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Throughout the evolution of my thought as the Empire reached its highest point and began to collapse there have been some key figures: Mike Ruppert and Guy McPherson are the first to come to mind. However there are others, such as Chris Hedges.
Amongst these people is Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed who I have followed since his film "Crisis of Civilisation". He has been a first-rate researcher and journalist who has joined the dots between resource decline, climate change, "the war on terror" and the assault on liberty.
His recent history with the Guardian has mirrored my own experience and disenchantment with "the Guardian" as a source to understand the world we are living in.
Both this article , by former Guardian journalist, Jonathon Cook and Nafeez's own article are MUST-READS for recovering liberals like myself.
The piece that helped me understand the nature of liberalism above all, was the surperb book by Chris Hedges, Death of the LIberal Class.
Why
the Guardian axed Nafeez Ahmed’s blog
Jonathon
Cook
4
December, 2014
Nafeez
Ahmed’s account of the sudden termination of his short-lived
contract to write an environment blog for the Guardian is
depressingly instructive – and accords with my own experiences as a
journalist at the paper.
Ahmed
is that rare breed of journalist who finds stories everyone else
either misses or chooses to overlook; he regularly joins up the dots
in a global system of corporate pillage. If the news business were
really driven by news rather than a corporate-friendly business
agenda, publications would be beating a path to his door.
Instead
he has been mostly ploughing a lonely furrow as a freelance
journalist, bypassing the media gatekeepers by promoting himself on
social media, and placing his articles wherever a window briefly
opens. His 43,000 followers on Twitter are testament to his skills as
a journalist – skills, it seems, that are in short demand even at
the bastions of liberal journalism.
Let’s
be clear: the Guardian is now a raucous market-place of opinion –
its model for monetising the mostly voluntary labour of desperate
journalists, writers, academics and lobby groups. The paper calls it
“Comment is Free” – free for the Guardian, that is.
But
it is certainly not “free” in the sense of “free expression”,
as I know only too well from my many run-ins with its editors, both
from my time on staff there and from my later experiences as a
freelance journalist (more below). The Guardian’s website covers a
spectrum of “moderate”, meaning conventional, opinion from
right to left, with a couple of genuinely progressive staff writers –
currently Seumas Milne and Owen Jones – there to offer the illusion
of real pluralism.
Recruiting
Ahmed was therefore a risky move. He is a voice from the genuine
left, and one too independent to control. The Guardian did not
offer him a column, or the more interesting – and suitable –
position of investigative journalist, a platform that would have
given him the opportunity and resources to explore the biggest and
most under-reported story of our era: the connection between
corporate greed and the destruction of the life-support systems
necessary for our continued existence on the planet.
Instead
he got a minor leg-up: a raise out of the morass of CiF contributors
to his own Guardian blog. Rather than waste inordinate time and
energy on arm-twisting the Guardian’s ever-cautious editors, he was
able to publish his own posts with minimal interference. And that was
the beginning of his downfall.
Ignoring the real story
In
July, as Israel began its massive assault on Gaza, Ahmed published
a post revealing
a plausible motivation – Gaza’s natural gas reserves – for
Israel’s endless belligerence towards the enclave’s Hamas
government. (The story had until then been confined to minor and
academic publications, including my own contribution here.)
Israel wanted to keep control over large gas reserves in Gaza’s
waters so that it could deny Hamas a resource that would have bought
it influence with other major players in the region, not least Egypt.
This
story should be at the centre of the coverage of Gaza, and of
criticism of the west’s interference, including by the UK’s own
war criminal Tony Blair, who has conspired in the west’s plot to
deny the people of Gaza their rightful bounty. But the Guardian, like
other media, have ignored the story.
Interestingly,
Ahmed’s article went viral, becoming the most shared of any of the
paper’s stories on Operation Protective Shield. But readers appear
to have had better news judgment than the Guardian’s editors.
Rather than congratulate him, the Guardian effectively fired Ahmed,
as he details in the link below. No one has suggested that there
were errors in the story, and no correction has been appended to the
article.
In
axing him, the Guardian appears to have broken the terms of his
contract and has failed to offer grounds for their action, apart from
claiming that this story and others had strayed too far from his
environment beta.
There
is an obvious problem with this justification. No responsible
employer sacks someone for repeated failures without first warning
them at an earlier stage that they are not fulfilling the terms of
their employment.
