MIT’s Orwellian Language Masks Its Stance On Gaza Protests

By Michel DeGraff

May 25, 2024

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique


MIT lecture hall (Photo: Ryan Tyler-Smith)

I write this essay while thinking of my dear friend and colleague Noam Chomsky who deeply understands the importance of truth, courage, language and linguistics for decolonisation, liberation, peace and community-building in Israel and Palestine to Haiti.

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional language Newspeak is designed to control human minds and hide reality — for example, claiming that ‘war is peace’ and ‘ignorance is strength’ or, in the case of my native Haiti, calling a violent invasion a ‘peacekeeping mission’— so that the ruling classes of the world, aka ‘Big Brother’, can strengthen the power of their totalitarian regimes. In recent months, this dystopian use of language as a political weapon for a variety of nefast objectives (gaslighting, dehumanisation and manufacturing consent) has intensified in the context of the war on Gaza and associated protests and counter-protests, police crackdowns on student encampments against genocide. Most surprisingly, doublespeak has permeated even curriculum-related disputes with my own departmental colleagues at MIT about what’s ‘fit’ to teach as linguistics and what my expertise (or alleged lack thereof) should allow me to teach as such. Is ignorance really strength, even at MIT, even among linguists? If linguistics were taken as an indispensable tool for unveiling Newspeak’s semantic distortions and for advocating for liberation and community-building, it might help usher a better world.

Under the banner of Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (SAGE), MIT students are courageously standing for justice and peace for Palestinians. With their chants of ‘intifada’ (meaning ‘shaking off, uprising, resistance’ in Arabic) and of freedom for Palestinians ‘from the river to the sea’ (a phrase also used in Likud’s original charter, before Hamas, for Zionist expansion), they demand that MIT cut ties with Israel’s ministry of defence in the context of collaboration that represents only 0.03% of MIT’s 2023 allocated sponsorship. In their protests, the SAGE students have highlighted two projects that directly contribute to Israel’s war against Palestinians: one for autonomous robotic swarms of killer drones, the other for biosensors for remote detection.

Some in the MIT community, like post-doctoral student Lior Alon, claim that the SAGE’s students’ pleas to halt the genocide of Palestinians are ‘pro-Hamas’ and advocate the killing of Jews. That’s false. And Alon contradicted himself by mocking his own ‘fear’ after scaling the gates of the encampment and standing on top of a chair among SAGE students minding their business and ignoring him. He sarcastically shouted: ‘Retsef, I feel unsafe. Can you come and help me? Retsef, I am all alone here, and I need help from some other Jewish person.’ Alon, like many other Zionist counter-protesters, participate in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases the anti-Zionist Jewish students and misrepresents them, along with their non-Jewish comrades, as violent and antisemitic. Here it must be stressed that the anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters are not anti-Israel, though they are anti-Zionist to the extent that they want the peaceful co-existence of an Israel-Palestine where both Jews and Palestinians can safely live with fully uninhibited sovereignty, human rights, land rights, justice and dignity as equals.

Yet MIT president Sally Kornbluth, too, is guilty of participating in this narrative as she helps spread the racist trope that Palestinian students and their allies pose a potential threat to the MIT community. In a recent video, she criticises ‘chants [that] are heard by members of our community as calling for the elimination of the state of Israel’. SAGE students are now paying a heavy toll for her duplicity, when so-called ‘interim suspensions’ and other unprecedented penalties levied by MIT’s administration carry permanent consequences for students’ lives and careers, including delay in graduation and loss of employment, loss of post-graduate opportunities etc. Worse yet, these suspensions were decided without any due process. To date, four of them have had to be rescinded due to missing or false evidence in these students’ cases. Yet the administration still defends these measures, even comparing them to the preemptive measures that are needed to protect potential victims of sexual predators. The layers of doublespeak and racism are thick.

MIT professor Retsef Levi, a member of MIT Israel Alliance (MITIA), has added fuel to the fire of these Orwellian allegations about SAGE students’ violence when he mistranslated the Arabic slogans ‘Death to the Zionist project’ as ‘Death to the Zionists’, and ‘Israel is thief’ as ‘Israel destroyed’. These mistranslations are tendentious, as confirmed by colleagues who speak and study Arabic. It’s as if Martin Luther King had called, not for an end to racism, but for death to racists. Such slander endangers SAGE students, especially when mistranslated videos go viral in Zionist anti-Palestinian circles. These distortions come from the same professor who, on 8 May at SAGE, decided unilaterally that his senior MIT faculty colleague (myself) cannot be considered ‘faculty’. During MITIA’s Yom Ha’atzmaut party on 7 May, an event sanctioned by MIT, Zionist Jews were dancing near SAGE to the beat of חרבו דרבו, ‘Harbu Darbu’, a song calling Palestinians ‘whores’, ‘fucking mice coming out of tunnels’ and ‘children of Amalek’, which encourages the Israel army to make a ‘complete mess on [their] head[s]’. Yet it’s the SAGE students who are accused of posing an existential antisemitic threat to the community and to Israel, and who are met with suspensions and evictions.

The antisemitism charge is false. In the Boston Globe, the MIT Israel Alliance characterised SAGE as ‘anti-Jewish’, ‘anti-Israel’, and fear-inducing for Jewish students. There, too, there’s no mention that SAGE includes, among many Jewish students, members of MIT Jews for Ceasefire (MITJ4C) who organised a Passover Seder at the encampment to which MITIA was invited. MITJ4C students, too, have been forceful in their critiques of Israel’s government.

