This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Faramarz Farbod.

Britain and America would like everyone to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured more than a century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK Axis don’t want this important slice of history resurrected to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

William Knox D’Arcy, having obtained a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia and with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 and completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually cancelled the D’Arcy agreement and took the matter to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were slightly improved but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company was re-named Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951 while Aramco shared profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls to nationalise its oil could no longer be ignored. In March of that year the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavourable to the host country.

Social reformer Dr Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, cancelling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable:

Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence. (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?

Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. The coup by MI6 and the CIA was successful and in August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

For his impudence Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He was imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

Smouldering resentment for more than 70 years

The British-American conspiracy that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. It all backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word MOSSADEQ – the Iranian who dared to break the chains of slavery and servitude to Western colonial interests.

Is Britain incapable of playing fair? During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

“The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

The company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment and we were mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. They had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it?

Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

In 2022 when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

Now we’re playing dirty yet again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 77 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when the Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”.

Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration and support. UK prime minister Starmer much prefers to talk about “the malign influence of Iran”

The excuse this time is that Iran’s nuclear programme might be about to produce weapons-grade material which is bad news for Israel. There’s a blanket ‘hush’ over Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nukes. The US and UK and allies think it’s OK for mad-dog Israel to have nuclear weapons but not Iran which has to live under this horrific Israeli threat. Then there’s America’s QME doctrine which guarantees Israel a ‘Qualitative Military Edge’ over its Middle East neighbours.

Then consider that Israel is the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention. Yes, it’s quite evident that the Zionist entity, not Iran, is the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Of course, the world’s hegemon would like to get its hands on all their oil. But it would be simplistic to think that would be only for narrow economic reasons. Control over energy flows – especially from countries with large reserves – is central to maintaining global influence. Washington requires control of strategic resources to maintain its position as the global hegemon, guided by its official policy of “full spectrum dominance.”

For Venezuela and Iran, sovereign control of vast hydrocarbon assets is a precondition for exercising a modest level of independence and even some regional and global influence in a geopolitical landscape dominated by the US and its allies.  But their drive for self-determination is animated by a third and essential shared characteristic. That is, the political one; both are led by revolutionary administrations.

The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the Islamic Revolution in Iran were both of necessity anti-imperialist. And it for this political reason, even more than the economic, both have earned Washington’s hostility. Conversely, the Iran-Venezuela political relationship is rooted in mutual support against US aggression and a commitment to sovereignty and non-interference.

Venezuela-Iran relations

 Venezuela has been at the forefront of Iran’s engagement in Latin America. The two nations were founding members of the OPEC alliance of oil-producing countries in 1960.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez made his first visit to Iran in 2001. Since then the two countries have forged close relations, especially regarding energy production, industrial cooperation, and economic development. Chávez awarded visiting Iranian President Mohammad Khatami with the Order of the Liberator, praising him as an anti-imperialist. Venezuela and Iran “are firm in the face of any aggression,” said Chávez.

With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as Iran’s president in 2005, he and Chavez visited each other multiple times forming a self-described “axis of unity” against US imperialism. Hundreds of bilateral agreements were executed between the two oil-producing states. Chavez supported Iran’s nuclear program, pledging in 2006 to “stay by Iran at any time and under any condition,”

In a prescient address at Tehran University, Chávez admonished: “If the US empire succeeds in consolidating its dominance, then humankind has no future. Therefore, we have to save humankind and put an end to the US empire.” With the passing of Chávez and the election of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela-Iran relations continued to consolidate.

In 2015, US President Barack Obama declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to US national security as an excuse to impose unilateral coercive measures on Caracas. By 2017, US President Donald Trump intensified the hybrid war against Venezuela with a “maximum pressure” campaign.

Amid crippling US sanctions, Iran dispatched multiple tanker shipments in 2020 to help stabilize Venezuela’s fuel supply. Iran, along with China, also sent technicians to help repair refineries. It is no exaggeration to say that Iran’s assistance was been a lifeline for Venezuela.

Joint projects have included ammunition plants, auto assembly (Venirauto), a cement factory, the Venirán Tractor Factory, and refinery upgrades. An Iranian supermarket chain even opened stores in Venezuela.

Then Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi signed a 20-year cooperative agreement with Venezuela in 2020. Besides tourism, food production, and opening airplane routes, the agreement addressed mutual defense, including the continued transfer of drone-making technology. Raisi complemented Caracas for “exemplary resistance against sanctions and threats from enemies and imperialists.”

In 2022, agreements were signed to restore Venezuela’s El Palito refinery and explore nanotech collaboration. This year, the two countries established a fiber optic factory. Plus, there have been extensive cultural and educational exchanges.

In Washington’s crosshairs

 The refusal of Venezuela and Iran to align with the US geopolitical agenda is a key factor in Washington’s coercive strategy. It reflects the hegemon’s broader pattern of targeting resource-rich, independent states that resist integration into its “world order.”

 Both countries have rejected Western dominance and have nationalized their considerable oil sectors. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh established NIOC in Iran in 1951, precipitating the CIA/M16 coup that disposed him. Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez established PDVSA in 1976, later expanded and reoriented by President Chávez after 2002.

Current US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela reduce their ability of to sell oil freely. This limits alternative energy markets that could compete with US-aligned suppliers such as the Gulf states. It also reduces petrodollar diversification. Both countries have tried to trade oil outside the dollar system, including via a system of barter with allies.

Moreover, Venezuela and Iran have been targeted for their non-aligned foreign policy. Central has been Iran’s pivotal position in the resistance to Zionism. Iran supports Hezbollah, the former government in Syria, Ansar Allah (Houthis), and above all the Palestinian struggle. Likewise, Venezuela has been among the foremost supporters in Latin America of the Palestinian’s right to self-determination, having severed relations with Israel in 2009. Caracas has also opposed US-backed regional blocs and supports socialist and anti-neoliberal movements (e.g., ALBA, ties with Cuba and Nicaragua).

Confronted by aggressive hostility by the US and its allies, both Iran and Venezuela have pivoted toward China, Russia, and the BRICS+ coalition as alternatives. Sanctions from the US and its partners have accelerated the creation of alternative financial, logistical, and diplomatic systems that bypass Washington’s control (e.g., INSTEX, barter, crypto, regional banks).

In a recent interview, Iranian diplomat Ali Faramarzi affirmed that Venezuela and Iran are bound by profound affinities. They have significantly deepened what TeleSUR calls their “symbiotic” relationship, forging an alliance that spans political solidarity, economic cooperation, military collaboration, and shared ideological stances. Both nations, facing intense pressure and sanctions from the US, have found common cause in resisting Western hegemony and promoting a multipolar world order.

Regime change in Iran could have major negative consequences for Venezuela. Reestablishment of a US client-state, as it was under the Shah of Iran, would mean the loss of diplomatic support for Caracas, the probable end to energy cooperation, greater defense vulnerabilities, and cascading adverse economic and trade repercussions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

The pre-emptive, illegal strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure by Israel was not merely an attempt to arrest an alleged existential threat from yielding fruit (that weapons of mass destruction canard again); it was also a murderous exercise of institutional decapitation. Instead of receiving widespread condemnation in the halls of Washington, Brussels and other European capitals, there was cool nonchalance: Israel was within its right to limitlessly expand its idea of self-defence, a concept now so broad it has become a crime against peace.

We have seen how that self-defence so far operates. In Gaza, it functions on the level of starvation, the levelling of critical infrastructure, the killing of scores of civilians in each strike, the displacement of populations by the hundreds of thousands, the murdering of aid workers, and shooting those desperately in need of humanitarian aid as it is rationed by private security companies.

Regarding Iran, the flexible scope of Israeli self-defence includes the killing of a thick layer of military leaders, preferably while sleeping in the bosom of their families. Such figures include Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces; Hossein Salami, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC); Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the air force wing of the IRGC; Esmail Qaani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force; and Ali Shamkhani, an aide to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Of the scientists associated with Iran’s nuclear program, some 25 are on the assassination list, what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu libellously designated “Hitler’s nuclear team”. Thus far, the murders of 14 have been confirmed by sources cited in the Times of Israel. The Israeli Defense Forces have published some of their names, including nuclear engineering specialist Fereydoon Abbasi; physics expert Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi; chemical engineer Akbar Motalebi Zadeh; and nuclear physicist Ahmadreza Zolfaghari Daryani. Many of the figures are said by Israel to have been the intellectual progeny of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the touted father of the Iranian nuclear project.

Having killed the father in 2020, Israel has, with biblical brutality, sought to exterminate the brood and rob the cradle. With a mechanical formality bordering on the glacial, an IDF statement declared that, “The elimination of the scientists was made possible following in-depth intelligence research that intensified over the past year, as part of a classified and compartmentalized IDF plan.”

The attacks have broadened, suggesting a nationwide program of destabilisation. Oil and gas facilities have been struck, including the world’s biggest gas field, the South Pars. Not satisfied, Defence Minister Israel Katz promised to attack Iran’s media outlets, having an eye on Iranian state broadcaster IRIB: “The Iranian propaganda and incitement mouthpiece is on its way to disappear.” True to his word, the outlet was attacked even as TV anchor Sahar Emami was broadcasting, a crime captured in real time. In doing so, Israel replicates its own efforts in Gaza, which have seen the killing of 178 journalists since October 2023, the most lethal conflict ever recorded for media workers.

Netanyahu will not stop there. He smells the vapours of regime change and societal chaos, and, as his American counterparts did on eve of their illegally led invasion of Iraq in 2003, merrily feeds the notion that foreign interference can masquerade as liberation. “I believe the day of your liberation is near,” he haughtily proclaimed to Iran’s downtrodden subjects.

His most wishful target yet remains the religious leaders of the country. In an interview with ABC news, the Israeli PM was frank that killing Khamenei would not escalate the conflict so much as end it. He had been reluctantly dissuaded from doing so by US President Donald Trump, according to Reuters, Associated Press, Axios and Israel’s Channel 13. To Axios, a US official said that the administration had “communicated to the Israelis that President Trump is opposed to that. The Iranians haven’t killed an American, and discussion of killing political leaders should not be on the table.” Given Israel’s elastic stretching of self-defence, such restraint is likely to change.

Not wishing to be too modest, Netanyahu would have you think that he has done the world a moral service. “I’ll tell you what would have come if we hadn’t acted,” he boasted in a video message. “We had information that this unscrupulous regime was planning to give the nuclear weapons that they would develop to their terrorist proxies. That’s nuclear terrorism on steroids. That would threaten the entire world.”

These words are a chilling echo of the rationale used by the George W. Bush administration in attacking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, ostensibly to disarm him of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that had already been eliminated. (The US had, as cheer leaders and supporters, those other fine students of international law: the United Kingdom and Australia.) As part of Washington’s “Global War on Terror”, President Bush explained in his 2002 State of the Union address that North Korea, Iran and Iraq constituted an “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” By seeking WMDs, such states “could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.” Many justifications for using force in international relations, especially regarding the language of illegal war, are reruns of plagiarism.

For Netanyahu, killing Iranian leaders and the scientific intelligentsia was a salvaging antidote, a point he was trying to impress upon his US allies. “Our enemy is your enemy… We’re dealing with something that will threaten all of us sooner or later. Our victory will be your victory.” Forget international law and its contrivances, its disciplining protocols and hindering conventions. In its place, an unvarnished rogue state which, by any other name, would be as criminally dangerous.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Starvation, dizziness, brain fog, and sickness all directly affect the daily reports produced by Gaza’s dismantled, exhausted press corps, most of whom are already living and working in tents, amid indiscriminate bombing, and often without electricity or internet access.

While what U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterrez described as a “teaspoon of aid” has trickled in to southern and central Gaza since May 19, the strip’s entire population of 2.1 million people remain acutely food insecure, with the prospect of famine looming amid an intense military offensive.

“Due to hunger, I lose focus and forget information during my live TV reports. On two occasions, I collapsed after finishing a report, and it turned out I had food poisoning,” Saleh Al-Natoor, Gaza correspondent for Al Araby TV, told CPJ from southern Khan Yunis, where he fled with his family to escape bombing in Gaza City in October 2023.

“We suffer from continuous hunger attacks, extreme fatigue, loss of balance, and an inability to think or perform any tasks. Sometimes I am too exhausted to search for food in the nearby street markets,” he said.

Assault on press freedom

The tiny, densely populated Gaza Strip was heavily reliant on food imports before October 7, 2023, with more than 500 trucks entering each day. Last year, journalists told CPJ they were on near-starvation rations, drinking unclean water, and foraging for scraps. CPJ has repeatedly called on the international community to urgently pressure Israel to allow food and humanitarian aid into Gaza, protect journalists, and lift the ban on media access.

Despite the images of emaciated babies on Western news channels following Israel’s March 2 blockade, international pressure has only produced what one U.N. spokesperson described as “a token that appears more like cynical optics than any real attempt to tackle the soaring hunger crisis.”

“What we are witnessing is not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but a direct, unprecedented assault on press freedom, while the world watches,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Journalists cannot carry out their work — let alone survive — while being deliberately starved and denied life-saving aid. Israel must allow humanitarians, international media, and human rights investigators into Gaza at once.”

Firsthand testimonies from journalists in Gaza offer some insight into the daily horrors that millions of Palestinians are living through.

“It feels as though your stomach walls are collapsing into each other, and you taste bitterness in your throat, as if the digestive fluids have reached your mouth,” Al-Natoor wrote on Facebook, detailing what it feels like to experience a “hunger attack.”

“A sharp headache strikes the top of your head or a sense of emptiness surrounds your brain. When you try to stand, you feel dizzy and off-balance. You quickly try to support yourself on something and close your eyes for a while, hoping the blood will return to your brain.

“Our bodies have started to digest themselves, muscle mass is vanishing, and we suffer from extreme emaciation. Hunger is not just a metaphor —  it is truly a murder weapon we face every hour,” he posted.

Canned food, exorbitant prices

The journalists who spoke to CPJ said their diet was mainly tinned goods, sometimes supplemented with sporadic supplies of foul-smelling flour, and occasional rotting vegetables. Even these minimal supplies have become increasingly scarce and unaffordable due to an exorbitant increase in prices.

“We rely solely on canned food from aid packages — beans, cheese, processed meats that lack sufficient nutritional value. They merely help us break our hunger — not more,” Al-Natoor told CPJ. 

“Even simple necessities, including canned goods, have become unavailable,” said Akram Dalloul, a correspondent for the Lebanon-based broadcaster Al-Mayadeen, whose weight has fallen from 95 to under 80 kilograms during the war.

“We are talking about a reality that is difficult to describe in words. Often, we cannot stand on our feet because there is no milk or eggs,” said Dalloul, who posted a video on Facebook of himself and his son sharing one raw eggplant as a meal.

Mohammad Al-Hajjar, a freelancer contributing to the Associated Press news agency and London-based site Middle East Eye, said journalists suffer like everyone else in Gaza.

“There are no basic food supplies — no flour, sugar, cooking oil, ghee, rice, or legumes. We only have a few canned goods and some locally grown vegetables in the southern part of the Strip,” Al-Hajjar told CPJ from Gaza City. “My eight-year-old son Majd suffered from malnutrition and dehydration during the first wave of famine at the start of the war.”

Money exchangers take 30% cut

Al-Hajjar is not the only journalist juggling work with finding food for his family.

“Fruits are non-existent, and some vegetables are available in very limited quantities and are far too expensive,” said Shrouq Al Alia, director of Ain Media production company, a correspondent for France 24 television network, and the sole parent to a toddler. “My daughter often complains of abdominal pain.”

Their poor diet has also caused stomach and colon problems for the 30-year-old, who received CPJ’s 2024 International Press Freedom Award in recognition of her courage in taking over Ain Media after her husband Roshdi Sarraj was killed on October 22, 2023.

“We face several battles: first, to find flour that is not spoiled and safe for human consumption; second, to afford the soaring prices; and third, to access cash because banks are closed,” Al Alia said, adding that the cost of a 25-kilogram sack of flour has risen from 25 to 1,500 shekels (US$7 to $418) or more — an increase of 6,900% — since the war began.

“This forces us to turn to money exchangers who take a 30% cut on any cash we withdraw,” said Al Alia, describing the system by which Palestinians transfer their money digitally to middlemen who provide them with cash since banks stopped operating.

And Israel’s blockade on cooking gas remained in place. “We rely on wood fire for cooking, which is inefficient and exhausting,” added Al Aila, whose weight has fallen from 59 to 50 kilograms during the war.

‘We work while hungry’

With the import of water purification supplies still prohibited, chronic water scarcity, and no way to manage sewage, diarrhea, scabies, and skin rashes have proliferated.

