How The New York Times Slants The News on Killings of Jews (unjustified) and Palestinian Arabs (justified)

"Palestinians using knives, guns and vehicles have killed 19 Israelis, an American student and a Palestinian resident of the West Bank over the past three months. More than 130 Palestinians have been killed during the same period, about two-thirds of them in carrying out, or attempting to carry out, attacks. Others were killed during violent clashes with Israeli forces in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and demonstrations along the Gaza border." Notice that Palestinians kill Israelis, so we know who killed Israelis. In the case of the Palestinian killed (and note that NYT always lists Israeli victims before Palestinian victims although almost ten times more Palestinians have been killed in this period than Israelis). And notice that passive voice in "Palestinians have been killed", as we don't know who killed them. And then notice how justifications are given: that they were killed either as they were carrying out or "attempting to carry out". How do we know they were attempting to carry out if they did not carry out? Because Israel says so of course. The remaining are listed to have been killed "during violent clashes". So basically with that slight of language, the New York Times manages to make 130 Palestinians killed guilty of crimes, while it manages to make 19 Israeli killed to be innocent victims of Palestinian "murderers". Welcome to the world of US journalism about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Oh, and notice how it links Palestinians who were killed "in violent clashes" with Palestinians killed in "demonstrations", thereby implying that demonstrating is a crime that should be punished by death.

Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil at www.angryarab.blogspot.com

BULLETIN: WHO KNEW?

 From The NEW YORK TIMES!



| Rich Children and Poor Ones Are Raised Very Differently

Pro-Capitalist Climate Problem Needs Anti-Capitalist Solution

The Paris meeting of national officials united to save capitalism by re-branding climate change was challenged by outside demonstrators from all over the world calling for system change. The people were  way ahead of their governments. Whether called revolutionary by supporters or disastrous by opponents, what should rightly be called COP-OUT 21 came to a final agreement that means business as usual. Private profits continue to come before any consideration of public loss and that is the root of the problem for humanity.

By slightly slowing the pace of earth drowning under carbonation through “advising” less carbon creation offered as much a solution to our problem as continued pouring of raw sewage into our drinking water offers planetary health as long as we slow the rate at which diseased slop oozes into our reservoirs.

While the world’s foremost polluters figure out how to continue sucking fossil fuel out of the earth and only change its market  pricing structure as an effort to slow down its use, outside demands for leaving that fuel underground and switching to alternative energy sources grow in passion, logic and necessity. Switching from fuel burning energy to wind, geothermal and solar power spells calamity for financial empires built on coal, oil and war, but mean salvation for our race. The ruling powers of finance capital wont stand for that but we can’t tolerate anything less, no matter what mental and physical havoc their media and military minions help them carry out. We cannot go on this way, and it isn’t only the recently arrived problem of climate change – it’s actually been around and criticized for generations – but all the negative things this anti-democratic economy does, which have also been criticized for generations.

  

The future of humanity calls for an end to the system of private profit and public loss that has brought wonderful lives to many – as did feudalism and slavery – but misery and deprivation to even more, with the number of humans carrying the loss rising dangerously as profits grow for an ever smaller population.

In less than a generation we have gone from worshipping a millionaire minority and relying on their philanthropy, rather than taxing them, to help majorities with much less, to groveling before a much smaller billionaire minority and relying on their philanthropy to help even greater majorities with much less, rather than taxing them. This staggering progress in our democracy is very much like the tremendous gains we have made in falsely identifying people by race and moving from calling some fellow humans “colored people” back in the dumb 20^th century to calling them “people of color” in the brilliant 21^st. And interestingly, far more “people of color” are locked up in our penal colonies and have been shot dead by our police than was the case when they were lowly “colored people”. Progress for some who jumped into a few openings in the upper middle class was accompanied by far more sinking into worse poverty and social exclusion than was the sordid case before. Affirmative action indeed, but for how many? And at what cost?

That is how this system works at all times. Some profit while others lose. Always. We’re told it’s nature but we were once ignorant enough to think slavery was also natural. We at least seemed to learn that wasn’t the case. Now, we have to learn to understand all the contradictions of running society according to these warped rules of minority domination or we will lose society itself, for everyone.

The exact same economic process has been at work for “people of no color”, though even without skin tone bigotry it is almost bizarre to attribute privilege, as in “white privilege” to all who share one or another complexion with little notice to the size of their bank accounts and their social stratification. Economics rule the nation and economic privilege is enjoyed by a minority, with bigotry and injustice dealt out with meaner outcomes to various groups but with full equality of divide and conquer rule that assures minorities acting for minorities means the smallest minority – the rich – maintains power and control of everything that matters. Especially humans reduced to powerless pawns, only able to operate for some members of one or another identity group, but never able to work together as a functioning democracy in deed and not merely word.

This system has created abundant comfort for many and incredible amounts of lethal garbage for most, inconceivably increasing financial fortunes for a dwindling-in-number class of royal rich and a fast expanding number of poor with re-branded as middle class workers sinking into categories of working poor, unemployed and homeless.

This has been going on since long before science “discovered” climate change, enlightened capital figured out how to use it to make money, and the reactionary pinheads, boneheads and brain-dead used their opposition to organize the innocent. But 150 years ago Karl Marx did an extensive analysis of this system. He spoke of all its positives and mostly negatives, calling attention to what capitalism was doing and would do to people and the earth if it wasn’t stopped. Think about chemicals in our food “products”, imported cheap labor, exported jobs, unions reduced to a tiny segment of the population, increasing poverty and all the present talk of threatening environmental factors, and consider this:

“Capitalist production…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil…. The social combination and organization of the labor processes is turned into an organized mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom and independence.… Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology…only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”

That’s a very brief quote from a three-volume work. Much too long for a tweet but hopefully understandable to anyone but a twit. Capitalism is an old, outmoded, abusive system that needs to be changed for the salvation of humanity. Marx could see that fact a long, long time ago. We’d better learn and act on it, now, before it’s too late.

