBISR), requesting an inspection of our lead ship. This was a highly unusual request as our ship had already passed all required inspections; nevertheless, we agreed. ...

Sadly, Guinea-Bissau has allowed itself to become complicit in Israel’s deliberate starvation, illegal siege and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is showing the world the extent to which it will go to deny Palestinians the aid they need to stay alive, in direct contravention of International Humanitarian Law, UN Security Council resolutions, and two orders of the International Court of Justice. Israel is only allowed to get away with this because we have an international order where law does not apply equally, where people are not valued the same, and where might equals right.

The US has hijacked international law and is violating its own laws to protect Israel at every turn. A recently-leaked USAID memo states that 'famine in Gaza is inevitable,' and that 'changes could reduce but not stop widespread civilian deaths.' It also states that the government of Israel does not currently demonstrate necessary compliance with U.S. law required to receive U.S. military aid. Nevertheless, last week, the U.S. Congress passed and Biden signed a $26 billion aid package for Israel. It is this kind of naked impunity, over decades, that has brought us to this point where Israel can carry out a genocide, that includes a public declaration by Israel’s leaders that it is going to deliberately starve children, and not only face no consequences, but also involve a majority of world governments in its crimes."
https://freedomflotilla.org/2024/04/27/press-conference-under-israeli-pressure-guinea-bissau-moves-to-withdraw-flotilla-flags/

-->Children are dying, while 100 internationals try to sail a relief ship to Gaza. Of course, the NYT doesn't cover this story. Our "newspaper of record" is a pro Israel, pro genocide rag.

=====

Common Dreams:
"Government aggression and the rise of Big Tech are threatening the rules-based international order and global human rights, Amnesty International warned in its annual State of the World's Human Rights report, released Wednesday.

The organization expressed particular alarm over Israel's war on Gaza and the inability or unwillingness of its allies to rein in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from bombing civilian populations, displacing more than 1.9 million people, and restricting the flow of aid into the besieged Gaza Strip. This and other conflicts, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, had led to a 'near breakdown of international law,' Amnesty said.

'For millions the world over, Gaza now symbolizes utter moral failure by many of the architects of the post-World War Two system; their failure to uphold the absolute commitment to universality, our common humanity, and to our 'never again' commitment,' Amnesty International's secretary-general Agnès Callamard wrote in the preface to the report."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2023-near-breakdown-international-law

-->No major US news source covered this story. When it comes down to reporting, our media comes out in favor of the war criminals, not their Palestinian victims.

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Counterpunch:
"Israeli bombs continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon. Al Jazeera published a story about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza. The former United Nations assistant secretary-general for human rights Andrew Gilmour told BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing 'collective punishment' and that what we are seeing in Gaza is 'probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.'

Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch shows that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts.

Yet, these facts—according to a leaked memorandum—cannot be spoken about in the 'newspaper of record' in the United States, the New York Times. Journalists at the paper were asked to avoid the terms 'genocide,' 'ethnic cleansing,' and 'occupied territory.' Indeed, over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the United States have generally written about the genocidal violence using passive voice: bombs fell, people died. Even on social media, where the terrain is often less controlled, the ax fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as 'decolonization' and phrases such as 'from the river to the sea' would be banned on X."
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/24/elites-in-the-global-north-are-scared-to-talk-about-palestine/

-->Our major media supports the genocide in Gaza. Not such a surprise because our government is paying for it and even protecting it at the UN.