Thursday, September 05, 2024

The Intercept: 
"In early August, Columbia University told Congress that most of the students arrested in the past year for protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza would be allowed to return to campus for the fall.


Then a congressional inquiry applied pressure. Last week, the Republican chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which has been conducting an inquiry into Columbia’s handling of the protests since this spring, published a letter blasting the school for not punishing students harshly enough and issued a subpoena for internal records.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C, accused the university of having “waved the white flag in surrender while offering up a get-out-of-jail-free card” to student protesters. She further blamed 'radical students and faculty' for interrupting the disciplinary process, and called protesters 'antisemites.' (Students are facing accusations of violating the school’s policies on protest, and not harassment or bias against Jewish students.) Foxx then subpoenaed the university later in the week for records related to the protests, including communication among administrators in handling of encampments, meeting minutes from the board of trustees, and documentation of alleged antisemitic incidents on campus."  
https://theintercept.com/2024/08/29/columbia-campus-protests-gaza-subpoena

-->The NYT didn't print this story. Maybe it was just too pathetic, with another top university caving into crude attacks by Republican lawmakers. But shouldn't readers be made aware of how freedom of speech is under attack on US campuses?

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FAIR:
"I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called 'the suits'—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration, and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented 'a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.' ...

But 'the suits' ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq War—she was told she’d need to book three right-wingers for political balance.

Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show."
https://fair.org/home/phil-donahue-changed-my-life-and-millions-of-others/

-->This quote by Jeff Cohen was hardly our mainstream media's take on Phil Donahue. In fact, the NYT used its obituary to tell one more lie about Donahue's career, that he was fired for bad ratings. But internal memos have long ago pointed out why MSNBC let him go right before the Iraq invasion. General Electric, one of the owners of the station, stood to make huge profits from this war. Donahue was fired because he questioned all the war lies, and the NYT can't get it right twenty years later.

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Aljazeera:
"The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has accused the Israeli government of 'buying ads on Google to block users from giving donations' to the agency. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said in a post on X that Israel’s attempts to defame the agency both harm its reputation and put the lives of its staff at risk.

'These deliberate efforts to spread misinformation should stop and be investigated,' Lazzarini wrote on Saturday, calling for more regulations for companies, including social media platforms, to combat disinformation and hate speech.

Israel has campaigned for years against UNRWA, the main organisation delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory and providing services for Palestinian refugees in other countries since 1949, claiming it has connections with 'terrorists' and lobbying for its closure."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/31/unrwa-head-accuses-israel-of-buying-google-ads-to-block-donations-to-agency

-->Israel is attacking the major relief effort for Palestine. All part of the planned genocide, and all kept out of the NYT news coverage.