Tuesday, July 16, 2024

 

“Straight as a Die”: Giving Starmer a Free Pass


The BBC’s banner headline reporting the UK’s 4 July general election result was clear:

‘Chris Mason: “Starmer tsunami” and civility after brutality’

This alliterated nicely but gave the misleading impression that there had been a massive display of public support for Starmer. Mason’s own analysis pointed elsewhere:

‘The story of this election is one of an electorate showing a ruthless determination to eject the Conservatives.’

Indeed, the results show a mere 1.6 per cent Labour increase on Corbyn’s supposedly disastrous 2019 vote share following the most intense propaganda blitz in UK domestic political history. Moreover, the 1.6 per cent increase hides the fact that, because less people voted, Starmer actually received less votes than Corbyn did in both 2017 and 2019:

‘2017 (Jeremy Corbyn) — 12,877,918

‘2019 (Jeremy Corbyn) — 10,269,051

‘2024 (Keir Starmer) — 9,686,329’

So, while journalists are claiming a ‘sensational’ result for Labour, the reality is that the party’s total vote has fallen by 6 per cent since 2019.

The real ‘tsunami’ saw a 19.9 per cent decrease in the Tory vote and a 12.3 per cent increase in the Reform UK vote – the wave swept from right to far-right, not towards Starmer’s ‘extreme centrism’.

Peter Oborne commented:

‘Labour is set to poll about 34 percent, not even two percentage points more than Jeremy Corbyn scored in 2019 and significantly less than the 40 percent that Corbyn scored in 2017.

‘To put it another way, thanks to the second lowest turnout since 1885, scarcely 20 percent of eligible British voters support Keir Starmer’s Labour. Yet, he will end up with approximately two-thirds of all parliamentary seats.’

Remarkably for an incoming Prime Minister, Starmer’s personal vote tally declined dramatically:

‘Starmer has held the seat since 2015, but his vote share dropped by 17% after a surge in support for independent, pro-Gaza candidate Andrew Feinstein.’

Tom Mills of Aston University noted wryly:

‘If you’ve just joined us, Labour has achieved a landslide with less votes than it won in 2019.

‘Which you’ll recall was so bad that the then leader unfortunately had to be expelled from the parliamentary party.’

Real Issues ‘Virtually Non-Existent’

One of the great myths of our ‘managed democracy’ is that ‘mainstream’ journalism provides the public with the balanced information it needs to make an informed decision at election time. In reality, the ‘free press’ does a spectacular job of not talking about issues that would facilitate informed public participation.

Amazingly, one might think, in the first three weeks of campaigning for the 2001 general election, the communications research centre at Loughborough University found that there had been ‘little sign of real issues’ in media election coverage, where ‘few issues make the news’ (Peter Golding, ‘When what is unsaid is the news,’ The Guardian, May 28, 2001). Topics like the environment, foreign policy, poverty and defence were ‘all but invisible’ following the pattern of the 1997 and 1992 elections. (Peter Golding, email to David Edwards, 10 June 2001)

Or consider that, just two years into the seething bloodbath of the full-scale, unprovoked and illegal US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraq comprised just 8 per cent of media reporting during the 2005 election campaign, as compared to 44 per cent for ‘electoral process’. (See David Deacon et al, ‘Reporting the 2005 U.K. General Election,’ Communication Research Centre, Loughborough University, August 2005) Everyone knew Bush and Blair had fabricated a case for war, huge numbers of Iraqis were dying, and yet the war was still not deemed an issue by corporate media in deciding if Blair was fit to remain Prime Minister.

No-one should therefore be surprised by this comment from Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, on the latest election:

‘In terms of content, the media are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the “horse race” aspect of the election – reporting on opinion polls, PR strategies and TV debates – rather than holding parties to account in relation to a broad set of policies. The Loughborough researchers found that coverage of the “electoral process” has taken up 35% of all coverage on TV and in newspapers since the start of the campaign. Adding in stories on corruption, scandals and sleaze (such as the recent betting scandal that has plagued the Tories) and you find that 42% of all coverage is related to “process” more than substantive policy debate.

‘The only policy issue that even gets into double figures is that of taxation, at 11% of total coverage.’

Yet again, media focus has been on ‘electoral process’ with ‘little sign of real issues’.

Thus, closely echoing the blanking of Iraq in 2005, Freedman notes that coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been ‘virtually non-existent’. According to Loughborough University, the categories ‘defence/military/security/terrorism’ account for just 3 per cent of total coverage, most of it focused on whether Labour and Tories are more pro-Nato.

And yet, a few days after Hamas launched its attack on 7 October 2023, Keir Starmer was questioned by Nick Ferrari of LBC on Israel’s response:

‘A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power, cutting off water?’

Starmer replied:

‘I think that Israel does have that right. It is an ongoing situation.’

In 2019, ‘mainstream’ media were far more concerned about Jeremy Corbyn having questioned the removal of an allegedly anti-semitic mural than they are now about Starmer’s stance on Israel’s authentic, ongoing genocide in Gaza. A 5 July report in The Lancet medical journal commented:

‘… it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip’.

The Guardian’s leading article in response to the election result noted merely:

‘In areas with a high proportion of Muslim voters, anger around Labour’s apparent ambivalence over Gaza saw the party lose ground…’ (Our emphasis)

Complicity in Israel’s atrocities is not ‘ambivalence’. But even if Starmer had shown ‘ambivalence’ over genocide, that would be appalling enough, would it not? And worth more than a bland comment in passing?

