09/28/15 – James North – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Oh, I need my ear goggles on here.
Hang on.
All right.
All right.
So our first guest, oh, our only guest on the show today is James North from mondoweiss.net.
James, how are you?
Delighted.
Thanks for inviting me.
Very happy to have you here.
I read you every morning.
I get the morning e-mail, and I can't resist clicking on always the majority of the stories in there, and quite a few of them are by you, especially lately, it seems like.
So always learn a lot, and it's kind of sad to say it's a pretty unique niche you have there, you know, providing honest coverage of Israel-Palestine for an American audience.
So it's sad but true.
But anyway, happy to have you around.
I wanted to first ask you about something that I'm not certain you've written about, but I'd be willing to bet you have been paying some attention, and that is how the Israeli establishment and particularly the Netanyahu government are handling their loss on the nuclear deal and what they have to say about Iran and the nuclear deal going forward from here since they lost in the U.S. Congress.
We've heard very little about what the Israeli government is saying since their defeat on that.
Well, great.
That's an excellent question.
I don't follow that directly myself, but certainly Mondoweiss covers a lot of that.
We have two reporters in Palestine-Israel who write up this kind of thing.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the Israeli government claimed that its threat was that the Iranians would get nuclear weapons and threaten the future or the existence of Israel.
I don't think anyone who looks realistically at this believes that this was the actual fear.
The fear is that a strengthened Iran would be a counterbalance to Israel in the Middle East region and Israel would not be able to continue the occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories.
I did do a piece up at Mondoweiss about a week or so ago in which the question was, who has the bigger military budget, Israel or Iran?
And to my surprise, on consulting some of the experts who are quoted in the piece, it turns out that Iran's military budget is smaller than that of Israel, far smaller than that of our U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia.
And in fact, this fight over the Iran deal has been basically a hidden fight over continuing the occupation in Palestine and Israel's regional strength.
That's what the real issue has been here.
Yeah, it sure seems like the fact that Gareth Porter writes in his book Manufactured Crisis that it was actually Rabin who basically spoiled the relationship between Israel and Iran and turned on them for PR purposes to distract from the fact that he was trying to negotiate a two-state solution.
But then after his assassination, every successor prime minister since then has continued the demonization, but for the opposite reason, to distract from the fact that they'll never negotiate a two-state solution.
And it's still basically grand theft.
You're 100% right.
And what you had was up to $20 million spent on ads and propaganda in the U.S. media, frankly frightening people in the United States, the idea that a nuclear Iran was a threat not only to Israel, but to possibly even the United States, when frankly that wasn't the issue at all.
And I'm sure top Israelis recognize this and say this.
They're very adept at manipulating American public opinion.
And this time they failed, though.
All right.
Now, so let's talk about what's going on in the West Bank here.
Can you tell us the story of the killing of this Palestinian woman, Hadil?
Well, 18-year-old.
She'd be a child if she was a white American.
So this teenager, Hadil, I'll let you say her last name.
Sure.
Hadil al-Hashlamoun.
Basically what happened here is yet another instance of New York Times bias in reporting.
Now, I personally this year have done probably 20 different articles in Mondoweiss pointing this out.
It's not work that I particularly enjoy doing in the sense that I feel I should be able to pick up my Main Street.
I live here in New York City, so the New York Times is, you know, my home newspaper.
I feel I should be able to pick it up and read articles about other parts of the world that follow the general rules that when I taught journalism were taught in Journalism 101, which is to listen to all sides of the story, give everyone their say, et cetera.
And in many areas, the New York Times does exactly this.
But in terms of covering Palestine and Israel, we find that it falls short often.
And the latest example is on September 22, a young Palestinian woman, Hadil al-Hashlamoun, was shot dead at a checkpoint in Hebron in the occupied West Bank of Palestine.
And there are photographs, which we have on Mondoweiss and which are available on the Internet, of a frightening photograph of an Israeli soldier in uniform with an automatic weapon pointing his weapon at her just before he shot her dead.
Okay.
Now, the New York Times briefly covered the story.
This happened on September 22.
The New York Times briefly covered the story.
And they printed, first they printed the Israeli government response, which was that this was an accident or they had an excuse or whatever, which is okay.
I mean, print both sides, fine.
But then they went on and briefly they quoted an eyewitness, a European activist, who said that the Israeli, he challenged the Israeli accountants, said the woman hadn't been provocative in any way.
Okay.
So far, so good.
However, this story is flying all around the Internet.
Other places have covered it.
But the New York Times in the ensuing five days has not done a single story.
