JULIAN ASSANGE AND PETER GRESTE

Because I do not agree with people over political differences does not mean that I should ignore the fact that as Australian citizens they should all be entitled to equal treatment.

Peter Greste, as a journalist, was treated criminally in Egypt, and the Australian government, albeit very  reluctantly, eventually went into some sort of action to get him released, not forgetting that one of his Al Jazeera colleagues was still held criminally by the Egyptian government.

Julian Assange is an Australian citizen and the Australian government has shown it is completely indifferent to doing anything to help him over the years when he has been illegally held in the Ecuadorian embassy and they have now kicked him out and handed him over to the UK government.

Now the USA has applied for him to be extradited to the USA to face several charges with Chelsea Manning over the saga of the Wikileaks published documents which exposed the USA's lies over the Iraq war and many other devious plots for which the US government needs to be charged - in the International criminal court in The Hague, together with its middle east ally, Israel.

All of this involves exposures, whistleblowers, journalists exposing the lies and cover-ups and somehow alerting people around the globe to what our governments are telling us - and not telling us and the cover-ups which fool most of the people most of the time.

Now we come to Peter Greste who worked for an organisation which was involved with exposing information which Israel and the United States do not want the middle east and others to know about.

Peter Greste says that Julian Assange is not a journalist and does not deserve to have the protection which government are supposed to give to journalists.

Governments are not only not supporting journalists, but are murdering them and/or exposing them to situations where they are not protected, are imprisoned and tortured and often murdered. Think of Khashoggi and the Saudi embassy in Turkey and another foul murder.

Greste was imprisoned in Egypt while doing his job. After a great battle he was released and managed to come home to Australia. Why doesn't Greste do something?

Why should Assange as an Australian citizen not be extended the same privileges and support and why don't more journalists in Australia speak out and complain? They forget how easily they could be next on the list, and their union as also not doing an awful lot to show support either.

The MEAA should hang its head in shame, and I as a retired unionist have watched most unions in Australia behave in the same disgusting way towards their trusting members.

The more we hear about Israel, the more those of us who are South Africans and lived in that police state for many of the apartheid years see that not only is Israel an apartheid state, it is also guilty of one of the major genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Not a day passes than the Israelis are committing more crimes against humanity - human rights abuses which stir our memories of the apartheid years and their follow up by "the only democracy in the middle east"!

From CounterPunch: 2 March 2018

Netanyahu’s Corruption: How Israeli Journalists Project Israel’s Crimes Onto Palestinians

by Ramzy Baroud

In an article published in Al-Monitor without a single verifiable citation, Israeli journalist, Shlomi Eldar, went to unprecedented lengths to divert attention from the corruption in his country.

He spoke of Palestinian journalists – all speaking on condition of anonymity – who ‘applauded’ and ‘admired’ Israeli media coverage of corruption scandals surrounding the country’s rightwing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Eldar’s approach is underhanded and journalistically unsound.

The Israeli media, which has largely supported Netanyahu’s devastating wars on Gaza, continues to relentlessly defend the illegal occupation of Palestine and to serve as a shield for Israel’s stained reputation on the international stage. It is hardly praiseworthy, even if it arguably provides decent coverage for the Netanyahu investigations.

For an Israeli journalist to handpick a few Palestinians who, allegedly, praised the war crimes-apologist Israeli media is a remarkable event that surely cannot be satisfactorily addressed in anonymity.

But Eldar’s journalism aside, one would think that seeking Palestinian admiration for Israeli media should be the least urgent question to address at this time. Others are far more pressing. For example:

Is corruption among Israel’s political elite symptomatic of greater moral and other forms of corruption that have afflicted the entire society?

And, why is it that, while Netanyahu is being indicted for bri
bery, no Israeli official is ever indicted for war crimes against Palestinians?
In fact, well before Netanyahu’s corruption scandals included more serious charges – for instance, quid pro quo deals in which his advisors tried to manipulate media coverage in his favor and offering high political positions in exchange for favors – it included bribes pertaining to fancy cigars and expensive drinks.

