Censored 2014 (16 page)

Censored #25: Israel Gave Birth Control to Ethiopian Immigrants Without Their Consent

In January 2013, Israel acknowledged that medical authorities have been giving Ethiopian immigrants long-term birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent. The Israeli government had previously denied the charges, which were first brought to light by investigative reporter Gal Gabbay in a broadcast of Israeli Educational Television's news program,
Vacuum,
on December 8, 2012. The following month, the Israeli Health Ministry's director-general, Roni Gamzo, ordered all gynecologists to stop administering the drugs.

Alistair Dawber reports for the UK's
Independent
that the Ethiopian women in question believed they had to accept medical treatment in order to be allowed to enter and stay in Israel; but medical personnel administering the injections—alleged to be Depo-Provera, a highly effective and long-lasting form of contraception—did not explain the injections' purpose.
²⁶
The Electronic Intifada's
Ali Abunimah reported that the Israeli health ministry ran the convert contraception program in transit camps with the assistance of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC),
²⁷
which describes itself as the “world's leading Jewish humanitarian assistance organization.”
²⁸

In late January 2013, in a carefully framed article, the
Times of Israel
reported that health minister Roni Gamzo ordered new standards when renewing prescriptions of the birth-control drug Depo-Provera for new Ethiopian immigrants.
²⁹
Gamzo did not admit wrongdoing and only acknowledged that the women had been given the shots without understanding their effects. The article provided further denials that Ethiopian women were singled out, and the JDC denied any involvement in procedures for Jewish immigrants to Israel.
³⁰

Nevertheless, these health policies raise concerns of government-sanctioned racism. If the shots were given without proper consent, with the intent to target Ethiopian women and reduce their birthrates, then the forced contraception program may fit the legal definition of genocide, in violation of Article II(d) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
³¹

This story must be understood against the backdrop of antiAfrican sentiment, and even violence, in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benja
min Netanyahu has publically stated that African migrants threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
³²
And, in May 2012, a thousand Jewish Israelis ran through the streets of Tel Aviv, looting and destroying African-operated businesses and physically assaulting any person of color they encountered.
³³
As David Sheen reported, such racism has not been properly addressed or quashed by Israeli religious, economic, or political leaders; instead, that establishment has “ramped up their efforts to expel all non-Jewish African people from the country.”
³⁴

CONCLUSION

Each of the stories in this news cluster demonstrates how those in power will go to great lengths to maintain social and political institutions that favor them. The conflicts that charge these underreported news stories involve a paradigm of white-and/or Jewish-supremacy and policies and practices aimed at maintaining status quo demographics in order to sustain hegemony over people who are not white and/or Jewish. Judged on the basis of their reluctance to cover such stories adequately, US corporate media appear to have an interest in maintaining such power structures. Therefore, it is urgent that we continue to report and reveal the truth.

SUSAN RAHMAN, MA
, is a sociology instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College and the College of Marin. Her areas of interest include Palestinian self-determination, issues of privilege and inequality, and media literacy. Her current work focuses on the role of self-reflection in social transformation. She lives in Sebastopol, California, with her partner Carlos, daughter Jordan, and dogs, Rosie and Cody.

DONNA NASSOR
is an adjunct United Nations Non-Governmental Organization (UNNGO) representative with the International Peace Research Association, a UNNGO Human Rights Committee Member, a restorative justice and business professional, a retired attorney, and a mediator. She is working on a PhD in nonclinical psychology at Saybrook University. Her current research project is titled “Palestinian Voices: Peace with Justice through the Eyes of Palestinians Living in Their Homeland.”

Notes

^1.
Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(New York: The New Press, 2010).

^2.
Ibid.

^3.
LaurieInQueens, “‘Patriot' Groups At All-Time High, Hate Groups Up Again: Report,” National Memo, March 7, 2013,
http://www.nationalmemo.com/patriot-groups-at-all-time-high-hate-groups-up-again-report/
. The National Memo story is based on the SPLC report itself. See Mark Potok,
Intelligence Report: The Year in Hate and Extremism,
Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring 2013,
http://www.splcenter.org/home/2013/spring/the-year-in-hate-and-extremism
.

