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      Israeli Official Claims Anger at Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh Is Rooted in "Anti-Jewish Racism"

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 20 May, 2022 - 18:59 · 4 minutes

    Israel’s special envoy for combatting antisemitism, the actress Noa Tishby, suggested this week that three prominent American Muslims were motivated by “anti-Jewish racism” when they condemned the fatal shooting of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist killed during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank.

    Tishby, who was appointed to the post by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid last month , argued in a conversational but deeply misleading social media video that only racism could explain why the killing of Abu Akleh — by gunfire that witnesses said came from an Israeli position — generated so much anger.


    Pointing to an annual report from the International Federation of Journalists, Tishby noted that Abu Akleh was just one of more than 2,600 journalists to be killed in war zones since 1990. She also said that Abu Akleh was the only one of 12 Al Jazeera journalists on the list to have been killed in Israeli-occupied territory.

    What Tishby did not say is that Abu Akleh is just the latest of more than 50 journalists to have been killed in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories since the early 1990s. “Despite this shocking figure,” IFJ’s current president, Younes M’Jahed, wrote in the 2015 edition of the report, “not one investigation conducted into the actions of the Israeli army concluded that there was any wrongdoing or fault, and certainly no one has been held accountable.”

    “Facing up to the killing of Palestinian journalists by the Israeli army, which enjoys political support inside Israel and internationally,” M’Jahed added, “will require making better use of remedies available through international law, humanitarian law, and the laws of democratic countries to demand effective investigations and bringing the perpetrators to justice.”

    Tishby went on to claim that no one watching her video could name any of the other dead journalists — apparently expecting an audience made up entirely of people who had never heard of the well-reported murders of Marie Colvin and James Foley , to take just two examples. (And by referring only to deaths in “war zones,” Tishby framed the discussion to entirely erase the waves of revulsion that followed the killings of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi , the Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya , and the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia .)

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    A screenshot of an Instagram post by the International Federation of Journalists in 2020.

    Photo: IFJ, via Instagram

    The only reason for the outrage over the killing of Abu Akleh, Tishby insisted, was a double standard applied to Israel that is “purely rooted in sometimes subconscious antisemitism, anti-Jewish racism.”

    According to Tishby, that explains why none of the other fatalities in war zones had prompted “such vitriol, hateful, horrific reactions and rhetoric,” like that from “the international community, social media celebrities and the United Nations towards Israel.”

    As she made this claim, the examples that flashed on screen were condemnations of the killing from three prominent Americans — Rashida Tlaib , Ilhan Omar , and Bella Hadid — all of whom are Muslim. Tishby made no reference to this fact and offered no explanation as to why she had singled out only criticism of Israel from Muslim Americans, but the effort to cast their anger as the product of ethnic or religious bigotry was clear.

    Despite Tishby’s claims, there was nothing racist in the criticism of Israel over Abu Akleh’s death in the comments on news reports from Tlaib, Omar, and Hadid that flashed by on screen. All three held Israel responsible, but they did so after witnesses had already said that the fatal shot was fired by an Israeli soldier. Subsequent video evidence has only made that seem more likely.

    “When will the world and those who stand by Apartheid Israel that continues to murder, torture and commit war crimes finally say: ‘Enough’?” Tlaib wrote in the supposedly racist section of a tweet that was highlighted in Tishby’s video.


    “She was killed by the Israeli military, after making her presence as a journalist clearly known,” Omar tweeted.


    “Shireen dedicated her life to exposing Israeli military violence — and it is ultimately what killed her,” Hadid wrote on Instagram. “She revealed Israel’s policy of letting its soldiers get away with murder,” the American model, whose father is Palestinian, added.

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    A screenshot of an Instagram post by Bella Hadid, an American model whose father is a Palestinian refugee from Nazareth.

    Bella Hadid, via Instagram

    The post Israeli Official Claims Anger at Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh Is Rooted in “Anti-Jewish Racism” appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Israeli Investigation Into Killing of Palestinian-American Journalist Ends Before It Begins

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Thursday, 19 May, 2022 - 17:39 · 4 minutes

    Israel’s military police have reportedly decided not to open any criminal investigation into the fatal shooting of the Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, even though newly released video appears to contradict the Israeli army’s claim that the journalist was standing close to Palestinian militants when she was shot last week in the occupied West Bank.

    Amos Harel, the senior military correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported on Thursday that the decision not to investigate the Israeli soldiers who might have fired the fatal shot came after an internal review by the commando unit of the Israel Defense Forces “found six instances of IDF gunfire at armed Palestinians who were near Abu Akleh” as she reported on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in Jenin.

    According to Harel, the criminal investigations division of the Israeli army simply accepted the accounts of the soldiers who opened fire, but “testified that they did not see the journalist at all and aimed their fire at gunmen, who were indeed nearby.”