What Israelis are trying to tell us is that, despite all of its problems, Israel is a good, transparent, law-abiding and democratic society.

This is precisely why Eldar wrote his article. The outcome was a familiar act of intellectual hubris that we have grown familiar with.

Eldar even cites a supposedly former Palestinian prisoner who told Al-Monitor that, while in prison, “we learned how the democratic election process works in Israel. The prisoners adopted the system in order to elect their leadership in a totally democratic fashion, while ensuring freedom of choice.”

Others cited their favorite Israeli journalist, some of whom have served and continue to serve as mouthpieces for official Israeli hasbara (propaganda).

Many of Israel’s friends in western governments and corporate media have also contributed to this opportunistic style of journalism; they come to the rescue when times are hard, to find ways to praise Israel and to chastise Palestinians and Arabs, even if the latter are not relevant to the discussion, whatsoever.

Who could ever forget US Senator John McCain’s criticism of his country’s torture of prisoners at the height of the so-called ‘war on terror’? His rationale was that such a war can be won without torture, because Israel ‘doesn’t torture’ and yet it is capable of combating ‘Palestinian terrorism’.

Thousands of Palestinians have been tortured, and hundreds were killed under duress in Israeli prisons, the last of whom was Yaseen Omar on the day when this article was written. Moreover, according to the Palestinians Prisoners’ Club, 60% of Palestinian children arrested by Israel are also tortured.

If Israeli media was truly honest in its depiction of Netanyahu’s corruption, it would have made a point of highlighting the extent to which corruption goes well beyond the prime minister, his wife and a few close confidantes, but this would pierce through the entire legal, political and business establishment rendering the system itself as rotten and corrupt.

Instead, the heart of the discussion is relocated somewhere else entirely. In Eldar’s article, for example, he quotes the anonymous Palestinian who speaks about how Palestinians prisoners “rejected the political systems of Arab states and opted for the one they had absorbed from the ‘Israeli enemy’.”

This Israeli obsession of diverting from the discussion is an old tactic. Whenever Israel is in the dock for whatever problem it has invited upon others or itself, it immediately fashions an Arab enemy to beat down, chastise and blame.

In the final analysis, somehow Israel maintains the upper hand and self-granted moral ascendency.

This is also why Israelis refer to their country as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. It is a defense mechanism to divert from the fact that apartheid, racially-structured political systems are inherently undemocratic. So, Israel resorts to belittling its neighbors to confirm its own self-worth.

When Israel facilitated and helped carry out the Sabra and Shatila Massacre in Lebanon in September 1982, it used the same logic to defend itself against media outrage.

The then Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was quoted as saying “the goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.” By ‘they’ he meant the media.
The bottom line is always this: Israel is blameless no matter the hideousness of the act; it is superior and more civilized, and, according to Eldar’s selective reporting, even Palestinians know it.

But where is the outrage by Eldar and his Israeli media champions as thousands of black men and women are being caged in by Israeli police, ready for deportation, for committing the mortal sin of daring to escape war in their countries and seeking refuge in Israel?

How about the millions of besieged and subjugated Palestinians living a bitter existence under an inhumane military occupation?

Should not the Israeli media be targeting the very legal and political structures in their country that makes it okay to imprison a whole nation in defiance of international and human rights law?

In some strange way, corruption is one of few things that is truly normal about Israel, for it is a shared quality with every single country in the world.

What is not normal, and should never be normalized, is that Israel is the only country in the world that continues to practice Apartheid, many years after it was disbanded in South Africa.

Israeli media would rather delay that discussion indefinitely, a cowardly act that is neither admirable nor praiseworthy.