So
either the Guardian has been wildly irresponsible, or – far more
likely – the professed justification is nothing more than a
smokescreen. After all, the idea that an environment blogger for the
liberal media should not be examining the connection between control
over mineral resources, which are deeply implicated in climate
change, and wars, which lead to human deaths and ecological
degradation, is preposterous beyond belief.
It
is not that Ahmed strayed too far from his environment remit, it is
that he strayed too much on to territory – that of the
Israel-Palestine conflict – that the Guardian rigorously reserves
for a few trusted reporters and commentators. Without knowing it, he
went where only the carefully vetted are allowed to tread.
I
know from my own long years of clashing with Guardian editors on this
issue. Here is just one of my many experiences.
Comment is elusive
I
moved to Nazareth in 2001 as a freelance journalist, after a decade
of working for the Guardian and its sister publication, the Observer.
I knew many people at the paper, and I had some kind of track record
with them as a former staff member.
I
arrived in Nazareth at an interesting time. It was the height of the
second intifada, and I was the only foreign reporter in Nazareth, the
capital of Israel’s large Palestinian minority. In those days,
before Israel built its concrete and steel barrier, Jenin – one of
the most newsworthy spots in the West Bank – was a 20-minute drive
away. I have previously written about the way the paper so heavily
edited an
investigation I conducted into
the clear-cut execution of a British citizen, Iain Hook, in Jenin’s
refugee camp that it was effectively censored (see here and here).
But
I also spent my early years in Nazareth desperately trying to raise
any interest first at the comment section and later at Comment is
Free in my contributing (free) articles on my experiences of the
second intifada. Remember CiF, then as now, was a cacophony of
competing opinions, many of them belonging to dubious lobbyists and
interest groups.
I,
on the other hand, was a former Guardian staff member now located not
only in one of the world’s hot spots but offering a story no other
foreign journalist was in a position to tell. At that time, CiF had
several journalists in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem detailing the
experiences and traumas of Israeli Jews. But Israeli Palestinians –
a fifth of Israel’s population – were entirely unrepresented in
its coverage. It exasperated me that no one at CiF, including
the paper’s late deputy editor Georgina Henry, seemed to think this
of any consequence.
I
finally broke briefly into CiF after the Lebanon war erupted in
summer 2006. Pointing out that I was the only foreign journalist
actually living daily under threat of Hizbullah rockets finally
seemed to get the editors’ attention.
I
survived at CiF for just a year, managing at great effort to publish
seven stories, almost all of them after difficult battles with
editors and including in one
case sections
censored without my permission. My time with CiF came to an end after
yet another baffling exchange with Henry, after she refused to
publish an article, that I have previously documented here.
Escaping scrutiny
Why
is writing about Israel so difficult at the Guardian? There are
several reasons.
The
first, as I have regularly observed in my blog, is related to the
general structure of the corporate media system, including the
Guardian. It is designed to exclude almost all deeply critical
voices, those that might encourage readers to question the
ideological basis of the western societies in which they live and
alert them to the true role of the corporations that run those
societies and their media.
Israel,
as an intimate ally of the US, is therefore protected from profoundly
critical scrutiny, much as the US and its western allies are. It is
okay to criticise individual western policies as flawed, especially
if done so respectfully, but not to suggest that the whole direction
of western foreign policy is flawed, that it is intended to maintain
a system of control over, and exploitation of, weaker nations.
Policies can be dubious, but not our leaders’ moral character.
The
problem with Israel is that its place in the global order –
alongside the US – depends on it being a very sophisticated gun for
hire. It keeps order and disorder in the Middle East at Washington’s
behest and in return it gets to plunder the Palestinian territories
and ethnically cleanse the native population. It’s a simple story
but not one you can state anywhere in the mainstream because it
questions not just a policy (the occupation) but Israel’s very
nature and role as a colonial settler state.
Beyond
this, however, special factors pertain in the Guardian’s case. As
Ahmed notes, in part this is related to the Guardian’s pivotal role
in bringing to fruition the ultimate colonial document, the
Balfour Declaration. For this reason, the Guardian has always had a
strong following among liberal Jews, and that is reflected in its
selection of staff at senior ranks.
In
this sense, the editorial “mood” at the Guardian resembles that
of an indulgent parent towards a wayward grown-up child. Yes, Israel
does some very bad things (the occupation) but, for all its faults,
its heart is in the right place (as a Jewish, colonial settler state
practising apartheid).