TRUMP BARRED FROM CHILD MOLESTER'S CONVENTION

"We will not have our organization's image sullied by this vicious man and his hate speech. We do not discriminate among the children we have sex with and will not let this evil Hitler type monster influence our members or cast a dark light on all the good we do" said NCMFBA* president T.B. Falworth Jackson.

"Our members love and sexually relate to christian, jewish, muslim, agnostic, atheist, buddhist and any and all children of all faiths, races and belief systems. This is the American way!"

Spokespeople for the Democratic, Republican, Communist and American Nazi parties all joined in praise for the group's courageous outcry against rhetorical bigotry. In a joint statement of solidarity, they said:

At a time when all Americans need to come together against rhetorical bigotry against muslims while we continue murdering them by the thousands in their homelands with weapons and not words, the NCMFBA is a beacon of light shining on the ideals that make us the master race of self chosen people the world desperately needs, now more than ever.



*national child molesters for a better america

Media, Politicians, Soil Their Underwear Over Front-Runner Trump

by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com

He's "unhinged, offensive, reprehensible," and "ridiculous." His proposals are "unconstitutional." He's a "racist, xenophobic, religious bigot" who doesn't understand "our laws" or "our history." He must be rejected by all "real" Americans.

Wow. What accounts for such an emotional outburst from U.S. politicians and media commentators? Mostly it's that Trump is not simply repeating focus-group tested sound-bites and bumper-sticker slogans pre-approved by slick media managers, but is saying what he actually thinks about the U.S. being subject to continual terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists. The proposals themselves leave much to be desired (he says nothing about U.S. foreign policy crimes continually carried out against Muslim populations abroad), but he is at least paying us the compliment of honestly commenting on a serious problem, and not merely articulating a consensus of wealthy funders of his campaign. So far, he is the only Republican candidate to do this, which the talking heads in the corporate media find incomprehensible, so accustomed are they to the parroting of official cliches.

The pinhead pundits and bought candidates are particularly upset at Trump's calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, and the surveillance of Muslim mosques inside the U.S., proposals that offend the tender consciences of those who have accepted torture, preventive detention, mass killing of civilians (dismissed as "collateral damage") and nearly universal surveillance of communications, among other Bush-Obama policies manifestly inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution and "the rule of law" they claim to revere and uphold. Nonetheless, there is a certain unfairness in singling out Muslims for attention, given what is going on in synagogues and churches around the U.S. Do we really need to remind anyone that synagogues raise huge sums of tax exempt funds for Israel to degrade, rob, torture and murder Palestinian civilians on a daily basis, which has long been a major Muslim (and Christian) grievance against the U.S.? Apparently, we do. Have we forgotten that Christian evangelicals cheer these racist murderers on, convinced that such policies are the prelude to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and God's eternal paradise? Apparently, we have. And does anyone really know the full extent of Catholic sexual terrorism against children, long defended by the church as a private matter, best remedied by "healing" and prayer? Probably not.

So would the hysterical anti-Trump mob be any less upset if Trump proposed a general crackdown on organized crime in religious institutions? Of course not. The problem is not Trump per se, but the fact that he has the nerve and the money to say what he thinks without fearing the consequences. This is intolerable to establishment politics, which depends on an elite consensus imposed on the country by massive propaganda backed by force. Now that consensus has lost the confidence of the Republican base, which to its credit wants real change, not more of the phony "change you can believe in."

As the chorus of denunciation rises, Trump appears to grow ever stronger, while the GOP candidates condemning him fade into obscurity. A parade of political "experts" is then trotted out to proclaim his base marginal, though the plain fact is that many in the Cruz and Carson camps do not find him loathesome (Cruz conspicuously declines to condemn him) which means that his popularity still has plenty of room to grow should either or both of those candidates exit the race. In any event, he continues to hold double-digit leads both nationally and in Iowa, which must mean that everyone hates him except the voters.

For months now we have been told that Trump's public support will evaporate once subjected to "rational" scrutiny (by increasingly hysterical experts) or "likely voters" contemplating actual ballots they will cast in the no-longer-distant primary elections. But the opposite has occurred, and today Trump is the solidly entrenched front runner nationally and in Iowa. His approach may indeed be the "politics of fear," but then, after decades of Washington treating Muslim-dominant regions of the world like free-fire zones, there is plenty to be fearful about. How long will it be, for example, before an ISIS inspired terrorist group figures out how to construct and detonate an atomic bomb in a U.S. city? (Plenty of fissionable material is unaccounted for around the world, and construction of an atomic bomb is not technically difficult).

The problem is not Trump's appeals to fear, but rather that he aspires to be "tough on terror" without recognizing (let alone doing anything about) the wholesale terrorism the U.S. has long practiced throughout the world, especially in the Middle East, from where our insurgent terrorist threat in "the homeland" originates. This cannot work, of course, any more than peace in Northern Ireland could have been achieved without addressing British colonialism. Throughout the Muslim world serious grievances against the U.S. exist, and must be addressed, but neither Trump nor the chorus of fools ignorantly denouncing him recognize this.

This can only eventuate in further catastrophe.