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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-02-23/fates-gaza-assange-sealed/

The fates of Gaza and Julian Assange are sealed together

Two legal cases posing globe-spanning threats to our most basic freedoms unfolded separately in Britain and the Netherlands this week. Neither received more than perfunctory coverage in western establishment media like the BBC. 

One was the last-ditch appeal of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in London against efforts by the United States to extradite him so he can be locked away for the rest of his life. 

Assange’s crime, according to the Biden administration, is that he published leaks exposing the systematic war crimes signed off on by the US and British establishments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The British government, perhaps not surprisingly, has assented to his extradition. 

The other case was heard by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. Weeks after the World Court judges deemed it plausible that Israel was carrying out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the US client state was back in the dock on a separate matter. 

The judges have been asked by the United Nations General Assembly to provide an advisory opinion on whether Israel’s now-permanent occupation and colonisation of the Palestinian territories amounts to an illegal annexation of territory where it has established an apartheid regime. 

Separately, Israel also has to report back on whether it has adhered to the court’s earlier ruling that it cease activities that might amount to genocide. 

While the cases of Assange and Israel might appear to share little in common, they are, in fact, intimately connected – and in ways that have underscored the degree to which the West’s so-called “rules-based order” is being exposed as a hollow sham.

Media silence

One telling similarity is the limited media coverage each case has attracted despite the gravity of what is at stake. The BBC’s main evening news dedicated mere seconds to the first day of the Assange hearing, and near the end of its running order. 

If the US gets its way, the courts would effectively hand the White House the power to seize any publisher who shines a light on US state crimes, and then disappear them into its draconian incarceration system. 

The purpose of reclassifying investigative journalism as espionage is to further chill critical reporting and free speech. Any journalist contemplating taking on the US national security state would remember Assange’s cruel fate.

But in truth, much of the establishment media appears to need no such threats, as confirmed by the many years of obedient, near-non-existent reporting on Assange’s mistreatment by British and US authorities.

Meanwhile, if The Hague rules in its favour, Israel would be emboldened to accelerate its theft and colonisation of Palestinian land. The ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians would deepen, with the risk that current regional tensions could further escalate into a wider war.

A win for Israel would rip up the legal framework written after the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, stripping the weak and vulnerable of the protections supposed to be afforded to them by international humanitarian law. Conversely, it would signal to the strongest and most belligerent that they can do as they please. 

The legal clock would be set back eight decades or more.

Stinging hypocrisy

Yet strangely, both of these momentous cases – critical to the preservation of a modern liberal democratic order and the rule of law – have received barely a fraction of the interest and media attention dedicated to the death of Alexei Navalny, a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In flaunting their concerns about Navalny, the western media have once again echoed rather than tackled the all-too-obvious hypocrisies of western governments. 

US President Joe Biden this week announced sanctions against Moscow for the targeting of the Russian political dissident. That is the very same Biden seeking, at the same time, to lock a dissident Australian journalist, Assange, out of sight for up to 175 years for bringing to light US war crimes. 

For years, the western media have paraded their horror over Navalny’s treatment and various attempts on his life, which they always ascribe to the Kremlin. But there has been barely an eyebrow raised over reported discussions by the CIA in 2017 plotting potential ways to abduct and assassinate Assange. 

Few have highlighted the fact that Assange has already suffered a stroke amid his persecution and the 15-year confinement imposed on him by US and UK authorities. He was too unwell to attend this week’s court hearings or even to watch the proceedings via a digital link from the court. 

The former UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, has long warned that Assange is being slowly “crushed” through isolation and psychological torture, with grave consequences for his health. 

Assange’s lawyers warned the High Court in London this week that there was a serious danger the US would add more charges once Assange was extradited, including ones warranting the death penalty. This threat to the life of a western journalist fell under the media radar. 

According to medical experts, and accepted by the first judge to hear the extradition case, Assange is in danger of committing suicide should he end up in the strict isolation of a US super-max prison. 

The media’s tears for Navalny sting with their hypocrisy.

Blank cheque

Another revealing similarity between the Assange and Israel cases is that both are in front of the courts only because Washington has dug in its heels and refused to resolve the legal issues, despite their deeply ominous implications.

Were the US to withdraw its extradition request, Assange could be set free immediately. The oppressive cloud hanging over the future of a free society, one that has the right and ability to hold its officials to account for wrongdoing, would instantly lift. 

Basic freedoms, such as those enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, are being shredded only because a consensus reigns among the US political class – from Democrats to Republicans – to snuff out such rights.

Similarly, were the US to insist that the mass slaughter of children in Gaza stop – more than 12,000 have died so far – Israel’s guns would fall silent immediately.

Were it to demand that Israel bring to an end its occupation of the Palestinian territories and 17-year siege of Gaza, and were the US to take a genuinely even-handed approach to peace talks, the World Court could set aside its hearings against Israel. Its opinion would be superfluous. 