    However, within hours of Harel’s report, video posted on Twitter by Rushdi Abualouf, a Palestinian journalist for the BBC, appeared to contradict the claim that Abu Akleh was near any Palestinian gunmen engaged in a firefight with Israeli troops. The clip shows that Abu Akleh and several other journalists, all wearing blue vests marked “Press,” were instead walking in the direction of the Israeli soldiers, as young men behind them stood around talking and joking, when shots suddenly rang out and Abu Akleh and a colleague were both hit.


    As the writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer explained on Twitter, “At the start of the video you can see the mood is relaxed, what they are saying isn’t really clear mostly because they are chuckling.” After multiple shots are heard, and the young men scatter, a voice is heard saying, “Did anyone get hit?” and calling for an ambulance. Then, after more shots, someone shouts, “Shireen! Shireen!” and, amid frantic calls for an ambulance, the desperate warning: “Stay where you are, don’t move!”

    Video posted on the day of the killing last week appeared to show that people who tried to reach the mortally wounded Abu Akleh were fired on as they approached her.

    Harel also reported that there were no plans for a real criminal investigation of the Israeli soldiers because “such an investigation, which would necessitate questioning as potential criminal suspects soldiers for their actions during a military operation, would provoke opposition and controversy within the IDF and in Israeli society in general.”

    This latest evidence of impunity for Israel’s army outraged critics of the ongoing Israeli occupation, which imposes military rule over millions of Palestinians living in territory seized during war in 1967. “Israel is actively calling the bluff of all the countries that demanded it conduct an investigation,” observed Edo Konrad, the editor of +972, an online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. “It knows no one will hold it accountable, that the money will keep flowing, while at the same time ensuring that no will ever ‘truly know’ who killed Shireen Abu Akleh,” Konrad added.

    While commentators in the United States asked how the Biden administration would react to the news that Israel’s military was refusing to conduct the thorough investigation it had committed to just a week ago, senior American officials have gone out of their way in recent days to demonstrate what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called “ironclad support for Israel’s security.”


    As Sullivan met with Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, at the White House on Thursday, the Israeli army was celebrating a friendly visit to Israel by Lt. Gen. Michael Kurilla, the new Commander of U.S. Central Command.

    The killing of Abu Akleh might not have shaken Israel’s relations with the U.S. but it has destabilized the country’s fragile coalition government. On Thursday, a left-wing lawmaker cited the Israeli police attack on mourners at the funeral of the beloved Palestinian-American correspondent in Jerusalem last week as one of the reasons that she was withdrawing her support for the government, which could force new elections.

    Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who represents the Meretz party, wrote in a letter explaining her decision, that her hope that Arabs and Jews could work together to bring about “a new path of equality and respect,” had been dashed by a series of “hawkish, hard-line and right-wing positions,” taken by the coalition’s leaders. The sight of the police attacking mourners at Abu Akleh’s funeral, and nearly causing them to drop the coffin, prompted her to make what she called “a moral decision” to stop supporting the government.

    The post Israeli Investigation Into Killing of Palestinian-American Journalist Ends Before It Begins appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Israel Admits It Might Have Killed Journalist, Attacks Her Funeral

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 13 May, 2022 - 17:40 · 5 minutes

    Israeli police attacked the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday, nearly causing mourners to drop the casket of the renowned Palestinian American journalist.


    Abu Akleh was fatally shot while covering an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday. Fellow journalists who witnessed the shooting said Israeli forces had fired on them. Israel’s prime minister and other senior officials initially said Palestinian militants were “likely” to blame, but the Israeli army admitted on Friday that one of its soldiers might have fired the fatal shot.

    The assault on the mourners, who were beaten with clubs at a hospital in East Jerusalem, stunned viewers who watched it unfold on live television, further enraging Palestinians and the dead journalist’s colleagues and fans.


    Israeli police said they attacked the procession because mourners waved Palestinian flags and chanted nationalist slogans. An official Israeli police account shared drone video to support the authorities’ claim that two of the mourners had thrown rocks at them. But a comparison of that video to ground-level news footage showed that the police video had been edited to remove the initial police charge and slowed down to make it seem as if a man who just waved his arms in frustration had thrown something at the officers.


    The televised assault on the funeral of a beloved figure only intensified the outrage over her death and the images were quickly remixed and shared across social networks.






    Thousands of people later joined the procession for a beloved national hero before a funeral at a Catholic church in Jerusalem’s Old City.



    The suppression of dissent continued throughout the day.



    Later on Friday, Israel’s army said the results of an interim internal investigation suggested that its soldiers might have fired the shots that killed the Al Jazeera correspondent and wounded her colleague.

    That admission marked a sharp retreat from the initial version of events offered by Israeli officials, who responded to anger over the killing of Abu Akleh on Wednesday by quickly distributing video of a Palestinian gunman firing down an alley during the raid. Officials also released statements calling it “likely” that the journalist was killed by a Palestinian militant, not an Israeli soldier.

