Since on international matters the New York Times lies systematically in order to support the U.S. Government against all Governments (and others) that the U.S. Government wants to eliminate or overthrow, such as in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Ukraine before America’s 2014 coup there, and the Palestinians, only one example will be analyzed here, to show the general method by which it deceives its readership.
Nicholas Kristof is as much a part of the New York Times U.S. Establishment as anyone except the family who own the newspaper, and has worked there for 39 years in many capacities, including as economics reporter, Managing Editor for the Sunday Editions, and now, columnist.
He, like his friend Bill Clinton and many others at top levels in the U.S. Government, was a Rhodes scholar studying at Oxford with only fellow-supporters of U.S. and UK imperialism and support of and by the CIA and MI6, as well as of other agencies of regime-change (by coup or else invasion) for the spread of ‘democracy’ by the U.S./UK empire that had started its control over America on 25 July 1945 and that has continued expanding this empire ever since except for the final two years of the JFK Presidency. (Is it a democracy? No empire can even possibly be a democracy, because its vassal-nations or colonies — ‘allies’ — are subordinates to the imperial regime, and are actually its slave-nations. So, Rhodesism, commonly called “neoconservatism,” like any other imperialistic ideology, is a dictatorship, never a democracy. However, America’s empire promotes itself as ‘spreading democracy’. That’s its “brand.”)
Part of the Rhodes doctrine was introduced actually after Rhodes’s 1902 death, by his followers who saw in zionism an opportunity to use a Jewish-controlled state in the Middle East as a beach-head for themselves (the “Special Relationship” UK/U.S.) to continue controlling the Arab states after Britain’s direct control of them would wind down.
When U.S. President Harry Truman on 25 July 1945 accepted the advice from both the plain imperialist General Eisenhower, and the committed Rhodesist imperialist Winston Churchill, for the U.S. Government to take control over the entire world because otherwise the Soviet Union would take it over (which was actually a lie, but Truman fell for it), that was the big Rhodesist (or commonly called “neoconservative”) win, which actually started the Cold War.
And the lie that it actually was, became clear after the U.S./UK regime secretly continued the Cold War on its side after the Soviet Union ended it on its side in 1991.
Kristof’s special double-length column on October 28th headlined “‘We Are Overpaying the Price for a Sin We Didn’t Commit’” (quoting there sympathetically from a Palestinian), and this actual enemy of rights for the Palestinian people (Kristof) pretended there, both in that headline and in his column and ‘news’-report, to be sympathetic to the Palestinians whom Israel now is slaughtering. Such pretense of sympathizing with the U.S. Government’s (and its ‘allies’) victims, has been his stock-in-trade trick throughout his career.
But then he got to his real message, when he wrote:
Israel has the right to defend itself and strike military targets in Gaza, and there should be strong international pressure on Hamas to release its hostages. My reporting in Gaza over the years convinces me that Gazans themselves would be much better off if Hamas could be removed: Some American liberals don’t appreciate how repressive, misogynistic, homophobic and economically incompetent Hamas is in Gaza, to say nothing of its long history of terror attacks on Israel. All this explains why many Gazans are fed up with Hamas.
Those hostages were taken and are being held by Hamas as a self-defense tool for the Palestinians; they are a message to the Israeli regime — a message to the prison-guards in this the world’s largest open-air prison, containing 2.2 million inmates many of whom had been born into it and none of whom are allowed by Israel’s regime ever to leave it — a message to the Israeli-American regime from Hamas, saying: If you kill us, we shall kill them.
War is a continuation of politics by other means, and when the opponent is out to kill you, then you have the right to seize some of the opponents to be hostages. If you were born into this prison, then doubly is this so. Those hostages won’t be released except in trade for some weakening of Israel’s invasion of Palestine. They are tools on the political aspect of a war. Kristof’s assumption that “there should be strong international pressure on Hamas to release its hostages” lies about the reality there.
This is war. Kristof, always a fake ‘defender of the underdog’ and real propagandist for maintaining and expanding the U.S./UK empire, ignores the reality, he lies about it, and pretends that Hamas has no right to seize and keep those hostages.
