How Israel's PR controls the media (video)

Ashley Wells, Sheldon S., Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; documentary directors Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff (mediaed.org, IMDB.com)

Why is the U.S. public unaware of the war crimes our government (military-industrial complex) and Israel are committing even though it's in the news all day long? Careful public relations, also known as well crafted propaganda. Jahlly and Ratzkoff explain in Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land.

This video shows how the foreign policy interests of American political elites -- working in combination with Israeli public relations strategies -- influence U.S. news reporting about the Middle East conflict.

Combining American and British TV news clips with observations of analysts, journalists, and political activists, "Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land" provides a brief historical overview, a striking media comparison, and an examination of factors that have distorted U.S. media coverage and, in turn, [controlled] American public opinion.

- Exerpted from Media Education Foundation

What will it take to get the U.S. public's attention about our and Israel's crimes? Topless FEMEN protesters conduct a "Slut Walk" in Tel Aviv, May 10, 2014 calling attention to religious sexism, patriarchy, militarism, and crimes against humanity.

 

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land:

U.S. Media on Israel-Palestine

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage.
 

It focuses on the "crisis" [actually Israel's genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity] in the Middle East, zeroing in on distortions in U.S. coverage reinforce false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
 

I did what you said. - You'll get over it.

This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites -- big oil, a need to have an American military base in the region, and others -- work in combination with Israeli public relations (PR) strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from Israel is reported.

Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how -- through the use of language, framing and context -- the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied territories appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one.

Jewish-Israeli occupiers demand Muslim-Arab blood: All the U.S. gets in its mainstream media are slanted, spun, pro-Israeli images, explanations, and crafted talking points (newser.com)

 
The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel's PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.

Interviewees include Seth Ackerman, Mjr. Stav Adivi, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Hanan Ashrawi, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Neve Gordon, Toufic Haddad, Sam Husseini, Hussein Ibish, Robert Jensen, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Karen Pfeifer, Alisa Solomon, and Gila Svirsky. More

Arresting and imprisoning children 10 and older: Why is this Palestinian kid dressed in "concentration camp" garb being manhandled by a heavily armed adult Israeli militant?

• VIDEO: An Israeli  general's son tells the truth about Israel

Jewish voices for peace and Ralph Nader (video)

Ashley Wells, Sheldon S., CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Ralph Nader, Mitch Jeserich (KPFA.org, Berkeley); Amy Goodman, Nermeen Shaikh (DemocracyNow.org, July 31, 2014)

Why do you steal our homes, take our land, and kill us, even our babies? - I'dunno, it's my job. I was only following orders. Hey, why do wear that towel? (Corey Gil-Schuster/Ask-Project)

• AUDIO: Ralph Nader on Israel's US-backed wars and war crime: Amazing new information on the American history of this endless "conflict"

A Venerable Jewish Voice for Peace

Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
The Israeli assault on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip has entered its fourth week. Henry Siegman, a venerable dean of American Jewish thought and president of the U.S./Middle East Project, sat down for an interview with Democracy Now! An ordained rabbi, Siegman is the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress and former executive head of the Synagogue Council of America, two of the [three] major, mainstream Jewish organizations in the U.S. [The other being the ADL.] He says the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories must end [now]. LISTEN

• U.S. Jewish leader to Israel: Stop killing Palestinians and end [your illegal] occupation

Death toll tops 1300. "Enough blood has been spilled": Israel CONDEMNED for striking U.N. shelter with precision bomb (then trying to blame war crime on Hamas' homemade rockets)

Iron Dome or Iron Sieve? Evidence questions effectiveness of US-funded Israeli missile shield

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has publicly condemned Israel for what he called its "outrageous" and "unjustifiable" shelling of a U.N. shelter in Gaza that killed 20 Palestinian civilians on Wednesday.

Many of the dead were children who were sleeping. The U.N. itself has not directly condemned Israel [how could it with the U.S. promoting and protecting Israel's war crimes?] But it admits that all available evidence points to Israel's responsibility for the terrorist act and crime against humanity.

It was the sixth time Israel had hit [targeted] a U.N. shelter since the Israeli offensive in Gaza began 24 days ago. The United Nations said it had given the coordinates of the shelter to the Israeli military 17 times prior to the attack. [They knew exactly where to aim or to definitively avoid aiming.] 