More articles by:Ramzy Baroud

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London). His website is: ramzybaroud.net

ONLINE PRIVACY GUIDE FOR JOURNALISTS 2017

This arrived by email a few days ago, and as it is an issue about which we all need to be aware these days in view of the assaults on journalists around the world, physically, emotionally - and taking into account the numbers being murdered in their own countries - Russia being one example - and in countries around the world where they are reporting on every issue imaginable - we all need to take heed of what is being written about here.

Online Privacy Guide for Journalists 2017

Michael Dagan

(25 years experience as a senior editor)

You can see the eBook PDF-version of this guide here.

 

SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION 2016 - SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID GOVERNMENT 1988

De ja vu comes to mind with the oppressive regime running not only South Africa in government but in its organisations such as the SABC - the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

It reminds one again and again of how the apartheid government treated the SABC and the public by controlling rigidly what we could listen to, and after 1975 when we were allowed - finally to watch television - what we could watch. 

The control of the system was in line with what was at that stage a police state.

What is different in 2016? What are Zuma and the SABC doing to journalism in South Africa? Why don't we just say that the police state is back only controlled by the ANC and not the National Party?

Read the following article and weep:

Register of Journalists

Article in the Australian Financial Review

22 July 1988

All journalists in South Africa are to be forced to register with the Government under recently promulgated special regulations.

Those who fail to register could be jailed for up to 10 years.

Journalists claim the Government intends to withdraw registration, and hence the right to work, from over-critical journalists.

A spokesman for the Liberal Progressive Federal Party, Mr Peter Soal, said the regulations were “horrendous……….a pernicious form of intimidation” stemming from the Government’s “insatiable desire to control the flow of news.”

A parliamentarian who resigned from the ruling National Party last year, Mr Wynand Malan, called them “a step backwards for basic human rights”.

The editor of South Africa’s largest daily newspaper, The Star, Mr Harvey Tyson, said the regulations violated “the very basis of freedom of information and independent journalism.”

The Government already has a powerful arsenal of press curbs. Reporting of the military, prisons, oil procurement and political violence is restricted.

Under the current state of emergency, “subversive” reporting is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, and the Government can close newspapers for three months at a time. It temporarily closed two newspapers this year.

AAP

FAIRFAX MANAGEMENT AND JOURNALISTS HAVE ONLY THEMSELVES TO BLAME!

Mark Scott moved from Fairfax to the ABC, and the ABC has followed a downward path on a similar trajectory to that of Fairfax in the ensuing years.

Fairfax management agenda has been on a particularly right-wing reactionary path since the Howard years, following a political direction set since at least 1996 onwards.

Instead of responding to what many of the Fairfax readers have hoped for over the years, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age journalists have allowed themselves to forget about in-depth investigative journalism, and being seduced into the reactionary maelstrom of gutter journalism at its worst.

Where stories cried out for "deep and meaningful" investigation into allegations and counter-allegations of various breaking-news issues, most journalists have gone for the superficial, meaningless slurs and innuendos, the latest of which is the story about Peter Slipper, Craig Thomson, James Ashby and Kathy Jackson.

Why is it that independent journalist investigators, people who are not working for Fairfax, News Limited, the ABC and other like-minded media outlets, managed to get the factual information so lacking in those organisations' reporting of the important parts of the story?

Is it because they illustrated graphically their determination to bring down the Federal government and cast aspersions on all those who support it in the current parliament to the extent that most Fairfax journalists have worn their politics on their sleeves, and in the process shown what their mettles are like as journalists and reporters.

Some of the most senior reporters at the Fairfax newspapers have become so reactionary in their reporting of stories from the current federal parliament that they could easily be mistaken for members of the opposition parties without too many doubts about their interests and aspirations.

The only difference Rinehart would make to the editorial direction of Fairfax is to put the stories in her own image.

As things stand at the moment, they are not far off!

KATHARINE MURPHY JOINS THE AGE HIT SQUAD - JUDGE SOMEONE GUILTY BEFORE THE TRIAL!!

