A 27-year-old Palestinian was later killed by soldiers in unrelated army raid near Qalqilya
CCTV footage showed a car approaching a security booth near the entrance of Ariel settlement before two men stepped out and fired at it (Twitter/screengrab)
An Israeli settlement security guard was killed in a drive-by shooting late on Friday in the occupied West Bank.
The 23-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene due to gunshot wounds, Israeli ambulance service Magen David Adom (MDA) said.
CCTV footage showed a car approaching a security booth near the entrance of Ariel settlement before two men stepped out and fired at two guards inside it, killing one of them. The other guard was unharmed, Israeli newspaper Haaretz said.
The shooters managed to flee the scene and the Israeli army said it launched a large manhunt in the area.
A lockdown was announced in Ariel settlement located in the central West Bank after the shooting.
Entrances to Salfit, the nearest Palestinian city to Ariel, have been closed, according to the Palestinian news website Arab48.
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 200 settlements and outposts, deemed illegal under international law, across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Palestinian killed in Qalqilya
Later in the night, a Palestinian man was fatally shot by Israeli troops during a raid in Azzun town near Qalqilya, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The man was identified as Yahya Ali Adwan, 27, who was a former prisoner.
There are no immediate links between Adwan'a death and the earlier incident in Ariel.
The Friday shooting comes nearly a month after 14 Israelis were killed in a series of shooting and stabbing attacks carried out by Palestinians from the West Bank and inside Israel.
Israeli troops and police have been on high alert since, deploying additional army battalions to the West Bank and stepping up their operations in the occupied Palestinian territory.
At least 20 Palestinians were fatally shot by Israeli forces in April, bringing the total number of Palestinians in the West Bank killed by Israeli forces this year to over 50.
Israeli troops attack Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. (Photo: via ActiveStills)
April 29, 2022
Israeli forces on dawn Friday stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem and injured 42 Palestinian worshippers, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
WAFA correspondent said that heavily-armed police stormed the mosque compound via the heavily-guarded Bab al-Maghariba Gate, occupied the rooftops of several buildings, and fired rubber-coated steel bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards the worshippers, injuring 42.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said that its medics provided treatment to 42 people, mostly with upper-body injuries, and transferred 22 of them to al-Makassed Hospital. It confirmed that police initially denied medics access to the compound and brutally assaulted a medic, inflicting bruises across his body.
Isreali forces have stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque compound every Friday since the beginning of Ramadan.
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Al-Aqsa is located in East Jerusalem, a part of the internationally recognized Palestinian territories that have been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.
Palestinians wait to cross Qalandiya checkpoint near Ramallah on their way to Jerusalem for the fourth Friday prayers of Ramadan, 29 April.
Oren ZivActiveStills
Maureen Clare Murphy -29 April 2022
Palestinians confronted Israeli riot police early Friday morning as occupation forces entered Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The last Friday afternoon prayers of Ramadan later in the day ended without major incident, with some 160,000 worshippers in attendance.
The Tel Aviv daily Haaretzreported that “hundreds of young Palestinians fired fireworks and threw rocks within the compound.”
Police raided the compound for the first time since last Friday and fired tear gas and foam-tipped bullets, injuring more than 40 people.
Israeli occupation forces dropped tear gas grenades from a drone as they did over al-Aqsa last Friday.
A 21-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem, Walid Sharif, remains unconscious after he was hit in the head with a foam-tipped bullet during confrontations at al-Aqsa last week.
Around 200,000 people marked Laylat al-Qadr – one of the holiest nights of Ramadan – at al-Aqsa late Wednesday and early Thursday. Laylat al-Qadr, or Night of Destiny, marks the night Muslims believe the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
Israeli media reported that police required worshippers to deposit their ID cards in order to enter the al-Aqsa mosque compound after last Friday’s confrontations.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel told Haaretz that the practice violates the right to freedom of worship and that police have no legal authority to demand the deposit of worshippers’ IDs.
“In some cases, return of their ID was contingent upon being questioned by police,” according to Haaretz, citing a letter from Adalah, a human rights group serving Palestinians in Israel, to Israeli authorities.
Violation of “status quo”
Israel imposed “additional punitive restrictions” on Christians seeking to worship at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher during the Orthodox Easter holiday, the Palestinian Authority foreign ministry stated last week.
Israeli police restricted attendance to the Holy Fire ceremony held at the church on Saturday, saying that it sought to prevent a repeat of a stampede during a Jewish religious festival in the Upper Galilee that killed 45 people in 2021.
Some 11,000 people typically attend the ceremony, but that number has been much lower during the pandemic due to public health restrictions.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem rejected the Israeli move, saying “it will not compromise its right to provide spiritual services in all churches and squares.”
The PA foreign ministry accused Israel of “violating the status quo, upending centuries of Christian heritage and Palestinian traditions.”
It added that “the occupying power is willfully provoking Christian and Muslim worshippers and threatening a religious war.”
Video circulated last Saturday showing an Israeli police officer directing Arabic-speaking Christian worshippers to separate from the rest of a crowd queued in the Old City of Jerusalem amid Easter celebrations.
“Whoever is Arab, Christian, speaks Arabic, stand to the side,” the officer states in Arabic in the short clip.
The Israeli police stated that the officer was attempting to facilitate the entry of Old City residents, though the video shows his instructions pertained to ethnicity rather than residency location.
Israel prevents Palestinian Christians from the rest of the West Bank and Gaza from freely worshipping in Jerusalem and only a small fraction receive Israeli permits to worship in the city during Easter and Christmas.