 

According to the United Nations, more than 240,000 Palestinians are now staying in U.N. shelters in Gaza. Another 200,000 Palestinians have been displaced and are staying with other overcrowded families without sufficient food or water. 

Democracy Now! is joined by Christopher Gunness, spokesperson for the the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. "UNRWA has reached a breaking point," Gunness says. "Eight of our staff have been killed. Our facilities are overwhelmed. Because of the continued displacement...we may soon find ourselves where there are tens of thousands of people in the streets of Gaza -- no food, no water, no shelter, no safety [suffering illegal collective punishment at the hands of Israel's military], frankly, after we’ve found that Israeli artillery is capable of hitting our shelters. And we’re saying: enough is enough."

"The Last Magazine" - corporate media (video)

Amber Larson, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, Aaron Mate (democracynow)

A conscience will cost you in the Army

June 17th marks the first anniversary of the [assassination] of investigative journalist Michael Hastings. Just 33 years old, Hastings died in a [mysterious] car crash at a time when he was considered of one of the country’s most daring young reporters.

 

His dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan unveiled the hidden realities of war. His 2010 Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, sparked a political controversy after McChrystal and his aides were quoted making disparaging remarks about top administration officials.

The article exposed longstanding government discord over the U.S. War on Afghanistan’s direction and led to McChrystal’s firing. One year after his death, Hastings’ reporting has made waves once again.

 

In 2012, Hastings wrote a major investigation for Rolling Stone on the American prisoner of war, Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdhal. At the time, Hastings thought it was the most important story of his career. 

 

But it has only recently earned widespread attention after Bergdahl’s release in an exchange for five "Taliban" members sparked a political firestorm. In his report, Hastings revealed Berghdal was profoundly disillusioned with the War on Afghanistan and may have walked away from his base (as he and others regularly did) as a result. With Berghdal still silent as he recovers from five years in Taliban captivity and torture, Hastings’ article remains the definitive account of the young soldier’s story.

Today another major work from Michael Hastings is upon us: The Last Magazine, a posthumous novel and scathing satire of the corporate news media based on Hastings’ time at Newsweek. Democracy Now! are joined by Hastings’ widow, Elise Jordan, who brought the book to life after coming across the manuscript following her husband’s death. More

The RIGHT Forum: Bilderberg

Pfc. Sandoval and Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly

LAPD gets new DraganFlyer drones from Seattle police. The Los Angeles Police Department is getting two drones from Seattle police, whose pro-Socialist residents refuse to allow their police to use them (Mesa County Sheriff's Dept/Erika Aguilar/SCPR.org).

As the Left Forum met in New York City over the weekend, a far more secretive and sinister set of individuals met in Denmark to plan the future of the economy and world. For years the mainstream media, the heads of which are on the secret invitation list, denied that this annual meeting exists. It's not the only one of its kind, but it is one of growing influence. Neo-Nazis attend, and only libertarian/reactionary Alex Jones (InfoWars.com) is yelling, or even whispering, about it. It is real, and there is now a superficial Website that confirms its existence. The U.S. government openly lied about the existence of Area 51 then minimized its significance once it admitted lying. The military-industrial complex, the marriage of public government and private corporations, having lied now minimize and say of Bilderberg, "Nothing to see here." What do Globalists do, what do elitists want, what are Wall Street bankers engaged in international finance planning?

 

The Alex Jones Show covers some of the biggest revelations coming from this year's explosive Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The annual meeting of renowned globalists, banksters, and corporate CEOs received virtually no coverage by the establishment media.

The show also looks at the blowout over the Sgt. Bergdahl trade as Republicans accuse Obama of negotiating with terrorists in a suspiciously timed storytrying to overshadow the VA scandal. 

The Obama administration is making renewed efforts to target the coal industry by imposing draconian cuts in carbon emissions as part of the government's climate change agenda. That should be good but it is very misleading, focusing on carbon istead of methane and other much more polluting greenhouse gases and toxins. Carbon is not the problem, but it is the one the mouth of the military-industrial complex is railing against.

Jones talks with investigative journalist and author Jon Rappoport, who edits NoMoreFakeNews.com. His books include AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century and Oklahoma City Bombing: The Suppressed Truth.

• Sgt. Bergdahl Release Arranged by CIA Terror Group (Kurt Nimmo) Crucial component omitted as war on "manufactured terror" gets fresh influx.

