John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALISON WEIR IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“How Israel and Its Partisans Work to Censor the Internet
“Numerous well-funded, organized projects by and for Israel work to flood social media with pro-Israel propaganda, while blocking facts Israel dislikes.”
https://russia-insider.com/en/how-israel-and-its-partisans-work-censor-internet/ri22743
I don’t generally look at YouTube, so I am not as aware as Ms. Weir of what happens there. But I follow world affairs fairly closely and read many newspapers on the Internet.
And, yes, all of the points the author discusses are very much in evidence in our corporate and even our state (CBC, BBC, etc.) press.
If you want an excellent example of Israeli students or army groups at work on the Internet, go to the comments section concerning any story about, or of importance to, Israel.
You will invariably find comments under pseudonyms whose tone and wording are just so painfully obvious as to their origin, you just wonder why they bother, but they do.
You find certain ritualized sets of "facts" repeated time and again, as though from a crib sheet. You find utterly preposterous claims of various kinds. And you find hateful attacks on Palestinians, Syria, Russia, and others not in Israel’s good graces. At times, you even get some slurs and ethnic insults resembling the flavor of the recent appalling remarks by Israel’s Chief Rabbi about black people resembling monkeys.
I've always thought of the effort as kicking up lots of dust into the middle of discussions just to make them messy and confusing.
The Independent is particularly a target for them because it is, without a doubt, on the subject of Israel-Palestine the freest newspaper I am familiar with in "the West." Not that it is like that in all things, far from it, but on that subject, comment is almost always open and is relatively uncensored.
Over at The Guardian, it is quite a different story, and the Israelis do not have to follow these practices.
The Guardian is the most flagrantly biased newspaper I know on the subject of Israel and anything concerning it, as well as on the related topic of American imperial affairs.
No more so, of course, than The New York Times (which we now know passes every single story concerning Israel by the official Israeli censor before publishing), but the Times is a little subtler about its bias. The Guardian comes pretty close at times to being crude, like someone stomping into your house with dirty boots on.
Virtually no story about Israel-Palestine is open for comment. So, no concerns for the flocks of Israel’s paid commenters.
Also, The Guardian has an elaborate systematic form of censorship for comments. Comments are freely and often removed by editors. For those who make too many such comments, a warning is given every time you go to comment about your comments being pre-moderated. Finally, if they don't like your performance under that regime, they simply cancel your account's commenting privilege.
I know. I’ve been through the entire process and now am forced to comment under a pseudonym, something which has never been my practice anywhere. However, even under the pseudonym, I have arrived at the pre-moderation warning stage.
This is, of course, all done under the pretext of not following “house rules,” but I can assure you it is nothing of the kind. It is all about saying too much of the wrong kinds of things from The Guardian’s point of view or countering too strongly an article by one of their regular staff. I still make some effort there because there are now so very few papers without paywalls where you can comment, and a fair proportion of my comments do get through.
The Guardian, years ago, was a rather dull, serious paper in support of the Labour Party and things reasonably progressive. Its new management has changed it entirely, it resembles a pop magazine with lots of photos, and it has a great many silly and faddish articles that just fill lots of space and cost them nothing.
As with so many papers today, under the new economic circumstances induced by changing technology, The Guardian does virtually no real reporting or investigating, especially with regard to such matters abroad as Syria or Ukraine or Yemen or Palestine. Many of its writers and editors appear to know few more hard facts about such topics than the man on the street they are supposedly informing.
The Guardian constantly promotes the American-Israeli narrative of Russia is bad and NATO must be on its toes. It constantly promotes tales of anti-Semitism in Britain, despite that country being one of the more peaceful in the world in which you could live and despite a great deal of success for Jewish people in British society. There have been days, and I am not exaggerating, when that the paper’s front page has three stories related to supposed anti-Semitism. It does get a bit tiring.
In Canada, the CBC has long enjoyed some reputation for fairness and other good things, but it certainly no longer deserves it at all. On all its news-related talk shows, the bias is painfully obvious. The host of its Sunday morning long news and events show has done such charming things as call President Putin a thug on air. Now, that’s sure my idea of journalism.
Obvious, too, is the just plain misinformation at times, especially on subjects like Syria or Russia. It suffers, too, from the changed economics of press and broadcasting, maintaining relatively few foreign correspondents and little real journalism even at home. It is almost humorous to hear its correspondent for the whole Middle East reporting from Jerusalem. And does he ever spend time in Damascus or Tehran or Beirut, to talk to leaders and influential figures there? The answer is the same as for every corporate newspaper. Yet they all keep pretending to tell us what is happening.
So, that is the situation in the corporate and state press, in America, in Canada, and in Britain. I understand that it is much the same in Germany. It truly is rather distressing the way subjects can be so controlled in what we have been trained to think of as a free press. But I always remember the famous saying about the only way to have freedom of the press is to own one.