Palestinian Muslims seeking to exercise their faith in Jerusalem face similar restrictions during holidays and throughout the year as Israel controls Palestinian movement to and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“Racial segregation” in Jerusalem
Meanwhile, UN human rights experts said this week that “Israel’s housing policies in East Jerusalem amount to racial segregation and discrimination against the Palestinian people.”
Israel’s zoning and planning regimes “restrict access to housing, safe drinking water and sanitation, and other essential services, including healthcare and educational facilities,” the experts added.
International observers are increasingly echoing what Palestinians have been saying for years – that Israel’s policies and practices amount to apartheid, which has been recognized as a crime against humanity for the past half-century.
Amnesty International has called on the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor to “consider the applicability of the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current formal investigation” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Earlier this month, the international tribunal received a complaint alleging war crimes against journalists by Israeli occupation forces.
The complaint concerns the “systematic targeting” of four Palestinian media workers who were “killed or maimed by Israeli snipers while covering demonstrations in Gaza,” according to the International Federation of Journalists.
“All were wearing clearly marked PRESS vests at the time they were shot.”
The complaint also includes the bombing of two towers housing media offices during Israel’s attack on Gaza last May.
More than 45 journalists have been killed by Israel since 2000 “and no one has been held to account,” the federation said.
Meanwhile, Israeli occupation forces killed two Palestinians in the West Bank over the past week.
Ahmad Misad, 21, was killed during a raid on Jenin on Wednesday. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that Misad was shot with a live bullet to the head while Israeli forces, who were confronted by Palestinians throwing stones and empty bottles, were withdrawing from the area.
The previous day, Ahmad Oweidat, 20, was shot in the head during a raid in Aqabat Jabr refugee camp in Jericho.
More than 40 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank so far this year.
Are Israeli security authorities handing over investigation materials to online hasbara stars in order to score points on social media? It certainly seems so.
Last Friday, Israeli actress Noa Tishby, who this month was appointed Israel’s first-ever special envoy for combating antisemitism and the delegitimization of Israel, released a video on her personal Instagram account in response to a post by Palestinian-American supermodel Bella Hadid. Hadid had shared a story about Athal al-Azzeh, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who was arrested two weeks ago by the Israeli army, who accused him of throwing stones — a charge Athal has adamantly denied.
In her response video, Tishby featured two photos of a masked Palestinian rolling a tire, which appear to have been part of the Israeli military’s investigation file on Athal — a fact corroborated by his mother, Jinan, who says she was shown the photos by Israeli interrogators several days before Tishby’s post. The investigation file, which is not public, was most likely handed over to Tishby by the authorities.
Athal was arrested on April 15 near Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, as he was walking toward his grandmother’s home in Aida Refugee Camp, which is near to the separation wall. There was no protest at the site, but a few teenagers nearby had been throwing stones at the separation barrier as he walked by.
Palestinians take part in a solidarity protest with Athal al-Azzeh outside Ofer Military Prison, April 26, 2022. (Lema Nazeeh)
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Athal’s father, Ahmad, who works as an attorney, told +972. According to him, it was a few hours before the family finally received word from the Palestinian District Coordination and Liason Office (DCO) that their son had been arrested, after which they received a phone call from an Israeli military investigator.
“We were happy he was alive, that at least they didn’t kill him, especially at a time when we constantly hear about shooting teenagers,” said Ahmad.
Athal’s arrest garnered international attention after Bella Hadid shared a post about the case by left-wing Israeli activist Yahav Erez, which received over 16,000 likes. Erez’s post, which featured a photo of al-Azzeh playing the violin and sought to put pressure on the Israeli authorities to release him, stated that Athal was “being held hostage by Apartheid Israel.”
In response, Tishby — a longtime Israel advocate whose new envoy position falls under the Foreign Ministry — took to Instagram claiming that Hadid was “spreading antisemitism” by sharing Erez’s post.
“That’s not true,” Tishby told her followers. “He was not kidnapped nor is he being held hostage. He was arraigned on the 16th [April], saw a judge twice, and has a release date on the 24th. Athal was arrested for throwing rocks and burning tires, which is something he would have been arrested for in the United States or in any other law-abiding country in the world.”
By sharing the post, Tishby continued, Hadid was “spreading hate and misinformation, which is demonizing the Jewish state and flaming — yes, Bella — it’s flaming antisemitism,” adding that Athal should “focus more on his violin rather than on violence against Jews.”
Tishby’s video included photos of masked Palestinians which appear to have been taken by Israeli security cameras posted along the separation barrier, presumably during confrontations with Israeli forces. Jinan, Athal’s mother, said that Israeli interrogators had shown her, among other materials, the two photos seen in Tishby’s story after she was brought into the Atarot police station last Wednesday — several days before Tishby released her video.
“I saw the photos that went up on Instagram,” she recalled. “These were the exact same photos [they showed me]. They showed me the two images and wanted me to say it was my son, but I told them that it wasn’t. They called me a liar.”
Since his arrest, Athal has had four hearings at Ofer Military Court, one of which took place last Tuesday. He has been charged with stone throwing and setting fire to tires. “My son did nothing and denied all the accusations against him,” Jinan said. “They continued to pressure him in the investigation by using psychological tactics in order to force him to confess.”
Ahmad said that when he met his son at Ofer, Athal had told him that the interrogators threatened to keep him in prison “forever,” yet Athal refuses to admit to the allegations. “It annoys them,” Ahmad added. “I am a lawyer myself, and very often we spoke at home about the law. He knows this.” Athal also told his parents that should he refuse to confess, they too would be brought in for interrogation. The authorities made good on their promise and called in Jinan last week.