Katharine Murphy has joined an ever-increasing list of media people who have acted to bring down the Gillard government by whatever foul means they can muster.

While I continue to despise most politicians - particularly the recent spate who have no intelligence, integrity, perspicacity, or intellectual approach to their jobs - I believe that they are being served by media which are at the gutter level of Murdoch and his slaves.

When some of them start to show some backbone and tell the truth about what is happening in this country on all fronts - and particularly allowing the other side of the ghastly soapie playing out in parliament at the moment to be placed in the public arena, then, and only then, will people start to have a little more respect for the current ghastly bunch of politicians!

MICHELLE GRATTAN DAMAGES GILLARD YET AGAIN!

Michell Grattan is a journalist of long standing, but, as with so many other people of uncertain age, they reach a situation where their politics take a turn to the right with disastrous consequences, particularly if they are journalists and/or politicians.

Julia Gillard is not my favourite politican, and the Australia Labor Party (sic) is not my favourite political party, but to her credit Gillard has stood firm against the non-stop negativity of the attacks by Abbott and his gang and Grattan and her gang, and to date she has actually had a few political breakthroughs.

It may not occur to Grattan, or perhaps she hopes her attacks on Gillard will bring it about, but does she realise that with each of her assaults she brings Tony Abbott closer to becoming the next Australian prime minister.

It is to be hoped that the Coalition will wake up to the fact that Abbott is actually one of their biggest liabilities and that without him they may actually achieve much better electoral results., but one has to hope that this is just a nightmare scenario from which we will all wake up one day and we achieve a more democratic parliament thatn the one we currently have.

GILLARD'S ATTACKERS DOING THE WRONG THINGS FOR THE WRONG REASONS!

I am not a supporter of Julia Gillard. She represents a political party which has lost its way, is allied to the United States of America for all the wrong reasons, and is guilty of everything which is wrong with the Liberal/National Coalition.

Journalists from Michelle Grattan onwards on all sides of the so-called political spectrum are attacking Gillard in ways which would be unthinkable if Gillard was a male.

Gillard was put in the position she is in by a party which has lost its way, and is thus subject to vituperation from so-called left, right, centre and all shades between.

The personal attacks are unwarranted because they are none of them giving reasons why she is being attacked and the so-called elephant in the room is the media's fondness for saying Rudd is in the wings waiting for the next opportunity to challenge for the leadership once more.

This is the media's and Opposition's attempts to keep up the attack in the hope of destabilising an already very fragile coalition which is holding together by the skin of its teeth.

It is possible that all this negative assault will have a reverse effect and backfire on all those who are gearing up for an Abbott win at the next election.

Even for those on the Coalition side of politics, the idea of Abbott as the next prime minister of Australia must be a prospect too horrifying to contemplate.

Gillard should be attacked for the Australian Labor Party's policies on practically everything from asylum seekers to uranium, but not for what she looks like, how she sounds, what clothes she wears and other personal nonsenses which Rudd, Howard, Keating and Hawke were never subjected to.

If our governments are a reflection of the population at large, then once again, as Alan Paton could have said in an Australian context, "Cry the beloved country"!

If you think we have been subjected to a media beat-up over the events of invasion day and a political beat-up by the Opposition, taking place over a period of the last 18 months, then you are right.

A beat-up which is a waste of time, money and resources, which could be better spent on fixing the economy and the policies which are failing this country so lamentably!

The letters below were in the Sunday Age on 12 February 2012 in response to the hypercritical - or should that be hypocritical - Julia Gillard articles in the Sunday Age on 5 February 2012.

Shallow approach

THE article ''Julia Gillard is the least impressive prime minister since Billy McMahon. Discuss'' (5/2), illustrates the obsession we have with image, appearance and impressions rather than achievements, accomplishments and outcomes.