How were those hostages caught? On October 7th, nearby to the world’s largest open-air prison (Gaza), Israelis were celebrating at a concert. A group of Hamas-members managed to escape, and they killed some of those civilians who had chosen to remain in Israel while no Gazans are allowed by their lifelong jailers (Israel’s Government) to depart from this prison into which many of the parents in Gaza, and all of the children in Gaza, were born, to leave it.
These Israelis were celebrating their freedom, while being in close proximity to that hellish prison (their Government’s waste-dump for those Palestinians). These Israelis chose to be there. The Hamas members never did. How much does this reality fit with the ‘kindly’ Kristof’s advocacy for those jailers, and for the population that elected them: Israelis?
Collective punishment — punishing everyone in a broad category, and even individuals who are blameless — isn’t the issue here, but this state-of-war exception to banning it, is. Furthermore, how ‘blameless’ were these hostages, actually? What should there have been to celebrate, for example, right outside the Auschwitz concentration camp? Wasn’t any celebration there obscene? Or is a question like that too subtle for the actually Rhodesist (or “neoconservative”) Kristof (and perhaps for his readers) to understand?
As regards his statement that, “All this explains why many Gazans are fed up with Hamas,” it is linked to polls by an Israeli-front ‘non-profit’, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Those are the only polls that are carefully designed to allow interpretation — which they then, of course, eagerly provide — ‘showing’ that Palestinians oppose Hamas and support the U.S. Government position on the conflict.
All of the trustworthy polling on Palestinian opinion — and there is lots of that — displays very clearly the exact contrary.
For example: on 11 February 2020, the Times of Israel headlined “Poll: 94% percent of Palestinians oppose US peace plan: Palestinian support for two states is lowest since the signing of the Oslo Accords, survey says; 64% say US proposal should be met with violent Palestinian uprising”
That “uprising” came. But Kristof has chosen as his ‘authority’ that Israeli front organization’s ‘polls’ — and chosen to ignore the trustworthy polling about this matter.
His article contained many sob-stories, but missed the real tragedy of what’s happening in Gaza. It all goes back to 1948, the creation of Israel. Here’s from a lengthy article “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs” in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on 6 July 2019, about how Israel’s Government cleansed, eliminated, thousands of key documents, which remain unknown, but some scraps of which survived, and this is one:
And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages, most of which were in [the area covered by] Central Command, most of them.”
Lev Tov: “The ones that were still standing?”
Tamir: “The ones that weren’t yet inhabited by Israelis. There were places where we had already settled Israelis, like Zakariyya and others. But most of them were still abandoned villages.”
Lev Tov: “That were standing?”
Tamir: “Standing. It was necessary for there to be no place for them to return to, so I mobilized all the engineering battalions of Central Command, and within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There’s no place to return to.”
Later, Ben Gurion alleged that most of the Arab evacuations resulted from Arabs’ fears that Arab governmental authorities were demanding the area for an invasion against Jewish settlers, but on 11 March 2005, William James Martin headlined “Ben Gurion: ‘We Must Expel the Arabs and Take Their Place’” and he documented that, “Mr Ben Gurion was lying through his teeth, to put it plainly.”
Two 1937 letters from Ben Gurion gave the plan. One said: “The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple.”
The other said: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places then we have force at our disposal.”
At Amazon, the 636-page book from the Institute of Palestine Studies, by a team of investigators and edited by Professor Walid Khalidi, titled All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, out-of-print and with 757 there saying they “want” it, lists and details “The 418 Destroyed Villages of Palestine”. This was an ethnic cleansing.
Albert Einstein and 26 other prominent Jewish progressives co-signed a letter to the editor of the New York Times published 4 December 1948, condemning Menachem Begin by name as a “fascist,” and saying, of his work (and of his unnamed colleague in that, Itzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected Prime Ministers of Israel, and whose follower Netanyahu today leads Israel), that there was:
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 [1948], terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.
On 20 October 2023, The Hill headlined “Americans overwhelmingly support Israel in war with Hamas: poll”, and reported that:
More than 80 percent of Americans are siding with Israel amid an ongoing war against Hamas in a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll shared with The Hill.
The survey found that 84 percent of respondents sided more with Israel in the Israel-Hamas war, compared to 16 percent who sided with Hamas.
The propaganda works; the ‘democracy’ doesn’t. It’s not allowed to.
By Eric Zuesse
Published by Oriental Reviews
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com