^4.
Southern Poverty Law Center, “Hate Map,” accessed June 4, 2013,
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map
.

^5.
Ibid.; quoted by LaurieInQueens, “‘Patriot' Groups At All-Time High.”

^6.
J. Richard Cohen, “SPLC Letter to DOJ & DHS,” Southern Poverty Law Center, March 5, 2013,
http://www.splcenter.org/home/splc-letter-to-DOJ-DHS-.Ua4kueCCKXs
.

^7.
For example, on “major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the American radical right in the years since Oklahoma City,” see “Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City,” Southern Poverty Law Center, no date,
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/terror-from-the-right
.

^8.
Brian Levin, “U.S. Hate and Extremist Groups Hit Record Levels, New Record Says,”
Huffington Post,
March 8, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-levin-jd/hate-groups-splc_b_1331318.html
.

^9.
Cohen, “SPLC Letter to DOJ & DHS.”

^10.
“Hate and Extremism,” Southern Poverty Law Center, no date,
http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/hate-and-extremism
.

^11.
See Potok, “Year of Hate and Extremism.”

^12.
Juan Gonzales,
Harvest of Empire
(New York: Penguin, 2011).

^13.
Erika L. Sánchez, “Ripped Off by Smugglers, Groped by Border Patrol: The Nightmares Women Migrants Face,”
AlterNet,
June 26, 2012,
http://www.alternet.org/immigration/156035/ripped_off_by_smugglers,_groped_by_border_patrol%3A_the_nightmares_women_mi-grants_face?page=entire
.

^14.
No More Deaths, “A Culture of Cruelty,” September 21, 2011,
http://www.nomoredeaths.org/cultureofcruelty.html
.

^15.
Sánchez, “Ripped Off.”

^16.
No More Deaths, “Culture of Cruelty.”

^17.
Sánchez, “Ripped Off.”

^18.
The Department of Homeland contracted Kollsman, Inc., the US subsidiary of Israeli-based Elbit Systems Ltd., to work on its Secure Borders Initiative. See, for example, “Israeli Firm Gets Mexico Border Wall Contract,”
World War4 Report,
November 8, 2006,
http://www.ww4report.com/node/2743
; “Boeing Team Awarded SBInet Contract by Department of Homeland Security,” September 21, 2006,
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2006/q3/060921a_nr.html
.

^19.
Alison Weir, “American Media Distortion on Palestine,”
Middle East Monitor,
May 1, 2013,
http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/guest-writers/5890-american-media-distortion-on-palestine
.

^20.
See, for example, Peter Phillips, et al., “A Study of Bias in the Associated Press,”
Censored 2007: The Top 25 Censored Stories,
ed. Peter Phillips and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories, 2006), 348–349; Phillips, et al.'s analysis of AP bias in coverage of the Israel–Palestine conflict drew on “Deadly Distortion: Associated Press Coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Deaths,” If Americans Only Knew, April 26, 2006,
http://ifamericansknew.org/media/ap-report.html
.

^21.
Alison Weir, “U.S. Media Coverage of Israel Palestine: Choosing Sides,”
Censored2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories,
ed. Peter Phillips and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories, 2004), 285–300, quote at 285.

^22.
“Israel Forced to Release Study on Gaza Blockade,” BBC News, October 17, 2012,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19975211
; John Glaser, “Israel Counted Minimum Calorie Needs in Gaza Blockade, Documents Reveal,”
Antiwar.com
, October 17, 2012,
http://news.an-tiwar.com/2012/10/17/israel-counted-minimum-calorie-needs-in-gaza-blockade-documents-reveal/
.

^23.
Gisha, the Israeli human rights organization that secured the document, has published an English version of it online,
http://www.gisha.org/UserFiles/File/publications/redlines/red-lines-presentation-eng.pdf
.

^24.
David Poort, “History of Israeli Blockade on Gaza,”
Al Jazeera,
November 2, 1011,
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/10/20111030172356990380.html
.