And
then there is the Jonathan Freedland factor, as Ahmed also notes
(including by citing some of my previous criticisms of him). One
should not personalise this too much. Freedland, an extremely
influential figure at the paper, is a symptom of a much wider problem
with the Guardian’s coverage of Israel.
Freedland
is a partisan on Israel, as am I. But I get to write a blog and
occasional reports tucked away in specialist and Arab media in
English. Freedland and other partisans for Israel at the paper get to
reinforce and police an already highly indulgent attitude towards
Israel’s character (though not the occupation) across the coverage
of one of the most widely read papers in the world. Given that
Israel’s character, as a colonial settler state, is the
story, the Guardian effectively never presents more than a fraction
of the truth about the conflict. Because it never helps us understand
what drives Israeli policy, it – along with the rest of the media –
never offers us any idea how the conflict might be resolved.
And
this is where Ahmed tripped up. Because his piece, as the Guardian’s
editors doubtless quickly realised, implicated Israel’s
character rather than just its policies. It violated a Guardian
taboo.
Ahmed
is hoping to continue his fiercely independent reporting by creating
a new model of crowdsourced journalism. I wish him every luck with
his venture. Such initiatives are possibly the only hope
that we can start to loosen the grip of the corporate media and
awaken ourselves to many of the truths hidden in plain insight.
If you
wish to help Ahmed, you can find out about his new funding
model here.
UPDATE:
The Guardian
has issued a short official statement that manages to avoid
addressing any of Nafeez Ahmed’s complaints about his
treatment or throwing any further light on the reasons for the
termination of his contract. It’s a case study in evasiveness and
can be read here.
CORRECTION:
I
have amended the section of my post concerning my early
struggles to get published in Comment is Free. I inadvertently
suggested that these related to my whole time in Nazareth. In fact,
CiF was set up in March 2006, and my earliest travails
concerned efforts to get published in the main comment section,
battling with many of the same editors who would later join CiF.
Immediately
CiF was launched, I contacted those editors asking to be included
among the many contributors who were being taken on. As I explain
above, my repeated approaches were either ignored or rebuffed, while
many journalists and writers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were recruited
to write from an Israeli Jewish perspective.
That
finally changed in July 2006 when I persuaded the CiF editors that my
unique perspective on the Lebanon war needed to be included.
Interestingly, it seemed their interest was finally piqued not by the
perspective I could share of how Palestinians were treated in a
Jewish state but by the fact that Palestinians in Israel were under
threat from fellow Arabs, in this case Hizbullah.
Jonathan
Cook (born 1965) is a British writer and a freelance journalist based
in Nazareth, Israel, who writes about the Middle East, and more
specifically, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He was previously a
staff writer at the Guardian
How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas
Nafeez Ahmed
3 December, 2014
After writing for The
Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated
because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing
so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was
obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I
believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer
Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading
liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down
coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale
for going to war.
I joined the Guardian as
an environment blogger in April 2013. Prior to this, I had been an
author, academic and freelance journalist for over a decade, writing
for The Independent, Independent on Sunday, Sydney Morning Herald,
The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz,
Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among others.
On
9th July 2014, I posted an article via
my Earth
Insight blog at
The Guardian’s environment website, exposing the role of
Palestinian resources, specifically Gaza’s off-shore natural gas
reserves, in partly motivating Israel’s invasion of Gaza aka
‘Operation Protective Edge.’ Among the sources I referred to was
a policy paper written by incumbent Israeli defence minister Moshe
Ya’alon one year before Operation Cast Lead, underscoring that the
Palestinians could never be allowed to develop their own energy
resources as any revenues would go to supporting Palestinian
terrorism.
Gas resources exist
off Gaza’s shore
The article now has
68,000 social media shares, and is by far the single most popular
article on the Gaza conflict to date. Contrary to the conventional
wisdom, Israel has seen control of Gaza’s gas as a major strategic
priority over the last decade for three main reasons.
Firstly, Israel faces a
near-term gas crisis — largely due to the long lead time needed
to bring Israel’s considerable domestic gas resources into
production; secondly, Netanyahu’s administration cannot stomach any
scenario in which a Hamas-run Palestinian administration accesses and
develops their own resources; thirdly, Israel wants to use
Palestinian gas as a strategic bridge to cement deals with Arab
dictatorships whose domestic populations oppose signing deals with
Israel.