And what I do in today's, in Mondoweiss, the piece that's up now is I say, let's do a thought experiment.
Let's say that a young Jewish woman dressed in Orthodox clothing was shot dead by uniformed Palestinian policemen somewhere in the West Bank.
Would the New York Times ignore this story day after day?
And, of course, they wouldn't.
They would be covering it in great detail.
So my final verdict here is that after five days, the Times has not followed up this story in any way.
Amnesty International issued a report that said that this was an extrajudicial killing, which I think is a polite way to say it's a murder.
But the Times did not report what Amnesty International said.
There was no effort to write about the reaction among this young woman's family to give us a little background as to who she was and how she happened to be at that checkpoint.
The Times has at least three reporters in Israel-Palestine, but none of them has tried to go out and independently investigate the Israeli version of the killing.
And there has not been a single photograph.
These photographs are some of the most striking photographs.
I invite anyone to go to Mondoweiss.net and see what I'm talking about.
These photographs are very striking and painful.
The Times has not published them.
So again, we're not suggesting at Mondoweiss that the Times turn itself into a pro-Palestinian propaganda organ by no means.
We're simply suggesting that it do its job as a mainstream press media outlet and cover all the news that's fit to print and put all sides of the story.
It's a simple request.
They act like Israel is the 51st state when it's a foreign country, and never mind how ridiculous this is when it's a domestic thing.
The New York Times has been guilty of this, but just in the last year they've decided to try to rectify this a little bit and start covering police killings of Americans who don't deserve it.
And yet here they're giving the kind of deference to the IDF that they won't give to the cops of Baltimore.
Absolutely.
You're entirely right.
But at the same time, another element of the Times' bias in this is they cover up the kind of—you asked me earlier about the Israeli government and its reaction.
Well, they have some extreme—this is the most right-wing government in Israel's history, and they have some extremely conservative—conservative in the bad sense of the word, okay, not in the libertarian sense by any means.
But they have some arch-right-wing people there who are in power, and the Times makes no efforts to write about these people at all.
For instance, the current minister of justice is a woman called Ayelet Shaked, and she approvingly put a Facebook post up about a year ago that basically implied that all Palestinians are guilty, even the children, and that they should be—the children are little snakes who would grow into big snakes that would threaten Israel, and these people should be killed.
So here is a person who is now the minister of justice.
This is their attorney general.
It's unbelievable.
I'm sorry, James, I've got to interrupt right here.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with James North from Mondoweiss.net.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with James North.
He's at Mondoweiss.net.
And, well, we're talking Israel-Palestine and lots of things.
The killing by the IDF of this 18-year-old young woman on September the 22nd, the coverage of it, et cetera.
Plenty to follow up there, but where we left off at the break, you were mentioning, and it's an unfortunate thing to be interrupted on, James, so I'm happy to let you restate the point.
It's a hugely important one.
You were talking about something that had been said or written on Facebook by the woman who is now the Justice Minister of Israel, which parliamentary system, but basically that's their Attorney General, their top law enforcement officer on the national level there in Israel, correct?
That's right.
And, in fact, this woman, Ayelet Shaked, she's actually a protege of one of Netanyahu's coalition partners, and she's got a very senior job now.
And the fact is that a year ago she's known as an extreme racist, frankly, anti-Palestinian racist.
This is well known in Israel.
And she basically on her Facebook page approvingly quoted another person of that ilk who basically called for, implicitly called for the genocide of Palestinians, to get rid of the Palestinian problem by getting rid of the Palestinians.
Well, the New York Times did a profile of this woman in which it downplayed that and basically instead informed us that she was good at mathematics and that she had been a Girl Scout.
I mean, you know, you can humanize almost anybody.
So the point isn't that we're arguing that on the Weiss.net, we're not arguing that the New York Times should become a weapon in the pro-Palestinian struggle.
We understand how the mainstream media works.
But I'm reminded of a famous quote from Emma Goldman, the great anarchist feminist over 100 years ago.
And she said at one stage, we want them to live up to their values before we even try to teach them what our values are.
And here's an instance where this leading newspaper, which is extremely influential, you know, not just in the United States, but worldwide, where it's falling down on the job.
And we, you know, every few days we find another instance of this and we chronicle this on MamdaWeiss.net.
And I can tell you, we get a tremendous reaction from the public.
The website is growing.
People are following us more and more, as you kindly mentioned at the beginning of our segment here.
You tend to read it every morning.
And the problem is, it's necessary because there are very few other websites, at least in the United States, where you can get this kind of straightforward coverage of what's actually going on in Israel-Palestine.
Yeah.