Another Guardian report commented:

‘Starmer has been criticised by party members for a Middle East stance that could be seen as more pro-Israel than that of the Tories. The former barrister was accused of dithering for months while Israeli bombs killed more and more people. Labour’s manifesto mentions Gaza once, on page 124.’ (Our emphasis)

This is simply false: Starmer did not ‘dither’; he expressly confirmed Israel’s ‘right’ to inflict collective punishment by cutting off power and water from 2 million civilians.

Other subjects of deep concern to the British public have been similarly blanked: health provision and the NHS accounted for only 5 per cent of coverage, while environmental issues including climate change made up a pitiful 2 per cent of total media coverage.

Comparing Treatment Of Corbyn and Starmer

In July 2015, state-corporate politics and media launched an unprecedented smear campaign to derail Corbyn’s project, peaking just prior to the 12 December 2019 election. That month, Loughborough University found that pre-election coverage of Labour in the press had been consistently ‘very negative’, while coverage of the Conservatives had been consistently ‘positive’.

Our own ProQuest database search of UK newspapers for articles mentioning ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ showed how the smears massively intensified as the election grew closer:

September = 337 hits

October = 222 hits

November = 1,620 hits

On 25 November, The Times published an article by Britain’s chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, titled, ‘What will become of Jews in Britain if Labour forms the next government?’ Mirvis insisted that Corbyn should be ‘considered unfit for office’, adding:

‘I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.’

In response, high-profile journalists cast aside all semblance of impartiality. ITV’s political editor Robert Peston tweeted:

‘The Chief Rabbi’s intervention in the general election is without precedent. I find it heartbreaking, as a Jew, that the rabbi who by convention is seen as the figurehead of the Jewish community, feels compelled to write this about Labour and its leader. I am not… making any kind of political statement here.’

The BBC’s then political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted on the chief rabbi’s smears an astonishing 23 times in 24 hours. Kuenssberg even retweeted the following comment from chat show host Piers Morgan in response to then Labour shadow international development secretary Barry Gardiner’s refusal to field further questions on anti-semitism:

‘Wow. The breathtaking arrogance of this chump telling journalists what questions to ask. They should all ignore him & pummel Corbyn about anti-Semitism.’

Kuenssberg apparently later deleted this retweet.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald was typically forthright in responding to Mirvis’s attack:

‘This is utter bullshit.

‘The British Conservative Party is rife with anti-semitism, while there’s no evidence Corbyn is.

‘If you want the Tories to win, just say so. It’s incredibly dangerous to keep exploiting anti-semitism for naked political and ideological ends like this.’

This is just a tiny sample of the media hostility faced by Corbyn (See here and here for many more examples).

So how did our impartial, neutral corporate media’s pre-election treatment of Starmer compare? Des Freedman commented last week:

‘What we have really had during the course of the campaign is a plethora of puff pieces on Labour. Many journalists, aware that they will be dealing with a Labour prime minister from 5 July, appear all too happy to cosy up to senior Labour figures.’

That, actually, is not the reason establishment journalists are so favourable to establishment-friendly Starmer. Freedman continued:

‘So we have had a very upbeat profile of shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in the Guardian arguing that, despite her free-market commitment, she ‘carries little ideological baggage’. There is a rather sickening Guardian interview with Starmer in which we learn very little about his politics, but do find out that he doesn’t have phobias and doesn’t dream at night. And there is an utterly unrevelatory feature in the Financial Times on Starmer which characterises him as a ‘rational, diligent, ruthless’ lawyer but somehow fails even to mention his dealings with Julian Assange when he was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service.’

Despite Starmer famously scrapping every one of his 10 ‘socialist’ pledges, Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian of how the Conservatives failed to punish wrongdoing in the party because they didn’t take it that seriously:

‘Straight-as-a-die chief prosecutor Starmer will allow no such equivocation.’

After all, a salient characteristic of the Prime Minister who used fake smears to purge much of the Labour left is his ‘solid decency’. In June, billionaire Conservative donor John Caudwell supplied some detail:

‘What Keir has done, as far as I can see, has taken all the left out of the Labour Party. And he’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles and ways of growing Britain in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.’

Caudwell’s sage observations, of course, help explain the green-lighting of Starmer at the other end of the supposed media ‘spectrum’ from the Guardian. Daniel Finkelstein, otherwise known as Baron Finkelstein of Pinner in the London Borough of Harrow, commented on Starmer in Rupert Murdoch’s The Times:

‘He has pushed Corbyn out of the party, taken a robust stance on defence and supported a nuclear deterrent, abandoned almost every left-wing policy pledge he made during the leadership election and endorsed a tough policy on public spending, where once he attacked austerity.’

Finkelstein’s conclusion:

‘Starmer is bright and extremely diligent and often finds that evidence and reality push him away from his ideological starting point.’

Seeing what he wanted to see, Finkelstein noted that Starmer had run as a unity candidate for Labour but ‘came to see that this position was impossible and that the policy of the Corbynites was irresponsible’.

The verdict:

‘But as long as we don’t mind too much that he takes his time and sometimes gives a muddled first response, he will often get there in the end.’

Get where? Where the establishment needs him to be. This was captured beautifully in a compilation of two short video clips comparing two comments from Starmer: one, several years ago, saying that he would certainly not be giving interviews to The Sun newspaper; and the second, this recent declaration:

‘I am delighted to have the support and the backing of The Sun. I think that shows just how much this is a changed Labour Party, back in the service of working people.’

The standfirst of another deeply empathetic Times piece asked:

‘Friends say he’s warm, kind and funny. So why can’t he show that side to the public? Josh Glancy joined the campaign trail in search of the real Keir Starmer’

Glancy was keen to emphasise that Starmer ‘is, in many ways, a pretty normal bloke’.