Washington, whatever its protestations, has such power. It is the US and its allies supplying Israel with bombs and ammunition. It is the US and its allies providing the military aid and diplomatic cover that allows Israel to act as an attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East. 

Israel’s intransigence, its hunger for others’ land, its dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, and its constant resort to military options would have to be abandoned, however unwillingly, were it not being written a blank cheque by the US.

Instead, the US cast a veto this week at the Security Council, blocking efforts to impose a ceasefire to end the genocide. The UK abstained. 

Also this week, US officials told the World Court’s judges they should not call for Israel to end its occupation anytime soon. In Orwellian fashion, decades of violent oppression by Israel and the illegal settlement of Palestinian land were characterised by the US as “Israel’s very real security needs”. 

Intimidation campaign

The cases are connected in yet another way. 

In the Assange case, the US demands an absolute global legal jurisdiction to hound critics, those who wish to pull away the veil of secrecy that shields western officials from accountability for their crimes. 

It wishes to silence those who would expose its lies, deceptions and hypocrisies. It hopes to be able to disappear into its prison system those seeking to enforce the West’s self-professed commitment to a democratic order and lawful behaviour. 

In parallel, and for similar reasons, Washington demands the opposite for itself and client states such as Israel. It insists on absolute global legal immunity, whatever they do. 

Its veto at the Security Council is wielded to that effect, and so is its campaign of intimidation against judicial authorities who entertain the fanciful notion that the same international law used to rein in enemies might constrain Washington and its allies.

When the ICJ’s sister court at The Hague, the International Criminal Court, sought to properly investigate the US for war crimes in Afghanistan, and Israel for atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories, Washington went on a rampage.

It placed financial sanctions on leading figures of the ICC and blocked entry to its investigators so they could not carry out their duties. Israel has similarly barred a series of UN special rapporteurs from entering the occupied Palestinian territories to report on human rights abuses there. 

Just as the persecution of Assange is meant to terrorise other journalists from considering holding US officials to account for their crimes, the bullying of the highest legal authorities on the planet is intended to send a clear message to national court systems. Certainly, that message appears to have been loudly received in London.

Information void

Another connection is perhaps the most significant. Assange once observed: “Nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.”

It is only because of a void of real information – whether omitted by journalists for fear of upsetting powerful actors, or shielded from view by those same powerful actors’ self-serving secrecy policies – that states can persuade their publics to get behind wars and violent resource grabs.  

The only people to gain from these wars are a tiny, wealthy elite at the top of society. All too often it is ordinary people who pay the price: either with their lives or through damage to the parts of the economy on which the public depends.

The continuing proxy war in Ukraine – a Nato-funded and armed war with Russia, using Ukraine as the battlefield – is a perfect illustration. It is ordinary Ukrainians and Russians who are dying. 

Despite the West spurring on the bloodshed, European economies have been wrecked and further deindustrialised, while as a direct result of the fighting, yet another surge in consumer prices has hit the most vulnerable.

But a few – including major energy corporations and arms manufacturers, as well as their shareholders – have reaped a large windfall from the war. It has been precisely the same game plan in Gaza.

It is the job of the media to connect the dots for western publics by serving as a watchdog on power. But once again, they have failed in this, their most important professional and moral duty. The villains have yet again gotten away with their crimes.

It is the war criminals and genocide enablers in Washington who are free, while Assange is locked up in a dungeon and the people of Gaza are slowly being starved to death.

Assange’s project was designed to reverse all that. It was about bringing the war criminals in western capitals to book through truth-telling and transparency. It was about pulling back the veil.

Were Assange free, and were the whistleblowers and people of conscience in the corridors of power emboldened rather than terrorised by his treatment, we might live in a society where our leaders dared not arm a genocide; and dared not conspire in the starvation of two million people.

This is why the fates of the people of Gaza and Julian Assange are so tightly sealed together.

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-02-20/bbc-panorama-hamas-genocide/

Feeble BBC Hamas ‘exposé’ achieved one thing: obscuring genocide

With 10,000s of Palestinians slaughtered, Panorama chose to hand the microphone over to the very military – Israel’s – doing the killing

Israel was put on trial for committing genocide in Gaza last month by the judges of the International Court of Justice. So far western governments have not only done nothing to intervene but are actively assisting in that slaughter. They have supplied arms and turned a blind eye to Israel’s denial of humanitarian aid. The people of Gaza are slowly being starved to death.

But it was at this moment, as the world watches in horror, that the BBC’s chief news investigation programme, Panorama, chose not to scrutinise that massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians but to hand the microphone over to the very military doing the killing.

On Monday it aired a programme titled “Hamas’s Secret Financial Empire” headed by reporter John Ware.