Either way, the biggest
obstacle to Israel accessing Gaza’s gas is the Hamas-run
administration in the strip, which rejects all previous agreements
that Israel had pursued to develop the gas with the British Gas Group
and the Palestinian Authority.
Censorship
in the land of the free
Since
2006, The Guardian has loudly trumpeted its aim to be the world’s
leading liberal voice.
For years, the paper has sponsored the annual Index on Censorship’s
prestigious Freedom
of Expression Award.
The paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the National
Security Agency (NSA). Generally, the newspaper goes out of its way
to dress itself up as standing at the forefront of fighting
censorship, particularly in the media landscape. This is why its
approach to my Gaza gas story is so disturbing.
The day after posting it,
I received a phone call from James Randerson, assistant national news
editor. He sounded riled and rushed. Without beating around the bush,
James told me point blank that my Guardian blog was to be immediately
discontinued. Not because my article was incorrect, factually flawed,
or outrageously defamatory. Not because I’d somehow breached
journalistic ethics, or violated my contract. No. The Gaza gas piece,
he said, was “not an environment story,” and therefore was an
“inappropriate post” for the Guardian’s environment website:
“You’re writing too many non-environment stories, so I’m afraid we just don’t have any other option. This article doesn’t belong on the environment site. It should really be on Cif [i.e. the Guardian’s online opinion section known as ‘Comment Is Free’].”
I
was shocked, and more than a little baffled. As you can read on my
Guardian profile,
my remit was to cover “the geopolitics of environmental, energy and
economic crises.” That was what I was commissioned to do — indeed,
when I had applied in late 2012 to blog for The Guardian, an earlier
piece I’d written on the link between Israeli military operations
and Gaza’s gas in Le Monde diplomatique was part of my portfolio.
So I suggested to James
that termination was somewhat of an overreaction. Perhaps we could
simply have a meeting to discuss the editorial issues and work out
together what my remit should be. “I’d be happy to cooperate as
much as possible,” I said. I didn’t want to lose my contract.
James refused point blank, instead telling me that my “interests
are increasingly about issues that we don’t think are a good fit
for what we want to see published on the environment site.”
In the end, my polite
protestations got nowhere. Within the hour, I received an email from
a rights manager at The Guardian informing me that they had
terminated my contract.
Under that contract,
however, I had editorial control over what I wrote on my
blog — obviously within the remit that I had been commissioned
for. From May to April, environment bloggers underwent training and
supervision to ensure that we would eventually be up to speed to post
on the site independently based on our own editorial judgement. The
terms and conditions we signed up to under our contract state:
“You shall regularly maintain Your Blog and shall determine its content. You shall launch Your own posts which shall not be sub-edited by GNM. GNM occasionally might raise topics of interest with You suitable for Your Blog but You shall be under no obligation to include or cover such topics.”
The terms also point out
that termination of the contract with immediate effect could only
occur “if the other party commits a material breach of any of its
obligations under this Agreement which is not capable of remedy”;
or if “the other party has committed a material breach of any of
its obligations under this Agreement which is capable of remedy but
which has not been remedied within a period of thirty (30) days
following receipt of written notice to do so.”
The problem is that I had
committed no breach of any of my contractual obligations. On the
contrary, The Guardian had breached its contractual obligation to me
regarding my freedom to determine the contents of my blog, simply
because it didn’t like what I wrote. This is censorship.
As the Index on
Censorship points out, the “absence of direct state-sponsored,
highly visible censorship, which prevails in many countries around
the world, may contribute to the commonly held view that there is no
censorship in this country and that it is not a problem.” However,
“contemporary UK censorship, which sits within a liberal democracy”
can come “in many different forms, both direct and indirect, some
more subtle, some more overt.”