Truth, though, must not get in the way of Orwellian language. Observing a counter-protest on 3 May 2024 at MIT, co-sponsored by Israel’s consulate in Boston, one would think Palestinians didn’t even exist. The ‘Never Again Is Now’ rally focused solely on the evils of the Holocaust, the atrocities on 7 October and antisemitism — not one word about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the preceding violence against Palestinians since the Nakba.

In her work, Israeli professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, formerly at Hebrew University, has described a ‘semiotics of othering’ used in Israeli schools to foster indifference toward the suffering of Palestinians and toward the genocidal discourse of Israeli leaders and their allies. In this context, Palestinians are equated with Nazis; now the SAGE and other anti-genocide students are subjected to the same slander — and to ‘Hamasification’. In a related Orwellian twist, an MIT Israel Alliance student called Israel a ‘successful anti-colonial movement’, ignoring the fact that Theodore Herzl, at the end of the 19th century, founded Zionism as an explicitly colonial project. ‘Ignorance is strength’, indeed.

Kornbluth described the Israeli counter-protest as being ‘in support of our Israeli and Jewish students’ (note the pronoun!), again erasing anti-Zionist Jewish students who support justice for Palestinians on a par with Jews. This instance of Newspeak also fails to acknowledge the unusually direct interference of a foreign government in MIT’s affairs, with the Israeli consulate in Boston co-sponsoring a Zionist counter-protest on MIT’s main front steps. This is from the same government whose prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, compared encampment students with Nazi students in German universities in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the pro-Palestinian liberation chants that Jews for Ceasefire students sing keep challenging the false binary of pro-Palestine versus pro-Israel in MIT administration’s discourse about students’ protests — a binary that leads to unfair equations that conflate pro-Palestine with anti-Israel, pro-Hamas and even neo-Nazis. This is yet another manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism that’s veiled by doublespeak.

But there’s more Orwellian Newspeak from Kornbluth. She calls MIT’s collaboration with Israel ‘vibrant’ even though it violates MIT’s own ‘red lights’ principle for halting projects that violate human rights. These ‘red lights’ are based on the same ‘core values’ that led MIT to put a stop to individual MIT faculty accepting gifts from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein; those faculty who engaged with Epstein were asked by MIT administration to publicly apologise or resign. MIT also stopped collaboration with Russia immediately after the start of the war on Ukraine. Where are the ‘red lights’ to stop MIT complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians by Israel’s military? In yet another Orwellian twist, Kornbluth appeals to ‘academic freedom’ in order to trump human rights and license MIT’s complicity with genocide.

The personal is political, and nowhere is this more evident than in our academic institutions. On 1 April 2024, I was startled to learn, in a police report, that the MIT Israel Alliance (MITIA), an organisation claiming to be the victim of fear caused by allegedly antisemitic student activists, had, in fact, called for the physical surveillance of those protesting against the war on Gaza. In a disturbing twist of Newspeak, a student who was caught photographing me told MIT Police that the individuals targeted by MITIA were ‘disruptive’ and ‘confrontational’. Yet, the only instances when I felt unsafe at anti-genocide rallies at MIT were when Zionist counter-protesters physically or verbally assaulted the protesters. And on that April day, it was this student’s very actions, surreptitiously photographing me and then fleeing, that disrupted my peace of mind and prompted me to report the incident to MIT Police.

This incident is part of a larger pattern of surveillance and repression. The differential treatment by the MIT administration, hesitating to address such affronts while swiftly suspending and evicting pro-Palestinian student groups, is deeply concerning — especially when the reason given is the need to protect community members who feel ‘unsafe’.

As a Haitian-born linguist, I’ve dedicated my career to using language and linguistics as a tool for decolonisation and liberation. My Fall 2024 seminar, like many of my previous courses such as ‘Black Matters’, ‘Creole languages and Caribbean identities’ and ‘Linguistics & Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights’, is an embodiment of MIT’s now familiar, if somewhat hypocritical, slogans — for a #BetterWorld with #MindHandHeart. This seminar, for which I’ve already received MIT MindHandHeart funding for inviting experts in fields adjacent to mine, will explore linguistic dimensions of truth-seeking and nation-building from Haiti to Palestine — from Creole exceptionalism to the Palestine exception. However, my proposal for this seminar has met with resistance from my colleagues at MIT Linguistics — based on ‘concerns’ about whether it would ‘fit our curriculum’ and whether I have the necessary expertise to plan this seminar — though I’ve already invited authors of books who can help us navigate new contents in their respective fields of expertise when needed. My colleagues have even appealed to a clause in MIT’s ‘Report on Free Expression’ that limits ‘academic freedom’ in case a faculty member wanted to teach outside their expertise — for example, ‘Beginning Chinese’ in an advanced calculus class. Yet the very objective of research seminars at MIT Linguistics is to expand knowledge about language by applying already acquired insights to new empirical domains — in the case of my seminar, from Creole exceptionalism in Haiti to Palestine exceptions and Orwellian Newspeak in discourse about the war on Gaza. My MIT Linguistics colleagues have initiated an unprecedented review process for this course proposal, contrasting starkly with the swift approval of previous courses on a variety topics, taught by junior, senior and even visiting professors.

The ongoing scrutiny of my seminar feels less like an issue about ‘curriculum fit’ and ‘expertise’, and more like an attempt to silence analyses that might be perceived as a threat to the status quo. This suspicion is heightened when I recall that even the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), whose mission is ‘the advancement of [linguistic] knowledge and the betterment of society’, rejected my proposal of a statement about linguistic distortions regarding the war on Gaza.