    Later the same day, however, a researcher for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Abdulkarim Sadi, recorded video showing that the Palestinian militant had been in a part of the camp that made it impossible for him to have shot Abu Akleh.

    Israel’s military then released body camera video of its soldiers retreating from that part of the camp and emerging on a street where armored vehicles were waiting to extract them. Geolocation by the B’Tselem researcher and others showed that the Israeli armored vehicles were parked on the street where Abu Akleh was shot.

    The interim Israeli investigation acknowledged that the Israeli vehicles were parked about 200 meters away from Abu Akleh, and said that if she was shot by an Israeli soldier, it must have been because the soldier “fired several bullets from a special slit in the jeep and through a telescopic site at a terrorist … and there’s a possibility that the reporter stood near the terrorist.”

    That version of events was flatly contradicted by several other journalists who were with Abu Akleh at the time and insisted that they were nowhere near any of the Palestinian militants in the camp.

    Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of B’Tselem, told me by phone on Friday that there is no reason to expect the Israeli army to release any more of the video it collected from soldiers after the incident. The Israel Defense Forces, El-Ad said, has a track record of only releasing video evidence “when it is beneficial to support the Army version of events.”

    The rights activist also called it “grotesque” that the United States had called for Palestinian authorities to conduct a joint investigation with Israel, given that Israel had repeatedly used slow-moving investigations to “whitewash” the killing of Palestinian civilians living under Israeli military rule.

    The American pressure on Palestinian officials to allow Israel to take part in the investigation of itself shows the “U.S. complicity in what’s going on here,” El-Ad said, even when the victim is, like Abu Akleh, an American citizen.

    Updated: May 14, 2022
    This article was updated to add an analysis of Israeli police video that was posted online on Saturday night.

    The post Israel Admits It Might Have Killed Journalist, Attacks Her Funeral appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Video Shared by Israel Shows Palestinian Gunman Was Not Firing at Journalist Killed During Israeli Raid

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 11 May, 2022 - 18:42 · 4 minutes

    An effort by Israeli officials to use social media evidence to blame Palestinian militants for the fatal shooting of a journalist in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday unraveled within hours, as a close analysis of video shared by Israel showed that a Palestinian gunman was shooting in the direction of Israeli soldiers, not the reporter.

    Immediately after the tragic killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian American journalist who was gunned down while covering an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in Jenin, three other journalists who were with her, including one colleague who was shot and another who tried to save her, said that the group had come under fire from Israeli soldiers.



    In response, a chorus of senior Israeli officials insisted that it was “likely” the reporter had been killed by Palestinian militants, who exchanged fire with Israeli soldiers during the raid.

    To support that case, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett , the Israeli Foreign Ministry , and the Israeli Embassy in Washington all shared video on social networks that showed a Palestinian gunman opening fire during the raid.

    The edited and subtitled video, which was originally released by Palestinian militants, included a comment from an unseen person who said, in Arabic, that the militants had shot a soldier who was “laying on the ground.”


    Israeli officials called this evidence that the Palestinian militants might have mistaken Abu Akleh, a well-known correspondent for Al Jazeera who was wearing a blue helmet and flak jacket labeled “press,” for an Israeli soldier.

    However, an investigation of the video by a local researcher for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem showed that the militant had been firing down an alley in the densely populated refugee camp that was nowhere near the entrance to the camp where Abu Akleh and other journalists had been pinned down by gunfire.


    Working with visual clues from the harrowing video of Abu Akleh’s colleagues and bystanders attempting to rescue her, and a tip from an Agence France-Presse correspondent on the scene, geolocation experts confirmed that the Al Jazeera correspondent was at the edge of the camp, about a six-minute walk from where the militant was recorded firing down an alley.




    As the Al Jazeera English producer Linah Alsaafin noted , video clip of the effort to rescue Abu Akleh seemed to show that anyone who approached her was fired on, which suggests that the group of journalists was under deliberate attack and not just subject to indiscriminate fire.

    Later on Wednesday, after the B’Tselem investigation showed that the bullets fired by the Palestinian militant in the video Israel circulated could not have struck Abu Akleh, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Gen. Aviv Kochavi, said in a statement that it was not yet possible to be sure who had shot Abu Akleh, expressed regret for her death, and ordered an investigation. That, several activists noted, was quite different from an earlier statement from an Israeli military spokesperson who said that the journalists who were shot had been “ armed with cameras .”

    The Israeli army also released body camera footage shot during the raid to illustrate that its forces had come under fire from Palestinian militants in the camp.


    Remarkably, several visual clues in the Israeli military’s video exactly match the path shown in the video recorded by the B’Tselem researcher, which seems to prove that Israeli soldiers were at the end of the alley the Palestinian militant was filmed firing down and then emerged onto the very same street that Abu Akleh was at the end of when she was shot.