Violating the right to a free trial
Unsurprisingly, and despite Tishby’s claims, Athal was not released on April 24, but rather was brought in for a hearing at Ofer, where his remand was extended.
“I saw [Tishby’s] post. I hoped it was real and that he would be released, but unfortunately he wasn’t,” Ahmad said. “I don’t have any hope, but who knows. I want to continue to believe that maybe God will help and the judge will order [Athal] released.”
Ahmad himself posted two comments on Tishby’s Instagram video before and after Tishby’s claimed release date. Among other remarks, he wrote (edited for clarity): “You allow yourself to be unprofessional and to be a speaker for the Israeli intelligence. You are spreading lies about an innocent 14-year-old boy.” When April 24 passed, he posted another response: “Athal was tortured by your army, and the mother of Athal was taken through a hell of interrogation pressuring her to convict her son — any answers from you on that? While you are enjoying tanning on the beach, we Palestinians are being tortured by your government.”
At a hearing held Tuesday in Ofer Military Court, Judge Noam Breiman ordered Athal be released on NIS 4,000 bail, as well as third-party bail of NIS 5,000. Legal proceedings will continue and Athal is likely to be indicted at the end of May.
The judge ruled that the stone throwing taking place as Athal walked by was not directed at Israeli soldiers but rather at a guard tower, and that due to its physical size it is doubtful whether the stones could have caused any significant damage.
Arrests of Palestinian children, including teenagers, is a common Israeli practice in the occupied West Bank. According to Addameer, an organization working for the rights of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian jails, Israel currently holds 160 Palestinian children in detention.
Ofer Military Prison in the West Bank. (Oren Ziv)
Just this week, Haaretz reported that, according to army figures from between 2018 and April 2021, 96 percent of convictions in Israeli military courts ended in conviction, and 99.6 percent of those convictions were obtained through a plea bargain. This dominant trend is evident in Athal’s case, as with the army and the military court system apparently trying to pressure him to confess to the charges during interrogations, paving the road for a plea deal.
Riham Nassra, an attorney who represents Palestinian detainees in military courts, said that publishing investigative materials before an indictment is issued, as Tishby did, is illegal, and indicates that the materials had in fact been leaked. “Even if those materials were somehow presented at the court hearing, it was illegal for them to be released — this violates the right to a fair trial, especially when it comes to a minor whose hearing is held behind closed doors and may also disrupt or harm the investigation.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry, which oversees Tishby’s position as Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism, stated: “Noa Tishby’s video was published in response to a deceitful video that was posted on social media with deliberately false information regarding the arrest of a young Palestinian, in order to tarnish Israel’s image and delegitimize its actions. In coordination with various bodies, we conducted an examination of the facts that formed the basis for Noa Tishby’s response. The published photos do not reveal the detainee’s face and therefore there is no impediment to their publication.” Notably, the Foreign Ministry did not explicitly deny that they had handed over the materials for Tishby to publish.
The IDF Spokesperson offered the following response: “Athal al-Azzeh was arrested on April 15, 2022 after participating in a riot during which he set fire to tires and threw stones at a military guard post. On April 26, 2022, an indictment was filed against him.”
Noa Tishby did not respond to a request for comment, but following publication of this article took down her original post on Instagram.
A demonstrator displays a placard reading: 'Palestinian Lives Matter' during a pro-Palestinian protest in Berlin on May 19, 2021 [JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images]
April 30, 2022
Authorities in the German capital Berlin have banned all pro-Palestine protests until 2 May, alleging that some protesters have made antisemitic remarks.
A protest in support of Palestinians was scheduled to take place in Berlin yesterday – titled 'protest against Israeli aggression in Jerusalem' – but was cancelled by the city's police over "unacceptable antisemitism" at another protest last week, in which several of the protesters made alleged antisemitic statements.
"Based on experiences from the recent past," police officials said, there is "the immediate danger" that such events could happen during pro-Palestinians protests again. Berlin's Interior Minister Iris Spranger also stated earlier this week that "We had to witness criminal acts, antisemitic slogans, and exclamations of the worst kind", adding that it "is totally unacceptable."
Organisers of the protests, however, contested the narrative of events by highlighting that the action of a few protesters should not be used to judge the rest of those who take part in the protests.
The police were easily able to ban the scheduled protest using an amendment to the Assembly Act introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic, which enables them to ban protests and gathering if they claim there is a risk to public safety.
Organisers of the pro-Palestinian protests issued a last-minute appeal against the ban yesterday, but Berlin's Administrative Court struck it down by ruling that "The special public interest in the enforcement of the prohibition decision outweighs the interest of the applicant."
While protests in support of Palestinians and against Israeli occupation are banned until 2 May, there are several other demonstrations scheduled to take place in the city which have not been restricted. That is despite such demonstrations resulting in an even higher likelihood of street parties and chaos, according to critics of the ban.
Such discriminatory policies have led many to believe that German authorities have a problem solely with the pro-Palestinian theme of the protests, demonising any expression of criticism against Israel and its policies. German media has also directly adopted biases, with a flurry of outlets firing staff members and journalists – especially Arab ones – who express pro-Palestine views, attend protests, and even those who like social media posts criticising apartheid.
Many of the tunnels being utilised today in Ukrainian efforts to defend the country were built in the Cold War-era.
