https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2024

International Reporting: Staff of The New York Times

For its wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on October 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza.

Context:

The Intercept: “Between the Hammer and the Anvil” The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé

Israel promised it had extraordinary amounts of eyewitness testimony. “Investigators have gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, according to the Israeli police, including at the site of a music festival that was attacked,” Schwartz, Gettleman, and Stella reported on December 4. Those testimonies never materialized.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Abdush’s sister, that in a short timespan “they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?” Speaking about the rape allegation, her brother-in-law said: “The media invented it.”

“There is nothing,” Schwartz said she was told. “There was no collection of evidence from the scene.”

Vanity Fair: New York Times Launches Leak Investigation Over Report on Its Israel-Gaza Coverage Management has questioned staffers, including Daily producers, after The Intercept revealed internal debate over a yet-to-air episode on Hamas weaponizing sexual violence. Such a probe is highly unusual, say staffers, one of whom dubbed it a “witch hunt.”

The economic base of fascism has always been the petit bourgeois, or as I like to call them, the roofing class. Small business owners. The guys who have a handful of contractors and pay 1,200 bucks a month on an F-150 Raptor that’s never been used for any kind of manual labor.

Every worker in this country has always been at the mercy of the elite, but not the elite fascists assume are pulling the strings. It’s not a shadow cabal of elite Jews, it’s just the people who own the means of production. They’re not shy about it. People like Warren Buffet routinely admit there’s a class war being waged, and that the capitalists want to make sure that they win it.

On the whole, there’s a reason the ruling class tolerates fascism and not socialism. Socialism is genuinely revolutionary, whereas fascism is just a cancerous offshoot of capitalism that can, in their mind, be used as a tool when needed.

What we’re seeing today has the same hallmarks of every other period where fascism has grown in popularity: economic insecurity, the formation of fascist paramilitaries, and a series of charismatic figures trying to tap into the rising tide of far-right populism for personal gain.

According to software engineer and blogger, Paul Biggar, however, one key detail on the methods employed by the Lavender system that is often overlooked is the involvement of the messaging platform, WhatsApp. A major determining factor of the system’s identification is simply if an individual is in a WhatsApp group containing another suspected militant.

Aside from the inaccuracy of the method and the moral question of targeting Palestinians based on shared WhatsApp groups or social media connections, there is also notably the doubt it brings to the platform being privacy-based and guaranteeing “end-to-end” encryption for messages.

Stating that WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, makes it complicit in Israel’s killing of “pre-crime” suspects in Gaza, Biggar accused the company of directly violating international humanitarian law, as well as its own public commitment to human rights.

These revelations are the latest evidence of Meta – formerly Facebook – aiding in the suppression of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, with the platform long having been criticised for taking significant steps to shut down dissent against Israeli and Zionist narratives. Those measures have included permitting adverts promoting a holocaust against Palestinians and even attempting to flag the word ‘Zionist’ as hate speech.

Questioning the accuracy of the report, a WhatsApp spokesperson told MEMO: “We have no information that these reports are accurate. WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government. For over a decade, Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested. Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.

“I think part of the problem is young people aren’t having enough sex so they go on the hunt for fake threats and the most popular threat through history is [antisemitism].”

Galloway said American society would not survive if its people could not rally behind noble causes — adding that much of what he was seeing reminded him of the early rise of Hitler.

“It’s easy to poke fun at these kids, but history has a way of repeating itself, and this is how it starts. In ’30s Germany, a progressive community, a thriving gay community, excellent academic institutions. And how it started, was it was fashionable to wear a brown shirt and mock students at the University of Vienna,’ Galloway said.

Galloway repeated his observation which went viral this week that if students at terrorist encampments were chanting slogans calling for the death of black or gays they would be swiftly stamped out.

And that professors who did so would never work again.

Protesters calling for Israel to cease fire in its war with Hamas who have disrupted US public events and infrastructure are practicing “leftwing fascism” or “leftwing totalitarianism”, a senior US House Democrat said, adding that such protesters are “challenging representative democracy” and should be arrested.

