I don’t do “Hasbara”, i.e., Jewish or Israeli public relations.

I’m not interested in promoting American “Yankee Doodle” flapjack about the genius of the American Enterprise in Democracy, especially when that “democracy has served up a foreign infection for its head of state (related: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/czechoslovakia-spied-on-trump-to-exploit-ties-to-highest-echelons-of-us-power; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2024/11/08/well-have-it-fixed-so-good-said-donald-trump/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2025/02/18/trump-piracy-board-disarm-and-plunder-the-united-states-of-america/; https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property–find the same on X through the hash tag #RussiaRussiaRussia).

My interest: American modern culture and related art and humanism–and expressive of it, my own American neighborhood.

With Donald Trump in power, American may share the feeling of being marched forward into a past characterized by the power of feudal-medieval mafia to (in retrospect, inevitably) destroy themselves.

How many Americans — how many American neighbors — sunk in hunger or pain will quietly dissolve before power into a living death–or death–without a fight for their right to the dignity of their existence beneath the security umbrella of a nation that has their back?

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On my desktop earlier today: https://www.kyleorton.com/p/nyt-media-coverage-israel-hamas-gaza.

Moscow and its manipulation Palestinian “leaders” have lied to Palestinians for decades as regards their Jewish neighbors. Kyle Orton’s astute observation of plain factual “pro-Palestinian” errors may provide the fuel for a right revolutionary fire against . . . lies, for both Israelis and Palestinians might benefit from the kind of truth that may be questioned, explored with integrity, and affirmed, corrected, or trashed.

The study finds that the Times admitted seventy-two errors in its coverage of the war, forty-eight of them (fully two-thirds) directly against Israel. It is a point that authors do not stress, but should have: there is not a single case of false Times reporting that negatively affected the image of HAMAS. If incompetence was all that was going on here, the “mistakes” would not all be in the same direction. As telling on this point, the “errors were identified by external sources” and when corrections were issued they were often “late, vague, and sometimes evasive”.

Orton goes on to cover bias, deceptions, and misrepresentations in The New York Times‘ reporting on the Israeli-Hamas war.

For denizens of the American Far Left (or Far Right) one would think carelessness with information would be resented–the same informs the equivalent of lies with intent to manipulate popular perception while massaging along the way egos with malign narcissistic, partisan, and ultimately only selfish ends. They are those who worry about how they may look rather than how things are and what might bring improvements in security and in the enjoyment of life.

So why play along with falsehoods?

Palestinians have been basically bullshitted into slavery (as well as certain suicide-by-war and death) by their own (related on this blog: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2021/07/26/ftac-palestinian-kgb-the-palestinians-abused-and-plundered-by-their-own/).

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Criminals, including political ones, advance their interests through coercion (blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and patronage), fraud (misrepresentations), and force (violence). Any in and of the modern west may only wonder how some in and near Gaza may feel about being bullied, essentially, into a compliant posture toward retrograde and vicious power.

Above: Palestinians kill one another during the 2007 “Battle for Gaza“.

The interests of modern societies are not in power but in area-wide qualities of living of concern to the health of environments and of species supported, much including our own. For assorted cavemen, cowards, and criminals, coercive power, corruption, and wealth appear all that matter.

–33–