Invisible barriers
Ironically,
a few days later, I was contacted by the editor of The
Ecologist — one of the world’s premier environment
magazines — who wanted to re-print my Gaza gas story. After
publishing an updated
version of
my Guardian piece, The Ecologist also published my in-depth
follow up in
response to objections printed in The National Interest (ironically
authored by a contractor working for a US oil company invested in
offshore gas reserves overlapping the Gaza Marine). Obviously, having
been expelled by The Guardian, I could not respond via my blog as I
would normally have done
That follow-up drew on a
range of public record sources including leading business and
financial publications, as well as official British Foreign Office
(FCO) documents obtained under Freedom of Information. The latter
confirmed that despite massive domestic gas discoveries in Israel’s
own territorial waters, the inability to kick-start production due to
a host of bureaucratic, technological, logistical and regulatory
issues — not to mention real uncertainties in quantities of
commercially exploitable resources — meant that Israel could
face gas supply challenges as early as next year. Israel’s own gas
fields would probably not be brought into production until around
2018-2020. Israeli officials, according to the FCO, saw the 1.4
trillion cubic meters of gas in Gaza’s Marine (along with other
potential “additional resources” as yet to be discovered
according to the US Energy Information Administration) as a cheap
“stop-gap” that might sustain both Israel’s domestic energy
needs and its export ambitions until the Tamar and Leviathan fields
could actually start producing.
By broaching such issues
in The Guardian, though, it seems I had crossed some sort of
invisible barrier — that this topic was simply off-limits.
Energy is part of the environment, wait, no it isn’t, not in Palestine anyway
To
illustrate the sheer absurdity of The Guardian’s pretense that a
story about Gaza’s gas resources is “not a legitimate environment
story,” consider the fact that just weeks earlier, Adam Vaughan,
the editor of the Guardian’s environment website, had personally
assented to my posting the following story: ‘Iraq
blowback:
Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction — West’s
co-optation of Gulf states’ jihadists
created the neocon’s best friend: an Islamist Frankenstein.’
Proposed headlines for
stories that environment bloggers work on are posted on a shared
Google spreadsheet so that editors can keep track of what we’re
doing and planning to publish. Adam had seen my proposed headline and
requested to see the draft on the 16th June: “… would you mind
sending this one by me on preview, please, before publishing? Just
conscious it’s very sensitive subject,” he wrote in an email.
I sent him the full
article with a summary of what it was about. Later in the day, I
pinged him again to find out what he thought, and he replied:
“thanks, sorry, yes — I think it’s fine.”
So an article about ISIS
and oil addiction is “fine,” but a piece about Israel, Gaza and
conflict over gas resources is not. Really? Are offshore gas
resources not part of the environment? Apparently, for The Guardian,
not in Palestine, where Gaza’s environment has been bombed to
smithereens by the IDF
The Blair factor
Meanwhile,
the Israel-Gaza gas saga continues. Just over a week
ago,Ha’aretz carried
some insightful updates on the strategic value of the whole thing.
Quoting Ariel Ezrahi, energy adviser to Quartet Middle East envoy
Tony Blair (the Quartet representing the US, UN, EU and Russia),
Ha’aretz noted that there was a reason why Jordan — which had
recently signed an agreement with Israel to purchase gas from its
Leviathan field — had simultaneously announced that it intended
to purchase gas from Gaza. As Israel attempts to reposition itself as
a major gas exporter to regional regimes like Egypt and Turkey, the
biggest challenge is that “it’s very hard for them to sign a gas
contract with Israel despite their desperate need,” due to how
unpopular such a move would be with their domestic populations.
“If
I were Israel’s prime minister,” Blair’s energy adviser said,
“I’d think how I could help the neighboring countries extricate
themselves from the jam, and if Israel closes the Palestinian gas
market, that’s not a smart thing.” So Israel has to find a way to
open the Palestinian gas market and integrate it into the emerging
complex of Israeli export deals: “… it would be wise for Israel
to at least consider the contribution of the Palestinian dimension to
these deals,” said Ezrahi. “I think it’s a mistake for Israel
to rush into regional agreements without at least considering the
Palestinian dimension and how it can contribute to Israeli
interests.”
Israel, backed by its
allies in the west, wants to use the Palestinians “as an asset as
they strive to join the regional power grid, and as a bridge to the
Arab world,” by selling Palestinian “gas to various markets,”
or promoting a deal with the corporations developing Israel’s
“Tamar and Leviathan [fields] that will allow for the sale of cheap
gas to the [Palestinian] Authority.”
But
there is a further challenge when considering the Palestinian
dimension, namely Hamas: “I can’t meet with people linked to
Hamas,” said Blair’s energy adviser. “It’s
a very firm ban dictated by the Quartet. [emphasis
added] The Americans don’t enter Gaza either.” So it is not just
Israel that has ruled out any gas deal with the Palestinians
involving Hamas. So have the US, EU, UN and Russia.
