The Washington Post (4/15/24) published a glowing profile of two former public school teachers who had “grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist.” In the latest multi-thousand word feature depicting America’s “education culture war,” the Washington Post’s “They Quit Liberal Public Schools. Now They Teach Kids to Be Anti-‘Woke’” (4/15/24) fawningly profiled Kali and Joshua Fontanilla, the founders of the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K–12 school that aims to “de ..read more

  Reuters (4/23/24) The bodies of over 300 people were discovered in a mass grave at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, a Gaza city besieged by Israeli forces. The discovery of these Palestinian bodies, many of which were reportedly bound and stripped, is more evidence of “plausible” genocide committed by Israel during its bombardment of Gaza. Over 34,000 Palestinians have died thus far, with more than two-thirds of the casualties being women and children (Al Jazeera, 4/21/24). Yet this discovery prompted few US news headlines, despite outlets like the Guardian (4/23/24), Haaret ..read more

  The International Court of Justice in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The next month, in a lawsuit aimed at ending US military support for Israel, a federal court in California ruled that Israel’s actions in the Strip “plausibly” amount to genocide (Guardian, 2/1/24). Shortly thereafter, Michael Fakhri (Guardian, 2/27/24), the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said of Israeli actions: There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchar ..read more

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426.mp3   Columbia encampment (CC photo: Pamela Drew) This week on CounterSpin: Lots of college students, it would appear, think that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge, but acting on it. Yale students went on a hunger strike, students at Washington University in St. Louis disrupted admitted students day, students and faculty are expressing outrage at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (emphasis added) canceling their valedictorian’s commencement speech out of ..read more

  Janine Jackson interviewed author Dave Lindorff about his book Spy for No Country for the April 19, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240419Lindorff.mp3   Janine Jackson: The success of the movie Oppenheimer showed that there is interest in the human beings involved in the Manhattan Project: the choices, beliefs, situational ethics, if you will, of those involved in the World War II program to develop the atomic bomb. Another key figure, likewise reflective of the human ..read more

  With the encouragement of the state, universities from coast to coast are taking draconian steps to silence debate about US-backed violence in the Middle East. The Columbia University community looked on in shock as cops in riot gear arrested at least 100 pro-Palestine protesters who had set up an encampment in the center of campus (New York Post, 4/18/24). The university’s president, Nemat Shafik, had just the day before testified before a Republican-dominated congressional committee ostensibly concerned with campus “antisemitism”—a label that has come to be misapplied to any criticism ..read more

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240419.mp3   Time (4/14/24) This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Military Contractor Trial Set to Start 20 Years after Shocking Images of Abuse.” That’s th ..read more

  UOL (4/11/24) Libertarian pundit Michael Shellenberger on April 3 tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives, dubbed “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brazil‘s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters. A week later, Estela Aran ..read more

  A New York Times staffer told the Intercept (4/15/24) that the paper was “basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict.” New York Times editors issued a memo to staffers that warned against the use of “inflammatory language and incendiary accusations on all sides”—but the instructions offered by the memo, which was leaked to the Intercept (4/15/24), seemed designed to dampen criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and to reinforce the Israeli narrative of the conflict. Among the terms the memo tells Times reporters to avoid: “Palestine ..read more

A FAIR study finds that since October 7, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have overwhelmingly applied the term “brutal” to violence committed by Palestinians rather than by Israelis. In doing so, journalists helped justify US support for the assault on Gaza and shield Israel from criticism, particularly in the early months of the onslaught. Israel’s assault on Gaza has been nothing if not “brutal.” The indiscriminate use of US-supplied artillery that shred Palestinian bodies and bury them alive under rubble has killed at least 33,000, mostly women and childr ..read more