Journalist Neil Clark commented on X:

‘Impossible not to notice how friendly BBC, ITV & C4 have been to Labour in this election, & the stark contrast between now and 2017 & ‘19. No real scrutiny of the party’s policies, no hostile questioning, no “Gotchas”, Starmer given a very easy ride, so different to before.’

There were no ‘Gotchas’, because the propaganda arm of state-corporate power was not trying to get Starmer. The Guardian, for example, has long featured a sub-section of its archive, titled: ‘Starmer’s Path To Power’.

The Loughborough University research notes that ‘First name only’ references to the Labour leader have increased from 4 percent in 2019 to 29 percent in 2024. Establishment-friendly Starmer is often ‘Sir Keir’, while the openly targeted Official Enemy was strictly ‘Corbyn’.


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.


Starmer Learnt that the Price of Power was Support for Genocide


Britain’s new prime minister has shown he is already an arch-exponent of the dark political arts of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith


By a crushing majority, the 17 judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled more than five months ago that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza.

The highest court in the world put Israel on trial, accused of the ultimate crime against humanity.

Much has happened since that decision – and all of it is even more incriminating against Israel than the evidence considered by the World Court back in January.

Tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians are dead or missing, most likely under rubble. Gaza is now a wasteland, one that will take many decades to rebuild.

Till then, the population has nowhere to live, nor institutions such as hospitalsschools, universities and government offices to care for them, nor infrastructure like functioning electricity and sewage systems to rely on.

In violation of a second ICJ ruling, Israel has invaded and repeatedly bombed Rafah, a small “safe zone” into which Gaza’s population had been herded by Israel, supposedly for their own protection.

And Israel has intensified its blockade of aid, now to the point where there is famine across much of the enclave. Children, the sick and the vulnerable are dying in growing numbers from an entirely man-made catastrophe.

Presented with so much evidence, how is the World Court dealing with Israel’s genocide trial?

The answer: it is moving at a snail’s pace.

Most experts agree that the ICJ is unlikely to issue a definitive ruling for at least a year. Until then, it seems, the western powers will continue giving Israel a licence to shed far more of Gaza’s blood – that is, to continue much further on the trajectory of a plausible genocide.

At this rate, the court will determine conclusively whether Israel is guilty of genocide only when that genocide is all but finished.

Eyes tight shut

Back in the mid-1990s, the world was confronted by another genocide, in Rwanda.

Then, the West vowed that it and the legal institutions supposedly there to uphold international law and protect the weakest should never drag their feet again, permitting a crime of such monstrous proportions to unfold without hindrance.

But 30 years on, the West is not just dragging its feet in addressing the crimes against the people of Gaza. Washington and its closest allies, including Britain, are actively arming Israel’s slaughter, and assisting with its starvation of the population.

In ruling against Israel, the ICJ would, by implication, also be finding the sole global superpower and its allies guilty of complicity in genocide.

In the circumstances, the reasons for caution at the World Court, rather than urgency, are all too obvious.

The ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), showed late last month that it too was in no hurry to stop the slaughter and mass starvation in Gaza.

Whereas the World Court judges the behaviour of states, the ICC judges the actions of individuals. It is empowered to identify and put on trial those who carry out crimes on behalf of the state.

In May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, incensed western capitals by announcing that he was seeking an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.

All five were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Netanyahu and Gallant’s case, that included the crime of exterminating Gaza’s Palestinians, using starvation as a “weapon of war”.

In truth, the ICC swung into action very late indeed – some eight months after Israel began its war crimes spree.

Nonetheless, Khan’s decision offered a brief moment of hope to Gaza’s bereaved, destitute and starving.

While the World Court’s lengthy genocide trial offers the prospect of a remedy potentially years away, arrest warrants from the ICC pose a far more direct and pressing threat to Israel.

Once signed, those warrants would obligate all parties to the Rome Statute, including Britain and other European states, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they step on their soil.

Israeli media have reported on panicked army commanders worried about carrying out orders in Gaza for fear they may be charged next with war crimes.

For a moment, it looked as though Israel might have to weigh whether it could afford to continue the slaughter of Palestinians.

Superpower bullying

But the ICC’s judges agreed to lift the sword from Netanyahu and Gallant’s necks – while leaving Gaza’s women and children, the sick and elderly, exposed once again to the full force of Israel’s bombs and starvation policy.

Rather than approving, as expected, the arrest of Netanyahu and his defence minister for war crimes, the ICC caved into pressure from the United States and Britain.

It revealed that it was willing to revisit the question of whether it had jurisdiction over Gaza – in other words, whether it had the authority to put Netanyahu and Gallant on trial for crimes against humanity.

It was an extraordinary moment – and one that confirmed quite how dishonest the West’s professions of humanitarianism are, and quite how feeble are supposedly independent institutions like the ICC and ICJ when they run up against Washington.

The question of jurisdiction in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories was settled by the ICC long ago. Were that not the case, Khan would never have dared to request the arrest warrants in the first place.

Nonetheless, the ICC’s judges accepted submissions, secretly made by the outgoing British government, that question the legal body’s jurisdiction powers. The UK was undoubtedly waging this campaign of intimidation against the war crimes court in coordination with the US and Israel.

Neither have standing at the ICC because they have refused to ratify the war crimes statute that founded the court.

The UK’s move was a transparent delaying tactic, relying on a piece of standard Israeli sophistry: that the Oslo Accords, from 30 years ago, did not give Palestinians criminal jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, and therefore Palestine cannot delegate that power to the ICC.

The flaw in this argument is glaring. Israel violated the terms of the Oslo Accords decades ago and no longer considers itself bound by them. And yet it now insists – via Britain – that the Palestinians still be shackled by these obsolete documents.

Even more to the point, the Oslo Accords were long ago superseded by a new legal and diplomatic reality. In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recognise Palestine as a state.