“We’ve been affected by hepatitis as a result of no food, hygiene kits, or clean water,” Majdi Esleem, a 40-year-old Palestinian reporter for the pro-Fatah Al Kofiya TV, told CPJ from Gaza City. “Most days we [journalists] work while hungry,” said the father of five.

“During work and daily life, I frequently suffer from health problems, including dizziness, difficulty seeing, constant headaches, and weakness,” said freelance photographer Abd Elhakeem Abu Riash, who contributes to Al Jazeera.

“It is extremely difficult to obtain food or even a single meal … The calories I burn during field journalism are not compensated for due to the scarcity of food.”

The Israel Defense Forces’ North America Media Desk in New York referred CPJ to the Israeli military unit overseeing humanitarian aid, COGAT, which said via email, “The IDF, through COGAT, is working to allow and facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of the Gaza Strip, and is also actively supporting these efforts, including by conducting regular monitoring of food stocks within the Strip.”

CPJ emailed the ministry of communications and ministry of defense requesting comment but did not receive any responses.

CPJ calls on EU, others to ensure access and aid to Gaza

As famine tightens its grip on Gaza, CPJ calls on the international community — particularly the European Union, itself currently reviewing the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and the 50 countries that make up the Media Freedom Coalition — to support the following calls to action:

● Israel and Egypt must allow immediate, unhindered media access to Gaza, so that they may directly cover the hostilities on the ground and related news stories, including starvation and the wider humanitarian toll.

● Israel should immediately facilitate access to humanitarian aid to journalists in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Journalists, like all civilians in Gaza, are struggling to obtain the essentials — such as food, water, and sanitary supplies — necessary to live, let alone to report on the reality facing Gazans.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Doja Daoud.

That is the Introduction.

*****

The most pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian countries — America and its European colonies — are so blind to the evilness of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the residents of Gaza, and of its ongoing and accelerating land-thefts from the Palestinians in the West Bank, as to present the serious question of why these massive ongoing evils, which are of historic magnitude, are absent from their Governments’ official condemnations and (until recently) almost completely absent from these countries’ news-reports, even as-if these horrors weren’t being perpetrated by Israel with America’s weapons and satellite guidance and targeting, or weren’t even happening at all. There is a real blindness about the blindness, as if this tolerance of Israel’s (and America’s) genocide and land-theft against Palestinians simply were not so. But it is. What explains the blindness and the blindness about the blindness — the utter refusal — to acknowledge the evilness of Israel (and of the U.S. Government ever since Harry Truman created the state of Israel in 1948, even when the genocidal intent of Israel’s founders was already known both privately and publicly)?

Stupidity — believing the Israeli Government’s lies — is part of the answer. Especially the lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew is obvious to everyone but idiots, because many Jews are anti-Israel — even some rabbis, both in America and in Israel, are against Israel — and this means that the equation between “Jew” and “Zionist” (supporter of Israel) is false. Only stupid people would believe it. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration and many throughout the world spout Israel’s lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew (an “anti-Semite”); and, for example, prestigious American universities have expelled students for speaking publicly against Israel’s slaughter of Gazans — and the U.S. Government, despite the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (which prohibits the Government’s suppressing public expressions of political opinions), has halted federal funds to universities that DON’T expel such students.

However, even the opponents of that lie falsify, by alleging that the Jewish religion does not support this ethnic cleansing and genocide. Here are a few examples from the Jewish religion’s alleged ‘holy texts’ or Scriptures, specifically referring to what their ‘God’ wants:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land the Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it, and is therefore co-equal with Israel in doing this genocide, but (since America pretends not to be a theocratic nation [and our Constitution is entirely secular, so anything at all theocratic in the U.S. Government would actually be traitorous], and not even an aristocratic nation, but instead a democratic nation — though it now IS actually an aristocratic nation, a nation ruled by billionaires instead of by mere voters) alleges that it isn’t participating in the genocide. That allegation by the U.S. Government is clearly a lie.

Israel, therefore, does represent Judaism’s mythological god by doing to the Gazans what it is doing to them, and also doing to Palestinians in the West Bank what it is doing to them. Self-alleged Jews — including some rabbis — who say otherwise (that Judaism isn’t intrinsically racist and even genocidally so), are clearly lying about the Jewish religion, by saying that being a follower of the Jewish religion does NOT necessarily entail being a Zionist. Though Zionism, as a political movement, started only with Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish Nation in 1896, Zionism had been an intrinsic part of the Jewish faith ever since that faith’s Scripture, the Torah, which includes those passages, which Israel is now trying to finalize in both Gaza and the West Bank (and a bit beyond), which Scripture became Judaism’s Torah, or ultimate holy Scripture, at some time during the 6th-5th Century BC. Since that time, every Jewish assembly place or synagogue has had a Torah. It is the basis of the Jewish religion, and before that, Jews were simply tribes.

Judaism’s hatred of, and desire to destroy, the Palestinians is as old as the faith itself. For this reason, as I headlined on 14 August 2017, “Netanyahu’s Pro-Nazi Lie: ‘Hitler Wanted To Expel The Jews’“: Netanyahu blamed Palestinians — NOT Christians — for the Holocaust. Despite Hitler himself having been a Catholic, and that Church having held a solemn private (but attended by Bormann and Goebbels) Memorial Mass for him, on 6 May 1945, a week after his suicide. Hitler was born, lived, and died, as a Catholic.

However, there is nothing unique about Judaism’s racism. Consider, for example, the Christians, not just Hitler but all of the Nazi leaders, and the 94% of Germans in that time who called themselves “Christian”:

The Catholic-raised Hitler took very seriously such anti-Semitic New-Testament statements as, from ‘Jesus,’ John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and Luke 19:27; and from Paul, 1 Thes. 2:14-16. (Hitler even said to his followers on 18 December 1926, “The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against the Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish.” Then, on 26 April 1933, he told the Pope’s representative, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.”) All of that was Christian racism against Jews. Furthermore, virtually all of Germany’s Nazis were Christians — committed to the New Testament — and, in fact, that (an applicant’s purebred Christianity) was a requirement in order to join the Party, and ESPECIALLY in order to join the SS, as is documented in a 13,000-word masterpiece of an article by Coel Hellier, on “Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism,” which can leave no intelligent reader to doubt that the Nazi Party was itself a Christian movement, which historical fact is covered-up by ‘journalists’ and ‘historians’ (but exposed and documented by the primary sources cited in that article — they’re all authentic).

In addition to this: On 21 October 1941, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker, concluded a long tirade against Jews (as transcribed in his Table-Talk) by saying: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” Hitler’s buddy, Himmler, stated, in a speech to top SS leaders, two years later, when the Holocaust was in full swing, on 4 October 1943, that this extermination was necessary for them to carry out, in order to have “exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.” Hitler had stated, on various occasions, that the “Jewish infection” or “Jewish bacterium” or “blood-poisoning by Jews,” was transmitted to non-Jews in their “blood,” and so Jews must be entirely eradicated like plague-carrying rats — not only in Germany, but beyond. Hitler said, on 24 February 1943: “This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan [which to him meant the descendants of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 — and the snake was, according to the NT, the father of the Jews] but with the extermination of the Jew [which to him meant the descendants of the snake in Genesis 3] in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people.” (Yet,still, there are Holocaust-deniers who say that it is just ‘a Jewish hoax’, or that if it happened, Hitler didn’t know about it.) Or, as Hitler stated it in his last official words, his “Political Testament” right before his suicide: “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.” (His phrase “international Jewry” referred to Jews in all nations. He didn’t make any explicit reference here to exterminating them, because this statement from him was intended to be public — not merely private.)

Furthermore, that 24 February 1943 quotation ISN’T from the flawed Trevor-Roper publication of the Table-Talk but instead from an authentic speech that Hitler gave on that date, and the varying translations of which were discussed in an 8 March 1943 OSS Memorandum  by Walter Langer to William Donovan. The 1941 quotation from Hitler isn’t only in the original German version of the Table-Talk but was quoted in a book by Winston Churchill in 1948, four years before any translated version of the Table-Talks (Tischgesprache) (and this includes the one issued by Trevor-Roper) was published. The Himmler quotation is likewise accepted as authentic by historians.

Moreover, Horst von Maltitz perceptively observed in this regard in his excellent 1973 The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany (p. 171), that “railroad transport trains carrying Jews from the West to extermination camps in Poland were given priority over trains for urgently needed troops and war supplies. Moreover, skilled Jewish laborers, desperately needed in the munitions plants in occupied Poland, were carted off to extermination centers, in spite of strong objections by plant managers.” And, according to the Polish Ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, in his 1947 Defeat in Victory (p. 179), he had personally handed U.S. President Roosevelt in the White House on 28 July 1943 a memo that, “The unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany’s military requirements. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews before the war ends and regardless of its outcome.”

And, as I pointed out in my 2000 WHY the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up (see summary of it here), Hitler said that “Aryans” have remained unchanged since the time God first created Man (Adam and Eve). Thus, Mein Kampf asserted that the objective was “to give the Almighty Creator beings as He Himself created them.” Though during his later years Hitler was trying to adopt a scientific view, he failed, and Hitler even in his war bunker on the night of 25 January 1942, confided that Darwinian evolution does not apply to Man, who “has always been as he is now.” This was NOT an atheistic type of racism; it was SPECIFICALLY Biblical, a religious type of racism, despite all of the propaganda to the contrary (which has fooled almost all of the Hitler ‘experts’ ever since — though the evidence proves the contrary to be true).

Consequently, it will be good here to quote the most important New Testament origins of Hitler’s — and other Christians’ — Holocaust:

John 8:44

“You are the children of your father, the Devil, and you want to follow your father’s desires. From the very beginning, he was a murderer, and has never been on the side of truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he is only doing what is natural to him, because he is a liar and the father of all lies.”

Matthew 23:31-38

“So, you actually admit that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets! Go on, then, and finish up what your ancestors started. You snakes and sons of snakes! How do you expect to escape being condemned to hell? And so I will tell you that I will send you prophets and wise men and teachers; you will kill some of them, crucify others, and whip others in the synagogues and chase them from town too town. As a result, the punishment for the murder of all innocent men will fall on you. … The punishment for all of these murders will fall on the people of this day!”

Luke: 19:27

“Now, as for all those enemies of mine who did not want me to be their king, bring them here, and kill them in my presence!” (This is told as the closing line of a parable.)

Paul 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

“You suffered the same persecutions from your own countrymen that they suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us. How displeasing they are to God! How hostile they are to everyone! They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation. In this way, they have completed the full total of the sins they have always committed. And now God’s anger has at last come down on them!”

To put those passages into their true historical context: Paul never met nor heard the living Jesus but wrote the earliest of all documents that came to be canonized in the year 393 by the Roman Catholic Church and later by all other Christian churches; and his followers wrote the four canonical Gospel-accounts of ‘the words of Jesus’ but even in their time Jesus’s having been a rabbi who preached Judaism (NOT Christianity) was so well known so that 3 out of the 4 canonized Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ mentioned specifically that his disciples sometimes addressed him simply as “rebbi” rabbi: Matthew 23:7, 23:8, 26:25, 26:49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38, 1:49, 3:2, 3:26, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, and 11:8. They could not deny it, because to have tried would have been too obviously false and thus Paul’s new religion would have been recognized for what it actually was, not as they wanted it to become — they were evangelists for Paul’s religion, which they believed to be true because Paul told them that it was.

As I documented in my 2012 Christs’s Ventriloquists, Paul created Christianity in the year 49 0r 50 in order to get back at Jesus’s brother James who then headed the former Jesus-created sect of Jews and finally decided that the by-then thousands of uncircumcised men in Paul’s congregations would either be circumcised in accord with Genesis 17:14 or else be expelled from the sect. That is the reason why Christianity is anti-Jewish (anti-Semitic): James finally decided to enforce Genesis 17:14 (in that age when no such things as anesthetics nor antibiotics existed — and circumcision was therefore almost always perpetrated upon only infants, who didn’t volunteer for it and whose screams adults didn’t take seriously).

As regards the Christian clergy, they very predominantly supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and they even provided to his Government the documentation as to whom was and therefore also whom was NOT a Christian — the basic data from which the Holocaust’s “Jews” would be selected for extermination:

Eberhard Bethge, who had been a liberal Protestant cleric during the Third Reich, was interviewed in the last chapter of Augustin Hedberg’s 1992 Faith under Fire and was asked what those years had been like. Bethge commented, “‘Bad blood’ was the great term. You had to have Aryan blood.” Hitler, in only his private statements, had defined “Aryan,” as pureblooded Christian. Bethge’s interviewer inquired, “So we know this Jewish poison [Jewish blood] had to be cleansed. How did they propose to do that?” Bethge replied, tellingly: “For instance, everybody in an office, in a village, in a city, in a province, in Berlin, had to prove that he had [only] Aryan ancestors. How could he do that? He could do it only if he wrote to church officers in the villages or in the cities and asked them to look in the old books of the church in which baptisms were recorded. So many pastors and church secretaries had to work for hours and hours, weeks and months to answer all these requests. ‘Please give me an excerpt out of the church files that proves my ancestors had been Christians.’ The church officers and the ministers, they didn’t care. They did that. They said, ‘How important we are now.’ I was an assistant curator in the winter of ’33. I had to sit all morning and look through the books and answer these letters.” It was therefore the Christian clergy themselves — people indoctrinated with John 8:44, and Matthew 27:25, and Matthew 23:31-36, and Luke 19:27, etc. — who were the proud implementers of the indispensable first step in the Nazis’ 12-year-long “racist” war against the Jews, by supplying the crucial raw data for segregating-out Jews. Bethge was even honest enough to admit, “We were anti-Semitic, and we thought this was Christian.” (Of course, they did, because it was, and they had absorbed this from Christianity’s Scripture.) The essential first step in the “final solution” was this identification of who was NOT an “Aryan,” who WAS “a Jew.” Hitler commanded this first step in the year he came into power, 1933, and the Christian clergy executed it with pride. And yet even today, so-called “historians” say that Hitler didn’t have execution of the Jews in mind from the very start, and that Hitler was no Christian, and so forth.

“Historians” have not been doing their job, for the truth. That’s why the general public cannot separate propaganda from history —the latter is just an extension of the former.

Compare this account of the origin off how the Nazis managed to identify who was “a Jew” and who was not, that was given in a traditional history book on that topic, Edwin Black’s 2001 IBM and the Holocaust. Christianity’s role is ignored.

So: Zionists such as Netanyahu can’t blame Christianity for the Holocaust; they need Christian believers to blame Palestinians instead — people who had nothing to do with it — this was instead a Christian operation. The historical truth and context behind 7 October 2023 needs to be, and has effectively been, hidden from the publics in America, and in its European colonies.

There is a Big Lie, and, this time, it comes not from Germany’s racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist (or ideologically Nazi) Nazi Party and all the rest of Christendom, but instead from Judaism’s own racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist Zionists and all the rest of Judaism.

And what about Islam’s equivalent? That is the jihadists, the fundamentalist Arab Sunni (U.S. propaganda lies that it’s instead fundamentalist Iranian Shiite) movement that includes both al-Qaeda and ISIS and whose former leader in Iraq and Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Donald Trump made a deal with on May 14 for Syria to become a U.S. colony. Now this former al-Qaeda and then ISIS leader — whom both Obama and Biden, and also Trump, had protected ever since 2012 — has finally succeeded (with U.S.-supplied weapons and training) at overthrowing Syria’s secular President Bashar al-Assad, and started the ethnic cleansing in Syria against Shiite Muslims and Christians there (that isn’t being reported in the U.S. empire).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

The Indian strikes came on the intervening night of May 6 and 7. Shortly after this, there were reports of heavy mortar shelling by Pakistan on forward villages along the Line of Control (LoC) in the Poonch and Rajouri areas of Jammu and Kashmir. The LoC is an over 700-km de facto military border separating the two countries. The following day, May 8, the defence ministry confirmed that Pakistan tried to target multiple military installations in Western India and that 16 people were killed due to firing by the neighbouring country.

Qari Mohammad Iqbal was among those killed on May 7. Conferred with the title Qari, someone who reads and recites the Quran, he was dubbed a terrorist by mainstream media outlets. They said he was hiding in Kotli, Pakistan, and was killed by India as they targeted terror bases.

On May 7, news channel Republic aired a blurred image of Mohammad Iqbal’s corpse. The channel said he was a “top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander” involved in major terrorist attacks, including Pulwama.