But Israel has no
mechanism to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza strip — except, as
far as Moshe Ya’alon is concerned, military action to change facts
on the ground.
Over the 70 odd articles
I’d written for The Guardian, not a single piece falls outside the
subject matter I had been commissioned to write on: the geopolitics
of interconnected environment, energy and economic crises. The
conclusion is unavoidable: The Guardian had simply decided that
resource conflicts over the Occupied Territories should not receive
coverage. It should be noted that before my post, the paper had never
before acknowledged a link between IDF military action and Gaza’s
gas. Now that I’m gone, I doubt it will ever be covered again.
When I began speaking in
confidence to a number of other journalists inside and outside The
Guardian about what had happened to me, they all consistently told me
that my experience — although particularly outrageous — was
not entirely unprecedented.A senior editor of a
national British publication who has written frequently for The
Guardian’s opinion section, told me that he was aware that all
coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue was “tightly controlled”
by Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s executive editor for opinion.
Jonathan Freedland is
the Guardian’s executive editor for opinion
Another journalist told
me that a Guardian editor commissioned a story from him discussing
the suppression of criticism of Israel in public discourse and media,
but that Freedland rejected the story without even reviewing a draft.
Several other journalists
I spoke to inside and outside The Guardian went so far as to describe
Freedland as the newspaper’s unofficial ‘gatekeeper’ on the
Middle east conflict, and that he invariably leaned toward a
pro-Israel slant.
These
anecdotes have been publicly corroborated by Jonathan Cook, a former
Middle East staff reporter, foreign editor and columnist for The
Guardian, who is currently based in Nazareth where he has won several
awards for his reporting. A profile of
Cook at the progressive Jewish news site Mondoweiss points
out that a key turning point in Cook’s career occurred in 2001 when
he had just returned from Israel, having conducted an investigation
into the murder of 13 non-violent Arab protestors by Israeli police
during the second intifada the year before.
The police, Cook found,
had executed a “shoot-to-kill policy” against unarmed
victims — as was eventually confirmed by a government inquiry.
But The Guardian suppressed his investigation, and chose not to run
it at all. Cook says that while the paper does contain some exemplary
reporting and insights, and even goes out of its way to condemn the
occupation, there are certain lines that simply cannot be crossed,
such as questioning Israel’s capacity to define itself as
simultaneously an exclusively Jewish and democratic state, or
critiquing aspects of its security doctrine.
Cook’s
scathing criticism of his former paper in a 2011 Counterpunch article
is highly revealing, and relevant, for understanding what happened to
me:
“The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested — both financially and ideologically — in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.
The paper’s role, like that of its rightwing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough leftwing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed.”
Last
month, Cook highlighted ongoing subtle but powerful insensitivities
of language employed by The Guardian coverage’s of the Gaza
crisis which,
in effect, served to “disappear” the Palestinians. He
specifically identified Freedland as a major player in this
phenomenon. “The Guardian’s pride” in having helped create
Israel is “still palpable at the paper (as I know from my years
there),” especially among certain senior editors there “who
influence much of the conflict’s coverage — yes, that is a
reference to Jonathan Freedland, among others.”
UPDATE
4th Dec 2014 (10.13AM): Jonathan
Freedland has offered a response this morning via TwitLonger,
as follows:
“Your piece for Medium implies I was involved in the end of your arrangement with the Guardian. I don’t wish to be rude, but I had literally not heard of you or your work till seeing that Medium piece, via Twitter, a few hours ago. (The Guardian environment website, where you wrote, is edited separately from the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, which I now oversee.) I had no idea you wrote for the Guardian, no idea that arrangement had been terminated and not the slightest knowledge of your piece on Gaza’s gas until a few hours ago. What’s more, I was abroad — on vacation — on the days in July you describe. To put it starkly, my involvement in your case was precisely zero. I hope that as a matter of your own journalistic integrity, you’ll want to alter the Medium piece to reflect these facts. Perhaps you’ll also share this on Twitter as widely as you shared the Medium piece yesterday.”
However, Freedland’s
reading of this piece is incorrect. I am not implying that Freedland
was “involved” in the end of my Guardian tenure. I have no clue
about that, and to be sure, I did not make any such claim above.