The challenges at hand are not just about Orwellian misrepresentations of Gaza protests and counterprotests at MIT or the censorship one professor’s graduate seminar. These strategies of repression illustrate a critical battle around truth, freedom of speech, academic freedom and even democracy itself, amid political pressures that seek to mold academia, not into a crucible of critical, diverse and ethical thought, but into an echo chamber in service of hegemony. As for the linguistic battlefield, we’ve now glimpsed how the use, interpretation and translation of language are powerful weapons in creating fog around the war on Gaza. The light of truth, though, emerges when language is carefully analysed and its manipulation is exposed. By demystifying Orwellian language, Newspeak and doublespeak as weapons for gaslighting and dehumanisation, we can move closer to a world in which peace and freedom prevail for all — from Gaza to MIT to Haiti.

Michel DeGraff is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy.

Right-Wing Justices Struggle With Culture War Proclivities In Face Of Sprawling Social Media Laws

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito. TPM Illustration/Getty Images

By Kate Riga
|
February 26, 2024

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments centered on what’s become a cottage industry on the right: crafting legal and statutory challenges to social media platforms’ content moderation practices.

These cases grew out of endless conservative complaints about “shadow banning” and “censorship,” platforms’ policies that conservatives claim are single-mindedly aimed at tamping down right-wing influence. It’s a natural outgrowth of the Republican Party’s grievance politics, and ramped up after the COVID-19 pandemic, when anti-vaxxer content on social media became a huge point of contention.

Monday’s arguments centered on laws out of Florida and Texas that would guide and restrict the platforms’ content moderation decisions, and demand platforms provide individualized explanations for those decisions to the affected users. The oral arguments over challenges to the pair of laws are just the first on the Court’s docket this term to deal with these issues; another challenging the Biden administration’s practice of flagging misinformation to tech companies will be argued next month.

The Florida law in particular is quite sprawling, including provisions that the platforms cannot “censor” any “journalistic enterprise” or “willfully deplatform a candidate” for office. It also potentially extends beyond the traditional social media sites, prompting many justices to ask how the law may be applied to messaging carriers like Gmail or marketplaces like Etsy.

Questions about the breadth of the legislation consumed much of the hearings, with some justices clearly mulling remanding at least the Florida case to address the further flung applications.

But perhaps the most interesting moments in the proceedings arose when the right-wing justices’ long-held reflexive positioning came into conflict with a newer strain of their ideology: old-school, free market, pro-business conservatism vs. the new age, Trumpian culture wars. The Court’s Republican appointees are a microcosm of the same dynamic playing out in the party at large, as the old guard fights to retain relevance amid the influx of MAGA politicians and their new, often vindictive, priorities.

Justice Samuel Alito was trying to press U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar into admitting that a hypothetical private law school saying that any student who expresses support for Israel in the war with Hamas will be expelled is “censorship.”

She pushed back that the “semantics” — censorship, moderation — matter much less for these cases than what’s being regulated.

“The particular word that you use matters only to the extent that some may want to resist the Orwellian temptation to recategorize offensive conduct in seemingly bland terms,” he quipped in response.

It’s typical Alito, using a hypothetical to make his views clear: that the social media companies are “censoring” right-wing viewpoints, and using terms like “content moderation” or “editorial discretion” to obscure that. This is the culture warrior position — that red states can and should use government to punish companies acting in ways they don’t like. For some on the right, especially of the MAGA persuasion, these companies are no longer cloaked by the shibboleth that corporations are benevolent, economic drivers who deserve the benefit of the doubt and unregulated freedom. Call it the Ron DeSantis thesis.

A rebuttal came from an unlikely place a few minutes later: Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“I just want to follow-up on Justice Alito’s questions,” he said. “I think he asked a good, thought provoking, important question, and used the term ‘Orwellian.’ When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not a private individual.”

“Maybe people have different conceptions of Orwellian,” he added, before pointing to “the state taking over the media like in some other countries.”

And here’s our old-school Republican position. Private entities are trustworthy with power, or at least more trustworthy than the tyrannical government trying to regulate them.

Chief Justice Roberts, throughout, hewed to Kavanaugh’s camp.

“I wonder, since we’re talking about the First Amendment, whether our first concern should be with the state regulating what we have called the modern public square,” he said the first time he spoke.

Justice Clarence Thomas, unsurprisingly, seemed to side with Alito, his natural ally. While noting that the attorney for the social media platforms called it “censoring” if the government does it and “content moderation” if done by a private party, he snarked: “These euphemisms elude me.”

For all but the most dedicated culture warriors, the Florida and Texas laws may ultimately prove too sprawling for them to get behind. The justices spent much of the arguments debating the knock-on effects of the laws and of questioning how, if one of these tech platforms chose to opt out of serving Florida or Texas rather than complying with the law, it could even manage to do it.

But the issue isn’t going away. As long as a sizeable chunk of the right-wing legal world cares greatly about punishing companies it views as enemies — and as long as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals happily rubber stamps these suits on the way up — the pro-business justices and the culture warriors on the Supreme Court will continue to be locked into their internecine battles.

“[To whom] do you want to leave the judgment about who can speak or who cannot speak on these platforms?” Roberts asked. “Do you want to leave it with the government or the state, or leave it with the platforms? The First Amendment has a thumb on the scale when that question is asked.”


Kate Riga (@Kate_Riga24) is a D.C. reporter for TPM and cohost of the Josh Marshall Podcast.

Trump's White House ignored advice on COVID-19 that could've saved over 130,000 lives, Birx said

John Haltiwanger

Then-President Donald Trump speaks with Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Robert Redfield, and members of the White House coronavirus task force during a COVID-19 briefing on April 22, 2020.

 Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Trump's COVID-19 response led to many preventable deaths, Deborah Birx told House lawmakers.

 
Over 130,000 lives could've been saved if Trump's White House followed the science, she said.