^25.
The Norwegian newspaper
Aftenposten
was the first to publish the leaked cable:
http://www.aftenposten.no/spesial/wikileaksdokumenter/article3972840.ece
.

^26.
Alistair Dawber, “Israel Gave Birth Control to Ethiopian Jews Without Their Consent,”
Independent,
January 27, 2013,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gave-birth-control-to-ethiopian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html
.

^27.
Ali Abunimah, “Did Israel Violate the Genocide Convention by Forcing Contraceptives on Ethiopian Women?,”
Electronic Intifada,
January 28, 2013,
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/did-israel-violate-genocide-convention-forcing-contraceptives-ethiopian-women
.

^28.
“About JDC,” American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
http://www.jdc.org/about-jdc/
.

^29.
Asher Zeiger, “Israel Changes Birth-control Policy for Ethiopian Immigrants,”
Times of Israel,
January 29, 2013,
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-changes-birth-control-policy-for-ethio-pian-immigrants/
.

^30.
Ibid.

^31.
Abunimah, “Did Israel Violate the Genocide Convention?”

^32.
Ibid.

^33.
David Sheen, “A Year in Review: Anti-African Racism and Asylum Seekers in Israel,” Uruknet, May 29, 2013,
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m97985&hd&l=e
.

^34.
Ibid.

Targol Mesbah and Zara Zimbardo

Censored #7

Merchants of Death and Nuclear Weapons

Marc Pilisuk, “Occupying the Merchants of Death,” Project Censored, November 22, 2012,
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/occupying-the-merchants-of-death/
.

Student Researcher:
Jessica Eccles (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:
Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

Censored #11

Bush Blocked Iran Nuclear Deal

Gareth Porter, “Bush Blocked Iran Disarmament Deal,”
Consortium News,
June 6, 2012,
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/06/bush-blocked-iran-nuke-deal/
.

Student Researcher:
Seamus O'Herlihy (Santa Rosa Junior College)

Faculty Evaluator:
Susan Rahman (Santa Rosa Junior College)

Censored #12

The US Has Left Iraq with an Epidemic of Cancers and Birth Defects

Sarah Morrison, “Iraq Records Huge Rise in Birth Defects,”
Independent,
October 14, 2012,
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/iraq-records-huge-rise-in-birth-defects-8210444.html
.

Ross Caputi, “The Victims of Fallujah's Health Crisis are Stifled by Western Silence,”
Guardian,
October 25, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/25/fallujah-iraq-health-crisis-silence?INTCMP=SRCH
.

Dahr Jamail, “Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers,”
Democracy Now!,
March 20, 2013,
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/20/ten_years_later_us_has_left
.

M. Al-Sabbak, S. Sadik Ali, O. Savabi, et al., “Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities,”
Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology
89, no. 5 (November 2012),
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u35001451t13g645/fulltext.html
.

Student Researchers:
Ivan Konza (Florida Atlantic University); Marc David Prophete (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluators:
James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University); Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

RELATED VALIDATED INDEPENDENT NEWS STORY

Oil and Fraud: Why We Went to Iraq

“Secret Pentagon Docs Reveal Pre-War Plans to Get Big Oil into Iraq,” Institute for Public Accuracy, July 17, 2012,
http://www.accuracy.org/release/secret-pentagon-docs-reveal-pre-war-plans-to-get-big-oil-into-iraq/
.

“‘Fuel on the Fire': Author Greg Muttitt on Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, Arab Spring,”
Democracy Now!,
July 16, 2012,
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/16/fuel_on_the_fire_au-thor_greg
.