ABP’s May 7 report on his killing had the headline: “मिट्टी में मिल गया मोस्ट वांटेंड आतंकी कारी मोहम्मद इकबाल, घाटी में ढूंढ़ रही थी एजेंसियां; भारत के एयरस्ट्राइक में हुआ ढेर”. This translates to “Most-wanted terrorist Qari Mohammad Iqbal reduced to dust. Agencies were searching for him in the valley; he was killed in India’s airstrike”. (Archive)

His death was also the key focus of a segment hosted by senior CNN-News18 journalist Rahul Shivshankar.  “Lashkar Terrorist Qari Muhammad Iqbal, A Religious Preacher, Killed In Kotli By Indian Strikes,” the channel’s YouTube video said.

Zee News, too, aired a blurred image of his corpse with the ticker, “Terrorist Qari Mohammad Iqbal killed”.

News18 India’s reportage was also similar. The channel said that Mohammed Iqbal was among the Lashkar terrorists India had been trying to track for a long time.

Regional media outlets ABP Majha (Marathi) and News18 MP-Chhattisgarh also aired the same news: that terrorist Qari Mohammad Iqbal, who was in Kotli, was killed during the strikes by the Indian armed forces.

Qari Mohammed Iqbal Was an Indian, a Kashmiri, Not a Terrorist

Alt News found the photo of Qari Mohammed Iqbal, aired by many news outlets, on a Facebook post on May 7. The condolence post, by one Sayeed Ahmed Habib, read: “Our dear Maulana Qari Mohammad Iqbal Sahib, a teacher at Jamia Zia-ul-Uloom, Poonch, fell victim to the recent border tensions. He was in his room when death came to him…”

Habib’s bio identifies him as the deputy administrator of Jamia Zia-ul-Uloom High School in Poonch, which means the two were colleagues. Habib’s post was also shared by the official Facebook page of Jamia Zia-ul-Uloom High School where Qari Mohammad Iqbal worked as a teacher. Alt News reached out to the school and they confirmed that Mohammad Iqbal taught there for 20 years.

In a video statement, also shared by the school’s Facebook page, Habib said it was unfortunate how media channels had spread misinformation on the martyred teacher, Mohammed Iqbal. He warned the channels to apologise for their coverage or face legal action.

Poonch was one of the many districts along the Line of Control (LoC) that witnessed cross-border artillery and mortar shelling by the Pakistan armed forces, resulting in casualties, especially in Poonch. Qari Mohammad Iqbal was among those who lost their lives in this crossfire. This was confirmed by the District Police Poonch. “The deceased, Maulana Mohd Iqbal, was a respected religious figure in the local community and had no affiliation with any terror outfit,” the police statement said.

Alt News also reached out to the family of the deceased Qari Mohammed Iqbal. His brother-in-law, Ishaq Khayan, told Alt News that their family was extremely hurt by the way media outlets labelled the late Mohammed Iqbal a terrorist. “We are Indians, we have immense love for the nation and we stand by the country and the armed forces. But my brother-in-law was killed in firing; he was martyred. In such circumstances, if one is labelled a terrorist, of course it is hurtful. It was traumatising.”

In a video, Qari Mohammad Farookh, the victim’s younger brother, stood alongside his family and condemned the misinformation spread about Qari Mohammad Iqbal. “We were already wounded, and now this tragedy has struck us. Godi media is spreading the falsehood that he was a Pakistani terrorist. We strongly condemn this and appeal to the District Collector (DC saab) to take appropriate action,” he said.

Qari Iqbal Mohammad’s family demands action against ‘Godi media’ for falsely labelling him a Pakistani terrorist.

They claimed that he was killed in Indian airstrikes in Pakistan.

Fact: He was killed in Pakistani shelling in Poonch. pic.twitter.com/cXpD2RYXaQ

— Alishan Jafri (@alishan_jafri) May 8, 2025

To reiterate, Qari Mohammad Iqbal was not a Pakistani terrorist. He was a teacher and a religious figure in the Poonch district in Kashmir. In a crucial moment of geo-political conflict, where news outlets should have played a key role as the source of factual and reliable information, they ended up fabricating a lie and spreading falsehoods. As a result, an ordinary man, most importantly, an Indian citizen, was demonised and linked to a terror outfit from Pakistan.

(With inputs from Diti Pujara)

The post His name was Qari Mohammad Iqbal. He was not a terrorist. appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

“These systematic attacks are clear examples of censorship, media repression, and obstruction of the free flow of information,” said Sara Qudah, CPJ’s regional director. “We condemn the Iranian authorities’ ongoing persecution of journalists and media outlets, which creates an environment of fear and intimidation.”

Between April 14 and April 21, six media directors and founders were convicted by political-press courts in Iran, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). The convictions involved both private and state-affiliated outlets, including:

• Mehdi Rahmanian, director of the private reformist Shargh Daily on unknown charges
• A director of the state-run Fars News Agency, on charges of disclosing confidential information
• The director of the reformist newspaper Ebtekar, on charges of spreading rumors
• The director of the official state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), on charges of insult, slander, and dissemination of falsehoods
• The director of the independent Eslahat News platform, on charges of publishing false content
• The director of the economic news website Nabze Bazaar, on charges of disseminating fabricated material

The campaign of intimidation by Iranian authorities has continued to escalate. On April 22, security forces in Tehran threatened Kerman-based photojournalist Hassan Abbasi with arrest. Abbasi, the director of the banned news website Ashkan News, was summoned on charges of spreading false information.

On April 27, Karaj-based freelancejournalist and media activist Omid Faraghat, who focuses on political affairs, was also summoned.

That same day, security forces raided the home of journalist Mohammad Parsi, editor-in-chief of Kandoo magazine and director of two other media outlets, and seized his electronic devices. He was charged with offenses that include “propaganda against the state” and “spreading false information.”

In the wake of the April 26 explosion at a port near Bandar Abbas, in southern Iran, authorities have aggressively sought to suppress independent reporting, with an aim to control public discourse through the intimidation and censorship of media professionals.

Meanwhile, Nasrin Hassani, a journalist being held at Bojnourd Prison in Iran’s eastern Khorasan province, is enduring inhumane and degrading conditions, according to the recent report by press freedom group Defending Free Flow of Information in Iran (DeFFI). Hassani, a reporter for the state-run local newspaper Etefaghyeh and editor-in-chief of the social media-based outlet East Adventure Press, is serving the 15th month of her 19-month sentence in the general crimes ward, with inadequate access to medical care, poor sanitation, and denial of regular visits with her teenage son.

CPJ emailed the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on the suppression and detention of journalists but did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Ritter opened, “I have assiduously detailed the nature of the threat perceived by the US that, if unresolved, would necessitate military action, as exclusively revolving around Iran’s nuclear program and, more specifically, that capacity that is excess to its declared peaceful program and, as such, conducive to a nuclear weapons program Iran has admitted is on the threshold of being actualized.”

Threats perceived by the US. These threats range from North Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, China, and Russia. Question: Which of the aforementioned countries is about to — or ever was about to — attack the US? None. (Al Qaeda is not a country) So why does Ritter imply that military action would be necessitated? Is it a vestige of military indoctrination left over from his time as a marine? In this case, why is Ritter not focused on his own backyard and telling the US to butt out of the Middle East? The US, since it is situated on a continent far removed from Iran, should no more dictate to Iran what its defense posture should be in the region than Iran should dictate what the US’s defense posture should be in the northwestern hemisphere.

Ritter: “In short, I have argued, the most realistic path forward regarding conflict avoidance would be for Iran to negotiate in good faith regarding the verifiable disposition of its excess nuclear enrichment capability.”

Ritter places the onus for conflict avoidance on Iran. Why? Is Iran seeking conflict with the US? Is Iran making demands of the US? Is Iran sanctioning the US? Moreover, who gets to decide what is realistic or not? Is what is realistic for the US also realistic for Iran? When determining the path forward, one should be aware of who and what is stirring up conflict. Ritter addresses this when he writes, “Even when Trump alienated Iran with his ‘maximum pressure’ tactics, including an insulting letter to the Supreme Leader that all but eliminated the possibility of direct negotiations between the US and Iran…” But this did not alter Ritter’s stance. Iran must negotiate — again. According to Ritter negotiations are how to solve the crisis, a crisis of the US’s (and Israel’s) making.

Iran had agreed to a deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and Germany — collectively known as the P5+1 — with the participation of the European Union. The JCPOA came into effect in 2016. During the course of the JCPOA, Iran was in compliance with the deal. Nonetheless, Trump pulled the US out of the deal in 2018.

Backing out of agreements/deals is nothing new for Trump (or for that matter, the US). For example, Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate, the Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade, the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was subsequently renegotiated under Trump to morph into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, which is now imperilled by the Trump administration’s tariff threats, as is the World Trade Organization that regulates international trade.

Should Iran, therefore, expect adherence to any future agreement signed with the US?

Ritter insists that he is promoting a reality-based process providing the only viable path toward peace. Many of those who disagree with Ritter’s assertion are lampooned by him as “the digital mob, comprised of new age philosophers, self-styled ‘peace activists’, and a troll class that opposes anything and everything it doesn’t understand (which is most factually-grounded argument), as well as people I had viewed as fellow travelers on a larger journey of conflict avoidance—podcasters, experts and pundits who did more than simply disagree with me (which is, of course, their right and duty as independent thinkers), traversing into the realm of insults and attacks against my intelligence, integrity and character.”

Ritter continued, “The US-Iran crisis is grounded in the complexities, niceties and formalities of international law as set forth in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1970 as a non-nuclear weapons state. The NPT will be at the center of any negotiated settlement.”

Is it accurate to characterize the crisis as a “US-Iran crisis”? It elides the fact that it is the US imposing a crisis on Iran. More accurately it should be stated as a “US crisis foisted on Iran.”

Ritter argues, “… the fact remains that this crisis has been triggered by the very capabilities Iran admits to having—stocks of 60% enriched uranium with no link to Iran’s declared peaceful program, and excessive advanced centrifuge-based enrichment capability which leaves Iran days away from possessing sufficient weapons grade high enriched uranium to produce 3-5 nuclear weapons.”

So, Ritter blames Iran for the crisis. This plays off Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has long accused Iran of seeking nukes. But it ignores the situation in India and Pakistan. Although the relations between the two countries are tense, logic dictates that open warring must be avoided lest it lead to mutual nuclear conflagration. And if Iran dismantles its nuclear program? What happened when Libya dismantled its nuclear program? Destruction by the US-led NATO. As A.B. Abrams wrote, Libya paid the price for

… having ignored direct warnings from both Tehran and Pyongyang not to pursue such a course [of unilaterally disarming], Libya’s leadership would later admit that disarmament, neglected military modernisation, and trust in Western good will proved to be their greatest mistake–leaving their country near defenceless when Western powers launched their offensive in 2011. (Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power, Clarity Press, 2020: p 296)

And North Korea has existed with a credible deterrence against any attack on it since it acquired nuclear weapons.

Relevant background to the current crisis imposed on Iran

1. The year 1953 is a suitable starting point. It was in this year that the US-UK (CIA and MI6) combined to engineer a coup against the democratically elected Iranian government under prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh had committed the unpardonable sin of nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

1. What to replace the Iranian democracy with? A monarchy. In other words, a dictatorship because monarchs are not elected, they are usually born into power. Thus, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would rule as the shah of Iran for 26 years protected by his secret police, the SAVAK. Eventually, the shah would be overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

1. In an attempt to force Iran to bend knee to US dictate, the US has imposed sanctions, issued threats, and fomented violence.

1. Starting sometime after 2010, it is generally agreed among cybersecurity experts and intelligence leaks that the Iranian nuclear program was a target of cyberwarfare by the US and Israel — this in contravention of the United Nations Charter Article 2 (1-4):

1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

2. All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.

3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

1. The Stuxnet virus caused significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program, particularly at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

1. Israel and the United States are also accused of being behind the assassinations of several Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade.

1. On 3 January 2020, Trump ordered a US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq that assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani as well as Soleimani ally Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a top Iraqi militia leader.

1. On 7 October 7 2023, Hamas launched a resistance attack against Israel’s occupation. Since then, Israel has reportedly conducted several covert and overt strikes targeting Iran and its proxies across the region.

1. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of seeking nukes for nearly 30 years, long before Iran reached 60% enrichment in 2021. In Netanyahu’s book Fighting Terrorism (1995) he described Iran as a “rogue state” pursuing nukes to destroy Israel. Given that a fanatical, expansionist Zionist map for Israel, the Oded-Yinon plan, draws a Jewish territory that touches on the Iranian frontier, a debilitated Iran is sought by Israel.

Oded Yinon Plan

Says Ritter, “This crisis isn’t about Israel or Israel’s own undeclared nuclear weapons capability. It is about Iran’s self-declared status as a threshold nuclear weapons state, something prohibited by the NPT. This is what the negotiations will focus on. And hopefully these negotiations will permit the verifiable dismantling of those aspects of its nuclear program the US (and Israel) find to present an existential threat.”

Why isn’t it about Israel’s nuclear weapons capability? Why does the US and Ritter get to decide which crisis is preeminent?

It is important to note that US intelligence has long said that no active Iranian nuclear weapon project exists.

It is also important to note that Arab states have long supported a Middle East Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDFZ), particularly nuclear weapons, but Israel and the US oppose it.

It is also important to note that, in 2021, the U.S. opposed a resolution demanding Israel join the NPT and that the US, in 2018, blocked an Arab-backed IAEA resolution on Israeli nukes. (UN Digital Library. Search: “Middle East WMDFZ”)

As far as the NPT goes, it must be applied equally to all signatory states. The US as a nuclear-armed nation is bound by Article VI which demands:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

Thus, hopefully negotiations will permit the verifiable dismantling of those aspects of the Iranian, US, and Israeli nuclear programs (as well as the nuclear programs of other nuclear-armed nations) that are found to present an existential threat.

Ritter warns, “Peace is not guaranteed. But war is unless common sense and fact-based logic wins out over the self-important ignorance of the digital mob and their facilitators.”

A peaceful solution is not achieved by assertions (i.e., not fact-based logic) or by ad hominem. That critics of Ritter’s stance resort to name-calling demeans them, but to respond likewise to one’s critics also taints the respondent.

Logic dictates that peace is more-or-less guaranteed if UN member states adhere to the United Nations Charter. The US, Iran, and Israel are UN member states. A balanced and peaceful solution is found in the Purposes and Principles as stipulated in Article 1 (1-4) of the UN Charter:

The Purposes of the United Nations are:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

It seems that only by refusing to abide by one’s obligations laid out the UN Charter and NPT that war looms larger.

In Ritter’s reality, the US rules the roost against smaller countries. Is such a reality acceptable?

It stirs up patriotism, but acquiescence is an affront to national dignity. Ritter will likely respond by asking what god is dignity when you are dead. Fair enough. But in the present crisis, if the US were to attack Iran, then whatever last shred of dignity (is there any last shred of dignity left when a country is supporting the genocide of human beings in Palestine?) that American patriots can cling to will have vanished.

By placing the blame on Iran for a crisis triggered by destabilizing actions of the US and Israel, Ritter asks for Iran to pay for the violent events set in motion by US Israel. If Iran were to cave to Trump’s threats, they would be sacrificing sovereignty, dignity, and self-defense.

North Korea continues on. Libya is still reeling from the NATO offensive against it. Iran is faced with a choice.

The Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata knew his choice well: “I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Around midnight on March 18, about two dozen individuals, identifying themselves as police, forcibly entered and searched Noorani’s family home in Islamabad. They assaulted the journalist’s two brothers, Mohammad Saif ur Rehman Haider and Mohammad Ali, dragged them into vehicles, and took them to an undisclosed location, according to Noorani, his mother, and a copy of a petition about the abductions  filed by the family’s lawyers with the Islamabad High Court, which CPJ reviewed. Noorani and the petition identify the abductors as agents of Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence.

Khehtran disappeared on March 13 from his home district of Barkhan in Balochistan province, and there has been no information about his whereabouts, according to independent news outlet ANI news and human rights lawyer Imaan Mazari, who is following the case and spoke to CPJ.

“It is deeply concerning that journalist Asif Karim Khehtran, as well as Mohammad Saif ur Rehman Haider and Mohammad Ali, brothers of journalist Ahmed Noorani, have been forcibly disappeared. This is indicative of a severe media crackdown in Pakistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must ensure their safety, immediately release them, and respect the rule of law.”

On March 17, Noorani published an investigative report detailing the alleged control that Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, has consolidated since assuming the country’s top military position in 2022. Both Noorani and the petition filed on behalf of his family in the Islamabad High Court claim that this report led to the enforced disappearance of his brothers.

In 2024, Khehtran had faced persistent threats from military authorities, who pressured him to halt his reporting on human rights issues in Balochistan. His family members had previously been forcibly disappeared, as well, according to Mazari.

