So Trump is to cancel USAID?

Here’s a tale in three short parts. On November 29, 2023 – fifty-two days into Israel’s Western backed genocide on Gaza – an article on the Human Rights Watch website posed this question:

I’ve had my issues with HRW. Along with other NGOs like Amnesty International, it provided witless (if we’re being kind) cover for the propaganda blitz which ultimately helped oust Bashar al-Assad to allow Syria’s takeover by US, Turkish, Israeli and ISIS forces. But within the narrow confines of its humanism ¹ I’ve no quarrel with Mr Shakir’s piece, replicated the same day in the Los Angeles Times:

The last week has seen, as of November 28, the release of 69 civilians held hostage in Gaza in exchange for 180 Palestinian prisoners as part of a short-term cease-fire agreement between Israeli authorities and Palestinian armed groups.

While many have rightly hailed the release of civilians held hostage by Hamas after the killings of hundreds of Israelis and other civilians on October 7 — hostage-taking is a war crime — less attention has been focused on why exactly Israel has so many Palestinians in detention and available to trade. And less still on how they got there.

As of November 1, Israeli authorities held nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied territory in detention for alleged security offenses, according to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked. Far more Palestinians have been arrested since the October 7 attacks in Israel than have been released in the last week. Among those being held are dozens of women and scores of children.

The majority have never been convicted of a crime, including more than 2,000 of them being held in administrative detention, in which the Israeli military detains a person without charge or trial. Such detention can be renewed indefinitely based on secret information, which the detainee is not allowed to see. Administrative detainees are held on the presumption that they might commit an offense at some point in the future. Israeli authorities have held children, human rights defenders and Palestinian political activists, among others, in administrative detention, often for prolonged periods …

Read Omar Shakir’s piece in full…

Why should we be surprised? Given its nature as an ethno-supremacist, genocidal and bible-wieldingly expansionist entity which routinely practices torture and extrajudicial killing, why expect the ‘Jewish State’ to baulk at hostage-taking on an industrial scale? All the while, in bare-face denial of the most glaringly elementary of truths, gaslighting the planet about the region’s sole democracy defended by  the world’s most moral army.

Said gaslighting amplified massively by the reality – I’m moving to part two now – that its relentless hasbara  can rely on the full panoply of Western corporate media:

Corporate media shape our understandings of reality in ways favourable to power. How could they not when, as Chomsky reminded us, they are …

… large corporations selling privileged audiences to other large corporations. Now the question is: what pictures of the world would a rational person expect from this?

… while the language they deploy plays a major role in harnessing our worldview to the needs of ruling elites. Which brings me to the third and final part of this story. Among Trump’s bout of shock and awe pronouncements this past fortnight, his intent, for now held up by a Columbia District Judge, to abolish USAID prompted another BBC header, also of February 8:

A judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from placing 2,200 workers at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on paid leave, hours before it was due to happen.

Judge Nichols issued a “limited” temporary restraining order, after a last-minute lawsuit filed by two unions trying to save the agency. The order will remain in place for a week, until 14 February.

Trump says USAID is poor use of taxpayer money. He plans to put most of its 10,000 employees on leave.

Full BBC article here …

Yet here’s that same BBC four days earlier, on February 4:

Do you detect a contradiction between the first and second paragraphs? Dave Rubin and Ron Paul do:

… and so does Simplicius the Thinker, writing yesterday, February 10:

BBC issued a statement of alarm about losing their funding, calling themselves the “free press”—what does that even mean? If you’re objectively bought-and-paid-for by government scratch, how can you be the ‘free’ press? 

… how can the USAID be a Non-Governmental Organization when funded entirely by the US Congress to the tune of almost 5% of the entire non-defense, discretionary portion of the federal budget?  USAID lists doing the government’s bidding as part of its mission statement: Statute law places USAID under “the direct authority and policy guidance of the Secretary of State”.

This being one of those occasions where I’d rather err on the side of the pedantically redundant than the needlessly cryptic, let me close the post by closing the circle:

• The BBC (like almost all corporate media) uses language in ways to slant our perceptions in favour of imperial interests; in this case by obscuring what is being done to an entire people by a US client state operating as its beachhead in the Middle East.
• The BBC (like almost all corporate media) boasts of its independence even as it bewails the loss of US government funding.
• Donald Trump being contradiction incarnate – on this and much besides – this is one for that burgeoning folder of the funny if we’re in a good mood …

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1. Like many Palestinian defenders, Human Rights Watch is outraged by Israel’s criminality but fails to recognise its importance to imperialism as a beachhead in the Middle East. This, and the fact that – again like many on the right side of history over Palestine – HRW was so deceived over Syria is no coincidence. Where not informed by a grasp of empire’s deep-pocketed ability to hijack and subvert the best parts of who we are, empathy and morality will be manipulated by powerful elites who dominate the narrative. See my 2017 post on ‘universalism’ and Syria.