The National Press Club of Australia cancelled Chris Hedges’ talk on how the media, by amplifying Israeli lies, have betrayed Palestinian journalists, 278 of whom have been assassinated by Israel, writes Chris Hedges.
His Favorite Merchant – by Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report
I was scheduled to give a talk at the National Press Club of Australia on Oct. 20 called “The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists.” It was to focus on the amplification of Israeli lies in the press, which most reporters know are lies, betraying Palestinian colleagues who are slandered, targeted and killed by Israel. But, perhaps inadvertently proving my point, the chief executive of the press club, Maurice Reilly, cancelled the event.
The announcement of my talk disappeared from the web site. Reilly said “that in the interest of balancing out our program we will withdraw our offer.” The Israeli Ambassador, retired Lt. Colonel Amir Maimon, who spent 14 years in the Israeli military, is reportedly being considered to speak.
It is true that I know only one side of the picture from the seven years I spent covering Gaza. I was on the receiving end of Israeli attacks, including being bombed by its air force and fired upon by its snipers, one of whom killed a young man a few feet away from me at the Netzarim Junction.
We lifted him up, each person taking hold of an arm or a leg and lumbered up the road as his body swayed like a heavy sack. I saw small boys baited and shot by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others.
A Palestinian man mourns his family members who were killed in the Israeli bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza Strip, Aug. 10, 2024. (UNRWA /Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)
I was present more than once as Israeli troops shot Palestinian children. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets bombed overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory.
I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.
I have stood in the gutted remains of schools as well as medical clinics and mosques and counted the bodies. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the buildings were being used as arms depots or launching sites.
I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, including the over 278 Palestinians journalists and media workers who have been killed by Israel since the start of the genocide, many in targeted assassinations, have reported a reality in Gaza that bears no resemblance to how it is portrayed by Israeli politicians, its military and many media outlets that serve as Israel’s echo chamber.
Lt. Col. Amir Maimon, now Ambassador. (Screenshot)
Lt. Colonel Maimon can obviously, if he chooses, enlighten us about the artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender” and how it selects people, along with their families, in Gaza for assassination. He can explain how Israel determines the quotas of civilian dead, how soldiers are permitted to kill as many as 20 civilians in order to target a Palestinian fighter and hundreds for a Hamas commander.
He can let us know why Israel continues the mass slaughter when an internal Israeli intelligence database indicates that at least 83 percent of Palestinians killed are civilians. He can tell us how Palestinian civilians are abducted, dressed in Israeli army uniforms, have their hands tied, and are then forced to walk as human shields in front of Israeli troops into buildings and underground tunnels that are potentially booby-trapped.
He can explain how the special unit called the “Legitimization Cell” carries out propaganda campaigns to portray Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives to justify their assassinations. He can detail the targeting, bombing and controlled demolitions that have damaged or destroyed 97 percent of Gaza’s educational system, including every university and nearly all its hospitals.
Bearing Witness – Mr. Fish.
He can explain how, after Israel blocked all humanitarian aid on March 2 to starve the Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli officials set up the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to lure emaciated and malnourished Palestinians to four aid hubs in the south — aid hubs with little food and which Human Rights Watch calls “death traps” and Doctors Without Borders calls “orchestrated killing.”
These hubs, open only an hour, usually at 2:00 am, ensure a chaotic scramble for scraps of food. Israeli soldiers, along with U.S. mercenaries, who include members of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, a self-professed anti-“radical jihadist” biker group that counts members with Crusader tattoos among its ranks, fire live rounds into the crowds killing over 1,400 Palestinians and injuring thousands more in and around the hubs since May.
He can lay out the plans for the concentration camps in southern Gaza and the efforts to ultimately expel the Palestinians from Gaza and repopulate it with Jewish colonists. He can explain why Israel abandoned its own hostages, why it fired on vehicles headed into the Gaza strip on Oct. 7 carrying Israeli captives and why it used Hellfire missiles to obliterate the Erez Crossing installation when it was seized by Palestinian fighters knowing that dozens of Israeli soldiers were inside.
If Lt. Colonel Maimon spoke with this honesty and candor we could call this balance. It would fill in a side of the equation I glimpse from the outside. It would complete the circle. It would match truth with truth.
But Lt. Colonel Maimon, I see from his past statements, will spew out the mendacious narratives used by Israel to justify genocide — Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields, it operates command centers in hospitals, it sexually assaulted Israeli women on October 7 and beheaded babies.
He will make the spurious claim that Israel “has the right to defend itself,” ignoring the fact that Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups, which lack an air force, mechanized units, artillery, a navy, fleets of militarized drones and missiles, pose no existential threat to Israel.