Three years later, Palestine was allowed to become a member of the ICC. After a long delay, the court finally ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction in Palestine.

Since then, and again at a snail’s pace, the ICC has been investigating Israeli war crimes, including atrocities against Palestinians and the building of armed, exclusively Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory, denying the Palestinians any chance to exercise their right to statehood.

In a properly functioning system of international law, arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass would have been issued years ago, long before the current plausible genocide in Gaza.

Buying time

The question of jurisdiction is no longer a matter of legal debate. But revisiting it unnecessarily does buy time, time in which Israel can kill more Palestinians, level even more of Gaza, and starve more Palestinian children.

It is just such delays that lie at the heart of the matter. It is the endless deferments of accountability that directly enabled the current genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s cynical evasions in implementing the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s led to a growing backlash from Palestinians, culminating in the eruption of a violent uprising in 2000.

The endless postponements by western powers, led by Washington, in recognising Palestinian statehood destroyed the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting.

The obvious futility of the Oslo process drove many Palestinians into the arms of militant rival groups like Hamas that promised to let Palestinians take back control of their fate.

The reluctance in the West to put any kind of pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories gave Israeli leaders the confidence to tighten their stranglehold: through settlement building and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a blockade that led to the isolation and immiseration of Gaza.

Inaction in addressing Gaza’s increasingly dire conditions motivated Hamas to smash apart the status quo, one that was quietly suffocating the Palestinian population there. Hamas did so by carrying out a surprise and bloody attack on Israel on 7 October.

And the West’s refusal to intervene after 7 October opened the door to Israel’s current slaughter in Gaza, an extermination campaign designed to drive the people of Gaza out of the enclave, becoming someone else’s – ideally Egypt’s – problem.

The World Court’s delay in ruling on genocide, and the ICC’s delay in issuing arrest warrants, presage yet more, unpredictable disasters down the road.

One certainty, however, is that, through more bloodletting, Israel will be entirely unable to realise its professed goal of “eliminating” Hamas.

The most Israel can achieve by inflicting mass death and destruction in Gaza is to prove to Palestinians that Hamas is right: that Israel is unwilling to allow any form of Palestinian statehood, and has been since it belligerently occupied the Palestinian territories 57 years ago – long before Hamas even existed.

In killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel has served as Hamas’ biggest recruiting sergeant. More young Palestinian men in Gaza are throwing their lot in with armed resistance, if only to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.

Israel’s approach is obviously self-defeating – but only if the goal is truly to live in peace with their neighbours, and not to be engaged in permanent war with the region.

Abuse to continue

Responding to the ICC’s latest delay, Clive Baldwin, a legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, observed that the UK had to end its “double standards in victims’ access to justice”.

He added: “The next government will need to immediately decide if it supports the ICC’s essential role in bringing accountability and defending the rule of law for all.”

That next government is now led by Sir Keir Starmer, who won last week’s general election with a landslide of seats based on a paltry share of the votes.

Starmer benefited massively from a split in the right-wing vote. But a near-record low turn-out and a fall in votes for Labour compared to his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, hinted at the profound lack of enthusiasm both for Starmer and his evasive platform.

Throughout his election campaign, Starmer was keen to send signals to Washington and the establishment media that – in keeping with the outgoing Conservative government’s stalling tactics – he would buy time for Israel too.

He paid a price for that at the election: he alienated many party workers and lost seats to a handful pro-Palestine candidates running as independents, including Corbyn himself, on huge swings of the vote. Several senior Labour MPs also found themselves within a hair’s breadth of losing their seats.

That may explain why Labour officials lost no time emphasising that Starmer had called Netanyahu to talk tough with him and was distancing himself from the previous government’s efforts to openly run interference for the US and Israel at the ICC.

According to a report this week in the Guardian, Starmer is expected to drop the current move to stall at the ICC over issuing arrest warrants.

Important decisions remain, however. Will Labour quickly restore funding to Unrwa, the UN refugee agency that is best placed to tackle the Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza? And will it halt arms sales?

But most crucial of all, will it recognise Palestine, sending a signal both to the ICJ and ICC and to Israel that a ruling protecting the Palestinians from genocide will be enforced by a major western power and close ally of Washington’s?

No good signs

Back in January, days before the World Court announced it was plausible that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, Starmer quietly tore up the Labour Party’s long-standing policy on recognising Palestine as a state.

More than 140 other countries have already recognised Palestine, including recently Spain, Ireland and Norway.

Instead, Starmer declared that Palestine could only come into being once Israel agreed to such recognition. In other words, Israel – the serial abuser – will be the one to decide whether it will ever end its serial abuse of the Palestinian people.

Starmer, let us note, made his name as a human rights lawyer.

Next, in the final stages of the election campaign, Starmer’s aides briefed The Times of London of a further obstacle in the way of recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The paper reported that Starmer would refuse to recognise a Palestinian state until he had received the blessing of the United States, reportedly to avoid the risk of a diplomatic falling out. Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state.

Such a delay would once again reassure Israel that it can do as it pleases to the Palestinians.

And as should be all too clear by now, buying time for Israel means allowing it to carry out a genocide in Gaza and intensify ethnic cleansing policies begun decades ago.

Tissue of lies

Starmer’s own political trajectory suggests an uncomfortable truth about international power politics. The closer western leaders move to power, the more pressure they feel to do Washington’s bidding – and that invariably means casting aside principle.

Devotion to Israel – and a willingness to abandon the Palestinians to the death camp Gaza has become – has been one of the major conditions of entry into the West’s power club.

During the election campaign, Starmer passed that test with flying colours. Which is why he – unlike his predecessor – received an easy ride from the British establishment, including its public relations arm, the corporate media.