Noorani is a journalist with the investigative news website FactFocus, which extensively publishes on Pakistan, and Khehtran has worked with Daily Awami and Quetta Voice.

Abductions and forced disappearances of journalists in Pakistan have been widely documented, including the high-profile cases of Imran Riaz Khan and Sami Ibrahim, who were abducted in May 2023 and later released.

CPJ’s messages for comment to Information Minister Attaullah Tarar have received no response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Stupid” is a commonplace term casually used in everyday conversation. Much less so in writing – especially when the subject is political personalities. It is heavily weighted with inhibition. Why this hesitation? Why at a time when manifest stupidity in speech and action is rampant?

“Stupid” is both blunt and conclusive. Straight-forward. It does not welcome qualification or discussion. It implies: matter settled, closed. Moreover, it suggests a character flaw as well as low intelligence. That somehow makes us uncomfortable. So we prefer: dense, slow, thick, dim or dim-witted; or pithy euphemisms, e.g. “not the sharpest tool in the kit” or “none too swift” or “slow on the uptake” or “not playing with a full deck” or “in so far over his head that the bubbles don’t reach the surface.” In addition, there are those words that refer directly to intelligence: moron, imbecile, idiot. They, too, are in currency but suffer from the disability of taking in vain a descriptive word that refers to the poor souls who are born with mental deficiencies.

“Stupid” is used as an epithet 95% of the time. Not as a depiction of someone’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ). To do so in the latter sense is to complicate matters. Intelligence, as we now are aware, is a broad concept that covers 5 or 6 or 7 mental attributes whose correlations are quite low. So, almost no one thinks that through before throwing the word around. To the degree that one might consider meanings, it implies lack of logic – the core characteristic of conventional IQ intelligence.

Squirt kerosene on a simmering barbecue – that’s stupid. Sending more troops to Afghanistan in 2017 when you’ve failed miserably to achieve your (undefined) objective over the past 15 years with much larger contingents is stupid, i.e., illogical. Denouncing China as America’s enemy on whom it plans to impose severe economic sanctions while senior officials publicly predict war within 10 years, and then beseeching Beijing for assistance in keeping the dollar the global currency by ending its sale of U.S. securities; and then demanding that China slow its economic growth because 1) it causes balance-of-trade imbalances, and 2) that would reduce its oil imports thereby minimizing Russian revenue from its sales on a softer world market (as did Janet Yellin on two separate visits) – that’s stupid. Silently letting Turkey provide crucial material support to ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria while decrying terrorist acts by jihadis in the US and Europe is stupid, i.e., illogical. (The Obama administration soon joined in supplying arms indirectly those same groups, then helped secure their control of the Idlib enclave which was their base for the eventual breakout a few months ago; now in power they are massacring Alawites and Christians). Bestowing praise and honors on the Saudi leaders as declared brothers in the “war on terror” when in fact these very persons have done more to propagate the fanatical creed that inspires and justifies acts of terror is stupid, i.e., “illogical.”

These instances of stupid behavior draw our attention to the connections between intelligence and knowledge – between “stupidity” and “ignorance.” Stupid (illogical) behavior is more likely when you don’t know what you’re doing because important information is missing. In the examples cited, though, the information that is the foundation for logical thinking was known to the parties taking those actions. Not just accessible – it is lodged (somewhere) in the brain of the actor. “Dumb”¹ in popular usage is the word that combines “stupid” and “ignorant” – with the connotation that the ignorance is willful. That is a pertinent notion to which we’ll return.

Assuming that the “stupid’ actors are not mentally deficient, why do they act as if they are? That is the persistent question that crops us as we see and read the antics of public officials, commentators, and a host of celebrity personalities. Several explanations, not excuses, come to mind.

One is that there exists an implicit logic that is not acknowledged but salient for the person(s) involved. The Pentagon brass may well have been less concerned about “winning” in Afghanistan, whatever that means, than they were living with the intolerable perception that they “lost.” No general cum security policy-maker wants to be saddled with the label of “loser.” That sensitivity can become institutionally generalized; Generals Mattis and McMaster were in little danger of being blamed personally for failure in Afghanistan. What seems to count is that they did not want the U.S. military to be stigmatized as a failure. They were acutely aware of how much the image of the uniformed military suffered as a result of America losing its first war in Vietnam. It follows that they might hope against hope that the outcome can be fudged enough so as to escape that fate. There is a practical side to this concern, too. Failure, as perceived in the public eye, could tarnish the resplendent image so successfully cultivated during the “war on terror” era. That could translate into less support for bigger budgets, less lucrative consultancies after retirement, and less acclaim. And a weaker voice in policy debates.

If one were to postulate that these are cardinal objectives, then campaigning to send several thousand more troops on a strategically pointless mission is logical – and the plan’s promoters not as stupid as they appear. What of senior policymakers in and around the White House who did not share those particular interests? They, indeed, were stupid.

Another instructive example is Barack Obama’s announcing the conclusion of an historic, arduously negotiated nuclear treaty with Iran (JPOA) in a speech that vilifies the Tehran regime as a tyranny that sponsors terrorism, aims to dominate the Persian Gulf, and endangers Israel. Thereby, he emboldened opponents of the accord to attack it – clearing the way for its abrogation by Trump a few years later. The net result: we now are on the brink of war with Iran because of its nuclear activities. Stupidly illogical? Perhaps not. Obama, on narrow political grounds, was trying to insulate himself from a barrage of criticism from Washington hard-liners and the Zionist lobby. Only two years earlier, he had infuriated them by scotching plans for American military strikes against government forces in response to chemical attacks blamed on the Assad regime (in fact, a false flag operation by MI-6 and their White Hats in collaboration with the jihadi rebels); hence, the perceived need to mollify them. So, it can be seen as logical given his weighting of interests and priorities. Not stupid – just self-centered and unresponsive to the public good, vintage Obama.

A second reality to keep in mind is that governments are plural nouns – or, pronouns with multiple antecedent nouns. The numerous organizations, bureaucracies and individuals involved in decision-making typically lead to a convoluted process wherein it is easy to lose track of purposes, priorities and coordination. Where little discipline is imposed by the chief, the greater the chances that the result will be contradictory, disjointed, sub-optimal and often poorly executed policies. At the present moment, we are witnessing a disjointed Trump administration, that in regard to Ukraine/Russia, 6 individuals are pursuing 7 different lines as indicated by their public remarks – an octopus trying to put on a pair of mismatched socks. All exacerbated by a scatterbrained Chief Executive who contradicts himself – as well his senior deputies – on a nightly basis.

Another kind of impediment to coherent, reality-based policymaking arises when the opposite condition prevails: an elaborate process involving several parties with divergent perspectives and parochial interests concludes with an agreement on a lowest common denominator basis. Arduously reached, that decision becomes frozen, insulated from new information or changes in the environment due to the fear that any revision would unravel the consensus – a form of groupthink. An extreme example of this phenomenon is provided by the EU where 27 sovereign states must agree before any policy can be enunciated. In Brussels, success is proclaimed when they reach accord as if negotiating among themselves is tantamount to negotiating an accord with other governments. A similar example is presented by the current campaign of the Trump administration to press Ukraine into negotiations with Russia. The tussle between Washington and Kiev is taken to be the crucial step toward resolution of the conflict. In fact, the ideas being bandied about as key ingredients of a settlement already have been absolutely rejected by Moscow – in particular, the much ballyhooed ceasefire that is a Western pipedream. As yet, they have not even been formally conveyed to the Russians. Stupid – or pathological?

Finally, we should recognize that rigorous thinking is far from the norm – at the highest levels of government as well as in everyday life. It takes a combination of education/training, experience, intellectual integrity, a cultivated sense of responsibility, discomfort with deciding on the basis of skimpy or suspect information, and an ingrained preference for knowing why you’re doing something instead of flying by the seat of your pants. True, when practiced and reinforced, rigorous thinking can become habitual – just like other modes of human behavior. There are multiple influences, though, that militate against that habit taking root and being sustained. They include the lure of celebrity, time pressures due to an excess of travel and/or summonses to mind-numbing TV interviews, long-tedious-inconclusive meetings (such as those presided over by Susan Rice which drove Chuck Hagel out of government), endless bureaucratic games-playing, distracted Chief Executives who demand ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to complex issues. Altogether, the tumult can soften the toughest mind. Weaker minds simply latch onto whatever conventional wisdom and catch phrases are floating around in order to remain relevant and minimally functional in the kaleidoscopic setting of most administrations.

All of these patterns with attendant adverse consequences are more likely to crystallize into stupid acts when the man nominally in charge lacks the intelligence, emotional stability, self-awareness and/or advisors to recognize either the requirements for sound policymaking or for implementation. A lack of capacity to accept responsibility and to be held accountable exacerbates matters.

A business career such as Trump’s is not the desired preparation. Not only is that world fundamentally different from the world of public affairs (and especially foreign policy) Further, Trump partially compensated for his flaws through coercion, cheating, and duplicity. And at the end of the day, he could rig the books. That modus operandi doesn’t fly in the Middle East or in dealing with the likes of Vladimir Putin or Xia Jinping. It could, and does, win elections in a country where ignorance and “obtuseness”, in its many inglorious forms, are commonplace.

“Willful ignorance,” or “studied ignorance,” is an increasingly familiar phenomenon. Not just in Washington but among heads of large organizations of all stripes (e.g. universities). The inclination to avoid acquiring knowledge about a matter either at hand or looming is not necessarily a sign of stupidity. Here, too, there may be hidden considerations at play. American foreign policymakers may have wish to mask the Kabul government’s faltering popular support because doing so means a fundamental rethink of aims- an agonizing reappraisal for which they are unprepared intellectually, politically, and diplomatically. (MB: substitute Ukraine)

Making no effort to uncover the facts only becomes “stupid” where the responsible official then does things, as a consequence, that harm his interests. That has been the case in Syria where Barack Obama refused to come to terms with the uncomfortable truth that the “rebels” were overwhelmingly Salafist jihadis. In this case, an admission of that cardinal truth would pose the stark choice between continuing to back an al-Qaeda²-led cause or reversing course in tilting toward the Assad regime. The President lacked the courage to deal with the wide-ranging ramifications of that; so, he deluded himself into pursuing a will-o’wisp that existed only in the imaginings of those who were keen on an American military intervention. By surrounding himself with a rogue Secretary of Defense, a strategically disoriented Secretary of State, a self-absorbed, unpracticed National Security Advisor, and an obstreperous UN Ambassador, Obama fostered an environment that enabled his escapist behavior. So, too, did his ritual deference to the warped liturgy of the foreign policy Establishment that they represented.

For a President to avoid acting “stupidly,” he need not have an exceptional IQ – or score remarkably high on other dimensions of intelligence. Two things are most important: he must be honest with himself; and he must put in place a policy system that is both logical in process and self-aware as to why decisions are taken with what end in mind. To borrow an analogy from the football terminology favored in the corridors of Washington power: you can win a championship with a simply competent quarterback if the other pieces are in place and he follows a disciplined script. (Bart Starr of the old Green Bay Packers). An emotionally handicapped or narcissistic quarterback – however talented – will cripple a team sooner or later. One who suffers from the latter condition(s), along with a lack of athletic talent, is a guarantor of disaster. “Stupidity” will be the least of the derogatory terms applied to the ensuing performance; that word should be reserved for those who chose him.

Moral: we should not hesitate to call things as they are. Feigned politeness in situations marked by systematic deceit, ill-will and harm to the nation serves no good purpose. Concerned about the proverbial “dignity of the office?” Take your shoes off before entering the Oval Office. If “stupidity” displayed by stupid people is what we observe, virtue lies in calling it by its name.

The foregoing discussion pertains directly to government leaders. What of those non-official members of the “foreign affairs community” – the think tank pundits, the media personalities, the op ed columnists? These days, the thinking of most mirrors that of those in government positions. The unstated or unconfirmed premises, the partial or selective information, the logical flaws. The main differences are that they write/speak at far greater length, compose longer sentences, and use polysyllabic words. The level of intellectual rigor, though, is pretty much the same.

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael Brenner.

Despite being appalled at my government, I winced as a New Zealander to hear my country described as part of the “Axis of Genocide”. With increasing frequency I hear commentators on West Asia/Middle East news sites hold the collective West responsible for the genocide.

It’s a big come-down from the Global Labrador Puppy status New Zealand enjoyed recently.

Australia too has a record of being viewed as a country with soft-power influence, albeit while a stalwart deputy to the US in this part of the world. That is over.

• READ MORE: Israeli air strikes kill more than 100 across Gaza, Lebanon
• All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in he making – Paul Buchanan
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Professor Mohammad Seyed Marandi talks to Piers Morgan Uncensored. Video: Middle East Eye

Regrettably, Australia and New Zealand have sent troops to support US-Israel in the Red Sea (killing Yemeni people), failed to join the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel, shared intelligence with the Israelis, trained with their forces, provided R&R to soldiers fresh from the killing fields of Gaza while blocking Palestinian refugees, and extended valuable diplomatic support to Israel at the UN.

British planes overfly Gaza to provide data, a German freighter arrived in Alexandria this week laden with hundreds of thousands of kilograms of explosives to kill yet more Palestinian civilians.

Genocide is a collective effort of the Collective West.

Australia and New Zealand, along with the rest of the West, “will stand by the Israeli regime until they exterminate the last Palestinian”, says Professor Mohammad Seyed Marandi, an American-Iranian academic. What our governments do is at best “light condemnation” he says, but when it counts they will be silent.

‘They will allow extermination’
“They will allow the extermination of the people of Gaza. And then if the Israelis go after the West Bank, they will allow for that to happen as well. Under no circumstances do I see the West blocking extermination,” Marandi says.

Looking at our performance over the past seven decades and what is happening today, it is an assessment I would not argue against.

But why should we listen to someone from the Islamic Republic of Iran, you might ask. Who are they to preach at us?

I see things differently. In our dystopian, tightly-curated mainstream mediascape it is rare to hear an Iranian voice. We need to listen to more people, not fewer.

I’m definitely not a cheerleader for Iran or any state and I most certainly don’t agree with everything Professor Marandi says but he gives me richer insights than me just drowning in the endless propaganda of Tier One war criminals like Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, Antony Blinken and their spokespeople.

Dr Marandi, professor of English literature and orientalism at the University of Tehran, is a former member of Iran’s negotiating team that brokered the break-through JCPOA nuclear agreement (later reneged on by the Trump and Biden administrations).

He is no shrinking violet. He has that fierceness of someone who has been shot at multiple times. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, Marandi was wounded four times, including twice with chemical weapons, key components of which were likely supplied by the US to their erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein.

Killed people he knew
Dr Marandi was in South Beirut a few weeks ago when the US-Israelis dropped dozens of bombs on residential buildings killing hundreds of civilians to get at the leader of Hezbollah (a textbook war crime that will never be prosecuted). It killed people he knew. To a BBC reporter who said, yes, but they were targeting Hezbollah, he replied:

“That’s like saying of 7/7 [the terror bombings in London]: ‘They bombed a British regime stronghold.’ How would that sound to people in the UK?”

Part of what people find discomforting about Dr Marandi is that he tears down the thin curtain that separates the centres of power from the major news outlets that repeat their talking points (“Israel has a legitimate right to self-defence” etc).

The more our leaders and media prattle on about Israel’s right to defend itself, the more we sound like the Germany that terrorised Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And the rest of the world has noticed.

As TS Eliot said: “Nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.”

Not a man to mince words when it comes to war crimes.

To his credit, Piers Morgan is one of the few who have invited Dr Marandi to do an extended interview. They had a verbal cage fight that went viral.

Masterful over pointing out racism
Dr Marandi has been masterful at pointing out the racism inherent in the Western worldview, the chauvinism that allows Western minds to treasure white lives but discount as worthless hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives taken in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.

“There is no reason to expect that a declining and desperate empire will conduct itself in a civilised manner. Iran is prepared for the worst,” he says.

“In this great moral struggle, in the world that we live in today — meaning the holocaust in Gaza — who is defending the people of Gaza and who is supporting the holocaust? Iran with its small group of allies is alone against the West,” he told Nima Alkhorshid from Dialogue Works recently.

The Collective West shares collective responsibility.

Dr Marandi draws a sharp distinction between our governments and our populations. He is entirely right in pointing out that the younger people are, in countries like Australia and New Zealand, the more likely they are to oppose the genocide — as do growing numbers of young Jewish Americans who have rejected the Zionist project.

“All people within the whole of Palestine must be equal — Jews, Muslims and Christians. The Islamic Republic of Iran will not allow the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Zionist regime to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza.”