Ukrainian soldiers walk through a tunnel in the Lugansk region. | Anatolii Stepanov / AFP
Paul J Springer, 30 April 2022
Faced with the prospect of sending Russian troops into subterranean combat, Vladimir Putin demurred. “There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground,” he told his defence minister on April 21, ordering him to cancel a planned storming of a steel plant in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
While Putin’s back-up plan – to form a seal around trapped Ukrainian forces and wait it out – is no less brutal and there are reports that Russians may still have mounted an offensive on the site, Putin’s hesitancy to send his forces into a sprawling network of tunnels under the complex hints at a truth in warfare: tunnels can be an effective tool in resisting an oppressor.
For an invader who does not possess a thorough map of the subterranean passages, this can present a nightmare scenario, leading to massive personnel losses, plummeting morale and an inability to finish the conquest of their urban objective – all factors that may have factored in Putin’s decision not to send troops underground in Mariupol.
Military tunnelling’s history
The use of tunnels and underground chambers in times of conflict is nothing new.
The use of tunnels has been a common aspect of warfare for millennia. Ancient besieging forces used tunnelling operations as a means to weaken otherwise well-fortified positions. This typically required engineers to construct long passages under walls or other obstacles. Collapsing the tunnel weakened the fortification. If well-timed, an assault conducted in the immediate aftermath of the breach might lead to a successful storming of the defended position.
One of the earliest examples of this technique is depicted on Assyrian carvings that are thousands of years old. While some attackers climb ladders to storm the walls of an Egyptian city, others can be seen digging at the foundations of the walls.
Assyrian engraving of the siege of an Egyptian fort. Photo credit: The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA
Roman armies relied heavily upon sophisticated engineering techniques such as putting arches into the tunnels they built during sieges. Roman defenders also perfected the art of digging counter-tunnels to intercept those used by attackers before they presented a threat. Upon penetrating an enemy tunnel, they flooded it with caustic smoke to drive out the enemy or launched a surprise attack upon unsuspecting miners.
The success of tunnelling under fortifications led European engineers in the Middle Ages to design ways to thwart the tactic. They built castles on bedrock foundations, making any attempt to dig beneath them much slower, and surrounded walls with moats so that tunnels would need to be far deeper.
Although tunneling remained an important aspect of sieges through the 13th century, it was eventually replaced by the introduction of gunpowder artillery – which proved a more effective way to breach fortifications. However, by the mid-19th century, advances in mining and tunnel construction led to a resurgence in subterranean approaches to warfare.
During the Crimean War in the 1850s, British and French attackers attempted to tunnel under Russian fortifications at the Battle of Sevastopol. Ten years later, Ulysses S Grant authorised an attempt to tunnel under Confederate defences at the siege of Petersburg, Virginia. In both cases, large caches of gunpowder were placed in chambers created by tunnelling under key positions and detonated in coordination with an infantry assault.
Age of airpower
With warfare increasingly relying on aircraft in the 20th century, military strategists again turned to tunnels – undetectable from the skies and protected from falling bombs.
In World War I, tunnelling was attempted as a means to launch surprise attacks on the Western Front, potentially bypassing the other side’s system of trenches and remaining undetected by aerial observers. In particular, the Ypres salient in war-ravaged Belgium was the site of hundreds of tunnels dug by British and German miners, and the horrifying stories of combat under the earth provide one of the most terrifying vignettes of that awful war.
During World War II, Japanese troops in occupied areas in the Pacific constructed extensive tunnel networks to make their forces virtually immune to aerial attack and naval bombardment from Allied forces. During amphibious assaults in places such as the Philippines and Iwo Jima, American and Allied forces had to contend with a warren of Japanese tunnel networks. Eventually, they resorted to using high explosives to collapse tunnel entrances, trapping thousands of Japanese troops inside.
The Viet Cong tunnel networks, particularly in the vicinity of Saigon, were an essential part of their guerrilla strategy and remain a popular tourist stop today. Some of the tunnels were large enough to house hospital and barracks facilities and strong enough to withstand anything short of nuclear bombardment.
The tunnels not only protected Vietnamese fighters from overwhelming American airpower, but they also facilitated hit-and-run style attacks. Specialised “tunnel rats”, American soldiers who ventured into the tunnels armed only with a knife and pistol, became adept at navigating the tunnel networks. But they could not be trained in sufficient numbers to negate the value of the tunnel systems.
Tunnels for terrorism
In the 21st century, tunnels have been used to facilitate the activities of terror organisations. During the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, military operatives soon discovered that Al-Qaeda had fortified a series of tunnel networks connecting naturally occurring caves in the Tora Bora region.
Not only did they hide the movement of troops and supplies, they proved impervious to virtually every weapon in the US-led coalition’s arsenal. The complexes included air filtration systems to prevent chemical contamination, as well as massive storerooms and sophisticated communications gear allowing Al-Qaeda leadership to maintain control over their followers.
And tunnelling activity in and around Gaza continues to provide a tool for Hamas to get fighters into Israeli territory, while at the same time allowing Palestinians to circumvent Israel’s blockade of Gaza’s borders.
Soviet tunnels
Many of the tunnels being utilised today in Ukrainian efforts to defend the country were built in the Cold War-era, when the United States routinely engaged in overflights of Soviet territory.
These subterranean systems offered a certain amount of shelter for the civilian population in the event of a nuclear attack and allowed for the movement of military forces unobserved by the ever-present eyes in the sky.