Ultra-rich donors, including those with close ties to Israel, have been lining up to throw money at Starmer’s Labour party, at the same time as membership numbers have plummeted.

The reality is that we live in a world where the powerful pay lip service to human rights and international law, a world where they profess to aid the weak even as they assist in their slaughter.

Oppression flourishes, obscured by their empty promises and endless dithering.

For three decades, the West has advertised its benevolence and humanitarianism. It has launched invasions and waged wars supposedly to protect the weak and vulnerable – from Kosovo to Ukraine, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya. Democracy and women’s rights have supposedly been the West’s watchwords.

But in truth, as Gaza demonstrates only too clearly, those claims were a tissue of lies. It was always about treating the world as a giant chessboard, and one where Washington’s right to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” was the driving principle, not protection of the weak.

Talk of humanitarianism was there to obscure a deeper, more savage truth: might still makes right. And no one is stronger than the US and those it favours.

The Palestinians, unlike Israel, have no weight in the international system. They are denied an army, and have no warplanes. They are denied control over their borders and their airspace. They have no real economy or currency – they are entirely reliant on the goodwill of Israeli financial institutions. They have no freedom to move from their slivers of territory, their ghettoes, unless Israel first agrees.

They cannot even stop Israel from bulldozing their homes, or arresting their children in the middle of the night.

No one on the international stage, least of all governments in Washington and London, really needs to take account of Palestinian interests.

Abusing Palestinians comes at minimal political cost. Protecting them would offer few tangible political gains. Which is precisely why their abuse continues day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.

We live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith. Britain’s new prime minister has shown he is already an arch-exponent of those dark political arts. Listen not to what he says, but watch closely what he actually does.

• First published in Middle East Eye

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.
Hong Kong is testing out its own ChatGPT-style tool as OpenAI planned extra steps to block access


The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cellphone with an image on a computer monitor generated by ChatGPT’s Dall-E text-to-image model, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston. Hong Kong’s government is testing out the city’s own ChatGPT-style tool for its employees, with plans to eventually make it available to the public, its innovation minister said Saturday, July 13, 2024, on a radio show, after OpenAI took extra steps to block access from the city and other regions it does not support. 
(AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

BY KANIS LEUNG
July 16, 2024


HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong’s government is testing the city’s own ChatGPT -style tool for its employees, with plans to eventually make it available to the public, its innovation minister said after OpenAI took extra steps to block access from the city and other unsupported regions.

Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong said on a Saturday radio show that his bureau was trying out the artificial intelligence program, called “document editing co-pilot application for civil servants,” to further improve its capabilities. He plans to have it available for the rest of the government this year.

The program was developed by a generative AI research and development center led by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in collaboration with several other universities.

The system’s writing assistance functions could help draft, translate and summarize documents to enhance the efficiency of civil servants, said the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer. The program’s database and large language model were independently developed by the center, it said.
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Sun said the model would provide functions like graphics and video design in the future. To what degree it would compare to the capabilities of ChatGPT was unclear.


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He told the radio show that industry players and the government would play a role in the model’s future development.

“Given Hong Kong’s current situation, it’s difficult for Hong Kong to get giant companies like Microsoft and Google to subsidize such projects, so the government had to start doing it,” Sun said.

Beijing and Washington are locked in a race for AI supremacy, with China having ambitions to become the global leader in AI by 2030.

China, including Hong Kong and neighboring Macao, is not on the list of “supported countries and territories” of OpenAI, one of the best-known artificial intelligence companies.

The ChatGPT maker has not explained why certain territories were excluded but said accounts in those places attempting to access its services may become blocked.

According to a post on OpenAI’s online forum and local media reports, the company announced in an email to some users that it would be taking additional measures to block connections from regions not on the approved list starting July 9.

Francis Fong, the honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said it was hard to say whether the capabilities of the program in Hong Kong could match those of ChatGPT. With the input of AI companies in the city, Fong said he believed it could technologically catch up with the standards.

“Will it become the top? Maybe not necessarily be as close as that. But I believe it won’t be too far behind,” he said.

He also said a locally developed AI program might more accurately address local language and localized issues, but adding it would “make sense” if the final product appears to be “politically correct.”

Like most foreign websites and applications, ChatGPT is technically unavailable in China because of the country’s firewall, which censors the internet for residents. Determined individuals can still gain access via commonly available “virtual private networks” that bypass restrictions.

Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Baidu have already rolled out primarily Chinese-language AI models similar to ChatGPT for public and commercial use. However, these AI models must abide by China’s censorship rules.

In May, China’s cyberspace academy said an AI chatbot was being trained on President Xi Jinping’s doctrine, a stark reminder of the ideological parameters within which Chinese AI models will operate.

Also in May, SenseTime, a major Chinese artificial intelligence company, launched SenseChat for users in Hong Kong, where most of the population speaks Cantonese as their mother tongue rather than Mandarin, which is more widely spoken in mainland China. But a check on Tuesday found the application could not provide answers to politically sensitive questions, such as what the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 and Hong Kong’s protests in 2019 were about.

During the 1989 crackdown, Chinese troops opened fire on student-led pro-democracy protesters, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands, dead, and that remains a taboo subject in mainland China.

In 2019, protests that started over unpopular Hong Kong legislation morphed into an anti-government movement and the greatest political challenge to Beijing’s rule since the former British colony returned to China in 1997.