I heard Mohammad Seyed Marandi extend an interesting invitation to us all in a recent interview. He said the “Axis of Resistance” should be thought of as open to all people who oppose the genocide in Gaza and who are opposed to continued Western militarism in West Asia.

I would never sign up to the policies of Iran, especially on issues like women’s rights, but I do find the invitation to a broad coalition clarifying: the Axis of Genocide versus The Axis of Resistance. Whose side are you on?

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New York, October 29, 2024—United Nations legal experts determined that Israel’s detention of three Palestinian journalists — Moath Amarneh, Mohammad Badr, and Ameer Abu Iram — is discriminatory, arbitrary, and in violation of international law.

The expert opinion by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was released on September 22 following an urgent appeal by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) after a wave of arrests in the West Bank began on October 7, 2023, and continues to this day. More than 40 journalists are currently held by Israeli authorities.

The group expressed concern about the severity of the alleged conditions the journalists were subjected to during detention, some of which included beatings, being forced to wear winter clothes in summer and summer clothes in winter, and being handcuffed for long periods of time, causing swelling in their hands, as well as unrefuted allegations from CPJ regarding the poor quality and quantity of food.

“The U.N. Working Group’s determination that three Palestinian journalists were unlawfully held by Israel illustrates how imprisonment is wielded to take them out of commission,” said CPJ Director of Advocacy and Communications Gypsy Guillén Kaiser. “These journalists, and dozens of others put behind bars since the start of the war, are in a black hole of potentially endless detention, where they face brutal treatment. Israel must comply with its international commitments and end these arbitrary detentions.” 

The journalists’ work is linked to their detention, the Working Group found, noting that the three men had “critically examined the behavior and impact of the Israeli Defense Forces” and covered various issues relating to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It further held that the detention was discriminatory, being based on the journalists’ “national, ethnic and social origin as Palestinian” and “because of their political opinions, which are critical of the [Israeli] Government and its policies.”

The opinion urged Israeli authorities to release Badr, investigate the detentions, hold those responsible for these rights violations to account, and provide the three journalists with compensation or reparations in accordance with international law. Abu Iram and Amarneh were released earlier this year; none of the journalists were ever charged, the Working Group found.

The journalists were detained under Israel’s practice of administrative detention, which allows a military commander to detain an individual without charge, typically for six months, on the grounds of preventing them from committing a future offense. Administrative detention can be extended an unlimited number of times.

Prior to this ruling, the Working Group found administrative detention unlawful in Israel in at least three cases, and the U.N. special rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967 previously called for Israel to end the practice.

The journalists were also denied the right to be visited by and correspond with family members and communicate with the outside world. Two of the journalists were also denied the right to legal assistance, having been unable to initiate access or hold private communications with their lawyers, the Working Group found.

The Working Group concluded that the arrest and detention of the three journalists resulted from the peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of opinion and expression, contrary to article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 19 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Israel is party to both and thus in violation of its own commitments.

The working group followed its usual protocol of notifying and allowing 60 days for Israel to respond to CPJ’s allegations, which the government did not refute.

CPJ documented many incidents of journalists being killed while carrying out their work in Israel, the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank; and nearby Lebanon. These include 134 killings, at least five of which were targeted, 69 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.

According to CPJ’s 2023 prison census, Israel was one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists.

About the Committee to Protect Journalists

The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. CPJ defends the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.

Media contact: press@cpj.org

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“The Taliban’s latest ban on television and filming and photography in Takhar should trouble anyone who cares about media freedom worldwide” said CPJ’s program director, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, in New York. “The citizens of Afghanistan deserve fundamental rights, and the international community must cease its passive observation of the country’s rapid regression.” 

The ban was approved by senior officials from the Taliban’s provincial General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), directorates of Information and Culture, and the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as well as the governor’s office of Takhar province.

Takhar is the second province in Afghanistan to institute such a ban. Previously, the Taliban implemented a similar ban in Kandahar province, its unofficial capital and the residence of the group’s leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, according to a Kandahar-based journalist who also spoke to CPJ under the condition of anonymity for fear of Taliban retaliation.

Saif ul Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, confirmed to the Associated Press that media outlets in the provinces of Takhar, Maidan Wardak, and Kandahar had been “advised not to broadcast or display images of anything possessing a soul—meaning humans and animals,” according to the AP. Khyber said the directive is part of the implementation of a recently ratified morality law. 

Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada signed the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice bill into law on July 31, though the news was not made public until August 21, when it was published on the Ministry of Justice’s website.

Article 17 of the law details the restrictions on the media, including a ban on publishing or broadcasting images of living people and animals, which the Taliban regards as un-Islamic. Other sections order women to cover their bodies and faces and travel with a male guardian, while men are not allowed to shave their beards. The punishment for breaking the law is up to three days in prison or a penalty “considered appropriate by the public prosecutor.”

On October 14, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, the director of Taliban-controlled Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), informed senior management of Kabul’s national TV station that a phased strategy to implement the new law had already begun. TV stations across Afghanistan’s provinces will be gradually closed and converted to radio stations, with plans to eventually extend the ban to Kabul, where RTA and other major national broadcasters operate, according to two journalists familiar with the meeting and a report by the London-based independent outlet, Afghanistan International. 

On October 19, during a visit to Sheikh Zahid University in Khost province, Neda Mohammad Nadim, the Taliban’s Minister of Higher Education, barred the filming of the event, according to the London-based Afghanistan International.

On October 23, the Taliban’s Ministry of Defense launched the broadcast of Radio Sada-e-Khalid, which is managed by the ministry and operates from the 201st Corps of the Taliban army.

Since taking power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the Taliban has employed a gradual strategy to suppress media activity in the country, with the General Directorate of Intelligence forcing compliance with stringent regulations.  These include bans on music and soap operas, bans on women’s voices in the media, the imposition of mask-wearing for female presenters, a ban on live broadcasts of political shows, the closure of television stations, and the jamming or boycotting of independent international networks broadcasting to Afghanistan. To enforce these policies, the Taliban have detained, assaulted, and threatened journalists and media workers throughout the country.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

So our brand-new prime minister has refused to rule out UK military involvement in any Israeli response to Iran’s recent missile attack, condemning what he calls Iran’s “malign role” in the Middle East.

And he refused to say whether MPs would get a vote beforehand on any military action. “We support Israel’s right to defend herself against Iran’s aggression, in line with international law, because let’s be very clear, this was not a defensive action by Iran, it was an act of aggression and a major escalation in response to the death of a terrorist leader.

“It exposes, once again, Iran’s malign role in the region: they helped equip Hamas for the seventh of October attacks, they armed Hezbollah, who launched a year-long barrage of rockets on northern Israel, forcing 60,000 Israelis to flee their homes, and they support the Houthis, who mount direct attacks on Israel and continue to attack international shipping.”

Of course, Starmer didn’t mention the many attacks Israel had made on Lebanon and Iran over the years or explain why Hamas and Hezbollah came into being.

Be honest: who exactly are the “malign” influences in the Middle East?

Just as Britain and America would like everyone to believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict began on October 7 last year, when it had been going on since 1948 (and before), they’d like us to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured a whole century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK-Israel Axis don’t want this important slice of history to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

In 1901 William Knox D’Arcy, a Devon man, obtained from the Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia. The Persian government would receive 16% of the oil company’s annual profits, a rotten deal as they would soon realize.

D’Arcy, with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually canceled the D’Arcy agreement and the matter went to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were an improvement but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company changed to Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951, while Aramco was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis, Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls for nationalizing its oil could no longer be ignored. In March 1951 the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavorable to the host country.

Social reformer Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, canceling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable: “Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

“Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence.” (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

For his impudence he would be removed in a coup by MI5 and the CIA, imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

America was reluctant at first to join Britain’s destructive game but Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. In August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

The CIA-engineered coup that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. The British-American conspiracy inevitably backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word: MOSSADEQ.

But Britain seems incapable of playing fair. In 2022, when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband back in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

Smoldering resentment for more than 70 years

During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

“The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

As it happens the company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment. We were just mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. Britain had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it? Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

Alston acknowledged that “there is an understandable inclination to exact revenge in such cases” but warned that “to permit such instincts to prevail only sends the message that the rule of law continues to be mocked in Iraq, as it was in Saddam’s own time”.

So now we’re playing dirty again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 76 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. A century later it is quite evident that Zionism has been the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration for it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Mohtaj, a broadcast manager and presenter with the independent Millat Zhag radio station in the southern city of Kandahar, was transferred to an unknown location, according to a local journalist who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisals, the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center watchdog group, and the London-based news broadcaster Afghanistan International.

“Taliban officials must immediately release Mohammad Ibrahim Mohtaj and stop arbitrary detentions of journalists and media workers,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “Afghanistan’s notorious morality police must not exacerbate a media crackdown that has been a hallmark of Taliban rule or heighten fears among Afghan journalists.”

Millat Zhag broadcasts news and cultural programming for Kandahar city and surrounding districts.

A report by the U.N. Mission in Afghanistan said this month that the ministry, which the Taliban set up after taking power in 2021, used threats, excessive force, and arbitrary arrests to enforce its rules around media monitoring, drugs, and female dress codes.

Separately, culture journalist Sayed Rahim Saeedi was detained by Taliban intelligence agents in the capital Kabul on July 14.   

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app, but The Associated Press reported that the ministry had called the findings of the U.N. report false and contradictory.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Officers with the Iranian Cyber Police arrested Shanbehzadeh on espionage charges in the northwestern city of Ardabil, in Ardabil province, on Thursday, June 6. His social media accounts were suspended.

Shanbehzadeh’s arrest followed his response posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, to Iran’s Supreme Leader Seyed Ali Khamenei. The blogger’s post, which contained only a period, was a reply to Khamenei’s post missing a period and notably received more likes and shares than the original.

The Persian service of Voice of America reported that Shanbehzadeh is currently detained in Tehran, the capital, and has been banned from hiring a legal representative.

“Once again, Iranian authorities are pressuring journalists to silence them ahead of the country’s June 28 presidential election by arresting them on spurious charges. This is a trend CPJ has documented for years,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program coordinator, in New York. “CPJ calls on Iranian authorities to release Hassan Shanbehzadeh and all imprisoned journalists and ensure the media is able to freely cover this consequential election.”

Shanbehzadeh was arrested in 2019 on insult and propaganda charges for his editorial content and was held in solitary confinement. The Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced him to 5 years and 10 months in prison, and he served 10 months before receiving a pardon by the Judiciary, the London-based Farsi-language Iran International reported.

CPJ has documented a ramping up of arrests and prosecutions of Iranian journalists during a period when Iran’s Guardian Council, which oversees elections and legislation, finalized approving six candidates for the June 28 presidential election:

• Yashar Soltani, editor-in-chief of the now-defunct independent news website Memari News, and Saba Azarpeik, a freelance journalist who reported for several moderate newspapers, including Etemad, began separately serving one-year prison sentences in Evin prison on Sunday, June 9. They were charged with defamation and “spreading propaganda against the system” for their critical reporting of domestic issues on social media.

Several Iranian journalists were arrested and summoned for their coverage of the May 19 helicopter crash that killed Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, and several other officials:

• Security forces arrested Mahta Sadri, the editor-in-chief of the state-run news website GilanSadr.ir, in her northwest hometown of Gilan on May 25 on unspecified charges and was transferred to Lakan prison in the northern city of Rasht. She was temporarily released on bail on Sunday, June 9. According to a source who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, Sadri was arrested for covering the officials’ death in the helicopter crash.

At least five journalists were summoned in late May to the Islamic Revolutionary Court on charges of spreading propaganda against the system for their reporting on the helicopter crash. They include:

• Manijeh Moazen, a freelance reporter
• Alieh Motalebzadeh, freelance photojournalist
• Amirhossein Mosalla, editor-in-chief of online bi-weekly magazine Ayatemandegar
• Mohammad Moeini, an independent blogger
• Hirsh Saidian, a freelance economic journalist 

CPJ was unable to confirm further details about these cases. CPJ’s email to Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on the cases of imprisoned Iranian journalists did not receive any reply.

Iran was the world’s sixth-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s most recent annual prison census, with 17 imprisoned journalists as of December 1, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Thursday, the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice announced the closure of Tamadon TV, alleging that the broadcaster was affiliated with the Harakat-e-Islami political party, after the Taliban banned all such affiliations, and operating on “seized land,” according to Qari Baraktullah Rasuli, the spokesperson for the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice who posted the statement on X, formerly Twitter, and media reports. Tamadon TV denies the claims.

In a breaking news announcement earlier that day, Tamadon TV stated that a Taliban delegation was inside its station to shut down operations. However, later the TV station confirmed that the suspension of its operations was postponed until Saturday. The Taliban has not announced an exact date that it plans to close the station. 

“The Taliban must immediately and unconditionally reverse its decision to ban Tamadon TV and allow the channel to continue broadcasting,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The Taliban is expanding its relentless crackdown on Afghan media and suppressing any independent voices. This must end.”

On June 6, Mohammad Jawad Mohseni, director of Tamadon TV, rejected the Taliban’s claims about the broadcaster’s political affiliations, according to broadcaster Afghanistan International. Mohseni noted that the late founder of the TV station, Ayatullah Asif Mohseni, had resigned as the leader of Harakat-e-Islami in 2005, years before establishing Tamadon TV.

Mohseni said that “the land for Tamadon TV was purchased from a private owner and has a legitimate and legal title deed, and it is not and has never been government property.”

On February 18, 2023, about 10 armed Taliban members raided the headquarters of Tamadon TV in Kabul, beat several staff members, and held them for 30 minutes.

Tamadon TV is predominantly owned and operated by members of the Hazara-Shia ethnic minority and covers political and current affairs as well as Shiite religious programming. Hazara people have faced persecution and escalated violence since the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021.

The closure order of Tamadon TV follows a series of other restrictions imposed on Afghan media in recent months. In May, the Taliban’s Media Complaints and Rights Violations Commission banned journalists, analysts, and experts from participating in discussions or cooperating with London-based Afghanistan International’s television and radio stations. The Commission called on citizens to boycott Afghanistan International and banned anyone from providing facilities for broadcasting the channel in public places.

Earlier, in April, the Taliban shut down Noor and Barya TV broadcasters, which were affiliated with other Islamist political parties, citing violations of “national and Islamic values.”

The Taliban has shut down other broadcasters since it took over the country in 2021,  including Radio Nasim. in central Daikundi Province, Hamisha Bahar Radio and TV in eastern Nangarhar province, and Radio Sada e Banowan in northeastern Badakhshan province. In 2022, the group also banned international broadcasters such as the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America.

CPJ’s requests for comment sent to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Saeedi entered pre-trial detention on December 23, 2023, on charges of “colluding and assembling against the national security.” On May 1, the journalist was sentenced to five years in prison by Judge Abolqasem Salavati of Branch 15 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, according to news reports and a source familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity due to the fear of government reprisal. 

Saeedi, who has appealed the sentence, is waiting for the court to set a date for an appeals trial and is hopeful that her sentence will be reduced, according to the source. 

“Iranian authorities must free journalist Shirin Saeedi immediately and unconditionally and cease the practice of arbitrarily locking up members of the press,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York. “The lack of transparency about Saeedi’s arrest and her lengthy pre-trial detention show once again how the Iranian regime feels free to act with impunity against the country’s press.”

Saeedi attended an international journalism workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 2022 and later traveled to Lebanon to participate in a similar program before returning to Tehran. Iranian authorities took issue with the nature of these workshops, according to the source.

CPJ’s email to Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on Saeedi’s arrest and imprisonment did not receive any reply.

In addition to Saeedi’s case, there have been several other cases against journalists and obstructions of the work on the press in Iran in recent weeks: 

On April 24, the office of Tehran’s General Prosecutor filed a lawsuit against Bahnam Samadi, a freelance economic reporter, in connection with an article he wrote about political tensions in the region between Iran and Israel, and the Israel-Gaza war, HRANA reported.

On May 1, the judiciary blocked the news website Didbaniran.ir without any explanation or prior notice, HRANA reported. According to a source who spoke to CPJ about on the condition of anonymity due to the fear of reprisal, authorities blocked Didbaniran.ir due to its daily coverage of national political issues, and as a result many journalists were laid off.

On May 2, Marzieh Mahmoudi, the editor-in-chief of the state-run TejaratNews economic site, was summoned by Tehran’s Media court. According to a report by HRANA, the summons did not include any information about her potential charges. 

Several other Iranian journalists, including Asal Dadashlou, Hadi Kasaeizadeh, Mohammad Parsi, have been indicted and summoned by authorities for their coverage of international political issues, according to news reports.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Galehban, the publisher and the editor-in-chief of Urmiye24 Kurdish News, was arrested by the Iran’s Cyber Police Unit in the city of Urmia, in West Azerbaijan province, on April 8, according to news reports.