 
Birx also testified that the 2020 election distracted Trump from the pandemic.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House COVID-19 response coordinator, in testimony to the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis said that former President Donald Trump's approach to the pandemic led to a massive number of preventable deaths.

"No," Birx said when asked if Trump did everything in his power to curb the spread and save lives, per excerpts of her testimony released by the committee on Tuesday.

"And I've said that to the White House in general, and I believe I was very clear to the president in specifics of what I needed him to do," she added.

Birx, who testified before the committee in mid-October, said that over 130,000 lives could've been saved in the early stages of the pandemic had Trump's White House adhered to the science and pushed for measures advocated by experts.

"I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30% less to 40% less range," Birx said.

She also suggested that the 2020 election distracted Trump and took attention away from the nation's pandemic response.

"The governors and mayors and others that were campaigning, as well as the White House that was campaigning, just took people's time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic in my personal opinion," Birx said. "They were actively campaigning and not as present in the White House as previously."

Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump downplayed the threat of COVID-19 and repeatedly spread misinformation on the virus. He routinely pushed against public health recommendations, including wearing a mask or face covering. Trump during an interview with veteran journalist Bob Woodward admitted that he deliberately sought to downplay the dangers of the virus in an effort to avoid inducing "panic."

Top public health experts have excoriated Trump over his pandemic response, saying that his approach led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

By the time Trump left office, there had been over 400,000 reported COVID-19 deaths in the US.

Scott Atlas defends COVID work, slams Deborah Birx testimony as 'Orwellian attempt to rewrite history'

Birx testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis earlier this month

By Brooke Singman | Fox News

EXCLUSIVE: Former Trump COVID special advisor Dr. Scott Atlas slammed Dr. Deborah Birx for her reported testimony to congressional investigators as "an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history," defending his work on the Trump COVID-19 task force, and telling Fox News that history's "biggest failure of public health policy lies directly at the hands of" officials who recommended lockdowns during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Birx testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis earlier this month, saying that officials in former President Trump's White House did not take steps to push mask-wearing, social distancing and other mitigation steps that could have prevented thousands of COVID-19 deaths.

MORE GOP BS
SCALISE SAYS GOP MEMO ON CLOSED-DOOR BIRX TESTIMONY CONFIRMS WORLD WAS 'MISLED' ON COVID

Birx also reportedly slammed Atlas, saying he advocated for letting COVID-19 spread through the population to reach herd immunity. The New York Times reported Birx testified that she repeatedly raised her concerns about Atlas' positions and theories to other doctors on the task force.

Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator, speaks during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, April 7, 2020. 

Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Atlas, defending his work to Fox News, said during his time at the White House, he recommended policies "designed to reduce both the spread of the infection to the vulnerable and the harms of the policies themselves to those impacted the most-- low-income families, the working class of America, and our children."

Atlas, delivering a point-by-point rebuttal to reports of Birx's testimony about his role, told Fox News that her claim that he advised Trump to "let the infection spread widely without mitigation to achieve herd immunity," telling Fox News that "is false."

"I never advised the president, the Task Force, or anyone else while in Washington to allow the virus to spread," Atlas said. "Dozens of my writings and interviews during my Washington service explicitly called for specific mitigations, including social distancing, extra hygiene, and masks when not able to socially distance, and 'focused protection,' a heightened protection of those at risk, to allow a safe opening and end the public health destruction from lockdowns."

US President Donald Trump (L) listens to White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas speak during a press conference in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House on September 23, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Atlas told Fox News that "it is not a surprise that Dr. Birx, the official Task Force Coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from late February, 2020 through January 19, 2021, might want to blame others for the failure of her policies," adding that, in her position, she "held the authority over the official federal advice on medical policy."

Atlas said Birx "personally detailed the state of the pandemic" during all task force meetings, and COVID meetings attended by top Trump advisors, adding that Birx "composed in writing and communicated all recommendations from the Task Force to every state."

"I visited only one state, Florida, during my time in Washington," Atlas said.

HISTORICAL REVISIONISM OF THE ANTI VAX/ANTI MASKER

"It is an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history to blame those who criticized the lockdowns that were widely implemented for the failure of the lockdowns that were widely implemented," he said, adding that Birx's recommendations "were implemented by governors throughout nearly the entire nation during 2020."

"Those policies failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive health damage and destruction, particularly on working class and lower-income families and on our children," Atlas told Fox News. "History's biggest failure of public health policy lies directly at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not on those who advised otherwise. Period."

Atlas jointed the Trump White House COVID-19 Task Force in August 2020 as a special government employee, serving just a 130-day detail. Atlas' role expired in November 2020.

 

Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Friday, April 3, 2020, in Washington.

 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Atlas was criticized throughout his time at the White House for advocating for a reopening, while blasting COVID-19 lockdowns as "extremely harmful" to Americans.

MORE LIES 
Meanwhile, last week, Republican House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said a memo by Republican leadership on the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis outlining Birx’s closed-door congressional testimony confirms the world was "misled" on the origins of COVID-19.

"President Biden and Democrats have politicized Covid from the start and refused to acknowledge its origins from China," Scalise told Fox News in a statement. "Republicans have been sounding the alarm on these issues for well over year, and Dr. Birx’s closed-door testimony confirms that the world was misled."

The memo highlights several of Birx’s testimonial revelations, including that there were preventable deaths and that "neither the federal government or state and local governments are doing everything that they could at this moment." According to Republicans on the committee, Birx also testified about the importance of coordinating with state and local leaders.

According to the memo, Birx took aim at China’s role in suppressing information on the virus to the World Health Organization (WHO) at the onset of the pandemic, saying she believes "that there had to be evidence of human-to-human transmission weeks before the WHO or the world was notified" and that China "misled" the world on the virus.