KANIS LEUNG
Leung covers Hong Kong, Macao and mainland China for The Associated Press. She is based in Hong Kong.
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Thailand is set to roll out a controversial $13.8 billion handout plan in digital money to citizens


Thailand’s Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, delivers his speech during the Soft Power Forum in Bangkok, Thailand, Monday, June 28, 2024. Thailand’s prime minister said Monday July 15, 2024 that eligible businesses and individuals can register from August for digital cash handouts, a controversial program that will cost billions of dollars and is meant to boost the lagging economy. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)


BY JINTAMAS SAKSORNCHAI
July 15, 2024


BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand’s prime minister said Monday that eligible businesses and individuals can register from August for digital cash handouts, a controversial program that will cost billions of dollars and is meant to boost the lagging economy.

The government announced in April the widely criticized ambitious plan, named the Digital Wallet, meant to give 10,000 baht (about $275) to 50 million citizens in digital money to spend at local businesses.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin posted on the social platform X, saying the registration will begin Aug. 1 and that he has given instructions to ensure the smooth implementation of the program.

The “Digital Wallet” was a major campaign promise of the ruling Srettha’s Pheu Thai party ahead of last year’s general election. The government says that this scheme will cause an “economic tornado,” and Srettha has said the stimulus and subsequent consumption are expected to boost gross domestic product growth by 1.2 to 1.6 percentage points.

However, economists have criticized the program, calling it an ineffective way to contribute to sustainable economic growth compared to other measures.

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In addition, its financing has faced several hurdles, delaying its planned implementation. At first, the government said the state Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives would cover some of the funding needed. However, after warnings by financial experts, it was announced that the project’s funding would come out of the 2024 and 2025 fiscal budgets.

Deputy Minister of Finance Julapan Amornvivat said at a news conference on Monday the budgetary funding became possible after the plan’s estimated cost dropped from 500 billion baht ($13.8 billion) to 450 billion baht ($12.4 billion), asserting that all estimated 50 million people will still be part of the program as only up to 90% of those eligible utilized them in previous handouts.

Julapan added that the Digital Wallet committee has agreed to exclude tens of thousands of shopowners and cash recipients who have a record of committing fraud in past programs.

The plan also has certain limitations, such as excluding certain goods that are yet to be decided, and earlier proposals suggested oil, services, and online purchases should be among them. Julapan said the Commerce Ministry would handle the exclusions set to be announced next week after the detailed plan is submitted to the Cabinet.

Thailand has in recent years suffered from a sluggish economy that appears to have deteriorated with no clear sign of growth. This month, the World Bank’s Thailand Economic Monitor projected GDP growth of 2.4% for the year 2024.

The ruling Pheu Thai party had initially suggested digital wallet payments for all Thais 16 and older, but later this was limited to only lower-income Thais, defined as people with yearly incomes not exceeding 840,000 baht (about $23,000) and savings in financial institutions not totaling more than 500,000 baht ($13,700).
Tuskegee syphilis study whistleblower Peter Buxtun has died at age 86


Peter Buxtun is pictured in San Francisco in this undated photo. Bruxton, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. government allowed hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, died on May 18, 2024, from Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, Calif. (Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)


BY MIKE STOBBE
July 15, 2024Share

NEW YORK (AP) — Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. government allowed hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama to go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, has died. He was 86.

Buxtun died May 18 of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California, according to his attorney, Minna Fernan.

Buxtun is revered as a hero to public health scholars and ethicists for his role in bringing to light the most notorious medical research scandal in U.S. history. Documents that Buxtun provided to The Associated Press, and its subsequent investigation and reporting, led to a public outcry that ended the study in 1972.

Forty years earlier, in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were infected with syphilis. When antibiotics became available in the 1940s that could treat the disease, federal health officials ordered that the drugs be withheld. The study became an observation of how the disease ravaged the body over time.

In the mid-1960s, Buxtun was a federal public health employee working in San Francisco when he overheard a co-worker talking about the study. The research wasn’t exactly a secret — about a dozen medical journal articles about it had been published in the previous 20 years. But hardly anyone had raised any concerns about how the experiment was being conducted.

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“This study was completely accepted by the American medical community,” said Ted Pestorius of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking at a 2022 program marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the study.

Buxtun had a different reaction. After learning more about the study, he raised ethical concerns in a 1966 letter to officials at the CDC. In 1967, he was summoned to a meeting in Atlanta, where he was chewed out by agency officials for what they deemed to be impertinence. Repeatedly, agency leaders rejected his complaints and his call for the men in Tuskegee to be treated.

He left the U.S. Public Health Service and attended law school, but the study ate at him. In 1972, he provided documents about the research to Edith Lederer, an AP reporter he had met in San Francisco. Lederer passed the documents to AP investigative reporter Jean Heller, telling her colleague, “I think there might be something here.”

Heller’s story was published on July 25, 1972, leading to Congressional hearings, a class-action lawsuit that resulted in a $10 million settlement and the study’s termination about four months later. In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the study, calling it “shameful.”

The leader of a group dedicated to the memory of the study participants said Monday they are grateful to Buxtun for exposing the experiment.

“We are thankful for his honesty and his courage,” said Lille Tyson Head, whose father was in the study.

Buxtun was born in Prague in 1937. His father was Jewish, and his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1939 from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, eventually settling in Irish Bend, Oregon on the Columbia River.

In his complaints to federal health officials, he drew comparisons between the Tuskegee study and medical experiments Nazi doctors had conducted on Jews and other prisoners. Federal scientists didn’t believe they were guilty of the same kind of moral and ethical sins, but after the Tuskegee study was exposed, the government put in place new rules about how it conducts medical research. Today, the study is often blamed for the unwillingness of some African Americans to participate in medical research.

“Peter’s life experiences led him to immediately identify the study as morally indefensible and to seek justice in the form of treatment for the men. Ultimately, he could not relent,” said the CDC’s Pestorius.