According to CPJ research, the Urmiye24 website was suspended as soon as Galehban was arrested. According to news reports, Galehban was arrested after the office of Urmia’s Prosecutor General filed a lawsuit against him. CPJ was unable to determine where Galehban was being held or whether he had been formally charged.

Iranian cartoonist Atena Faraghdani was arrested violently again on April 14, according to a post by her lawyer, Mohammad Moghimi, on X, formerly known as Twitter.

According to a separate post by Moghimi, security forces arrested Faraghdani when she was trying to exhibit some of her critical cartoons publicly in the street. She was beaten in the head multiple times at the time of arrest, resulting in a nose bleed. She fainted, and later found herself in detention.

According to the report, Faraghdani is banned from publishing her cartoons or holding any exhibitions. According to her lawyer, the cartoonist was charged with “spreading propaganda against the system” and “blasphemy.”

“Iranian authorities are desperate to silence the truthful voices and now imprisoned journalist Rasoul Galehban and cartoonist Atena Faraghdani,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York  “Authorities must realize that jailing journalists and critical voices won’t help them in hiding Iran’s difficult realities, and they must immediately release Galehban, Faraghdani, and all jailed journalists.”

On April 15, the office of Tehran’s Prosecutor General filed multiple lawsuits against several newspapers, including the economic daily Jahane Sanat, the moderate state-run Etemad, and journalists Abbas Abdi, the head of the Tehran Journalists Association, and Hossein Dehbashi, a media worker, charging them with “disturbing public opinion,” according to news reports.

Dina Ghalibaf was also arrested on April 15 after reporting on social media about the sexual abuse and violent treatment of herself and other women by morality police agents, amid increased presence of compulsory hijab police forces to enforce Islamic hijab in big cities such as the capital, Tehran.

Ghalibaf, a freelance journalist who has previously worked with the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), was scheduled to be temporarily released on bail from Evin prison on Monday. But authorities announced to her family that a new case has opened against her questioning her claims of sexual assault.

CPJ emailed Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on the above-mentioned cases but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On Friday, four Palestinian journalists were injured by an Israeli shell while they were reporting in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. Sami Shehadeh and Sami Barhoom were covering war-related events for the TRT Arabic TV channel, Ahmad Harb was on duty for Al Arabiya TV at the time of the incident, and CNN stringer Mohammad Al-Sawalhi was also struck by shrapnel, resulting in a slight injury to his right hand and bruising on his left leg, according to TRT World, Arab News, Al-Jazeera, CNN, and RT Arabic. The journalists were transferred to Shohada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, where Shehadeh had his leg amputated.

A video captured by Al-Jazeera shows a shell being fired in an open residential area, followed by a group of journalists and others carrying Shehadeh, who is wearing a press vest and helmet—as were other journalists in the area of the attack. In the background, a journalist can be heard saying, “His right leg is blown off,” and added, It’s a direct targeted attack on journalists.”    

“CPJ condemns the Israeli attack in Gaza on a group of journalists wearing press insignia that resulted in cameraman Sami Shehadeh, of Turkish broadcaster TRT, having his leg amputated,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York. “The IDF’s disregard for press insignia, both after and prior to October 7, endangers the lives of journalists. This incident must be independently investigated, and those responsible for the attack must be held accountable.”

Shehadeh told Arab News that the group was in a relatively safe spot wearing press armor and helmets. “Even the car I arrived in was labeled ‘TV,’ and I’m a civilian and a journalist — they targeted us,” he said.

Right after the attack, while still in the hospital, Shehadeh appealed to the international community in a TRT video, asking, “Why do you ask us to wear press armor and helmets? The IDF clearly recognizes us as journalists wearing press vests, yet they still target us. Please put an end to this.”

In two interviews with Al-Jazeera Palestine and TRT Arabi, Barhoum mentioned that he and Shehadeh were in an open area with other journalists working for international media outlets and should have been easily identifiable by Israel Defense Forces tanks and drones, which were not close to them.  “As soon as I started speaking in front of the camera, a shell was directly fired at us, without warning, hitting me and Shehadeh,” he said “This was a targeted attack,” he added to Al-Jazeera, “and this is not the first time it has happened. But we will continue to cover because this is our moral and professional duty.”

In an interview with TRT following the attack on Friday afternoon, Türkiye’s Communications Director, Fahrettin Altun, strongly condemned the attack and added, “No matter what, we will continue to tell the world about Israel’s atrocities against civilians.”  Additionally, the United Nations said the Israeli attack on TRT Arabi team is yet another example of the dangers journalists face in Gaza and called for a “transparent and credible” probe.

CPJ research has documented a consistent pattern of IDF attacking journalists wearing visible press insignia. A May 2023 report found that of the 20 journalists killed by the Israeli military in the preceding 22 years, at least 13 were clearly identifiable as members of the media or were inside vehicles with press insignia at the time of their deaths, including the Palestinian American television journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7, 2023, several journalists have been killed or injured by IDF fire while wearing press insignia. On October 13, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed while wearing a press vest and helmet as he recorded cross-border shelling in Lebanon. On December 15, Al-Jazeera cameraperson Samer Abu Daqqa bled to death after Israeli authorities prevented his evacuation following what was believed to be an IDF drone attack. This attack also injured Al-Jazeera journalist Wael Al Dahdouh. Both Al Dahdouh and Abu Daqqa were wearing vests marked as ”press.”

CPJ’s email requesting comment from the North America Desk of the Israel Defense Forces on the April 12 attack did not immediately receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Monday, security agents with the Islamic Republic’s Intelligence Ministry arrested Mir-Ghasemzadeh, a local reporter in the northern city of Sowme’eh Sara in Gilan province, and took him to a detention center in the city of Rasht, according to news reports and a source who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity citing fear of government reprisal.

As of Thursday, authorities had not disclosed the reason behind Mir-Ghasemzadeh’s detention or any potential charges. Mir-Ghasemzadeh was recently working on a series of reports exposing the alleged financial corruption of a parliament member from Gilan province, according to that source and tweets by the New York-based Independent Center on Human Rights in Iran.

“Iranian authorities are desperate to silence their critics and have now imprisoned local reporter Mohammad Mir-Ghasemzadeh, who was reporting on alleged official corruption,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Authorities must realize that jailing journalists and critical voices won’t help them in hiding Iran’s difficult realities and release Mir-Ghasemzadeh and all jailed journalists immediately.”

Mir-Ghasemzadeh’s health is of particular concern following reports that he was allegedly beaten in custody, according to those sources.

In recent weeks, authorities have ramped up legal pressure on many journalists throughout the country: 

• Authorities arrested freelance journalist Nasim Soltanbeygi on November 21 and immediately transferred her to Evin prison to serve a 3.5-year prison sentence for spreading propaganda against the system and colluding against national security. Soltanbeygi reported on the death in morality-police custody of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini.
• On November 20, Parisa Salehi, a reporter with the financial newspaper Donya-e-Eqtesad, was indicted for writing about “nationalism” on X, formerly known as Twitter, according to her social media post and the exile-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). She was temporarily released on bail.
• Freelance reporter Saeedeh Shafiei began serving her prison sentence of three years and six months in Tehran’s Evin prison on November 19, HRANA reported.
• Shaghayegh Moradi, a reporter with the Art and Culture magazine Bukhara, was arrested on October 30 in her home in Tehran on unspecified charges and detained in Evin prison for about a month before being released on bail on November 25, HRANA reported.

CPJ’s email to Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on Mir-Ghasemzadeh’s arrest did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Saturday, October 28, at least 27 journalists covering rallies in the capital of Dhaka were attacked by supporters of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the ruling Awami League party, as well as police, according to a statement by local press freedom group Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, several journalists who spoke to CPJ, and various news reports.

BNP demonstrators demanded that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League step down and allow a nonpartisan caretaker government to oversee the upcoming election scheduled for January. Police fired tear gas, sound grenades, and rubber bullets to disperse BNP protesters, who threw stones and bricks in response.

“The attacks on at least 27 Bangladeshi journalists covering recent political rallies in Dhaka must see swift and transparent accountability,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “The leadership and supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, as well as police, must respect the rights of journalists to freely and safely report on the lead-up to the upcoming election scheduled for January.”

Md Rafsan Jani, a crime reporter for The Daily Kalbela newspaper, told CPJ that he was filming BNP supporters allegedly assaulting police officers when two demonstrators approached him and took his phone and identification card. A group of BNP supporters then surrounded Jani and beat him with iron rods, sticks, and pipes as he repeatedly identified himself as a journalist, he said, adding that he managed to escape after around 20 minutes. As of November 1, his items had not been returned.

S A Masum, a photographer for The Daily Inqilab newspaper, told CPJ that he was taking photos of a confrontation between Awami League and BNP supporters when his head was repeatedly struck from behind with what he suspected to be a bamboo stick, knocking him unconscious while the attackers, whom he did not identify, continued to beat him. Bystanders at the scene rescued Masum and took him to the hospital, where he was treated for a concussion and severe bruising and open lesions throughout his body, according to the journalist, who shared photos of his injuries with CPJ.

Md Sirajum Salekin, a crime reporter for the Dhaka Times newspaper, told CPJ that he was on his motorcycle on the way to cover clashes at the chief justice’s residence when a vehicle hit his motorcycle from behind, causing him to fall and break two bones in his right leg. Salekin said he believed he was targeted because he was wearing his press badge and his motorcycle was marked with a sticker of the Dhaka Times, which has critically reported on the Awami League.

Awami League demonstrators beat The Daily Kalbela reporter Abu Saleh Musa while covering their rally, according to The Daily Star.

Mohammad Ali Mazed, a video reporter for the French news agency Agence France-Presse, told CPJ that he was covering a clash between police and BNP demonstrators while holding a camera and press identification when five to six demonstrators surrounded him. The demonstrators damaged Mazed’s camera and other news equipment and beat him on his head, back, and right shoulder with bamboo sticks for around three minutes until the journalist fled the scene with the assistance of bystanders, he said.

Sazzad Hossain, a freelance photographer working with the news website Bangla Tribune and international outlets, including the British newspaper The Guardian and photo agency SOPA Images, told CPJ that BNP protesters threw broken bricks at him and trampled him while he was covering a clash with police.

Salahuddin Ahmed Shamim, a freelance photographer reporting for the news agency Fair News Service, told CPJ that he was covering BNP protesters allegedly assaulting police officers when seven to eight of the party’s supporters surrounded him, beat his backside with bamboo sticks, and kicked him for around 15 minutes.

Two journalists who spoke to CPJ– Sheikh Hasan Ali, chief photojournalist for Kaler Kantho newspaper, and Ahammad Foyez, senior correspondent for New Age newspaper– said they were struck with rubber bullets when police attempted to disperse BNP protesters, leaving them with minor injuries.

Ali told CPJ that an unidentified man hit the Kaler Kantho photographer Lutfor Rahman with a bamboo stick on his right shoulder while covering the same clashes.

Md Hanif Rahman, a photographer for the Ekushey TV broadcaster, told CPJ that he and Ekushey TV reporter Touhidur Rahman were covering an arson attack on a police checkpoint when they were surrounded by a group of 10 to 12 men who beat Md Hanif Rahman with pipes and sticks and pushed Touhidur Rahman.

Rabiul Islam Rubel, a reporter for The Daily Kalbela, told CPJ that he was among a crowd of BNP supporters while covering the clashes at the chief justice’s residence when 15 to 20 men threw bricks at him while shouting that journalists are “government brokers.”

Jony Rayhan, a reporter for The Daily Kalbela, told CPJ that BNP supporters beat him while covering their rally. Rayhan was also injured by a sound grenade that landed in front of him while police were dispersing the demonstrators, he said.

Salman Tareque Sakil, chief reporter for Bangla Tribune, told CPJ that he sustained a leg fracture after a brick was thrown at him while covering the BNP rally.

Jubair Ahmed, a Bangla Tribune reporter, told CPJ that while police were dispersing BNP demonstrators, a tear gas shell landed in front of him, blurring his vision before the protesters trampled him while fleeing the scene.

Tahir Zaman, a reporter for the news website The Report, was also injured by a rubber bullet while covering clashes at the BNP rally, according to his outlet and BJIM.

BJIM and local media named an additional 10 journalists who were attacked, but did not provide details on the incidents, which CPJ continues to investigate. Those journalists are:

• Touhidul Islam Tareque, reporter for The Daily Kalbela
• Kazi Ihsan bin Didar, crime reporter for the Breaking News website
• Tanvir Ahmed, reporter for The Daily Ittefaq newspaper
• Sheikh Nasir, reporter for The Daily Ittefaq
• Arifur Rahman Rabbi, reporter for the Desh Rupantor newspaper
• Masud Parvez Anis, reporter for the Bhorer Kagoj newspaper
• Saiful Rudra, special correspondent for the broadcaster Green TV
• Arju, camera operator for Green TV, who was identified by one name
• Hamidur Rahman, reporter for the Share Biz newspaper
• Maruf, a freelance journalist identified by one name

CPJ is investigating a report of a separate attack on at least one journalist on Saturday.

CPJ contacted BNP spokesperson Zahir Uddin Swapan, Information Minister and Awami League Joint Secretary Hasan Mahmud, and Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner Habibur Rahman for comment, but did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Saturday, two Palestinian journalists were shot dead while out reporting—Ibrahim Mohammad Lafi, a photographer for Ain Media, who was at the Gaza Strip’s Erez Crossing into Israel, and Mohammad Jarghoun, a reporter with Smart Media, who was to the east of Rafah city in the southern Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian press freedom group MADA and the Journalist Support Committee (JSC), a nonprofit that promotes the rights of the media in the Middle East.

In addition, Ibrahim Qanan, a correspondent for Al-Ghad channel, was injured by shrapnel in the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, those sources said.

Two Palestinian photographers, Nidal Al-Wahidi from the Al-Najah channel and Haitham Abdelwahid from the Ain Media agency, have also been reported missing since Saturday.

On Saturday, CPJ reported that freelance journalist Mohammad El-Salhi was shot dead in the central Gaza Strip.

“We are extremely concerned that three Palestinian journalists have been killed, with two more declared missing, and another injured while reporting on the conflict between Israel and Gaza since it began on Saturday,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “We call on all sides to remember that journalists are civilians and should not be targeted. Accurate reporting is critical during times of crisis and the media has a vital role to play in bringing news from Gaza and Israel to the world.”

Israel has declared war on Gaza, whose 2.3 million people are ruled by Hamas, in retaliation for the Palestinian Islamist group’s deadly assault on Saturday. About 1,300 people have died in three days of fighting.

On Saturday, Israeli police assaulted a television crew for the privately owned Sky News Arabia in the southern city of Ashkelon, which was targeted by Hamas, and damaged their equipment. The channel’s correspondent Firas Lutfi said Israeli police aimed rifles at his head, forced him to remove his clothes, confiscated the team’s phones, and made them leave the area under police escort.

CPJ’s emails requesting comment from the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson for North America and the Israel Police did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In Saturday’s assault, Hamas gunmen crossed into Israel from Gaza and fired thousands of rockets, while Israel responded with air strikes into Gaza. Hundreds were killed on both sides.

Freelance journalist El-Salhi was shot dead on the border to the east of al-Bureij, a Palestinian refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency Wafa, and the Journalist Support Committee, a nonprofit which promote the rights of the media in the Middle East.

“We urge the Israel Defense Forces to thoroughly investigate the killing of Palestinian journalist Mohammad El-Salhi, identify those responsible for the shooting, and hold them to account.” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “Israel’s army must take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of journalists covering the Israel-Gaza conflict.”

CPJ is investigating reports that at least two other Palestinian journalists were killed and three injured while reporting on Saturday’s attack.

CPJ’s emails to the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson for North America did not receive any replies.

In May, CPJ published “Deadly Pattern,” a report on the Israeli military’s killing of 20 journalists in 22 years—and how no one has been held accountable for those deaths.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On August 19, Taliban authorities detained Velayati, a photographer for Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency, at Kabul International Airport before he boarded a flight to Iran, according to his employer and a reporter in Kabul familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation by the Taliban.

Velayati had travelled to Afghanistan for a 10-day personal visit, according to those sources. Authorities have not disclosed any reason for Velayati’s detention or where he was being held as of Tuesday.

“The detention of Iranian photojournalist Mohammad Hossein Velayati is the latest blow to press freedom in Afghanistan, as the Taliban has ramped up its efforts to crack down on the media in recent weeks,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Kuala Lumpur. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Velayati, explain why they detained him in the first place, and end these arbitrary arrests once and for all.”