We use the ''image'' of a person and how we ''feel'' about them as a measure of their success or capacity to deal with problems (in this case the prime minister). This indicates a serious misconception about what is needed to solve current problems at home and abroad. Having the ''right look'' does not guarantee the job is done. Rather, employing an intellect and applying unfashionable scientific approaches such as analysing, measuring, calculating and quantifying are what will solve problems.

LEIGH ACKLAND, Deepdene

Negativity triumphs

LAST week's front-page story by Misha Schubert deliberately gives the impression that Julia Gillard is ineffective and out of touch. Like Michael Duffy and Michelle Grattan, Schubert has continued the negative reporting which seems designed to undermine our elected government … When will you start reviewing and contrasting opposition policy rather than just playing the man? The tall poppy syndrome is alive and well. What a pity our first female prime minister has to endure the media's wish to see her dragged down.

BILL NEALE, Ferntree Gully

Ragbag of opinions

THE article on Julia Gillard was dismaying for a national newspaper. Made up of a ragbag of opinions masquerading as measured argument, it maintains the male Australian tradition of breaking on the wheel those women who dare to aspire to high office. Robert Manne's statement about the need for the Prime Minister to create ''a narrative compellingly told about how Australia should chart its course'' harks back to another era.

Unsurprisingly, Tony Abbott, that ''ordinary'' man (Extra, 29/1), applies Manne's dictum to promote his own depleted and deprived ''narrative'' for Australia. Gillard's leadership, in fact, signifies a shift into a new era of more mature politics, one in which flexibility and negotiation have already achieved some remarkable outcomes. This is a sign of her political strength, not weakness.

RUTH SCHMIDT NEVEN, Camberwell

SYDNEY STAR OBSERVER LOSES CREDIBILITY

The Sydney Star Observer (SSO) was, for many years, the leading gay weekly paper in Australia.

There was a wide coverage of news and there was a broad spectrum of community issues addressed in depth and with good reporting.

Newspapers are having a difficult time since the advent of so much information which is now available online. However there is no excuse for the deterioration in the quality of what is still presented in hard copy which comes out in print once a week.

The SSO editorial board has decided to drop the letters page in the print copy, informing readers who bother to query this that letters are no longer printed because they are all available online.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to those daily newspapers which stopped printing letters every day. They would assuredly lose readership which is already falling because of online availability and because the quality of the journalism presented to us these days is of such a poor standard due to the proprietors trying to toe the politicians' lines - or their own!!! think Rupert Murdoch!

The result is a weekly paper which is a waste of good paper. News is poor, journalism is poor, the information is poor and community support is poor.

What next for a paper that was once so good??

FAIRFAX NEWSPAPERS - REACTIONARY, RIGHT WING, NO CONTRARY OPINIONS ALLOWED??

Imagine the shock and horror when opening The Age's opinion pages on Monday 5 September 2011 to discover that Amanda Vanstone and John Howard were setting the tone of political discussions on the Australian Labor Party's leadership issues and its asylum seeker policies!

Why on earth would anyone other than a dyed-in-the-wool, rusted on reactionary bigot be interested in anything these two has-beens have to say about the politics of 2011??

Just imagine The Age having supporters of the Palestinians and supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaigns writing opinion pieces to be shared with readers - if there are any left after 5 September - and showing that The Age's editor-in-chief and his reporters and journalists were open to views other than those of the zionists who seem to hold disproportionate sway over Fairfax!!

It really is time that the journalists who draw their pay from Fairfax put some pressure on their bosses to make them publish views other than those of the most reactionary members of our societies.

Vanstone and Howard have other avenues to make their repugnant and repellant views public, and the newspapers we read are not those who should give them room for those views. Howard and his government, which included Vanstone, had more than 11 years to push their particularly repulsive barrows, and voices opposing their views were made to grow dimmer in that time due to a very compliant media!

Fortunately there are many alternatives in 2011 where one can make one's voice heard and where one can also obtain information which the media deny us with their own self-censorship, but it is still wrong that Fairfax should give column space to these people who have access to all those media on radio, television and print whose views are the same as theirs.