It leant heavily on Israel’s military spokesman, on documents that had almost certainly been supplied by Israeli military intelligence, on video footage from the Israeli military, and an Israeli survivor of the Hamas attack of October 7.

Ware and Panorama have worked together before, most notably on a special hour-long edition that doubtless equally delighted Israel.

Broadcast shortly before the 2019 general election, the programme served as little more than a hatchet job on Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that the then Labour leader had allowed antisemitism to run rampant in his party.

Serial failures in the programme were exposed, including by me at the time.

Quotes and interviews had been edited misleadingly, including one that implied an antisemitic incident had happened inside the Labour party when it had not.

Basic fact-checking had not been carried out, which led to the complete misrepresentation of a key incident the programme wrongly claimed as antisemitic.

The programme concealed the identities of those claiming to have suffered antisemitism in Labour, when most were in fact members of a highly partisan, pro-Israel group openly committed to the ousting of Corbyn as leader for his pro-Palestininan views. One had trained with the Israeli army.

Another unnamed, tearful interviewee, Ella Rose, had previously worked for the Israeli embassy, though the audience was not told. The programme also did not refer to the fact that she had admitted to being a confidante of an Israeli undercover agent, Shai Masot, who was later exposed trying to bring down a British government minister for his critical views of Israel – views far less critical than Corbyn’s.

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Preposterous premise

One might have assumed that, given this disastrous outing for Panorama by Ware and his producers, they would have been considered by the BBC as a very unwise pick indeed to follow up with an investigation into another issue so close to Israel’s heart. But such an assumption would be wrong.

Much as the Corbyn “investigation” presented a distorted picture of what was taking place in Labour, the latest Panorama “investigation” completely obscured the reality of what is taking place in Gaza. Not least, Monday’s audiences would have been barely aware that Israel is currently under investigation by the World Court after its panel of 17 judges accepted that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

The Panorama narrative, following the BBC’s usual script, suggested instead that this was simply another round of fighting in a long-standing “conflict” in which, the programme limply conceded, both sides are suffering.

The only non-official interviewed was an Israeli survivor of Hamas’s October 7 attack, a young woman present at the Nova festival. She felt betrayed that “people only look at the side of Hamas. We are invisible to them.”

Bizarrely, the BBC team took this patently preposterous view as the programme’s central premise. It was, said Ware, Hamas’s nefarious goal to “project itself as a resistance movement and Israel as a terrorist state”.

The BBC seemed to have forgotten that it was also the World Court, not just Hamas, seriously considering the idea that the Israeli military is flagrantly acting outside the laws of war. If, in the eyes of the BBC, a campaign of genocide does not constitute state terrorism – or worse – one has to wonder what does.

Former Foreign Office official Sir John Jenkins was given centre stage by Panorama to claim that Hamas, not the prolonged slaughter of children in Gaza, was fomenting the “delegitimisation of Israel”.

All of this served as the prelude to the programme’s efforts to delegitimise Hamas and any of its activities in creating a network of tunnels to resist Israel’s occupation and siege at a time when western capitals are more actively than ever assisting Israel in destroying Gaza.

If Israel posed no real threat to the people of Gaza, as the programme implied throughout, then Hamas apparently did not need to fortify the enclave to defend it from an Israeli attack. Its money could have been better used for the benefit of ordinary Palestinians.

Elephant in room

The elephant in the room was genocide. Ware and the BBC had to keep treating Israel’s slaughter of at least 30,000 Palestinians over the past four months as an aberration – a reaction to the unprecedented events of October 7 – rather than as an intensification of Israel’s well-documented abuse of the Palestinian people spanning over decades.

The reference to Hamas’s “secret” financial empire was meant to sound sinister. But, as the programme-makers struggled to hide, there is nothing secret about Hamas’s funding.

After all, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally approved the flow of money to Hamas, wishing to keep the group just strong enough to ensure it could prevent the more compliant Palestinian Authority (PA), based in the West Bank, from re-establishing itself in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s goal – one he never concealed – was to keep the two rival Palestinian groups permanently feuding, the two territories split, and thereby undermine the case for any kind of Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Ware informed us that Hamas’s “financial empire” derived from various funding sources: directly from Iran and Qatar, but also from humanitarian aid provided by international donors. The programme concluded that these donors were effectively “subsidising Hamas’ war machine” by easing the economic burden on Hamas in providing – in so far as was possible given Israel’s siege – essentials such as food, water and power to Gaza’s civilians.

Predictably, Ware’s argument echoed one of the main claims made by Israel in its current campaign to intensify the genocide in Gaza by destroying the United Nations’ refugee body, UNRWA. The relief agency is the last lifeline to a population of 2.3 million people brought to the point of starvation by Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid.