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to a CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

The Taliban has detained at least five other journalists this month on claims they worked for media outlets operating from exile. Authorities also banned women’s voices from broadcasts in Helmand province.

Since the fall of Kabul on August 15, 2021, the Taliban’s repression of the Afghan media has worsened. On the second anniversary of the group’s return to power, CPJ called on the Taliban to stop its relentless campaign of intimidation and abide by its promise to protect journalists in Afghanistan.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Thursday, August 10, officials from the General Directorate of Intelligence, the Taliban’s intelligence agency, stormed the office of the independent Killid radio station in Jalalabad city, in eastern Nangarhar province, and detained its manager Faqirzai and reporter Saleh, according to the non-profit Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC)and a journalist with knowledge of the situation who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation by the Taliban.

Separately, also on Thursday, Taliban intelligence operatives entered offices of the independent Uranus TV network in Kunduz city in northern Afghanistan and detained Hasib Hassas, a journalist at the independent radio Salam Watandar, according to the AFJC and another journalist who spoke with CPJ anonymously due to fear of Taliban reprisal.

CPJ’s journalist sources said that Faqirzai, Saleh, and Hassas were detained on accusations that they reported for exiled media. 

“The detention of journalists Faqir Mohammad Faqirzai, Jan Agha Saleh, and Hasib Hassas just before the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul shows the Taliban is determined to continue their brutal crackdown on the media,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the three journalists and stop muzzling reporting, whether it is conducted for local media or the exiled press.”

The journalist sources said that the three were transferred to an undisclosed location; CPJ was unable to determine their whereabouts. 

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to a CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the country’s media have been in crisis, with journalists facing arrests, raids on offices, and beatings. The Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence has emerged as a key threat to journalists in the country. Some journalists who fled the country have established media outlets to continue reporting on Afghanistan in exile. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Thursday, August 10, officials from the General Directorate of Intelligence, the Taliban’s intelligence agency, stormed the office of the independent Killid radio station in Jalalabad city, in eastern Nangarhar province, and detained its manager Faqirzai and reporter Saleh, according to the non-profit Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC)and a journalist with knowledge of the situation who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation by the Taliban.

Separately, also on Thursday, Taliban intelligence operatives entered offices of the independent Uranus TV network in Kunduz city in northern Afghanistan and detained Hasib Hassas, a journalist at the independent radio Salam Watandar, according to the AFJC and another journalist who spoke with CPJ anonymously due to fear of Taliban reprisal.

CPJ’s journalist sources said that Faqirzai, Saleh, and Hassas were detained on accusations that they reported for exiled media. 

“The detention of journalists Faqir Mohammad Faqirzai, Jan Agha Saleh, and Hasib Hassas just before the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul shows the Taliban is determined to continue their brutal crackdown on the media,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the three journalists and stop muzzling reporting, whether it is conducted for local media or the exiled press.”

The journalist sources said that the three were transferred to an undisclosed location; CPJ was unable to determine their whereabouts. 

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to a CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the country’s media have been in crisis, with journalists facing arrests, raids on offices, and beatings. The Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence has emerged as a key threat to journalists in the country. Some journalists who fled the country have established media outlets to continue reporting on Afghanistan in exile. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Monowar, 24, was studying for a Master’s in English at Comilla University in eastern Bangladesh while also working as a campus correspondent for the Dhaka-based Jaijaidin national daily since 2019.

On July 31, he published a story in Jaijaidin titled “Corruption prompts development in Bangladesh,” quoting from a speech that the university’s vice-chancellor AFM Abdul Moyeen made at a university event earlier that day.

On August 2, the university sent Monowar a suspension order, reviewed by CPJ, saying that he had distorted the vice-chancellor’s statement and damaged the university’s reputation.

Monowar told CPJ that he was suspended without any due process or a show-cause letter, allowing him to explain why the suspension should not be made, and that the university had not sought any correction from the newspaper prior to taking action.

The journalist said he stood by his reporting and he had an audio recording of the speech.

Monowar’s suspension prompted a protest on August 5 led by former campus reporters. The Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, a local press freedom group, demanded the withdrawal of the order, saying the decision was “unacceptable” and it had sent a “chilling message” to hundreds of other campus journalists.

Moyeen did not immediately respond to CPJ’s email request for comment.

A university official said the suspension order would remain in place until a probe report on the incident was submitted, according to local media.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Monowar, 24, was studying for a Master’s in English at Comilla University in eastern Bangladesh while also working as a campus correspondent for the Dhaka-based Jaijaidin national daily since 2019.

On July 31, he published a story in Jaijaidin titled “Corruption prompts development in Bangladesh,” quoting from a speech that the university’s vice-chancellor AFM Abdul Moyeen made at a university event earlier that day.

On August 2, the university sent Monowar a suspension order, reviewed by CPJ, saying that he had distorted the vice-chancellor’s statement and damaged the university’s reputation.

Monowar told CPJ that he was suspended without any due process or a show-cause letter, allowing him to explain why the suspension should not be made, and that the university had not sought any correction from the newspaper prior to taking action.

The journalist said he stood by his reporting and he had an audio recording of the speech.

Monowar’s suspension prompted a protest on August 5 led by former campus reporters. The Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, a local press freedom group, demanded the withdrawal of the order, saying the decision was “unacceptable” and it had sent a “chilling message” to hundreds of other campus journalists.

Moyeen did not immediately respond to CPJ’s email request for comment.

A university official said the suspension order would remain in place until a probe report on the incident was submitted, according to local media.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Wednesday, June 7, authorities arrested Farghadani at Evin Prison in the capital city of Tehran after she responded to a summons to appear at the prison’s courthouse, according to news reports, which cited tweets by her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi.

Earlier that day, Farghadani published a satirical political cartoon of people with animal and satanic faces, which was the first time she had published on her Instagram account—where she posts political cartoons and has more than 20,000 followers—since February 2020. CPJ could not immediately determine why she was summoned and arrested or whether she had been formally charged.

In 2015, authorities sentenced Farghadani to 12 years and nine months in prison for “assembly and collusion against national security” for a cartoon depicting Iranian parliament members as animals, which she published on her Facebook page. Authorities released her on May 3, 2016, before her sentence ended.

“Iranian authorities must release cartoonist Atena Farghadani immediately and unconditionally,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “This cycling of journalists and commentators through prison is a continuation of authorities’ long-standing revolving door policy and a hallmark of Iran’s failure to respect the rule of law.”

In the caption of her June 7 cartoon, Farghadani wrote that she had made the piece “in the privacy of my own home” and that it did not involve “the Islamic Republic and its agents.”

In August 2015, Cartoonist Rights Network International honored Farghadani with its Courage in Editorial Cartooning award.

CPJ’s email to Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not receive a reply.

Since mid-April, Iran authorities have arrested at least four journalists. Iran was the world’s worst jailer of journalists at the time of CPJ’s December 1, 2022, prison census.

In its 2015 special report, “Drawing the Line,” CPJ found that cartoonists are often targeted for harassment because their satirical portraits, whether backhanded or overt, communicate complex political ideas in a form that is accessible and resonates with mass audiences.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Monday, May 8, the provincial directorate of the Taliban-controlled Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in the eastern province of Khost detained four journalists after summoning them for questioning, according to the exile-based media support group Afghanistan Journalists Center and the London-based broadcaster Afghanistan International.

Authorities accused the journalists of violating the Taliban’s media policies, according to the AFJC report, which cited an anonymous source that did not specify which policies they allegedly violated. CPJ could not immediately determine where the journalists are being held.

“The Taliban must immediately release four journalists recently detained in Khost province and stop the harassment and intimidation of the press in Afghanistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “The Taliban must abide by its own promise to protect press freedom. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice should be held accountable for its crackdown on journalists.”

Those sources identified the journalists as Sakhi Sarwar Miakhel, editor-in-chief of the privately owned Gharghast Radio and TV; Mohammad ud Din Shah Khiali, editor-in-chief of the privately owned Wolas Ghag Radio; Pamir Andish Mohaidi, editor-in-chief of the privately owned Chinar Radio; and Abdul Rahman Ashna, a reporter with the privately owned broadcaster Nan FM.

Shabir Ahmad Osmani, the Taliban’s director of information and public affairs in Khost, said the journalists had been summoned so authorities could share “some important issues” with them, and denied that they had been detained, according to AFJC.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response.

Afghanistan’s independent media have come under increasing pressure since the Taliban took back control of the country in 2021. On March 31, Taliban authorities shut down the women-run broadcaster Radio Sada e Banowan for allegedly playing music, which the Taliban banned after its return to power.  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

A Gazan Ph.D. candidate studying in India, Mohammad Abunahel steadily refines and updates a map on the World BEYOND War website, dedicating a portion of every day to continue researching the extent and impact of USA foreign bases.  What is Mohammad Abunahel learning, and how can we support him?

On the few occasions when a government moves toward converting property or weapon production facilities into something useful for human beings, I can’t restrain a tumbling brainstorm:  what if this signals a trend, what if practical problem-solving begins to trump reckless war preparation? And so, when Spain’s President Sanchez announced on April 26 that his government will build 20,000 homes for social housing on land owned by the country’s Ministry of Defense, I immediately thought about crowded refugee camps around the world and inhumane treatment of people without homes. Visualize the vast capacity to welcome people into decent housing and promising futures if space, energy, ingenuity and funds were diverted from the Pentagon to meet human needs.

We need glimmers of imagination about the worldwide potential for accomplishing good results by choosing the “works of mercy” over “the works of war.”  Why not brainstorm about how resources devoted to military goals of domination and destruction could be put to use defending people against the greatest threats we all face, – the looming terror of ecological collapse, the ongoing potential for new pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and threats to use them?

But a crucial first step entails fact-based education about the global infrastructure of the USA’s military empire. What is the cost of maintaining each base, how much environmental damage does each base cause (consider depleted uranium poison, water contamination, noise pollution, and risks of nuclear weapon storage). We also need analysis about ways the bases exacerbate the likelihood of war and prolong the vicious spirals of violence attendant on all wars. How does the U.S. military justify the base, and what is the human rights record of the government the U.S. negotiated with to build the base?

Tom Englehardt of Tom Dispatch notes the paucity of discussion about the expanse of U.S. military bases, some of which he calls MIA because the U.S. military manipulates information and neglects to even name various forwarding operating bases. “With very little oversight or discussion,” says Englehardt, “the massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains in place.”

Thanks to the tenacious work of researchers who formed the No Bases campaign, World BEYOND War now presents the many-faced hydra of U.S. militarism, worldwide, in a visual database.

Researchers, scholars, journalists, students and activists can consult this tool for help in exploring vital questions about the cost and impact of the bases.

It’s a unique and challenging resource.

At the helm of daily exploration enabling the mapping project’s growth is Mohammad Abunahel.

On almost any given day in Abunahel’s busy life, he sets aside time, far more than he is compensated for, to work on the mapping project. He and his wife are both Ph.D. students in Mysore, India. They share caring for their infant son, Munir. He takes care of the baby while she studies and then they trade roles. For years, Abunahel has devoted skill and energy to create a map which now draws the most “hits” of any section on the WBW website. He considers the maps as a step in addressing wider problems of militarism. The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one data base which is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying  toll of U.S. militarism and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Abunahel has good reason to resist military dominance and the threats of destroying cities and towns with overwhelming weaponry. He grew up in Gaza. Throughout his young life, before he finally managed to obtain visas and scholarships to study in India, he experienced constant violence and deprivation. As one of ten children in an impoverished family, he readily applied himself in classroom studies, hoping to improve his chances for a normal life, but along with the constant threats of Israeli military violence, Abunahel faced closed doors, dwindling options, and rising anger, his own and that of most other people he knew. He wanted out.  Having lived through successive Israeli Occupation  Force onslaughts, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent people of Gaza, including children, and destroying homes, schools, roadways, electrical infrastructure, fisheries and farms, Abunahel grew certain that no country has a right to destroy another.

He’s also adamant about our collective responsibility to question justifications for the U.S. network of military bases. Abunahel rejects the notion that the bases are necessary to protect U.S. people. He sees clear patterns showing the base network being used to impose U.S. national interests on people in other countries. The threat is clear: if you do not submit yourselves to fulfill U.S. national interests, the United States could eliminate you. And if you don’t believe this, look at other countries that were surrounded by U.S. bases. Consider Iraq, or Afghanistan.

David Swanson, the Executive Director of World BEYOND War, reviewing David Vine’s book, The United States of War, notes that “since the 1950s, a U.S. military presence has correlated with the U.S. military starting conflicts. Vine modifies a line from Field of Dreams to refer not to a baseball field but to bases: ‘If you build them, wars will come.’ Vine also chronicles countless examples of wars begetting bases begetting wars begetting bases that not only beget yet more wars but also serve to justify the expense of more weapons and troops to fill the bases, while simultaneously producing blowback — all of which factors build momentum toward more wars.”

Illustrating the extent of the USA’s network of military outposts deserves support. Calling attention to the WBW website and using it to help resist all wars are vital ways to expand the potential for expanding and organizing resistance to U.S. militarism. WBW will also welcome financial contributions to assist Mohammad Abunahel and his wife who are, by the way, excitedly awaiting the birth of their second child. WBW would like to increase the small income he earns. It will be a way to support his growing family as he raises our awareness of warmaking and our resolve to build a world BEYOND war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

On March 20, the National Investigation Agency, India’s counterterrorism body, arrested freelance journalist Irfan Mehraj under sections of the penal code and anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, according to multiple news reports. He was arrested after responding to a summons for questioning at the NIA’s Srinagar office in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. 

In a March 21 press release, the NIA stated that Mehraj’s arrest concerned an investigation opened in October 2020 into non-governmental organizations allegedly funding terrorism. The press release alleged that Mehraj was working with the Kashmir-based human rights group Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society and was a close associate of human rights defender and JKCCS coordinator Khurram Parvez, who has been imprisoned since November 2021. 

Prior to his arrest, Mehraj was investigating the installation of surveillance cameras in Srinagar and the resilience of the Kashmiri Hindu community, according to a journalist familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ by phone on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal. Mehraj remained in prison as of April 19, 2023. CPJ is continuing to investigate whether his arrest was connected to his reporting.

Mehraj has produced reporting critical of the impact of Indian government policies in Kashmir, including reports on extrajudicial killings, heroin addiction, and the plight of Kashmiri Hindus. He is also a part-time copy editor at the TwoCircle.net news website, which reports on issues throughout India, including caste discrimination, violence against Muslims, and right-wing Hindu groups.

CPJ’s email to the NIA did not receive a response. 

Beginning on March 2, Mohammad Zubair, co-founder of Alt News, an independent fact-checking website based in Bengaluru, the capital of southwest Karnataka state, received an onslaught of threats from Hindu right-wing influencers on Twitter, according to news website The Wire and Zubair, who communicated with CPJ via messaging app.

The threats came after an Alt News report about a disinformation campaign about attacks on northern Indian migrant workers in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. They included demands for someone to attack Zubair and “extrajudicial steps” against Zubair and lasted for three days.

In June 2022, Zubair, who uses social media to fact-check false news, was arrested over a tweet allegedly “hurting religious sentiments.” He was released on bail in July following a Supreme Court order.

CPJ’s email to Praveen Sood, director general of the Karnataka police, did not receive a response. Bengaluru Police Commissioner Pratap Reddy told The Wire, “If Zubair approaches us, we will consider giving security based on the case.”

Beginning in mid-March, Twitter withheld in India the handles of BBC News Punjabi and at least three journalists based in Punjab state amid a government crackdown in which authorities shut down the internet while searching for Sikh separatist leader Amritpal Singh Sandhu, according to multiple news reports.

BBC News Punjabi’s handle was suspended in India early March 28 and was restored around six hours later. Indian officials said the government had not asked Twitter to suspend the outlet, but it was due to user reports.

The three journalists–Gagandeep Singh, bureau chief of the Punjabi-language broadcaster Pro Punjab TV; Kamaldeep Singh Brar, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper; and freelance journalist Sandeep Singh–were reporting on the crackdown on Twitter before their handles were withheld in India. The journalists’ handles had not been restored as of April 19, according to CPJ’s review.

An independent journalist, speaking to technology news website Rest of the World on the condition of anonymity, that they received an email from Twitter indicating that their handle was withheld in the country following a “legal removal demand from the Government of India” for violating the Information Technology Act of 2000.

In January 2023, the Indian government ordered YouTube and Twitter to take down the first episode of the two-part BBC documentary investigating Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in the 2002 riots in Gujarat.