The doctor also said she believed that China was giving false information to the WHO on the virus, resulting in a delay of two weeks before worldwide confirmation of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19.

Fox News' Houston Keene contributed to this report.

“Is That Orwellian Or Kafkaesque Enough For You?”

The Guardian Removes Bin Laden’s "Letter To America"   

by Media Lens / November 28th, 2023

The Guardian has long promoted itself as a valiant publisher of news and analysis that holds the powerful to account. It is a thing of wonder that the Guardian appends the following comment beneath news pieces:

Our quality, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more.

For over twenty years, Media Lens has shown how false is this claim.

A new, significant example occurred just last week. On 15 November, the paper removed Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” which it had hosted on its website for almost 21 years. What was suddenly so problematic about the letter that it had to be abruptly removed by the Guardian after being on its website for so long (an archived version can be seen here)?

The deleted text was an English translation of bin Laden’s letter, first published on a Saudi website linked to al-Qaeda, in November 2002, over one year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The Guardian website published a full translation on its website on 24 November 2002. The letter, addressed to the American people, contains a detailed list of grievances against the US shared by many in the Muslim world, explaining what motivated the 9/11 attacks.

The letter has been ‘rediscovered’ during Israel’s current genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza, with people around the world discussing relevant issues online. The Guardian link to the letter went viral, particularly among young people on TikTok, with 14 million views of videos tagged with #lettertoamerica. Many of these videos were posted by young Americans, shocked to find that people around the world hate their country because of strong grievances rooted in real issues.

To properly understand why this response is so remarkable, and why it was quickly followed by an Orwellian act of Guardian censorship, requires some vital context.

‘They Hate Us For Our Freedoms’

In a recent edition of System Update, a widely-watched online politics programme, the US journalist Glenn Greenwald summed up the belief system of most Americans, of all ages:

The people who live in the United States believe and are told that we are a nice, good, benevolent, democratic, free country. We don’t want to bother anyone in the world. We’re not here to conquer anyone. To the extent that we involve ourselves in the world, it’s to help; like we’re doing now in Ukraine, we’re told. We just want to spread democracy, want to defend people…So, why would anyone possibly want to perpetrate an attack on the United States of that brutality and savagery? Americans rightly wanted to know.

Greenwald continued:

And they were fed a complete bullshit answer: by the neocons, by the media, by the government: “They hate us for our freedoms”.

The letter was written by bin Laden, who was loudly blamed for the attacks by the US and other governments, and who was extrajudicially executed by US special forces in Pakistan in May 2011. Greenwald pointed out that there are interviews with bin Laden where he had spelled out the grievances explaining the actual reasons why many in the Muslim world hate the United States.

Greenwald added:

And yet, after 9/11, the US government instructed the television networks – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox – do not show any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden, because they didn’t want the American population hearing from him what their actual grievances were. They didn’t want Americans to think that maybe we had done things in that part of the world that caused it to happen, that causes “blowback”, to use the CIA’s term.

As with any statement from an influential or powerful figure, bin Laden’s letter needs to be read critically. There is much to revile in the letter, not least its antisemitism and homophobia. But consider some of the grievances he detailed against the US government, summarised below:

• Palestine was ethnically cleansed to allow the state of Israel to be set up in 1948. Since then, the Palestinians have been subjected to an Israeli military occupation, suffering for decades as a result of massacres, imprisonment, torture, shootings, bombs, destruction of homes and livelihoods: all backed with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the US.
• Sanctions against Iraq, pushed heavily by the US, led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, 0.5 million of them children under 5.
• US attacks in Somalia, support for Russian atrocities in Chechnya, and support for Israeli aggression against Lebanon.
• Oppression of the populations of US client states in the Middle East, ruled by authoritarian monarchs, or where democratically elected leaders were removed and replaced by US-friendly dictators.
• The exploitation of the Middle East’s natural resources, especially oil, by Western corporations at paltry prices secured through economic and military threats.
• US military bases spread across the region, protecting what the US sees as its own assets.
• The leading US role in destroying climate stability – in particular, its refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement made at the 1997 UN Climate Summit – in order to preserve the profits of US fossil fuel giants.
• US power and influence has been used, not to defend universal humanitarian principles and values, but to secure US geostrategic interests and profits.
• The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.

The now blatant US support for Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza – and the genocidal nature of Israel’s attacks on Palestinians – seemingly underpins the explosion on social media of attention directed towards bin Laden’s letter. Young Americans are waking up to the fact that the US has long supported Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians.

Another significant factor is the awful realisation among young American people, especially, that US government policy has made them targets as retribution for the crimes committed by Washington.

“Removed Document”: Guardian Censorship

So why did the Guardian, which proclaims its credentials in supposedly enabling readers to understand the world, remove bin Laden’s letter from its website? The decision was ‘explained’ in a piece by Blake Montgomery, the tech editor for Guardian US in New York City. In fact, the headline, and most of the article, focused on TikTok:

TikTok “aggressively” taking down videos promoting Bin Laden “letter to America”.

The Guardian quoted TikTok:

Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got on to our platform.

But what did the article report about the Guardian itself?

In response to the letter’s renewed spread, Guardian News and Media removed it on 15 November 2023, replacing it with the statement: “The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.”

Significantly, the Guardian article closed with a statement from the White House, as though this should be literally the last word on the matter:

There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.