Buxtun attended the University of Oregon, served in the U.S. Army as a combat medic and psychiatric social worker and joined the federal health service in 1965.

Buxtun went on to write, give presentations and win awards for his involvement in the Tuskegee study. A global traveler, he collected and sold antiques, especially military weapons and swords and gambling equipment from California’s Gold Rush era.

He also spent more than 20 years trying to recover his family’s properties confiscated by the Nazis and was partly successful.

“Peter was wise, witty, classy and unceasingly generous,” said David M. Golden, a close friend of Buxtun’s for over 25 years. “He was a staunch advocate for personal freedoms and spoke often against prohibition, whether it be drugs, prostitution or firearms.”

Another longtime friend Angie Bailie said she attended many of Buxtun’s presentations about Tuskegee.

“Peter never ended a single talk without fighting back tears,” she said

Buxtun himself could be self-effacing about his actions, saying he did not anticipate the vitriolic reaction of some health officials when he started questioning the study’s ethics.

At a Johns Hopkins University forum in 2018, Buxtun was asked where he got the moral strength to blow the whistle.

“It wasn’t strength,” he said. “It was stupidity.”
__

AP reporters Edith M. Lederer in New York and Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed. Lederer was a friend of Peter Buxtun’s for more than 50 years and played a role in AP’s report on the Tuskegee study.
World’s rarest whale may have washed up on New Zealand beach, possibly shedding clues on species


Spade-toothed whales are the world’s rarest, with no live sightings ever recorded. No one knows how many there are, what they eat, or even where they live in the vast expanse of the southern Pacific Ocean. However, scientists in New Zealand may have finally caught a break. The country’s conservation agency said Monday a creature that washed up on a South Island beach this month is believed to be a spade-toothed whale.


BY CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-MCLAY
 July 15, 2024


WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Spade-toothed whales are the world’s rarest, with no live sightings ever recorded. No one knows how many there are, what they eat, or even where they live in the vast expanse of the southern Pacific Ocean. However, scientists in New Zealand may have finally caught a break.

The country’s conservation agency said Monday a creature that washed up on a South Island beach this month is believed to be a spade-toothed whale. The five-meter-long creature, a type of beaked whale, was identified after it washed ashore on an Otago beach from its color patterns and the shape of its skull, beak and teeth.

“We know very little, practically nothing” about the creatures, Hannah Hendriks, marine technical adviser for the Department of Conservation, said. “This is going to lead to some amazing science and world-first information.”

If the cetacean is confirmed to be the elusive spade-toothed whale, it would be the first specimen found in a state that would permit scientists to dissect it, allowing them to map the relationship of the whale to the few others of the species found, learn what it eats and perhaps lead to clues about where they live.


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Only six other spade-toothed whales have ever been pinpointed, and those found intact on New Zealand’s North Island beaches were buried before DNA testing could verify their identification, Hendriks said, thwarting any chance to study them.

This time, the beached whale was quickly transported to cold storage and researchers will work with local Māori iwi (tribes) to plan how it will be examined, the conservation agency said.

New Zealand’s Indigenous people consider whales a taonga — a sacred treasure — of cultural significance. In April, Pacific Indigenous leaders signed a treaty recognizing whales as “legal persons,” although such a declaration is not reflected in the laws of participating nations.

Nothing is currently known about the whales’ habitat. The creatures deep-dive for food and likely surface so rarely that it has been impossible to narrow their location further than the southern Pacific Ocean, home to some of the world’s deepest ocean trenches, Hendriks said.

“It’s very hard to do research on marine mammals if you don’t see them at sea,” she said. “It’s a bit of a needle in a haystack. You don’t know where to look.”

The conservation agency said the genetic testing to confirm the whale’s identification could take months.



It took “many years and a mammoth amount of effort by researchers and local people” to identify the “incredibly cryptic” mammals, Kirsten Young, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter who has studied spade-toothed whales, said in emailed remarks.

The fresh discovery “makes me wonder — how many are out in the deep ocean and how do they live?” Young said.

The first spade-toothed whale bones were found in 1872 on New Zealand’s Pitt Island. Another discovery was made at an offshore island in the 1950s, and the bones of a third were found on Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island in 1986. DNA sequencing in 2002 proved that all three specimens were of the same species — and that it was one distinct from other beaked whales.

Researchers studying the mammal couldn’t confirm if the species went extinct. Then in 2010, two whole spade-toothed whales, both dead, washed up on a New Zealand beach. Firstly mistaken for one of New Zealand’s 13 other more common types of beaked whale, tissue samples — taken before they were buried — later revealed them as the enigmatic species.

New Zealand is a whale-stranding hotspot, with more than 5,000 episodes recorded since 1840, according to the Department of Conservation.
From basement to battlefield: Ukrainian startups create low-cost robots to fight Russia
Facing a huge manpower and arms supply disadvantage, the Ukrainian military is hoping hundreds of start-ups inside the country can provide machines to carry out battlefield tasks, from mine clearance and automated evacuations of the wounded to simply carrying a soldier’s equipment.

 AP Video shot by Anton Shtuka
Photos 8

BY DEREK GATOPOULOS AND ANTON SHTUKA
July 15, 2024Share

NORTHERN UKRAINE (AP) — Struggling with manpower shortages, overwhelming odds and uneven international assistance, Ukraine hopes to find a strategic edge against Russia in an abandoned warehouse or a factory basement.

An ecosystem of laboratories in hundreds of secret workshops is leveraging innovation to create a robot army that Ukraine hopes will kill Russian troops and save its own wounded soldiers and civilians.

Defense startups across Ukraine — about 250 according to industry estimates — are creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically look like rural car repair shops.