CPJ’s calls, emails, and app messages to those journalists and to Alkesh Kumar Sharma, secretary of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, did not receive any response. Twitter responded to CPJ’s emailed request for comment with a poop emoji.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On March 15, police assaulted at least nine journalists on the court’s premises in the capital city of Dhaka after clashes broke out between lawyers supporting the ruling Awami League party and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and police charged into the crowd swinging their batons, according to multiple news reports and five of those journalists, who spoke with CPJ.

The deputy commissioner of the Dhaka police’s Ramna division told news website Bdnews24.com later on March 15 that “journalists got caught up in the turmoil” when officers attempted to break up the unrest, and police were investigating the attacks.

On March 16, Dhaka police officials expressed regret over the incident in a meeting with local journalists but, as of March 29, have not held any of the officers involved in the attacks to account, the journalists told CPJ. 

“The recent apology by the Dhaka police over officers’ attacks on at least nine Bangladeshi journalists is a welcome but insufficient response,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Bangladeshi authorities must hold the officers who attacked journalists to account, return any equipment confiscated from reporters, and ensure that police are thoroughly trained so they can help, rather than imperil, members of the press covering newsworthy events.”

Two officers with the police Public Order Management Division slapped Zabed Akhter, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster ATN News, shoved him to the ground, and kicked him as he repeatedly identified himself as a journalist and told them he suffered from a nerve condition, Akhter told CPJ by phone.

Police also pushed Jannatul Ferdous Tanvi, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster Independent Television, as she tried to help him, Akhter said.

Later that day, Akhter received medical treatment for internal injuries to his waist and back at a hospital, where the two officers apologized to the journalist, Akhter said, adding that those officers had not been held to account for the incident as of March 29.

A group of 10 to 15 officers kicked and used a bamboo stick to beat Md. Humaun Kabir, a senior camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster ATN Bangla who was filming the unrest, knocking him to the ground, Kabir told CPJ by phone. Officers continued to slap him as he ran away, according to a video of the incident reviewed by CPJ. Kabir sustained a head injury for which he took painkillers. 

Five or six officers beat Maruf Hasan, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Manab Zamin, in the head and back while he identified himself as a journalist, he told CPJ via messaging app.  Officers also insulted him with vulgar language and confiscated his microphone, which they had not returned as of March 29, Hasan said.

He told CPJ that he sustained painful injuries to the areas that were beaten.

About five police officers also beat Mohammad Fazlul Haque, a senior reporter for the privately owned news website Jago News, according to Haque, who told CPJ via messaging app that he had been beaten but then did not respond to additional questions seeking details.  

According to those news reports and the journalists who spoke with CPJ, police also attacked Nur Mohammad, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Ajker Patrika; Ibrahim Hossain, a camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster Boishakhi Television; Kabir Hossain, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Kalbela; and Mehedi Hassan Dalim, a reporter for the privately owned news website The Dhaka Post.

CPJ contacted those journalists via messaging app seeking additional details but did not receive any replies.

Suvra Kanti Das, a senior photojournalist for the privately owned newspaper Prothom Alo, told CPJ by phone that he was also covering the elections when an officer grabbed him by the shirt, demanded to see his media identification card, insulted him with vulgar language, and ordered him to leave the premises, which he did.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Roy Niyati, a spokesperson for the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Well, the bad blood between the US and Iran has not stopped. I dare say most people are not aware that, SEVENTY years later, the CIA, and other Western powers, using over sixty TV/radio stations, mostly in the Los Angeles area, broadcast their lies and propaganda day after day while they attempt to poison and frustrate any effort by Iranians to improve their finances and their lives. To be precise, the target of such conspiracies are the people of Iran who dared to rise up and overthrow the Shah’s regime in 1979.

After the coup d’état, the US suggested to the Iranian dictator that it would be mutually beneficial to create a secret police organization. The Shah who owed his throne to the CIA, accepted and the work of creation of a repressive secret service started with the financing of the United States, and training, by Israel.

Before we continue with this story, I would like to backtrack and mention one other fact which could have some bearing with the rest of the story: Reza Shah, the Shah’s father and the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty had fascist tendencies and wanted to follow the Third Reich, and so, even though he was put in place with the help of the Allied Forces, he was also removed from power by them, and replaced by his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who until his final days called the Iranians Aryans. ATTENTION ZIONISTS WHO LOVED THE SHAH. I guess dirty politics makes strange bed-fellows.

As the work of building the SAVAK (called by its acronymes, Sazeman Etela’at Va Amniete Keshvar, meaning Organization for Information and Security of the Country) got underway, a man by the name of Parviz Sabeti was brought on board who quickly moved up the ladder of promotion to eventually become the director of the SAVAK. Sabeti had the job of handpicking the torturers, sending them to Israel to be trained on interrogation techniques, and choosing or designing the tools of torture. A good amount of vicious beating at the time of arrest, and flogging using thick, electric cables by psychopathic torturers constituted the poor victim’s introduction to SAVAK. In addition, there were special tools, such as “Apollo” and the burning bed that would bring nightmares to their potential victims. The prisoners would be hung upside down, their heads inside a metal container that would echo their shouts and cries as they were beaten by maniac torturers. The burning bed was a heated, metal bed on which the prisoner would be placed, their hands and feet tied to the bed as it became hotter and hotter as the back of the prisoner was being burned and cooked. The victim’s cries could be heard by imprisoned writers, poets, activists, waiting for their turn. The stories about torture by the SAVAK were so horrific that many dissidents, even outside the country did not dare to speak against politics in Iran. “The walls have mice, and the mice have ears” was a common saying by Iranians, in reference to the SAVAK and its agents.

Allow me to say this article could have been alternatively titled “The Shah’s SAVAK, The CIA, And Their Crimes Against Humanity.” How would you react if I told you this Iranian Eichmann, the torturer and murderer of thousands, lives in, and freely travels around the United States? There was a time when US administrations paid a lot more lip service to “freedom and democracy”, here and around the world, but no more. Am I having a nightmare, or is this today’s reality? Here we encounter total impunity on the part of the US government that allows torturers and mass murderers to freely go to live where they like.

In response to such impunity I would suggest what is needed is an international commission to arrest this man – not to smuggle him outside the country, as Adolf Eichmann was, but to put him on trial right here in the United States, along with the American intelligence for their crimes against humanity.

This needs to be done today, while the victims of such crimes are still alive, and there are many victims and witnesses. Some have become totally paralyzed as a result of floggings with the electric cables. Many have died. What we cannot allow to die is their ideals, the cause for humanity, fairness, and equality.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Andres Kargar.

A video clip of a doctor sexually violating a patient is widely circulating on social media with the claim that a pregnant woman was raped by a doctor named Islam Muhammad in the operation theatre of a hospital.

Sharing this clip on Twitter, user Sumit Kumar Sondhi wrote in Hindi, “Doctor Islam Mohammad, who raped unconscious pregnant women in the operation room.” (Archive.)

Another Twitter user Shivani Yaduvanshi also shared the clip with the same captions. (Archive.)

Other Twitter users who have shared the videos include @ManavPatel123, @SurajMi50567890, @maxchandan16 and many more.

Fact Check

We broke down the video into key-frames and performed a Google reverse image search. This took us to a tweet by The Rio Times from July 2022. As per this tweet, the man in the video is Brazilian doctor/anesthesiologist  Giovanni Quintella Bezerra, who was caught on camera orally raping a woman during a C-section.

The tweet also says that the doctor was later placed under arrest. Alt News has not embedded the tweet as the video provided on the platform was not blurred.

We performed an additional keyword search using the words “Doctor Giovanni Quintella Bezerra”. This took us to a detailed report by Daily Mail.

As per this report, Giovanni Quintella Bezerra, 32, had qualified as an anaesthetist in April 2022, three months before his video went viral. It says that some of Bezerra’s colleagues grew suspicion of him after it was noticed that he sedated C-section patients so heavily that they were barely conscious. After this, during a surgery in which Bezerra was involved, nurses placed a mobile phone in a cabinet and recorded him. It was seen that as surgeons operated on the patient, Bezerra strategically positioned himself near the head of the patient and raped her. Because of a surgical curtain, the other doctors could not see him in the act.

The report says that five other patients came forward after the incident was widely reported in the media. A local media outlet called ‘Globo‘ reported that the same doctor was previously accused of misdiagnosing a patient after which the patient was put in a 23-day coma.

In November 2022, CNN Brasil reported that a bail request for Giovanni Quintella Bezerra was rejected by the local courts. A detailed report about Bezerra’s arrest was also published by CNN, with additional information about the risks of high doses of sedatives.

So, it can be confirmed that the video is from Brazil and the individual arrested is Giovanni Quintella Bezerra.

To sum it up, a video in which a doctor can be seen sexually violating a patient was shared with a false claim that the doctor’s name was Islam Muhammad.

The post Viral video: Doctor sexually assaulting patient is Giovanni Quintella Bezerra from Brazil, not ‘Islam Mohammad’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

The journalists are all freelancers, except for Shibli who is the editor of news website The Kashmiriyat. 

Police seized electronic devices including laptops, mobiles phone, memory cards, and pen-drives during the raids, the statement added. The home of Adil Pandit, a lawyer representing imprisoned journalist Aasif Sultan, was also raided, The Telegraph said. 

Police said they raided the homes of the journalists in an investigation into a militant group that threatened other members of the media. One of the journalists whose home was raided told CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, that he is not linked to any militant group, and that he believes is being targeted for his critical reporting. 

At least two journalists whose homes were raided have been subject to official scrutiny in the past. In February, authorities issued an arrest warrant for Geelani, who went underground. Authorities raided Shibli’s home in August 2021.  

The recent raids came after police in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir, said in a November 16 Twitter statement that they had initiated an investigation into online threats against journalists allegedly made by militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and The Resistance Front, which police described as a Lashkar-e-Taiba offshoot. 

According to The Telegraph, the threats were made on a blog, KashmirFight.com, against 21 journalists “allegedly working for the State [of India]”; the blog called the journalists “stooges” and “traitors.” The Telegraph said that most of the journalists named are employed at three Srinagar news outlets — newspapers Greater Kashmir and Rising Kashmir and news website Asian News Network. CPJ emailed the three outlets but did not receive an immediate response. 

CPJ could not locate the threatening post on KashmirFight.com. 

The blog has issued threats in the past. In June 2018, the blog said Rising Kashmir Editor Shujaat Bukhari “betray[ed] the Kashmir struggle”; 11 days later the journalist was killed, according to news reports. In October 2020, the blog issued a similar threat to 39 Kashmiri journalists, accusing them of being “Indian agents,” CPJ documented.

CPJ sent requests for comment to Dilbag Singh, director-general of the Jammu and Kashmir police, via messaging app but did not receive a response. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On the evening of October 31, three men armed with guns stopped reporter Niaz Mohammad Khaksar as he walked home in District 7 in the city of Jalalabad in eastern Nangarhar province, according to Khaksar, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and a report by U.K.-based Afghanistan International.

The men questioned him about his identity, his background as a journalist, and his work at the privately owned independent Enikass Radio and TV, according to those sources. Khaksar said one of the men punched him in the eye, and the other two started beating him in the head, legs, and stomach after he said he was a journalist, leaving him unconscious.

Separately, on October 18, two men armed with guns took Ezatullah Salimi, a reporter and presenter with the privately owned Spogmai FM, from his office in the capital, Kabul, and held him in their car for three hours while questioning and beating him, according to Salimi, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and security footage of the abduction reviewed by CPJ.

“The Taliban must investigate the beating and harassment of Afghan journalists Niaz Mohammad Khaksar and Ezatullah Salimi, and bring the perpetrators to justice,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator in Frankfurt, Germany. “Violence against journalists must not go unpunished. The Taliban should also stop detention and harassment of journalists in Afghanistan and allow the media to operate freely.”

Residents sent Khaksar to the Fatema Zahra hospital, where he regained consciousness after a few hours and was hospitalized for a day, he said. As a result of the beating, Khaksar has bruises on his left eye and back, according to pictures reviewed by CPJ.

The attackers questioned Salimi about his journalistic activities, and when he defended his reporting, he said one of the men punched him in the head and slapped him in the face. They continued to punch and slap him on the face, head, and upper body as they questioned and accused him of anti-Taliban reporting.

When they approached a Taliban checkpoint, one of the men shocked him in the neck with some type of electric tool and told him to keep silent, said Salimi. The men also searched his cell phone and released him from the vehicle, threatening him with sexual assault and murder if he ever disclosed the incident.

Salimi said he tried to report the attack to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid but did not receive a reply. Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In the evening of Monday, June 27, officers with the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations unit of the Delhi police arrested Zubair, co-founder of the fact-checking website Alt News, after summoning him for questioning, according to multiple news reports and a tweet by Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha.

Sinha wrote that Zubair had been summoned for questioning in relation to a 2020 criminal investigation over his social media posts, for which he was already granted protection from arrest by the Delhi High Court.

When Zubair responded to that summons, officers arrested him in relation to a criminal investigation opened earlier this month following a post about Zubair by an anonymous Twitter user with the account @balajikijaiin, according to those news reports.

Police accuse Zubair of promoting enmity between different groups and committing malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings, those reports said; if charged and convicted, he could face up to three years of prison and a fine for each offense, according to the Indian penal code.

“The arrest of journalist Mohammad Zubair marks another low for press freedom in India, where the government has created a hostile and unsafe environment for members of the press reporting on sectarian issues,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Zubair, and allow him to pursue his journalistic work without further interference.”

The @balajikijaiin account features a profile photo of the Hindu god Hanuman; its most recent tweet was on June 19, in which it reposted a 2018 tweet by Zubair commenting on a hotel changing its name from “Honeymoon Hotel” to “Hanuman Hotel” after the ruling Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party came to power.

In its June 19 tweet, @balajikijaiin tagged the Delhi Police, called Zubair’s comment a “direct insult of Hindus,” and asked the police to “kindly take action against this guy.”

Zubair, who is Muslim, has repeatedly been targeted in criminal cases in retaliation for his posts on Twitter, where he has about 550,000 followers and which he uses for journalistic work.

Police in the Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh opened a criminal investigation into Zubair on June 3 after he tweeted that three right-wing Hindu activists were “hate mongers,” as CPJ documented at the time. On June 10, the Allahabad High Court refused to dismiss that case, according to news reports.

Uttar Pradesh police also opened a criminal investigation into Zubair in June 2021 over his social media posts about a video depicting a group of Hindu men beating an elderly Muslim man.

Sinha did not immediately respond to CPJ’s calls and WhatsApp messages requesting comment. CPJ was unable to contact @balajikijaiin on Twitter, as the account had disabled its direct messages function.

Delhi police spokesperson Suman Nalwa did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

CPJ’s 2021 annual prison census found that seven journalists were detained in India and Jammu and Kashmir as of December 1, 2021, setting the country’s record for the highest number of detained journalists since at least 1992.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“The Taliban must take immediate measures to halt repeated arbitrary detentions and abuse of journalists in Afghanistan,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “The Taliban must immediately release journalists Abdul Hannan Mohammadi and Khan Mohammad Sial and investigate the assault of Mohammad Ikram Esmati.”

On May 10, Taliban police in the provincial capital Trinkot in southern Uruzgan province detained Sial, a broadcast manager for independent Paiwaston TV station, and have held him in Uruzgan’s central prison since then, according to a journalist familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, and tweets by veteran Afghanistan journalist Bilal Sarwary.

The journalist told CPJ that Taliban members beat Sial and told him to confess that his outlet was funded by foreigners and was both morally and financially corrupt. The Taliban members also told Sial that he would be released if he confessed, according to the journalist familiar with the case.

Separately, on June 14, Taliban intelligence agents detained Mohammadi, a reporter for Pajhwok news agency in northern Kapisa province, while he was on his way to an assignment and transferred him to an undisclosed location, according to a journalist familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation and independent news website Etilaatroz. CPJ was unable to confirm the reason for Mohammadi’s detention.

In a separate incident on June 14, Esmati, a former journalist for the independent Kabul News TV station, was stopped in District 5 of the capital Kabul and searched at a Taliban checkpoint by a Taliban member, who found his press identification cards and began questioning him about his journalism, according to Esmati, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and a BBC Persian report. Esmati was dismissed by the outlet one day before the assault for an unknown reason, according to those sources.

Three Taliban members then put Esmati in a vehicle, drove him to a remote area, and beat him with their guns and fists for approximately five minutes until he received a hard blow to the head and lost consciousness, according to those sources. Esmati said he believed he was unconscious for about 10 minutes and was alone when he woke up. Esmati was later treated at a hospital and said he was not seriously injured.

CPJ has documented the increasingly prominent role of the General Directorate of Intelligence in controlling news media and intimidating Afghanistan journalists.

CPJ contacted Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response. CPJ was unable to determine contact information for Kabul News TV. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.