As Greenwald observed, US ‘Big Tech’ companies – Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) – are already subjected to censorship in accordance with the dictates of the US security state, as the ‘Twitter files’, a cache of leaked documents, showed. TikTok, a Chinese company, was the only major platform outside the reach of the US. But, noted Greenwald, they were told that, as a condition of being able to continue to operate in the US, they would have to agree to the censorship demands of the US government. Hence, TikTok’s determination to ban TikTok clips discussing #lettertoamerica.

In other words, the censorship actions taken by both TikTok and the Guardian align with the requirements of the US government. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the long history of the Guardian acting as a liberal gatekeeper for establishment power. Moreover, the paper’s ever-closer relationship with UK state security services, themselves subservient to US state power, is abundantly clear.

Piling irony upon irony, one article that the Guardian has not removed from its website, is the fake front-page ‘news’ story in November 2018 claiming that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, supposedly held secret talks with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Such reprehensible journalism unjustly besmirched Assange’s reputation and may well have been part of a state-sponsored propaganda campaign in advance of his forcible removal from the embassy by British police in April 2019, to be thrown in Belmarsh Prison where he remains to this day, awaiting likely extradition to the US.

What about the Guardian’s decision to redirect readers to their 2002 news article that ‘contextualised’ the letter? The article was titled, ‘Osama issues new call to arms’, and was written by Jason Burke, then the Guardian’s chief reporter and now the paper’s international security correspondent. The opening sentence made explicit the state-friendly pitch adopted throughout:

A chilling new message from Osama bin Laden is being circulated among British Islamic extremists, calling for attacks on civilians and describing the “Islamic nation” as “eager for martyrdom”.

Burke continued:

Britain, with its close support for America in the war on terror and Iraq, is a prime target and analysts believe any military action against Saddam Hussein would provoke a spate of revenge attacks by Islamic militants. Sources described the mood in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard as “jumpy”.

Recall that this article was published in November 2002, as the West was mounting a propaganda blitz to ‘justify’ its imminent invasion of Iraq which began in March 2003.

Burke added:

Most of his letter comprises a lengthy list of grievances against the West.

But which grievances? Surely the Guardian would spell out several examples from this ‘lengthy list’? Amazingly Burke did not cite any of them, other than bin Laden’s ‘sustained attack on the “immorality” of Western society.’

In other words, the Guardian article that supposedly ‘contextualised’ bin Laden’s letter, which the paper has now removed, does nothing of the sort, obscuring US crimes in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Japan and elsewhere.

Because the letter had gone viral, but then been removed, the most viewed link on the Guardian at one point last week (on 15 November) was actually, ‘Removed – document’; the place-marker with its risible ‘explanation’ that the Guardian had provided.

As Greenwald noted:

Is that Orwellian enough, or Kafkaesque enough, for you? The article in which most people had an interest in reading was the [letter hosted by the] Guardian [which], precisely because too many people were interested in it, [the editors] decided to remove, so that people couldn’t read it any longer. It’s a document by a major historical figure. The person we’re told was responsible for the 9/11 attack explaining to Americans why people in that part of the world were angry enough with America to do that.

And the Guardian decided, even though it had been up on their website for 21 years, that now that people were discussing it in connection with the war in Gaza from Israel, and US support for it, you can no longer read it.

One of our recent media alerts focused on the phenomenon of Orwellian ‘memory-hole journalism’. That the Guardian had been caught in the act, arguably attracting even more attention to what it had tried to conceal (known as the ‘Streisand effect’), is noteworthy.

What is so encouraging about the fact that this went viral among young people is that it suggests they are beginning to look beyond the benevolent platitudes of US government public relations and are seeking to understand the reasons why so many people around the globe hate, not US ‘freedoms’, but US foreign policy.

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

 

The Collapse of Industrial Farming

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER   

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Photograph Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture – CC BY 2.0

The most upending event of the past 10,000 years is the advent of engineered food as fermentation farms displace factory farms. “We are on the Cusp of the Fastest, Deepest, Most Consequential Disruption of Agriculture in History.” (RethinkX.com)

“Modern foods will bankrupt the cattle industry within a decade.” (RethinkX)

More on that to follow, but first: Industrial farming, alongside global warming, ranks at the top of the list of existential risks this century. And, similar to the dangers attendant to excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, industrial farming is dangerously out of control, but in contrast to global warming, it is not followed at all by corporate media, begging the Orwellian question whether media other than corporate media truly exist?

All of which serves to highlight George Orwell’s concerns as expressed in his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg Publishers, 1949) wherein he explained the primary consequences of “media manipulation” described as: (a) “loss of a critical thinking faculty” and (b) “diminished capacity for self-expression.”

More than 70 years post-Orwellian, his words ring true as corporate media skims over the tragic news of a world in such a dangerous state that only the collapse of industrial agriculture itself, along with cutting GHG emissions, can help to stop the pronounced ongoing collapse of ecosystems throughout the world, especially evident at the extreme latitudes, north and south.

According to Forest Trends, as of 2021, clear-cutting of forests for commercial agriculture purposes, principally for beef and soy production, within the past couple of years increased by a rip-snorting +50%, mostly illegal, to 27 million acres a year. (Source: Trees Fell Faster in the Years Since Companies and Governments Promised to Stop Cutting Them Down, Inside Climate News, May 19, 2021).

That huge acceleration of clear-cutting follows in the footsteps of the New York Declaration on Forests signed in 2014 by 200 endorsers to cut deforestation in half by 2020 (ahem!) and stop it altogether by 2030 (lol).

Industrial farming is destroying the planet’s resources with clear-cutting as well as spewing tons upon tons of toxic chemicals that subtly destroy major ecosystems throughout the world, including wetlands, floral meadowlands, and precious farmland as toxic chemicals turn rich black soils into useless dirt.