These same tunnels serve to connect much of the industrial infrastructure in Mariupol today – and have become a major asset for the outnumbered Ukrainian forces.
Other Ukrainian cities have similar systems, some dating back centuries. For example, Odesa, another key Black Sea port, has a catacomb network stretching over 2,500 km. It began as part of a limestone mining effort – and to date, there is no documented map of the full extent of the tunnels.
In the event of a Russian assault on Odesa, the local knowledge of the underground passages might prove to be an extremely valuable asset for the defenders. The fact that more than 1,000 entrances to the catacombs have been identified should surely give Russian attackers pause before commencing any attack upon the city – just as the tunnels under a steelworks in Mariupol forced Putin to rethink plans to storm the facility.
Paul J Springer is Professor of Comparative Military Studies at Air University.
Since World War I, propaganda has played a crucial role in warfare. Propaganda is used to increase support for the war among citizens of the nation that is waging it. National governments also use targeted propaganda campaigns in an attempt to influence public opinion and behavior in the countries they are at war with, as well as to influence international opinion. Essentially, propaganda, whether circulated through state-controlled or private media, refers to techniques of public opinion manipulation based on incomplete or misleading information, lies and deception. During World War II, both the Nazis and the Allies invested heavily in propaganda operations as part of each side’s overall effort to win the war.
The war in Ukraine is no different. Both Russian and Ukrainian leaders have undertaken a campaign of systematic dissemination of warfare information that can easily be designated as propaganda. Other parties with a stake in the conflict, such as the United States and China, are also engaged in propaganda operations, which work in tandem with their apparent lack of interest in diplomatic undertakings to end the war.
In the interview that follows, leading scholar and dissident Noam Chomsky, who, along with Edward Herman, constructed the concept of the “propaganda model,” looks at the question of who is winning the propaganda war in Ukraine. Additionally, he discusses how social media shape political reality today, analyzes whether the “propaganda model” still works, and dissects the role of the use of “whataboutism.” Lastly, he shares his thoughts on the case of Julian Assange and what his now almost certain extradition to the United States for having committed the “crime” of releasing public information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq says about U.S. democratic principles.
Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. His intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, as his work has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C.J. Polychroniou: Wartime propaganda has become in the modern world a powerful weapon in garnering public support for war and providing a moral justification for it, usually by highlighting the “evil” nature of the enemy. It’s also used in order to break down the will of the enemy forces to fight. In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin propaganda seems so far to be working inside Russia and dominating Chinese social media, but it looks like Ukraine is winning the information war in the global arena, especially in the West. Do you agree with this assessment? Any significant lies or war-myths around the Russia-Ukraine conflict worth pointing out?
Noam Chomsky: Wartime propaganda has been a powerful weapon for a long time, I suspect as far back as we can trace the historical record. And often a weapon with long-term consequences, which merit attention and thought.
“In the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized,” says Noam Chomsky.ULI DECK / PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Just to keep to modern times, in 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sank in Havana harbor, probably from an internal explosion. The Hearst press succeeded in arousing a wave of popular hysteria about the evil nature of Spain. That provided the needed background for an invasion of Cuba that is called here “the liberation of Cuba.” Or, as it should be called, the prevention of Cuba’s self-liberation from Spain, turning Cuba into a virtual U.S. colony. So it remained until 1959, when Cuba was indeed liberated, and the U.S., almost at once, undertook a vicious campaign of terror and sanctions to end Cuba’s “successful defiance” of the 150-year-old U.S. policy of dominating the hemisphere, as the State Department explained 50 years ago.
Whipping up war myths can have long-term consequences.
A few years later, in 1916, Woodrow Wilson was elected president with the slogan “Peace without Victory.” That was quickly transmuted to Victory without Peace. A flood of war myths quickly turned a pacifist population to one consumed with hatred for all things German. The propaganda at first emanated from the British Ministry of Information; we know what that means. American intellectuals of the liberal Dewey circle lapped it up enthusiastically, declaring themselves to be the leaders of the campaign to liberate the world. For the first time in history, they soberly explained, war was not initiated by military or political elites, but by the thoughtful intellectuals — them — who had carefully studied the situation and after careful deliberation, rationally determined the right course of action: to enter the war, to bring liberty and freedom to the world, and to end the Hun atrocities concocted by the British Ministry of Information.
One consequence of the very effective Hate Germany campaigns was imposition of a victor’s peace, with harsh treatment of defeated Germany. Some strongly objected, notably John Maynard Keynes. They were ignored. That gave us Hitler.
In a previous interview, we discussed how Ambassador Chas Freeman compared the postwar Hate Germany settlement with a triumph of statesmanship (not by nice people): The Congress of Vienna, 1815. The Congress sought to establish a European order after Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Europe had been overcome. Judiciously, the Congress incorporated defeated France. That led to a century of relative peace in Europe.
There are some lessons.
Not to be outdone by the British, President Wilson established his own propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information (Creel Commission), which performed its own services.
These exercises also had a long-term effect. Among the members of the Commission were Walter Lippmann, who went on to become the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, and Edward Bernays, who became a prime founder of the modern public relations industry, the world’s major propaganda agency, dedicated to undermining markets by creating uninformed consumers making irrational choices — the opposite of what one learns about markets in Econ 101. By stimulating rampant consumerism, the industry is also driving the world to disaster, another topic.
Both Lippmann and Bernays credited the Creel Commission for demonstrating the power of propaganda in “manufacturing consent” (Lippmann) and “engineering of consent” (Bernays). This “new art in the practice of democracy,” Lippmann explained, could be used to keep the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” — the general public — passive and obedient while the self-designated “responsible men” will attend to important matters, free from the “trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.” Bernays expressed similar views. They were not alone.