Well, and of course there is a real controversy there because to plagiarize Colbert, the truth about Israel-Palestine has a well-known pro-Palestinian bias.
And so they have to treat the issue this way because if they're just frank about, you know, look, to even tell the story, you have to say, well, remember now, Israel's been occupying the West Bank since 1967.
You know, a military foreign occupation longer than the Soviets ruled Eastern Europe going on here.
These people have no rights whatsoever and the Israelis are in violation of international law 500 ways.
Okay, now the rest of the details of the current story that we're breaking here.
But that's the kind of context that they would have to provide every time if they're going to tell the truth.
And they sure as hell aren't going to do that.
Right.
Well, exactly.
I mean, the West Bank and Palestine would be, well, any decent person, but certainly a libertarian's nightmare.
I mean, the checks, the papers, the stopping you.
If you want to talk about government power, you know, about government dictatorship, try living under a military occupation.
I mean, there's no more extreme version of it.
I mean, it's quite extraordinary.
And that's why I'm very thankful.
I'm not a libertarian myself, but I'm very sympathetic to some of your views.
But I'm very thankful that the libertarian community has spoken up on this issue repeatedly over the years.
Many of your people have, you know, going back to Ron Paul, have pointed out that this occupation and that the U.S. policy getting involved in endless wars overseas is dangerous both for the places that we invade and for our own country.
Well, it's simple.
Natural rights theory carried to its conclusion.
Palestinians are humans.
They own property.
You don't have the right to kill them and take it.
Nobody does.
Simple as that.
Same as everyone.
Exactly.
And liberals and conservatives always, you know, agree with that at least to a degree.
Us libertarians, we just mean it 100% of the time.
Right.
But everybody, at least in the West, you know, pretends like those are the principles we start with, at least in America.
But again.
This is why the censorship, right?
This is why they can't ever explain to the Americans.
They pretend like Palestine is the country next door, forever threatening the poor Israelis with terrorist attacks and never explain that they already lost.
They lost a long time ago.
They've been conquered since then, and that that's the current context, you know?
Precisely.
Precisely.
And that's why the New York Times coverage, again, is so because New York Times coverage also sets the tone for coverage in other parts of the mainstream American press.
You know, if the New York Times had followed up this story about this young woman being judicially murdered, and again, I invite your listeners to go to Mondoweist.net and look at the photographs.
I mean, it couldn't be more clear what's happening there.
And yet these photographs have never appeared in the Times.
But if the Times had started to pursue this story, then other newspapers and media outlets, possibly even the major networks would have done something about it, and people would be talking about it.
And again, as you just pointed out, why is this woman going through a checkpoint in her own country, Palestine?
Well, there's a military occupation.
What does that really mean?
What does that in practical terms mean for people there?
It sometimes means that people die in ambulances on their way to a hospital because the military checkpoint, there's a backup.
It means that children are sometimes born in the back of the family car because they can't get to the hospital in time.
It goes on and on.
But the fact is, you're right, if people knew, I'm absolutely convinced that if people in the United States knew what was really going on in Israel-Palestine, they would not give the extent of support that they do to the Israeli government, which they mistakenly believe is defending freedom, is part of the free world, et cetera.
That's not true.
Yeah, I have to believe that.
And I guess it's the great, you know, there is no counterfactual, there is no real way to prove it.
It's unfalsifiable because it's never going to change.
They're never going to be honest with the American people about what's going on around here.
And so it's just going to continue.
And as you say- On the plus side, I tend to agree with you, but at the same time on the plus side, with alternative media, both online and programs like yours, the word is starting to get out there.
I mean, I've been following the Israel-Palestine question for quite a few years now, and there's a decisive change in opinion, particularly among younger people.
Younger people on campuses and elsewhere are becoming more and more aware of what's going on here.
And the beauty of the Internet is it's still free, I mean, to a great extent, and you can go on there and you can find things out that you won't read in your local newspaper.
You can get the message out about this.
This woman's story would not be publicized.
You'd have to wait a month until a tiny little magazine came from Palestine to learn about this, and now it's right in front of everybody's face.
You turn your computer on and you can learn about it.
And by the way, please, everybody, do that as soon as you can.
Go to Mondoweiss, look at this, and watch the video.
He mentioned the still pictures, but watch the video.
It took this woman, by some reports, I think half an hour to lay there and bleed out while these guys just stood around gawking at her.
And I even read that one of them was an EMT, and they just sat there and watched her die for half an hour laying on the ground.
You've got to see it, everybody.
I just tweeted the video out, too.
All right, that's James North at Mondoweiss.net.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
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