The Center for Biodiversity and the World Animal Protection-US orgs in February of 2022 released a major report “Collateral Damage” documenting the deadly harm of toxic chemicals used by factory farms. Clearly, humans are poisoning the planet, and in a mind-blowing “tip of the hat” to Orwell’s prognosis about human dullness, it is legal! Yes, poisoning the planet is legal! Which suggest that Orwell’s concern about “loss of a critical thinking faculty” is understated.

That amazing fact is underscored by the frightening knowledge that within only a few decades industrial farming, assuming it can be called “farming,” displaced thousands of years of family farming that husbanded nature, displaced by rapacious corporate models of stern-minded profit-oriented callous mass slaughter to satisfy the gluttonous fast-food craze that’s unique to the decadent 21^st century.

This sudden emergence of CAFOs or concentrated animal feed operations is so gruesome and so powerful and so outlandishly disparate from traditional family farming that only a fantasy comparison can approximate its oddity via the passing of a magical wand that morphs Tinker Bell into Hannibal Lecter.

On the other hand, a turning point may be at hand. Factory farming is about to be disrupted via better foods, tastier foods, cheaper foods, healthier foods, and a much healthier environment. That future, sans institutional slaughterhouses and sans widespread use of chemicals and the end of clear-cutting has been theorized in detail by the independent think tank RethinkX.

The not-so-secret formula to better, tastier, cheaper, healthier, more prevalent food is the production of microorganisms. Already over past centuries humanity has shown the value of controlling microorganisms through fermentation, producing bread, cheese, alcohol, as well as preserving fruit and vegetables.

“Moving food production to the molecular level promises a more efficient means of feeding ourselves and the delivery of superior, cleaner nutrients without the unhealthy chemical/antibiotic/insecticide additives required by current industrial means of production.” (RethinkX)

The capability to create foods with exact attributes of nutrition, structure, taste, and texture is advancing whereby ordering food will be similar to installing software on your phone but via databases of engineered molecules, as fermentation farms displace factory farms.

Impossible Foods is an example that utilizes fermented (heme) to create a higher-performing product. (Source: A Rainbow of Opportunity: How Fermentation Biotech is Creating “Agricultural 2.0”, Food Navigator, March 25, 2021)

According to RethinkX: “By 2035, 60% of the area currently allocated to livestock and food production will be freed for other uses. This is enough land that if it were dedicated to the planting of trees for carbon sequestration, it could completely offset U.S. greenhouse emissions.”

Moreover, it is anticipated that rapid uptake of engineered foods means water consumption for cattle will drop by 50% within a decade. And destruction of rainforests for cattle-raising and soy oil production will plummet.

And most importantly for human health concerns, toxic chemicals will be unnecessary. The current industrial food supply chain, from A to Z, is loaded with chemicals. For starters, pesticides used to grow food and livestock end up in human bodies one way or another, and in high enough concentrations proven to influence cancers, brain, nerve, genetic and hormonal disorders, kidney and liver damage, asthma and allergies. (Source: Julian Cribb: Earth Detox, Cambridge University Press, August 2021)

In addition to pesticides, some 3,000 chemical ingredients added to food are permitted by the FDA to enhance freshness, taste, and texture. Preservatives, for example, which extend shelf life, are chemicals that poison the bacteria and moulds that cause food to rot: “Common chemical preservatives such as sodium nitrate and nitrite, sulphites, sulphur dioxide, sodium benzoate, parabens, formaldehyde and antioxidant preservatives, if over-consumed in the modern processed food diet, may also lead to cancers, heart disease, allergies, digestive, lung, kidney and other diseases and constitute a further reason for avoiding or reducing one’s intake of industrial food.” (Earth Detox, pg 70)

Two hundred million (200,000,000) or more than 50% of Americans have at least one chronic disease. (Rand Corporation, 2017) Prompting the query, what causes chronic disease? Answer: Mainstream medical sites blames tobacco, secondhand smoke, poor nutrition, alcohol and lack of exercise, sinful-related stuff. Yet, there are several books and science papers published that point the finger at toxic chemicals in our environment as the cause of chronic diseases. Here’s one recent publication: Stephanie Seneff, PhD: Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment, Chelsea Green Publishing, London, UK, 2021)

“Interestingly enough, Europe only permits the use of 400 out of the 3000 food additives permitted in the US (ed.- the EU has only one-half the US rate of chronic diseases). Essentially, Europe has banned 4/5ths of the chemicals allowed in the US food chain. Europe outlaws any chemicals that do not meet its criteria for ‘non-harm to humans or the environment.” (Earth Detox, pg. 73)

The Center for Biological Diversity in conjunction with World Animal Protection-US report Collateral Damage (February 4, 2022) studied the impact of an estimated 235 million pounds annually of herbicides and insecticides applied to feed crops for factory farms. The chemicals are applied to corn and soybeans for farmed animal feed in the US. Roughly 50% of toxic pesticide use on a global basis is for corn and soy for factory farms… hundreds of millions of pounds of chemicals are applied to corn and soy crops as pesticides in the US.

If only two out of the thousands of toxic chemicals could be eliminated, i.e., glyphosate (herbicide) and atrazine (pesticide); it would be a major health benefit to complex life and ecosystems.

Glyphosate, the king of toxic chemicals, is the most widely used herbicide worldwide. Already 13,000 lawsuits have been filed claiming it causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. WHO claims it is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Atrazine is one of the most widely used pesticides, especially in the US. To date, thirty-five (35) countries have banned its use, including the EU because of persistent groundwater contamination and dangerous levels of toxicity.