Lippmann and Bernays were Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberals. The conception of democracy they elaborated was quite in accord with dominant liberal conceptions, then and since.
The ideas extend broadly to the more free societies, where “unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force,” as George Orwell put the matter in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm on “literary censorship” in England.
So it continues. Particularly in the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized, becoming as invisible as the air we breathe, particularly in articulate educated circles. Imposing war-myths is a regular feature of these enterprises.
It often works, quite spectacularly. In today’s Russia, according to reports, a large majority accept the doctrine that in Ukraine, Russia is defending itself against a Nazi onslaught reminiscent of World War II, when Ukraine was, in fact, collaborating in the aggression that came close to destroying Russia while exacting a horrific toll.
The propaganda is as nonsensical as war myths generally, but like others, it relies on shreds of truth, and has, it seems, been effective domestically in manufacturing consent.
We cannot really be sure because of the rigid censorship now in force, a hallmark of U.S. political culture from far back: the “bewildered herd” must be protected from the “wrong ideas.” Accordingly, Americans must be “protected” from propaganda which, we are told, is so ludicrous that only the most fully brainwashed could possibly keep from laughing.
According to this view, to punish Vladimir Putin, all material emanating from Russia must be rigorously barred from American ears. That includes the work of outstanding U.S. journalists and political commentators, like Chris Hedges, whose long record of courageous journalism includes his service as TheNew York Times Middle East and Balkans bureau chief, and astute and perceptive commentary since. Americans must be protected from his evil influence, because his reports appear on RT. They have now been expunged. Americans are “saved” from reading them.
Take that, Mr. Putin.
As we would expect in a free society, it is possible, with some effort, to learn something about Russia’s official position on the war — or as Russia calls it, “special military operation.” For example, via India, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a long interview with India Today TV on April 19.
We constantly witness instructive effects of this rigid indoctrination. One is that it is de rigueur to refer to Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine as his “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” A Google search for this phrase finds “About 2,430,000 results” (in 0.42 seconds).
Out of curiosity, we might search for “unprovoked invasion of Iraq.” The search yields “About 11,700 results” (in 0.35 seconds) — apparently from antiwar sources, a brief search suggests.
The example is interesting not only in itself, but because of its sharp reversal of the facts. The Iraq War was totally unprovoked: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had to struggle hard, even to resort to torture, to try to find some particle of evidence to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The famous disappearing weapons of mass destruction wouldn’t have been a provocation for aggression even if there had been some reason to believe that they existed.
In contrast, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was most definitely provoked — though in today’s climate, it is necessary to add the truism that provocation provides no justification for the invasion.
A host of high-level U.S. diplomats and policy analysts have been warning Washington for 30 years that it was reckless and needlessly provocative to ignore Russia’s security concerns, particularly its red lines: No NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, in Russia’s geostrategic heartland.
In full understanding of what it was doing, since 2014, NATO (meaning basically the U.S.), has “provided significant support [to Ukraine] with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained, and then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter,” before the invasion, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
The U.S. commitment to integrate Ukraine within the NATO command was also stepped up in fall 2021 with the official policy statements we have already discussed — kept from the bewildered herd by the “free press,” but surely read carefully by Russian intelligence. Russian intelligence did not have to be informed that “prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO,” as the State Department conceded, with little notice here.
Without going into any further details, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked. That is exactly the opposite of standard commentary and reporting. But it is also exactly the norm of wartime propaganda, not just in the U.S., though it is more instructive to observe the process in free societies.
Many feel that it is wrong to bring up such matters, even a form of pro-Putin propaganda: we should, rather, focus laser-like on Russia’s ongoing crimes. Contrary to their beliefs, that stand does not help Ukrainians. It harms them. If we are barred, by dictate, from learning about ourselves, we will not be able to develop policies that will benefit others, Ukrainians among them. That seems elementary.
Further analysis yields many other instructive examples. We discussed Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe’s praise for President George W. Bush’s decision in 2003 to “aid the Iraqi people” by seizing “Iraqi funds sitting in American banks” — and, incidentally, invading and destroying the country, too unimportant to mention. More fully, the funds were seized “to aid the Iraqi people and to compensate victims of terrorism,” for which the Iraqi people bore no responsibility.
We didn’t go on to ask how the Iraqi people were to be aided. It is a fair guess that it is not compensation for U.S. pre-invasion “genocide” in Iraq.
“Genocide” is not my term. Rather, it is the term used by the distinguished international diplomats who administered the “Oil-for-Food program,” the soft side of President Bill Clinton’s sanctions (technically, via the UN). The first, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest because he regarded the sanctions as “genocidal.” He was replaced by Hans von Sponeck, who not only resigned in protest with the same charge, but also wrote a very important book providing extensive details of the shocking torture of Iraqis by Clinton’s sanctions, A Different Kind of War.
Americans are not entirely protected from such unpleasant revelations. Though von Sponeck’s book was never reviewed, as far as I can determine, it can be purchased from Amazon (for $95) by anyone who has happened to hear about it. And the small publisher that released the English edition was even able to collect two blurbs: from John Pilger and me, suitably remote from the mainstream.
There is, of course, a flood of commentary about “genocide.” By the standards used, the U.S. and its allies are guilty of the charge over and over, but voluntary censorship prevents any acknowledgment of this, just as it protects Americans from international Gallup polls showing that the U.S. is regarded as by far the greatest threat to world peace, or that world public opinion overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (also “unprovoked,” if we pay attention), and other improper information.