Student Researcher:
Jennifer Garza (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:
Barbara Widhalm (Sonoma State University)

INTRODUCTION

The tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq passed largely in silence in the corporate news media. Writing in the
Atlantic,
Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked that we “don't want to ‘look back' on things that might demand onerous labor on our part.” But, Coates observed, the failures of the Iraq War are likely to be repeated if the nation only “looks for-ward.”
¹

Looking back to the beginnings of “endless war” in October 2001, United States Vice President Dick Cheney glibly declared, “It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.”
²
Before considering some of the extant consequences of a perpetual war on terror, let us briefly reflect on the semantics of Cheney's statement. The uncertainty projected onto the open-ended war on terror, with its attendant incitement of fear, is presented here in contradistinction to the definitive end of the Gulf War. It replays the rhetoric of precision and speed that characterized the surgical language of the Gulf War: in Operation Desert Storm, precision-guided munitions and smart bombs were supposed to strategically take out military targets with minimal collateral cost. By most accounts, the Gulf War did end, once Saddam Hussein withdrew his troops from Kuwait in late February 1991, and US troops returned in March. Yet, the extent of the casualties from the use of depleted uranium is becoming more apparent—although not through US corporate media's reporting. Thus, for example, in a recent book on “slow violence” and the temporality and scale of ecological disasters, Rob Nixon brings attention to the “ecology of the aftermath” in his
discussion of belated Gulf War victims who suffer from the long-term consequences of exposure to radioactive depleted uranium.
³

To conceptualize the war event in terms of an ecology of war suggests an alternate temporality to normalized accounts of its duration. It also significantly shifts the spatial coordinates of war's logistics to make visible the range of violence, from the consequences of corporate oil extraction to reckless dumping of toxic metals.

These censored stories reveal critical glimpses into the breadth and depth of the cost of war in ways that we are not yet able to measure. Looking back again,
Censored 2009's
#1 story was, “Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation.”
⁴
As reported in the story, a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group Opinion Re-search Business (ORB) found casualty figures at least ten times greater than otherwise reported in corporate media. The same year, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes published
The Three Trillion Dollar War
⁵
Their study's stark quantification of the war's human and economic costs challenges readers to weigh US interventionist policies in terms of the “opportunity costs” of the trillions spent, what the US has sacrificed domestically by pursuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the wars' hidden costs, Stiglitz and Bilmes identified long-term physical and mental health care for veterans.
⁶
As this year's censored stories on war illustrate, we are now facing costs staggeringly far beyond even Bilmes and Stiglitz's calculations, uncountable and unaccountable.

In 2012, Hollywood offered frames within which to selectively understand US foreign policy, its military role, and the retroactive justification for targeted killing and torture, through feature films such as
Zero Dark Thirty
and Argo.
⁷
By contrast, the independent documentary films
Dirty Wars,
by Richard Rowley and investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, and
The Invisible War,
by Kirby Dick, have exposed both America's covert and increasingly privatized wars and the extent of sexual assault in the United States military. The political lines drawn to understand war's officially recognized “end” and “beginning” are erased by the realities of suffocating sanctions imposed on Iran and the Iraq military campaign's continuing contamination epidemics. As the national gaze is focused on the apocalyptic vision of potential nuclear annihilation at Iran's hands, we are blinded to the actual slow apocalypse in poisoned areas of Iraq.

The independent news stories featured in this
Censored
News Cluster bring the ecologies of war into sharper focus.

Censored #7: Merchants of Death and Nuclear Weapons

With the coordinated production of fear and obsession around Iran's alleged nuclear threat, a commensurate assessment of our sprawling military-industrial complex's economic logic is arrested. Public debate is corralled into concern projected abroad, away from domestic scrutiny. Drawing on the National Nuclear Security Administration's 2012 report, Marc Pilisuk wrote,

The corporate players financing and profiting from the nuclear complex are backed with political support that contradicts official rhetoric. “The staggering budget for this dangerous drift is staunchly defended by corporate lobbyists and gigantic contracts are awarded out of public view.”
⁹
This report names all the institutions most heavily involved in financing nuclear arms makers.