“Intimidation is the tactic,” said Adam Smith of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the House armed services committee. “Intimidation and an effort to silence opposition … I don’t know if there’s such a thing as leftwing fascism. If you want to just call it leftwing totalitarianism, then that’s what it is. It is a direct challenge to representative democracy now.”

Smith was speaking – before the outbreak this week of mass protests on US college campuses, many producing arrests – to the One Decision Podcast and its guest host Christina Ruffini, a CBS News reporter.

Blinken never reads my briefings and it shows 🤡 https://lemmy.ml/search?creatorId=1468481&q=uyghur

Kapustin is indeed dressed in black for his discussion with POLITICO in a downtown Kyiv hotel — though his clothing is free of any neo-Nazi logos or flashes. That’s despite the fact he runs a far-right apparel line of T-shirts and caps emblazoned with white nationalist and xenophobic imagery as well as the Nazi symbol 88 — the eighth letter of the alphabet twice being a not-so-subtle code for “Heil Hitler.”

He has links with American neo-Nazi groups, and in 2021 co-hosted a podcast with Robert Rundo, founder of the Rise Above Movement, which participated in the Charlottesville white supremacist rally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrylo_Budanov

In 2014, he took part in the war in Donbas, where he was wounded several times and reportedly participated in a number of classified special military operations.

According to The New York Times, Budanov was brought to the United States for treatment at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after being wounded in fighting in the Donbas.

Budanov was one of the members of the elite Unit 2245 of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate trained by CIA.

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR): UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want

The editorial boards of the nation’s major media organizations must have been frantic last week.

Used to reporting on US foreign policy, wars and arms exports so as to portray the United States as a benevolent, law-abiding and democracy-defending nation, they were confronted on March 25 with a real challenge dealing with Israel and Gaza. No sooner did the Biden administration, for the first time, abstain and thus allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that was not just critical of Israel, but demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, than US officials began declaring that the resolution that they allowed to pass was really meaningless.

It was “nonbinding,” they said.

That was enough for the New York Times (3/25/24), which produced the most one-sided report on the decision. That article focused initially on how Resolution 2728 (which followed three resolutions that the US had vetoed, and a fourth that was so watered down that China and Russia vetoed it instead) had led to a diplomatic dust-up with the Israeli government: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a planned visit to Washington by a high-level Israeli delegation to discuss Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah and the future of Gaza and the West Bank.

It should be noted that the New York Times, when there is a dispute regarding a document, typically runs a copy of the document in question—or, if it is too long, the relevant portion of it. In the case of Resolution 2728, which even counting its headline only runs 263 words, that would have not been a hard call. Despite the disagreement between the US and most of the Council over the wording of the ceasefire resolution, the Times chose not to run or even excerpt it.

Fucking Hasbara Times. And this is just weeks after their Al-Aqsa Flood atrocity porn fabrication was exposed by The Intercept: “Between the Hammer and the Anvil” The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé

Not to imply that the Times was the only one: the FAIR article goes on about other US media misrepresentations, and compares them to European media coverage of the UNSC resolution.

Deconstructed podcast interview about the piece with the journalist:
How the Gaza War Is Reshaping Social Media

Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving the 2 million people who remain, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food; a group of charity leaders warns that without adequate aid, hundreds of thousands more will soon likely join the dead.

Yet Israel is still planning to invade Rafah, where the majority of people in Gaza have fled; UN officials have described the carnage that is expected to ensue as “beyond imagination.” In the West Bank, armed settlers and Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians, including US citizens. These actions, which experts on genocide have testified meet the crime of genocide, are conducted with the diplomatic and military support of the US government.

I am haunted by the final social media post of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on February 25: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

NPR: A former State Department employee speaks out against Biden's support for Israel

NBC: Israel faces growing U.S. ire on war in Gaza A State Department official told NBC News she felt she had no choice but to quit over American support for Israel, while a new poll found that a majority in the U.S. now oppose its ally's actions in Gaza.