Review: The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media

Middle East Eye

In 1988, his final year of service as New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief before being appointed diplomatic correspondent in Washington, Thomas Friedman gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, in which he proposed some symbolic concessions to the Palestinians in order to keep them in line.

The Palestinians must be given "something to lose", argued Friedman, because "I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands."

Writing shortly thereafter, Noam Chomsky wondered whether a prominent journalist might also be promoted to the post of chief diplomatic correspondent by "urg[ing] South Africans to 'give Sambo a seat in the bus', or propos[ing] that Jews be granted something to lose, because 'if you give Hymie a seat in the bus, he may limit his demands'".

Now, three decades later, Friedman remains regrettably institutionalised at the Times, despite having told the nation of Iraq to "suck on this". But even without his assistance, the US newspaper of record has exhibited enthusiastic dedication to traditions of Orientalist contemptuousness and other forms of bias.

In a new book titled The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media, Greg Shupak, a professor of media studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto, undertakes to document- and correct - the warped media narrative on Palestine-Israel. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Is Mexico the most dangerous country on earth?

Al Jazeera English

In 2006, Mexico launched a war on drugs with the fervent backing of its ever-helpful neighbour to the north, the United States of America.

Now a bit more than a decade later, some 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed thus far as a result, with an additional 30,000 or more disappeared and a continuous discovery of unmarked mass graves.

Recent reports suggest that 2017 was, in fact, Mexico's most violent year, in terms of homicides, since the Mexican government began publicising crime data in 1997. More than 29,000 murders were recorded last year alone. 

And what do you know: Drugs continue to flow into the US, where the proscription of mind-altering substances that are in sky-high demand is precisely what has rendered the drug business in Mexico so lethally lucrative in the first place. 

Arturo Cano, a journalist with the prominent Mexican newspaper La Jornada, once commented to me on the perverse symbiosis that has long characterised the US-Mexico relationship: "Mexico provides the cheap labour and the US provides the deportees. Mexico provides the dead and disappeared and the US the armies of drug users". 

Cano went on to invoke a lament attributed to former Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, who died in 1915: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States". 

Indeed, thanks to acute geographical misfortune, Mexico has been an easy target for economic abuse by its northern neighbour - entailing magical forms of "free trade" in which the US is permitted to freely bombard the Mexican market with subsidised products while driving several million Mexican farmers out of business. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

US continues trafficking in deceit with Hezbollah ‘narcoterrorism’ unit

Middle East Eye

Last month, the US Justice Department announced the launch of an exciting new project: the Hezbollah Financing and Narcoterrorism Team (HFNT), which will continue the US effort to paint the Lebanese group as the epitome of global evil and criminalise its supporters.

The announcement comes on the heels of a December 2017 three-part Politico "expose", tantalisingly headlined: "The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook."

Who knew that the president who dropped 26,172 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries in a single year - while wildly increasing US military aid to Israel - was an old softie on the Party of God?

Providing helpful ammunition to the current administration of Donald Trump, the Politico article highlights allegations that Obama recklessly ignored Hezbollah's "narcoterrorist" activity in order to appease Iran in the run-up to the beloved nuclear deal.

Never mind that drug trafficking is fundamentally at odds with Hezbollah's religious orientation; reality has never been a prerequisite to manufacturing threats.

According to Fox News, the HFNT will "begin its work by reviewing investigations stemming from Project Cassandra" - a decade-long operation overseen by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). 

The existence of Project Cassandra, Politico notes, was first revealed in 2016 along with the operation's target: "the drug- and weapons-trafficking unit known as Hezbollah's Business Affairs Component". (Hezbollah, for its part, has never mentioned a Business Affairs Component, but US law enforcement agencies clearly know best.) READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.