Pilisuk's report also analyzed the economic relationships that un-dergird the United States' increasing reliance on drones as weapons of war. As critics of the US drone strikes have noted, the Obama administration describes US drone policy in seductive and sanitized terms, as “targeted” killings that are “costless” to the US.
¹⁰
Writing for the
Guardian,
George Monbiot, for example, contrasted President Obama's sorrow for the child victims of the December 2012 Newtown school shooting with his silence regarding children murdered by drones:

Elsewhere the victims of US drone strikes are linguistically reduced to the status of vegetation: Justifying drone strikes, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and Obama counterterror-ism adviser Bruce Riedel likened drones to lawn mowers: “You've got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”
¹²

Pilisuk warned against a proliferating combination of nuclear weapons with remote weapons delivery systems, such as drones. Compared with the Cold War's large-scale nuclear delivery systems, today's drones are much more economical. Thus, in Pilisuk's view, “the world is quickly moving toward a matrix of surveillance vehicles of unknown origin and likely soon to include nuclear weapons. This is not the world that sane people wish to hand off to our children.”
¹³

The satirical newspaper the
Onion
ran the headline in February 2012, “Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon.” “Reporting” from Tehran, the
Onion
's mock story continued, “Obviously, the prospect of this happening is very distressing to Iran and all countries like Iran. After all, the United States is a volatile nation that's proven it needs little provocation to attack anyone anywhere in the world whom it perceives to be a threat.”
¹⁴
Although the
Onion
only slightly exaggerates the number of US nuclear warheads, the article's reversal makes absurdly explicit the doublespeak and double standards at play.

Censored #11: Bush Blocked Iran Nuclear Deal

Corporate media's recurrent narrative on nuclear weapons portrays the US as consistently doing everything in its power to prevent Iran's development of nuclear weapons, while Iran resolutely pursues that goal. Gareth Porter's report for
Consortium News
throws a wrench into the works of the Bush and Obama administrations' self-rationalizing and
polarizing foreign policies toward Iran (e.g., “leave all options on the table”). The specter of a “nuclear Middle East,” a persistent phrase in White House discourse regarding Iran, clearly aims to generate fear and anxiety in the US public. A highly effective spell, each time administration officials invoke this phrase it renders invisible the reality that the Middle East is already “nuclear,” given Israel's possession of war-heads. US government officials and corporate media emphasize the in-tolerable existential threat of Iran possibly acquiring nuclear weapons, while downplaying Israel's status as an existing nuclear power in the region. The echo chamber of “We can't wait for a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” is reanimated, from Iraq to Iran.

The formulaic and predictable steps to war are being followed in textbook (read: CIA handbook) fashion: demonize the enemy, exaggerate a threat, fake a diplomatic effort, and then establish a line that was supposedly crossed as a pretext for military intervention. The construction of simmering inevitability lays the psychic national backdrop against which allegedly imminent threats can be brought to boil in the public's imagination. Fear and selective amnesia never fail as the tandem tools of empire. Recognizable masks for war are donned and adjusted as Oceania begins another propaganda round of “We've always been at war with Eastasia.”
¹⁵

In another instance of the double standards and rhetorical distinctions that characterize the US promotion of its foreign policy, economic sanctions are presented as peaceful means to neutralize the nation's enemies.

Although India, Israel, and Pakistan possess nuclear arsenals, none are currently a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
¹⁶
By contrast, Iran—which has been a NPT signatory since 1968—has been repeatedly targeted, most recently with sanctions that have had devastating effects on the Iranian people, despite the fact that the NPT's terms allow for uranium enrichment.

Against this backdrop, revelations in Seyed Hossein Mousavian's recent memoir,
The Iranian Nuclear Crisis,
deserve more widespread news coverage. Mousavian, one of Iran's top nuclear negotiators in 2004–05, offers new details about how President George W. Bush blocked a deal with Iran, despite a number of European Union members' support for the deal. By Mousavian's account, Iran had offered a deal to the United
States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom that would have made it impossible for it to build nuclear weapons. The deal involved Iran shipping its uranium to an “agreed upon country” for enrichment in exchange for yellowcake, the raw material used to make fuel rods. As Gareth Porter reported, “Iran did not have the capability to fabricate fuel rods, so the implication was that the LEU [Low Enriched Uranium] would have to be shipped to another country for conversion or would have to be done under international auspices within Iran. Once the fuel rods were fabricated, it would be practically impossible for Iran to reconvert them for military purposes.”
¹⁷