Employees at a startup run by entrepreneur Andrii Denysenko can put together an unmanned ground vehicle called the Odyssey in four days at a shed used by the company. Its most important feature is the price tag: $35,000, or roughly 10% of the cost of an imported model.

Denysenko asked that The Associated Press not publish details of the location to protect the infrastructure and the people working there.

The site is partitioned into small rooms for welding and body work. That includes making fiberglass cargo beds, spray-painting the vehicles gun-green and fitting basic electronics, battery-powered engines, off-the-shelf cameras and thermal sensors.


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The military is assessing dozens of new unmanned air, ground and marine vehicles produced by the no-frills startup sector, whose production methods are far removed from giant Western defense companies’.

A fourth branch of Ukraine’s military — the Unmanned Systems Forces — joined the army, navy and air force in May.

Engineers take inspiration from articles in defense magazines or online videos to produce cut-price platforms. Weapons or smart components can be added later.

“We are fighting a huge country, and they don’t have any resource limits. We understand that we cannot spend a lot of human lives,” said Denysenko, who heads the defense startup UkrPrototyp. “War is mathematics.”

One of its drones, the car-sized Odyssey, spun on its axis and kicked up dust as it rumbled forward in a cornfield in the north of the country last month.

The 800-kilogram (1,750-pound) prototype that looks like a small, turretless tank with its wheels on tracks can travel up to 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) on one charge of a battery the size of a small beer cooler.

The prototype acts as a rescue-and-supply platform but can be modified to carry a remotely operated heavy machine gun or sling mine-clearing charges.

“Squads of robots … will become logistics devices, tow trucks, minelayers and deminers, as well as self-destructive robots,” a government fundraising page said after the launch of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. “The first robots are already proving their effectiveness on the battlefield.”

Mykhailo Fedorov, the deputy prime minister for digital transformation, is encouraging citizens to take free online courses and assemble aerial drones at home. He wants Ukrainians to make a million of flying machines a year.

“There will be more of them soon,” the fundraising page said. “Many more.”

Denysenko’s company is working on projects including a motorized exoskeleton that would boost a soldier’s strength and carrier vehicles to transport a soldier’s equipment and even help them up an incline. “We will do everything to make unmanned technologies develop even faster. (Russia’s) murderers use their soldiers as cannon fodder, while we lose our best people,” Fedorov wrote in an online post.

Ukraine has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI and the combination of low-cost weapons and artificial intelligence tools is worrying many experts who say low-cost drones will enable their proliferation.

Technology leaders to the United Nations and the Vatican worry that the use of drones and AI in weapons could reduce the barrier to killing and dramatically escalate conflicts.

Human Rights Watch and other international rights groups are calling for a ban on weapons that exclude human decision making, a concern echoed by the U.N. General Assembly, Elon Musk and the founders of the Google-owned, London-based startup DeepMind.

“Cheaper drones will enable their proliferation,” said Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “Their autonomy is also only likely to increase.”
___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine










OpenAI whistleblowers ask SEC to investigate the company’s non-disclosure agreements with employees


 An OpenAI logo is shown on May 29, 2024, in Los Angeles. OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission and asked the agency to investigate whether the company illegally restricted workers from speaking out about the risks of its artificial intelligence technology.(AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)


 July 15, 2024

NEW YORK (AP) — OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission and asked the agency to investigate whether the ChatGPT maker illegally restricted workers from speaking out about the risks of its artificial intelligence technology.

A letter to SEC Chair Gary Gensler representing “one or more anonymous and confidential” whistleblowers asks the agency to swiftly and aggressively enforce its rules against non-disclosure agreements that discourage employees or investors from raising concerns with regulators.

The July 1 letter references a formal whistleblower complaint recently filed with the SEC. The Washington Post was the first to report on the letter.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office shared a copy of the letter with The Associated Press, noting it was provided to his office by legally protected whistleblowers.

“OpenAI’s policies and practices appear to cast a chilling effect on whistleblowers’ right to speak up and receive due compensation for their protected disclosures,” said Grassley, an Iowa Republican, in a written statement. “In order for the federal government to stay one step ahead of artificial intelligence, OpenAI’s nondisclosure agreements must change.”


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OpenAI said in a statement that its policies protect employees’ rights to make protected disclosures. The company also noted that it’s already made changes to remove “nondisparagement terms” that could punish departing employees if they criticize the company after they leave.

SEC didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday and doesn’t typically comment on whether or not it is opening an investigation.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to confirm delay in Aug. 8 robotaxi unveil event to make design change

DETROIT (AP) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday appeared to confirm a report that the company’s much-ballyhooed event to unveil a robotaxi will be delayed beyond its scheduled Aug. 8 date.

Musk didn’t give a new date for the event, but in a posting on X, the social media site he owns, he wrote that he requested a design change to the front of the vehicle.

“The extra time allows us to show off a few other things,” he wrote.

A message was left Monday seeking comment from Tesla.

Bloomberg News reported on Thursday that the robotaxi event would be delayed until October due to changes sought by Musk. That sent Tesla shares down 8% for the day. But they have since rallied and closed Monday up 1.8% at $252.64.

Tesla shares had been down more than 40% earlier in the year, but are up more than 80% since hitting a 52-week low in April.

For many years Musk has said Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” system will allow a fleet of robotaxis to generate income for the company and Tesla owners, making use of the electric vehicles when they would have been parked. Musk has been touting self-driving vehicles as a growth catalyst for Tesla since “Full Self Driving” hardware went on sale late in 2015. The system is being tested on public roads by thousands of owners.

But in investigative documents, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it found 75 crashes and one death involving “Full Self Driving.” It’s not clear whether the system was at fault.

Tesla, which is based in Austin, Texas, has said the system cannot drive itself and that human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.