A year and a day after October 7

I’ve not big on anniversaries. Never have been. Seismic events, joyous or tragic, don’t resurface for me at multiples of 365 days adjusted for leap years. They do so for other reasons or none at all.

So I missed yesterday’s big anniversary, opting instead to write about Ukraine’s Nazis. To make amends – dark chocolates and long stem roses from a man who forgot his wedding anniversary – here’s my pick of Alt media on a year of mass murder still being spun as Israel’s Right To Self Defence.

In a footnote to the Ukraine Nazi post I wrote, as I so often do, that while:

… our media do lie actively when the interests of power require it, they prefer to mislead by omission. Out of sight and out of mind, as the saying goes. If it ain’t in the papers it ain’t real. Thus is truth skewed and meaningless consent manufactured. 

For ‘quality’ media like the Guardian – obliged for reasons set out, inter alia, here and here and here to serve power when it matters, make a show of feisty independence when the stakes are lower – lies of omission may take various forms. When it comes to post October 7 Gaza, one of those forms is to help us forget that:

• Under international law an occupying power has no “right to self defence”.
• Under international law an occupied (and racially oppressed) people have every right to take up arms against the occupier.
• Claims of systematic rape and infants beheaded on October 7 2023 have been exhaustively debunked.
• Many if not most deaths that day were at IDF hands courtesy its Hannibal Directive
• As a matter of simple arithmetic, those deaths are rendered miniscule at side of the tens of thousands of Palestinians slaughtered, starved and traumatised for life while …
• … also as a matter of simple arithmetic, a few score Israeli hostages are miniscule at side of a thousand Palestinian men, women and children incarcerated without charge and tortured in Israeli jails.

I was therefore unsurprised to find, embedded in a halfway decent Guardian piece by Peter Beinart – professor at Newark School of Journalism, New York City University, and editor of Jewish Currents – this paragraph:

Some may argue that the mainstream media didn’t platform anti-war voices after 7 October because the anti-war movement marginalized itself. In some cases, that may be true. Networks had every right to avoid commentators who justified the 7 October massacre. And they understandably wanted guests who could not only criticize the war, but provide an alternative course of action, something some leftists failed to do.

Re the charge of “justifying October 7”, see my bullet list above. Re the “alternative course of action” Israel should have taken, a flying start would be made by dismantling an inherently and designedly genocidal racist settler state – which is not the same as “driving out all Jews from river to sea”.  (Actually an inversion of an eschatologically Zionist slogan.) The surest route to such a thing, of course, would be for Washington to cease its unconditional backing of the said genocidally racist state. But don’t hold your breath.

Moving on, one of my earliest posts after October 7 last year, a response to another offering from Guardian Media Group, was the public grief of Howard Jacobson. But when this man featured yet again in the Observer, on October 7 this year, I didn’t have to take to my keyboard a second time. Jonathan Cook beat me to it with his, Why is the ‘liberal’ media peddling the vilest genocide apologism? Though normally a hawk on crimes against grammanity, I can for once turn a blind eye to the failure of subject-verb agreement in that title, given what follows:

I can’t put this strongly enough. Howard Jacobson’s article in today’s Observer may be one the vilest pieces of journalism published in Britain in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s documented slaughter of many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is a “blood libel” and antisemitic. It is pure genocide apologism.

But far worse is the fact that the Guardian Media Group signed off his column. This isn’t the work of one Zionist loon. A whole army of journalists brought it to print …

Spot on, Jonathan.

But with good people like Jonathan and Caitlin doing sterling work in drawing our attention to the abetting by systemically corrupt corporate media of Israeli genocide, my focus has been on the geostrategic implications. My three video offerings all supply highly informed perspectives on how a year like no other has impacted on the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, the Middle East – Western Asia if you insist – and global south at large, America and the collective West and, of course, an Axis of Resistance comprising China, Russia, Iran and DRK.

First, former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke, who never fails to impress, in conversation with Judge Napolitano:

Second, Larry Johnson – formerly of the CIA and State Department Office of Counter Terrorism – also assessing, in his case with the quietly probing Nima Alkhorshid, that year of suffering, and a world transformed forever. Worth seeing just for its opening clip of Netanyahu – imagine the media fest were Putin to go so spectacularly bonkers! – and a response from Larry which underscores points made by Alastair Crooke as featured in my September 30 post, Israel as the end-times fanatics see it.

Last and for my money the most remarkable of the three is another chat with Nima Alkhorshid. As one with Iranian friendships spanning four decades, Persia’s high level of culture has long impressed and amazed me. I’ve known computer scientists, men who fled the revolution after its appropriation by theocrats, recite Shakespeare and invoke the work of Dickens.

Which segues nicely to Mohammad Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Islamic Studies at Tehran University. He’s had my attention for a while now. Smiling and unfailingly courteous, informed and highly intelligent, I’ve seen him in adversarial exchanges – like this with a smugly ignorant Piers Morgan and this with a pugnacious Australian hack – but enjoy him most with a smartly empathetic interlocutor who, not addicted to the sound of his own voice, will grant this man the latitude he merits in spades. If you choose only one of my three video offerings, pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable and learn from this one …

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