More important, he will not address Israel’s flagrant violation of international law by occupying and settling colonists on Palestinian land and carrying out a livestreamed genocide.
Catch and Kill Journalism – by Mr. Fish.
This is not balance, unless we accept a world where truth is balanced by lies. It is an abandonment of the fundamental mission of journalists — to hold power accountable. But most egregiously, it is a terrible betrayal of our colleagues in Gaza who have been killed for chronicling the daily savagery in Gaza, for doing their job.
No doubt, the corporate sponsors and wealthy donors of the press club are pleased. No doubt, the club is able to slither away from its journalistic integrity. No doubt, it is spared the attacks that would come from allowing me to speak.
But please, have the decency to remove the word press from your club.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Read the New York Times magazine section this week about military special forces gone rogue.
Brilliant work Chris.
It illuminates for many how much Oz is controlled by occupying Zionist Jews.
Oz journalists have known this for a long time but failed to mention it.
The ones that might have were spiked long ago.
Just think, it could have been anybody, any land mass, and the results would be the same savagery. It wouldn’t be the Palestinians being slaughtered, it could be the Rhode Islanders, the Cape Verdeans, or perhaps the New Zealanders. Everyone should be very grateful that the Zionists didn’t come to visit.
Zionism = No other lives matter. And that includes non-zionist Jews.
The West is filled with spineless politicians all bought and paid for by israel. There’s a saying in the US that goes like this: The best government money can buy. The same applies to israel.
As a Christian I never really understood this passage but it’s now making more and more sense:
Revelations 3:9
Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.
The Zionists have control in Australia to an extent I never realised before.
Shame on the leaders in our community who bow to the Synagogue of Satan.
Yes, shame on those cowards, too afraid to stand up against the monster known as Zionism. A monster that has hijacked and enslaved many western countries, and silenced all dissent and criticism of its barbarities.
The Bible was written three thousand years ago in three different languages. Consequently, the chances of error, even with a myth, is manifest. Unfortunately many people have taken it to heart. With all that has gone forward in Palestine. The Jews as the people of God ranks with the Easter Bunny.
We live in a post-reality mediascape. One in which the inverse of what stares us in the face is presented as factual and balanced ‘news’ coverage. One in which IDF brutes are killed and unarmed Palestinians die incidentally. One in which The SUMUD Flotilla’s courageous activists are ‘arrested’, and abducted Gazan’s, in torture facilities, are ‘prisoners.’ Literally no one – save Zionist fanatics, but definitely not the Israeli government – believes Israel’s desperate and insulting PR bullshit. Not the prostitutes masquerading as journalists. Not the White House. Not any world leader that remains supine before Israel. Not Maurice Reilly, of The National Press Club of Australia. Every major media outlet in the United States can be bought up by Zionist billionaires, the ‘alternative’ media space flooded with vapid Israel shills, but the fatuous lies will mostly on deaf ears. Because the world has seen what the Zionist state is, and the PR campaign for this abomination is forever broken.
Thank you for your wonderful insightful reporting.in my opinion the only solution to this problem is for IRAN to form an alliance with Russia And China and permit IRAN to do to Israel what it’s doing to GAZA . If Israel had not forced the U. S. To order a cease fire the other day Israel wouldn’t be more than rubble today.
Your honesty and integrity are 2nd to none Chris. Plus, your amazing strength and calm demeanour after all you have seen is extraordinary. Courage, Rob D.
“Press” is an essential omission because as with
Hitler’s “national socialism” neo-Nazi Zionist
rulers of Israel have created a nation-state of fascism.
Maybe their atonement on Yom Kippur will awaken
them.
The cowards in the West are revealing themselves. They may believe they are protecting their careers, but history will catch up to them. The day will come, (soon I hope) when the tide turns as it has already begun to do when the apologists for this genocide will be forced to reckon with their crimes.
And let us not lose sight of the fact that this is not about religion or a safe place for Jews after the holocaust. It is the end result of the Balfour Declaration by the Brits which was hatched well before Hitler even came to power. This Zionist project was designed to set up a white colonialist settlement in the heart of the Middle East to control access to petroleum products. It’s always about profits to white empire. We’ve read the obscene plans for Gaza after it has been “cleansed” of all Palestinians. The indigenous who are always in the way must be exterminated when they resist being removed from their ancestral lands. That’s what’s going on here and it’s no surprise that imperialists and those who have used genocide all along to enrich themselves are involved and defending this genocide for the same purpose. This diseased ideology must be defeated and removed once and for all from the face of the earth.
Well worth the read,thanks for posting
Thank you Chris Hedges for your honesty and for continuing to let all people know what is really happening in Israel and it’s horrific genocide!