    The post Video Shared by Israel Shows Palestinian Gunman Was Not Firing at Journalist Killed During Israeli Raid appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Mark Esper Waited Two Years to Tell Us Trump Wanted Troops to Shoot George Floyd Protesters

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 6 May, 2022 - 20:52 · 4 minutes

    According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, on June 1, 2020, a week after the murder of George Floyd, then-President Donald Trump asked him to deploy 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital and have them open fire on protesters. “Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, in an Oval Office meeting Esper describes in the introduction to his new memoir. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

    Esper, who waited nearly two years to reveal that an American president had urged him to launch a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown on dissent, is well aware that Trump’s plan was both illegal and immoral. That’s clear because his account of this “surreal” request is included not just in the introduction to his memoir, “A Sacred Oath,” but also featured on back cover of the book, due to be published next week.

    The cover of former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir.

    But instead of immediately resigning and letting the American people know that their president was a danger to the republic, here is what Esper did that day: He tried to placate Trump and then joined the president in posing for photographs outside St. John’s Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House, after federal agents had used chemical irritants and force to violently disperse peaceful protesters from the square.

    A month later, when Esper was called before the House Armed Services Committee to explain how the military had been used to suppress dissent that day — and that night, when Black Hawk and Lakota helicopters swooped low over protesters in Washington, D.C., using winds from the rotor wash to instill terror — the defense secretary made no mention of Trump’s request to use potentially deadly force.

    In that hearing , Rep. Adam Smith, the Democratic chair of the House Armed Services Committee, asked Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to describe “what sort of conversations went on between the Department of Defense and the president and others in the White House” about Trump’s public threat to use active-duty soldiers to clear the streets.

    Instead of answering that question, Esper offered bland assurances that the military, including 43,000 Army and Air National Guard personnel deployed in 33 states and the District of Columbia during “the civil unrest” after Floyd’s murder, was committed to “remaining apolitical” and ensuring that “our fellow Americans have the ability to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights.”

    US Attorney General William Barr (L) and US Defense Secretary Mark Esper walk around downtown Washington, DC during curfew on June 1, 2020. - Police fired tear gas outside the White House late Sunday as anti-racism protestors again took to the streets to voice fury at police brutality, and major US cities were put under curfew to suppress rioting.With the Trump administration branding instigators of six nights of rioting as domestic terrorists, there were more confrontations between protestors and police and fresh outbreaks of looting. Local US leaders appealed to citizens to give constructive outlet to their rage over the death of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis, while night-time curfews were imposed in cities including Washington, Los Angeles and Houston. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

    Attorney General William Barr and Defense Secretary Mark Esper inspect the work of federal security forces in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 2020.

    Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

    Esper — who said last year that he was writing his book because the “American people deserve a full and unvarnished accounting of our nation’s history, especially the more difficult periods” — told the New York Times this week that he had concluded that Trump “is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.”

    Given that his firsthand experience of Trump led him to this view, it is important to ask why Esper chose not to reveal that the president he served had wanted to turn the military on the people when it might have made a real difference — either before the 2020 election, when it might have dented Trump’s chances of winning, or just after it, when Trump fired him and put loyalists in charge of the Pentagon before urging his own supporters to disrupt the certification of his loss.

    And here, it must be said, there appears to be something even more troubling at work than just the fact that Esper might expect to sell more copies of his book by waiting to reveal the most damaging information about Trump — as former Trump aides John Bolton and Stephanie Grisham did before him.

    What I’m thinking of is a disturbing deference to presidential authority that seems deeply rooted in Washington. There was clear evidence of that in something else that Smith said to Esper and Milley at the start of the July 9, 2020, hearing on the events of June 1 that year.

    Before asking the top officials in the Pentagon to explain what role the military had been asked to play in the abusive policing of the racial justice protests, Smith told them that he was aware of “the difficult position that any secretary of defense and any chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in. You work for the president. He’s commander-in-chief.”

    But given the gravity of what Esper knew about Trump’s desire to see American troops open fire on peaceful protesters, what he chose to conceal from Congress and the public is far more grave than the sort of policy disagreement that Smith described as routine.

    And while other senior officials — including Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, and his former chief of staff, John Kelly — let their dim views of the former president’s character and intellect trickle out through leaks to reporters like Bob Woodward, Esper sat on explosive evidence about Trump’s willingness to unleash a form of martial law even after he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.

    Looking at Esper’s silence until after Trump was out of office, we are left with a very strange definition of what it means to be a public servant — one who cannot be expected to tell the public that the president would have them shot.

    The post Mark Esper Waited Two Years to Tell Us Trump Wanted Troops to Shoot George Floyd Protesters appeared first on The Intercept .