I don’t think there are “significant lies” in war reporting. The U.S. media are generally doing a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine. That’s valuable, just as it’s valuable that international investigations are underway in preparation for possible war crimes trials.
That pattern is also normal. We are very scrupulous in unearthing details about crimes of others. There are, to be sure, sometimes fabrications, sometimes reaching the level of comedy, matters that the late Edward Herman and I documented in extensive detail. But when enemy crimes can be observed directly, on the ground, journalists typically do a fine job reporting and exposing them. And they are explored further in scholarship and extensive investigations.
As we’ve discussed, on the very rare occasions when U.S. crimes are so blatant that they can’t be dismissed or ignored, they may also be reported, but in such a way as to conceal the far greater crimes to which they are a small footnote. The My Lai massacre, for example.
On Ukraine winning the information war, the qualification “in the West” is accurate. The U.S. has always been enthusiastic and rigorous in exposing crimes of its enemies, and in the current case, Europe is going along. But outside of U.S.-Europe, the picture is more ambiguous. In the Global South, the home of most of the world’s population, the invasion is denounced but the U.S. propaganda framework is not uncritically adopted, a fact that has led to considerable puzzlement here as to why they are “out of step.”
That’s quite normal too. The traditional victims of brutal violence and repression often see the world rather differently from those who are used to holding the whip.
Even in Australia, there’s a measure of insubordination. In the international affairs journal Arena, editor Simon Cooper reviews and deplores the rigid censorship and intolerance of even mild dissent in U.S. liberal media. He concludes, reasonably enough, that, “This means it is almost impossible within mainstream opinion to simultaneously acknowledge Putin’s insupportable actions and forge a path out of the war that does not involve escalation, and the further destruction of Ukraine.”
No help to suffering Ukrainians, of course.
That’s also nothing new. That has been a dominant pattern for a long time, notably during World War I. There were a few who didn’t simply conform to the orthodoxy established after Wilson joined the war. The country’s leading labor leader, Eugene Debs, was jailed for daring to suggest to workers that they should think for themselves. He was so detested by the liberal Wilson administration that he was excluded from Wilson’s postwar amnesty. In the liberal Deweyite intellectual circles, there were also some who were disobedient. The most famous was Randolph Bourne. He was not imprisoned but was barred from liberal journals so that he could not spread his subversive message that “war is the health of the state.”
I should mention that a few years later, much to his credit, Dewey himself sharply reversed his stand.
It is understandable that liberals should be particularly excited when there is an opportunity to condemn enemy crimes. For once, they are on the side of power. The crimes are real, and they can march in the parade that is rightly condemning them and be praised for their (quite proper) conformity. That is very tempting for those who sometimes, even if timidly, condemn crimes for which we share responsibility and are therefore castigated for adherence to elementary moral principles.
Has the spread of social media made it more or less difficult to get an accurate picture of political reality?
Hard to say. Particularly hard for me to say because I avoid social media and only have limited information. My impression is that it is a mixed story.
Social media provide opportunities to hear a variety of perspectives and analyses, and to find information that is often unavailable in the mainstream. On the other hand, it is not clear how well these opportunities are exploited. There has been a good deal of commentary — confirmed by my own limited experience — arguing that many tend to gravitate to self-reinforcing bubbles, hearing little beyond their own beliefs and attitudes, and worse, entrenching these more firmly and in more intense and extreme forms.
That aside, the basic news sources remain pretty much as they were: the mainstream press, which has reporters and bureaus on the ground. The internet offers opportunities to sample a much wider range of such media, but my impression, again, is that these opportunities are little used.
One harmful consequence of the rapid proliferation of social media is the sharp decline of mainstream media. Not long ago, there were many fine local media in the U.S. Mostly gone. Few even have Washington bureaus, let alone elsewhere, as many did not long ago. During Ronald Reagan’s Central America wars, which reached extremes of sadism, some of the finest reporting was done by reporters of the Boston Globe, some close personal friends. That has all virtually disappeared.
The basic reason is advertiser reliance, one of the curses of the capitalist system. The founding fathers had a different vision. They favored a truly independent press and fostered it. The Post Office was largely established for this purpose, providing cheap access to an independent press.
In keeping with the fact that it is to an unusual extent a business-run society, the U.S. is also unusual in that it has virtually no public media: nothing like the BBC, for example. Efforts to develop public service media — first in radio, later in TV — were beaten back by intense business lobbying.
There’s excellent scholarly work on this topic, which extends also to serious activist initiatives to overcome these serious infringements on democracy, particularly by Robert McChesney and Victor Pickard.
Nearly 35 years ago, you and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The book introduced the “propaganda model” of communication which operates through five filters: ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy. Has the digital age changed the “propaganda” model?” Does it still work?
Unfortunately, Edward — the prime author — is no longer with us. Sorely missed. I think he would agree with me that the digital age hasn’t changed much, beyond what I just described. What survives of mainstream media in a largely business-run society still remains the main source of information and is subject to the same kinds of pressures as before.
There have been important changes apart from what I briefly mentioned. Much like other institutions, even including the corporate sector, the media have been influenced by the civilizing effects of the popular movements of the ‘60s and their aftermath. It is quite illuminating to see what passed for appropriate commentary and reporting in earlier years. Many journalists have themselves gone through these liberating experiences.