Israeli officials have consistently implied that the Palestinian population of Gaza may justifiably be starved to death as the price to be paid to avoid any risk that some of that aid ends up in the hands of Hamas fighters. Such a denial of assistance is not only patently immoral but constitutes a war crime.

If journalists are ever brought to the Hague accused of complicity in the current genocide, there should surely be a place reserved in the dock for Ware and his BBC team for breathing credibility into this monstrous argument.

Context stripped out

Panorama’s central narrative was that Hamas had used parts of its revenues to build a network of resistance fortifications such as tunnels – money that, as Ware and his interviewees kept stressing, could have been spent on building schools and homes to aid the people of Gaza.

Ware omitted to mention, of course, that, more often than not, schools and homes actually needed rebuilding, not building, because Israel blew them up every few years with its bombs.

Again, all too predictably, the programme stripped out obvious context.

Hamas chose to build these fortifications, such as its extensive network of tunnels, because Israel is an offensive, occupying power that enjoys absolute control over Gaza’s borders, as well as its airspace and sea. Israel can bomb and invade Gaza any time it chooses. It can drag people off to “arrest” them – or take them hostage, as we would call it were the roles reversed.

Not only can it do those things, it did and does them regularly. And with complete impunity.

Pretending that Hamas had no reason to build a tunnel network, as Panorama does, is to rewrite history – to excise Israel’s decades of crimes against the Palestinians and their legitimate desire to struggle against that oppression.

It is to unthinkingly regurgitate Israel’s claim that these are simply “terror tunnels” rather than a way for Hamas to survive as a resistance organisation, as it is fully entitled to do under international law.

Hamas made it a priority to build a tunnel network to resist a violent, occupying army. Given limited resources and room to manoeuvre – after all, Gaza is a tiny territory and one of the most overcrowded places on the planet – Hamas had little choice but to move underground to avoid Israel’s sophisticated surveillance technology where it could build an arsenal of largely improvised, homegrown weapons.

Its historic popularity among ordinary Palestinians – at least compared to the supine, endlessly complicit PA in the West Bank – derives precisely from its refusal to submit to Israeli control. Panorama forgot to mention this too.

By contrast, and confounding Panorama’s thesis, the PA’s exclusive reliance on international diplomacy has won no tangible concessions from Israel – unless winning a reprieve from genocide, at least until this point, is considered such a concession.

Also inconveniently for Panorama, the PA’s standing with the Palestinian public continues to be dismal.

Proof of ‘wickedness’

Bizarrely, Ware was equally troubled by the fact that Hamas raised import taxes on the limited goods that Israel did allow into Gaza.

That is all the stranger given that the programme’s implicit – and entirely bogus – assumption is that Gaza is not under a belligerent Israeli occupation. Hamas, it therefore suggested, should have behaved more like a normal country.

But raising taxes on the import of goods is precisely what normal countries do. Why would Ware expect Hamas to behave differently?

And why would it be strange or sinister for it to use some of those revenues to build Gaza’s defences, as best it could, against an aggressive occupier?

Does Britain not also spend the money it raises from taxes to buy weapons and “subsidise its war machine”? And it does so, even though the UK is not under belligerent occupation and is unlikely to be invaded any time soon.

In dramatic fashion, Ware declared ominously: “We have obtained documents that Israeli intelligence say are from inside Hamas and shine a light on how it makes some of its millions.”

It is hard not to conclude that those words mean Panorama was fed those documents by the Israeli intelligence services. Nonetheless, with utter credulity, the programme treated the papers as though they were infallible proof of Hamas’ wickedness.

What they actually showed, assuming they are real, is that Hamas had gained a modest income stream from investments in Middle Eastern companies and ventures. Should Hamas not make investments to raise income, as countries and funds do around the world? And if not, why?

Moving money out of Gaza and investing it overseas seems eminently sensible given that Israel has so regularly laid waste to the enclave – and is doing so once again and on an unprecedented scale.

In similar credulous fashion, Ware accepted unquestioningly the claim that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was known to “hate Jews”. On what basis? Because a former Israeli security officer who proudly admitted that years ago he interrogated Sinwar for “between 150 and 180 hours” said so. Interrogation of Palestinians by Israel typically includes lengthy periods of torture.

Misused public funds

All of this was depressingly familiar. The BBC and Panorama rarely dig into issues that might reflect badly on Israel and risk a backlash of criticism, including from the British government. That toothlessness when a genocide is unfolding in Gaza is especially egregious.

But the BBC is not just overlooking that horrifying crime but using its resources – funds provided by British taxpayers – to actively obscure Israel’s campaign of genocide and implicitly rationalise it as warranted.

A programme whose thesis is that Hamas misused public funds for nefarious purposes is, paradoxically, doing the very thing it condemns. It has misused British taxes to make a entirely bogus case that provides cover for the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.