“Atrazine is a potent endocrine disruptor and is linked to a variety of human health issues, including different types of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and harm to the reproductive system. After just six hours of exposure an increase in cell death and DNA damage were observed. The same level of damage from exposure to Gamma radiation would take a full 15 minutes. Atrazine also alters the levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain and decreases the electrical activity of certain cells in the cerebellum (the region of the brain that controls motor function). As an endocrine disruptor it can interfere with the balance of hormones in the body, significantly impacting overall physiology and development.” (Source: Collateral Damage: How Factory Farming Drives Up the Use of Toxic Agricultural Pesticides by World Animal Protection, New York, NY, February 2022).

It’s not at all surprising that 35 countries, including the EU, banned atrazine. But, it’s enormously popular in the US.

Time after time, the brilliance of Orwell’s mass media prognosis of “loss of a critical thinking faculty” shows up on the shores of the United States.

It’s probably a good idea to reread Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind… at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week… On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.” (1984, pg. 1)

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

DeSantis blasted for 'Orwellian' vaccine investigation

Alexander Nazaryan
·Senior White House Correspondent
Thu, December 15, 2022 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a news conference in Miami on Dec. 1. 

(Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire)

One day after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a push to investigate alleged harms caused by coronavirus vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, criticized the move as a pointless exercise that would only undermine public confidence in efforts to boost and maintain protection against the circulating pathogen.

“We have a vaccine that, unequivocally, is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives,” Fauci said Wednesday on CNN. “What’s the problem with vaccines?”

The problem is vaccines have become part of America’s polarized politics. Since the advent of COVID-19 vaccines late in the Trump administration, skepticism of the established medical science has become a kind of creed for many conservatives, as well as for some on the far left. Political disagreements about lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine requirements have hardened into antipathy toward the vaccines themselves.


Seizing on rare adverse side effects and diminishing effectiveness — the result of new variants and low booster uptake — vaccine critics have dismissed inoculation as ineffective and potentially dangerous.

Some have also embraced outlandish conspiracy theories about vaccines as a form of government and corporate control.

Anti-vaccination activists at a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in January. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

During a pandemic-related hearing in the House, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland progressive, called the proposed grand jury an “Orwellian” development. “These actions are transparently designed to falsely suggest that coronavirus vaccines, and not the coronavirus itself, are dangerous,” he said Wednesday.

Widely expected to seek the Republican nomination in 2024, DeSantis played open to those concerns on Tuesday, when he announced that he would call for Florida's Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” He is also seeking “further surveillance into sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine in Florida.”

Such deaths are rare, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose vaccine surveillance statistics indicate that 17,868 people — or 0.0027% of vaccine recipients — died after their shots. But those reports unquestionably include thousands of deaths that happened after vaccination but had nothing to do with the vaccines themselves.

Vaccine skeptics have often used reports of supposed side effects — such as those to a vaccine database that does not require confirmation — to exaggerate supposed dangers. And such critics invariably downplay the fact that vaccines are exceptionally effective at stopping serious and critical COVID-19 illness, which has killed more than 6.6 million people globally.

A health care worker administers a COVID-19 vaccine 

at a drive-through site in Miami in December of last year. 

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

And with online misinformation and partisan politics exercising strong pressures on the American public, vaccine fears have been easily exploited, leading to low uptake among Republicans. As a consequence, heavily Republican areas have had higher death rates than Democratic ones.

In Florida, more than 83,000 people have died from COVID-19, and cases there have been rising recently. DeSantis, who has decried what he describes as “Faucism” (the echoes of “fascism” are difficult to miss), downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic from the start, though he has also been credited for opening schools and other businesses well before Democratic counterparts, some of whom remained in a cautious crouch well into 2021.

Earlier this year, DeSantis clashed with former President Donald Trump for supporting vaccination, refusing to say whether he received a booster shot; Trump shot back by calling DeSantis “gutless.”

DeSantis has also regularly attacked Fauci in personal terms. “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac,” he said earlier this year of Fauci, who has been the face of the pandemic for both the Trump and Biden administrations. (He was eventually sidelined by the former in favor of experts closer in line with DeSantis’s views.)

In late 2021, DeSantis hired Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Ladapo has had no experience with infectious diseases and has routinely attacked vaccination and masking. “With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines,” Ladapo said after Tuesday’s event.

Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, 

with Gov. Ron DeSantis looking on, in Brandon, Fla., 

in November 2021. (Chris O'Meara/AP)

The announcement by DeSantis comes days after new Twitter owner Elon Musk attacked Fauci on Twitter, calling for his prosecution. A supporter of DeSantis, Musk has argued that prior to his ownership, Twitter executives suppressed information on the coronavirus that presumably undermined public health messaging.

Last week, he invited Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — an outspoken critic of pandemic precautions — to Twitter’s headquarters. Bhataccharya, who has advised DeSantis in the past, will be on the governor’s new public safety committee, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (a co-author, with Bhatacharrya, of the pro-reopening Great Barrington Declaration) and Bret Weinstein, a quasi-celebrity on the so-called Intellectual Dark Web with no professional experience in vaccinology.

“I’m not sure what they’re trying to do down there,” Fauci said in the Wednesday CNN interview. Though he is about to retire after four decades of federal service, he is likely to face calls to testify from House Republicans, who continue to accuse him of making misleading statements on masks, vaccines and the origins of the coronavirus.

As his retirement has approached, Fauci has been increasingly vocal and defiant about the challenges revealed by the nation’s faltering coronavirus response, which has left more than a million people dead in the U.S.

In a New York Times essay, Fauci lamented the role “disinformation and political ideology” have played in sowing doubt about masks, vaccines and other measures.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Dec. 9 during a virtual event to urge 

Americans to get vaccinated ahead of the holiday season.

(Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)