Grad Night and Intolerance (video)

Pat Macpherson, Crystal Quintero, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; Matt Bai (news.yahoo)

"Die-in" San Francisco protest (IM)

America's college students are back and resting at home this week, which is a good thing, because during the long months away they seem to have gone completely out of their minds.

 

Last weekend, The New York Times' Jennifer Medina reported on the latest bizarre demand on campus: "trigger warnings" to let students know if the text [book] they're about to study will expose them to some version of misogyny or homophobia, so they aren't unexpectedly [re-]traumatized by visions of things that can never be unseen -- like, say, every novel written by a white man before 1960 [Hey, by the way, I'm a privileged white male, but never mind that].

The Harvard Commencement Speech

PC on overdrive: Ali G. (Sacha Baron Cohen aka Borat) gives commencement speech at America's most prestigious university in 2004.

That followed the public [sham]ings of several commencement speakers whose invitations had to be rescinded, including such evildoers as [Bush Era war criminal] former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the International Monetary Fund's [bankster] Christine Lagarde, and [insider] Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this has provoked a torrent of eloquent condemnation from pundits and academics, who worry that our elite universities, in the words of an editorial published in Monday’s Washington Post, are being "impoverished by intolerance."

One of Obama's alleged alma maters, Oxy

[This] is a reasonable concern, except that it misses the point. It's not the students' fault that they expect to laze around in a world of ideological comfort. It's totally ours.

 

There's nothing new about the basic tension between speech and sensitivity on campus. When I was at Tufts in the late '80s, at the height of what we called political correctness [PC], we argued fiercely about whether the military belonged on campus [ROTC] or whether certain faculty members were denied tenure because of their politics. But, by and large, we were primed to have the debate, not chill it. More

How we rule the world: Confessions of an Economic Hitman (John Perkins, Y Audiobooks)

Trying to escape the Surveillance State (video)

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; author, researcher, and journalist Julia Angwin with Amy Goodman, Nermeen Shaikh, Juan González (democracynow.org)

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin visited Democracy Now! to discuss her new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. Currently at ProPublica and previously with The Wall Street Journal, Angwin details her complex path toward increasing her own online privacy as a private citizen.

According to her research, the private data collected by East Germany’s Soviet-era Stasi secret police at its height of abuse pales in comparison to the information revealed today by an individual’s Facebook profile or Google search history, which is never erased by Google even when we clear our history. It is used by the government for unconstitutional unwarranted spying on Americans, by police to give everyone a police record, and by advertisers to target individuals. More

• Obama Administration confirms warrantless "backdoor" searches target U.S. citizens 
• Chile declares state of emergency after 8.2 earthquake triggers tsunami
• Koch Brothers-backed measure bans transit funding in Tennessee
• GM CEO apologizes to the dead, family victims, but fails to explain negligence [which was due to a profit motive for the car compy after a very conscious cost-benefit analysis]
• Obama celebrates [weak, insurance-friendly] health law enrollment numbers
• NATO suspends formal cooperation with Russia
• Palestinian Authority signs International Conventions after Israel goes back on promised prisoner release 
• Obama Administration: No decision on release of jailed spy 
• Group: Syrian civilian death toll could reach 220,000
• House votes to block climate research

Disney to capitalize on RAVE music (EDM)

Dev, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Gerrick Kennedy, Los Angeles Times

Do we have to go to Disneyland to listen to it? No, Cherry Glazerr, just go corporate.

Wooo, Mickey Deadmau5, yeah! (Hard)

“Let It Go,” the soaring showstopper from “Frozen,” has an unlikely remix coming out soon.

 

The Academy Award-winning smash sung by Idina Menzel got a reworking by Dutch electronic dance music DJ Armin van Buuren.
 

Dconstructed morphs Disney tunes into EDM

His remix is just one of more than a dozen that Walt Disney Records commissioned for “Dconstructed,” a compilation album that placed Disney tunes, including several beloved classics, into the hands of EDM (electronic dance music) stars.
 
Songs have been pulled from older Disney films: “Dumbo,” “The Lion King,” and “Toy Story,” and more recent hits, such as “Monsters University” and “The Incredibles.”

The 14-track set will include contributions from Buuren, Avicii, Kaskade, Mat Zo, and Unkle. More

• Raves: Electric Daisy Carnival auditions, Hard Summer