After 100 days of a Javier Milei presidency, hundreds of thousands of Argentinians marked the anniversary of the 1976 coup amid growing revisionism of the brutal dictatorship years. BERT SCHOUWENBURG reports
EVERY March 24, hundreds of thousands of Argentinians flood the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities to commemorate those who were killed, tortured or simply disappeared during the military dictatorship that took power on that date in 1976.
This year the marches and demonstrations had particular significance because they took place just after President Javier Milei’s first chaotic 100 days in office following his shock election victory in November of last year.
Until now, it has been widely accepted that during a dictatorship that lasted until 1983, some 30,000 people were taken from their homes, workplaces or from on the streets and were never seen again.
They were put in clandestine detention centres where they were interrogated, tortured and in most cases, killed. Some were put in aeroplanes, flown out to sea and dumped into the ocean.
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Following the return of civilian rule, the leaders of the coup and other perpetrators of these crimes against humanity were tried and imprisoned, though many of them have been permitted to remain under house arrest rather than go to jail.
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However, since Milei’s election, the consensus that the sentences being served by those guilty of the atrocities are more than justified is being challenged by his government who say that they have been wronged.
[A young-looking] Rupert Murdoch, chairman emeritus of the group that owns The Times, is staunchly pro-Israel. (Photo: WEF / Handout)
A new report by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring highlights the UK media’s systematic bias in favour of Israel in reporting on the Gaza war.
The media’s role in the face of Israel’s aggression in Gaza – and plausible genocide – should be to responsibly report the news, validate facts, hold all powers to equal account and paint an accurate picture of events.
But whether this is actually so is the focus of a new, exhaustive report by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring. It reveals Britain’s worst kept secret: the systematic bias of the mainstream media in favour of Israel when it comes to reporting on its onslaught in Gaza.
The report analyses 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4.
It also scrutinises 25,515 news articles from over 28 UK online media websites including the Guardian, Times, Express and Telegraph, between 7 October 2023 and 7 November 2023.
The data was analysed for the framing of events, use of language and representation of Palestinian voices.
It finds that 76% of online articles frame Israel’s aggression as the “Israel-Hamas war” – rather than a war on Gaza – and that over 70% of the terms atrocities, slaughter and massacre in broadcast media were used exclusively in reference to attacks against Israelis.
A notable absence of Palestinian voices is also detected: In TV reporting, Israeli perspectives have been referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).
‘Right to self-defence’
Also identified is the willingness of many broadcasters to emphasise Israel’s supposed right to defend itself in Gaza.
But as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has said, Israel cannot claim the right of “self-defence” under international law because Gaza is a territory that it occupies.
Yet across TV, the insistence on this Israeli “right” is mentioned on 1,482 occasions. By contrast, mentions of the right of Palestinians to resist Israel’s onslaught in Gaza amount to just 278.
“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion.”
A group of Palestinian Americans on Thursday urged a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction barring the Biden administration from providing any additional weaponry or diplomatic support to the Israeli military as it carries out mass atrocities in Gaza.
The “urgent motion” comes days after the group, represented by the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), sued President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a federal court in California, arguing that the top officials are “failing to prevent an unfolding genocide where they have influence over the state of Israel to do so, and directly abetting its development with weapons, funds, and diplomatic cover” in violation of international law.
The plaintiffs in the case are U.S. citizens with family in Gaza, which has been under relentless assault since a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel last month. At least 116 of the plaintiffs’ family members have been killed in the Palestinian enclave since the latest Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza began.
“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion,” Astha Sharma Pokharel, an attorney at CCR, said Thursday. “There is no starker illustration of how urgently this injunction is needed.”
The Biden administration has opposed calls for a cease-fire and pledged unconditional support to the Israeli government as it wages war on the besieged Gaza Strip with the help of U.S. weaponry, including thousands of Hellfire missiles and army vehicles. That support has continued in the face of a horrific death toll and humanitarian crisis and amid global alarm over Israeli officials’ genocidal rhetoric.
In an emergency briefing paper released less than two weeks into Israel’s assault, CCR warned that the U.S. “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”
The lawsuit filed earlier this week echoes that case, stating that the “unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support given by the named official-capacity defendants in this case”—Biden, Blinken, and Austin.
On behalf of Palestinian human rights groups and civilians, @theCCR is suing President Biden for his administration's "absolute" failure to prevent genocide in Gaza.
The lawsuit and push for a preliminary injunction are backed by leading scholars of genocide and the Holocaust, including William Schabas, a world-renowned expert on international human rights law.
In a declaration supporting the lawsuit, Schabas wrote, “There is a serious risk of genocide committed against the Palestinian population of Gaza and that the United States of America is in breach of its obligation, under both the 1948 Genocide Convention to which it is a party as well as customary international law, to use its position of influence with the Government of Israel and to take the best measures within its power to prevent the crime taking place.”
Meanwhile, little humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter the blockaded territory, leaving millions of lives at risk as most of the population lacks water, food, medicine, and other basic necessities.
The World Food Program warned Thursday that “nearly the entire population” of Gaza “is in desperate need of food assistance.”
“The small quantities of food that can be found are being sold at alarmingly inflated prices and are of little use without the ability to cook, forcing some to survive on one meal a day,” the U.N. organization said. “For the lucky, that includes more than solely canned food, though some people have resorted to consuming raw onions and uncooked eggplants.”