My simple point is that
my experience of egregious Guardian censorship over the Gaza gas
story — which Freedland does not address beyond denying his
involvement — has a long and little-known context, suggesting
that rather than my experience being a mere bizarre and accidental
aberration, it is part of an entrenched, wider culture across the
paper of which Freedland himself has allegedly played a key role in
fostering.
It is not my fault that
the range of journalists I spoke to all described Freedland as the
Guardian’s resident unofficial “gatekeeper” on Israel-Palestine
coverage. Notably, Freedland fails to address their allegations that
he has previously quashed stories which are critical of Israel on
ideological grounds rather than reasons of ‘journalistic
integrity.’
End===This
is perhaps not entirely surprising. A book commissioned by The
Guardian, Disenchantment:
The Guardian and Israel,
by Daphna Baram, documents clearly the connection between the
newspaper and Zionism, noting for instance that Guardian editor CP
Scott had been central to the negotiations with the British
government resulting in the Balfour Declaration and the very
conception of the state of Israel. Her conclusion is that despite
becoming increasingly critical of the occupation after 1967, The
Guardian remains staunchly pro-Zionist, its staff devoting
“inordinate time and effort” to ensure “fairness
to Israel.”
The Guardian, quite
rightly, has a reputation for breaking some of the most important
news stories of the decade — among them, of course, playing a
lead role in releasing Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass
surveillance and related violations of civil liberties. Yet hidden in
the cracks of this coverage is the fact that while disclosing
critical facts, The Guardian has been unable to raise the most
fundamental and probing questions about the purpose and direction of
mass surveillance, why it has accelerated, what motivates it, and who
benefits from it.
Questions must therefore
be asked as to why a newspaper that sees itself as the global media’s
bastion of liberalism, has engaged in such grievous censorship by
shutting down coverage of environmental geopolitics — a
phenomenon which is increasingly at the heart not just of conflict
over the Occupied Territories, but of the chaos of world affairs in
the 21st century.
If this is the state of
The Guardian, undoubtedly one of the better newspapers, then clearly
we have a serious problem with the media. Ultimately, mainstream
media remains under the undue influence of powerful special
interests, whether financial, corporate or ideological.
Given the scale of the
converging crises we face in terms of climate change, energy
volatility, financial crisis, rampant inequality, proliferating
species extinctions, insane ocean acidification, food crisis, foreign
policy militarism, and the rise of the police-state — and given
the bankruptcy of much of the media in illuminating the real causes
of these crises and their potential solutions, we need new reliable
and accountable sources of news and information.
As
print newspapers go increasingly into decline, the opportunity for
new people-powered models of independent digital media is rising
exponentially. That’s why I’ve launched a crowdfunder to
help support my journalism, and to move toward creating a new
investigative journalism collective that operates in the public
interest, precisely because it is funded not by corporations or
ideologues, but by people. If we can create new journalism platforms
that are dependent for their survival on citizens themselves, then it
is in the interests of citizens that those platforms will function.
Until then, fearless, adversarial investigative journalism will
always be in danger of being shut down or compromised.
I
believe that together, we can create a new people-powered model of
journalism that will make the old, hierarchical media conglomerates
dominated by special interests and parochial paternalistic visions of
the world obsolete. So, if you like, pop along to my Patreon.com
crowdfunder for INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a truly independent
people-powered investigative journalism collective that will remain
dedicated to breaking the big stories that matter, no matter what.
Pledge as little or as much as you like, and join
the coming media revolution☺
Here is a statement from the Guardian
Statement in response to a blog post by Nafeez Ahmed
A
Guardian News & Media spokesperson said: “Nafeez Ahmed is a
freelance journalist who self-published blog posts on our environment
blogging network for just over a year as a regular contributor. He
has never been on
the staff of the Guardian. His Guardian blog - Earth
Insight -
was about the link between the environment and geopolitics, but we
took the decision to end the blog when a number of his posts on a
range of subjects strayed too far from this brief. For the record,
Jonathan Freedland played absolutely no part in this decision, as
he has already confirmed.
“Any
suggestion of censorship is unfounded: all of Nafeez Ahmed’s blog
posts remain
on our website to this day.
He is welcome to continue to pitch story ideas to us in the normal
way.”
I you don't have the time to read his book watch this lecture by Chris Hedges (speech starts at 3'40")
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