Naturally, there is a huge backlash, including passionate denunciations of “woke” culture that recognizes that there are human beings with rights apart from white Christian males. Since Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” the GOP leadership has understood that since they cannot possibly win votes on their economic policies of service to great wealth and corporate power, they must try to direct attention to “cultural issues”: the false idea of a “Great Replacement,” or guns, or indeed anything to obscure the fact that we’re working hard to stab you in the back. Donald Trump was a master of this technique, sometimes called the “thief, thief” technique: when you’re caught with your hand in someone’s pocket, shout “thief, thief” and point somewhere else.
Despite these efforts, the media have improved in this regard, reflecting changes in the general society. That’s by no means unimportant.
What do you make of “whataboutism,” which is stirring up quite a controversy these days on account of the ongoing war in Ukraine?
Here again there’s a long history. In the early postwar period [World War II], independent thought could be silenced by charges of comsymp: you’re an apologist for Stalin’s crimes. It’s sometimes condemned as McCarthyism, but that was only the vulgar tip of the iceberg. What is now denounced as “cancel culture” was rampant and remained so.
That technique lost some of its power as the country began to awaken from dogmatic slumber in the ‘60s. In the early ‘80s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a major Reaganite foreign policy intellectual, devised another technique: moral equivalence. If you reveal and criticize the atrocities that she was supporting in the Reagan administration, you’re guilty of “moral equivalence.” You’re claiming that Reagan is no different than Stalin or Hitler. That served for a time to subdue dissent from the party line.
Whataboutism is a new variant, hardly different from its predecessors.
For the true totalitarian mentality, none of this is enough. GOP leaders are working hard to cleanse the schools of anything that is “divisive” or that causes “discomfort.” That includes virtually all of history apart from patriotic slogans approved by Trump’s 1776 Commission, or whatever will be devised by GOP leaders when they take command and are in a position to impose stricter discipline. We see many signs of it today, and there’s every reason to expect more to come.
It’s important to remember how rigid doctrinal controls have been in the U.S. — perhaps a reflection of the fact that it is a very free society by comparative standards, hence posing problems to the doctrinal managers, who must be ever alert to signs of deviation.
By now, after many years, it’s possible to utter the word “socialist,” meaning moderately social democrat. In that respect, the U.S. has finally broken out of the company of totalitarian dictatorships. Go back 60 years and even the words “capitalism” and “imperialism” were too radical to voice. Students for a Democratic Society President Paul Potter, in 1965, summoned the courage to “name the system” in his presidential address, but couldn’t manage to produce the words.
There were some breakthroughs in the ‘60s, a matter of deep concern to American liberals, who warned of a “crisis of democracy” as too many sectors of the population tried to enter the political arena to defend their rights. They counseled more “moderation in democracy,” a return to passivity and obedience, and they condemned the institutions responsible for “indoctrination of the young” for failing to perform their duties.
The doors have been opened more widely since, which only calls for more urgent measures to impose discipline.
If GOP authoritarians are able to destroy democracy sufficiently to establish permanent rule by a white supremacist Christian nationalist caste subservient to extreme wealth and private power, we are likely to enjoy the antics of such figures as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who banned 40 percent of children’s math texts in Florida because of “references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” according to the official directive. Under pressure, the State released some terrifying examples, such as an educational objective that, “Students build proficiency with social awareness as they practice with empathizing with classmates.”
If the country as a whole ascends to the heights of GOP aspirations, it will be unnecessary to resort to such devices as “moral equivalence” and “whataboutism” to stifle independent thought.
One final question. A U.K. judge has formally approved Julian Assange’s extradition to the U.S. despite deep concerns that such a move would put him at risk of “serious human rights violations,” as Agnès Callamard, former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, had warned a couple of years ago. In the event that Assange is indeed extradited to the U.S., which is pretty close to certain now, he faces up to 175 years in prison for releasing public information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you comment on the case of Julian Assange, the law used to prosecute him, what his persecution says about freedom of speech and the state of U.S. democracy?
Assange has been held for years under conditions that amount to torture. That’s fairly evident to anyone who was able to visit him (I was, once) and was confirmed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture [and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment] Nils Melzer in May 2019.
A few days later, Assange was indicted by the Trump administration under the Espionage Act of 1917, the same act that President Wilson employed to imprison Eugene Debs (among other state crimes committed using the Act).
Legalistic shenanigans aside, the basic reasons for the torture and indictment of Assange are that he committed a cardinal sin: he released to the public information about U.S. crimes that the government, of course, would prefer to see concealed. That is particularly offensive to authoritarian extremists like Trump and Mike Pompeo, who initiated the proceedings under the Espionage Act.
Their concerns are understandable. They were explained years ago by the Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, Samuel Huntington. He observed that, “Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
That is a crucial principle of statecraft. It extends to private power as well. That is why manufacture/engineering of consent is a prime concern of systems of power, state and private.
This is no novel insight. In one of the first works in what is now called political science, 350 years ago, his “First Principles of Government,” David Hume wrote that,
Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
Force is indeed on the side of the governed, particularly in the more free societies. And they’d better not realize it, or the structures of illegitimate authority will crumble, state and private.
These ideas have been developed over the years, importantly by Antonio Gramsci. The Mussolini dictatorship understood well the threat he posed. When he was imprisoned, the prosecutor announced that, “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.”
We have advanced considerably since fascist Italy. The Trump-Pompeo indictment seeks to silence Assange for 175 years, and the U.S. and U.K. governments have already imposed years of torture on the criminal who dared to expose power to the sunlight.
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