Censored by The Guardian

[Paul Rigby]

Can the author of what follows really be as naive about the paper's history as he would have us believe?

Palestine is not an environment story'

How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel's war for Gaza's gas

By Nafeez Ahmed

https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/palestin...1d9167ddef

After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I'm speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world's leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel's publicised rationale for going to war.

Gaza's gas

I joined the Guardian as an environment blogger in April 2013. Prior to this, I had been an author, academic and freelance journalist for over a decade, writing for The Independent, Independent on Sunday, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among others.

On 9th July 2014, I posted an article via my Earth Insight blog at The Guardian's environment website, exposing the role of Palestinian resources, specifically Gaza's off-shore natural gas reserves, in partly motivating Israel's invasion of Gaza aka Operation Protective Edge.' Among the sources I referred to was a policy paper written by incumbent Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya'alon one year before Operation Cast Lead, underscoring that the Palestinians could never be allowed to develop their own energy resources as any revenues would go to supporting Palestinian terrorism.

Gas resources exist off Gaza's shore

The article now has 68,000 social media shares, and is by far the single most popular article on the Gaza conflict to date. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Israel has seen control of Gaza's gas as a major strategic priority over the last decade for three main reasons.

Firstly, Israel faces a near-term gas crisis  largely due to the long lead time needed to bring Israel's considerable domestic gas resources into production; secondly, Netanyahu's administration cannot stomach any scenario in which a Hamas-run Palestinian administration accesses and develops their own resources; thirdly, Israel wants to use Palestinian gas as a strategic bridge to cement deals with Arab dictatorships whose domestic populations oppose signing deals with Israel.

Either way, the biggest obstacle to Israel accessing Gaza's gas is the Hamas-run administration in the strip, which rejects all previous agreements that Israel had pursued to develop the gas with the British Gas Group and the Palestinian Authority.

Censorship in the land of the free

Since 2006, The Guardian has loudly trumpeted its aim to be the world's leading liberal voice. For years, the paper has sponsored the annual Index on Censorship's prestigious Freedom of Expression Award. The paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA). Generally, the newspaper goes out of its way to dress itself up as standing at the forefront of fighting censorship, particularly in the media landscape. This is why its approach to my Gaza gas story is so disturbing.

The day after posting it, I received a phone call from James Randerson, assistant national news editor. He sounded riled and rushed. Without beating around the bush, James told me point blank that my Guardian blog was to be immediately discontinued. Not because my article was incorrect, factually flawed, or outrageously defamatory. Not because I'd somehow breached journalistic ethics, or violated my contract. No. The Gaza gas piece, he said, was "not an environment story," and therefore was an "inappropriate post" for the Guardian's environment website:

"You're writing too many non-environment stories, so I'm afraid we just don't have any other option. This article doesn't belong on the environment site. It should really be on Cif [i.e. the Guardian's online opinion section known as Comment Is Free']."
I was shocked, and more than a little baffled. As you can read on my Guardian profile, my remit was to cover "the geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises." That was what I was commissioned to do  indeed, when I had applied in late 2012 to blog for The Guardian, an earlier piece I'd written on the link between Israeli military operations and Gaza's gas in Le Monde diplomatique was part of my portfolio.

So I suggested to James that termination was somewhat of an overreaction. Perhaps we could simply have a meeting to discuss the editorial issues and work out together what my remit should be. "I'd be happy to cooperate as much as possible," I said. I didn't want to lose my contract. James refused point blank, instead telling me that my "interests are increasingly about issues that we don't think are a good fit for what we want to see published on the environment site."

In the end, my polite protestations got nowhere. Within the hour, I received an email from a rights manager at The Guardian informing me that they had terminated my contract.

Under that contract, however, I had editorial control over what I wrote on my blog  obviously within the remit that I had been commissioned for. From May to April, environment bloggers underwent training and supervision to ensure that we would eventually be up to speed to post on the site independently based on our own editorial judgement. The terms and conditions we signed up to under our contract state:

"You shall regularly maintain Your Blog and shall determine its content. You shall launch Your own posts which shall not be sub-edited by GNM. GNM occasionally might raise topics of interest with You suitable for Your Blog but You shall be under no obligation to include or cover such topics."

The terms also point out that termination of the contract with immediate effect could only occur "if the other party commits a material breach of any of its obligations under this Agreement which is not capable of remedy"; or if "the other party has committed a material breach of any of its obligations under this Agreement which is capable of remedy but which has not been remedied within a period of thirty (30) days following receipt of written notice to do so."

The problem is that I had committed no breach of any of my contractual obligations. On the contrary, The Guardian had breached its contractual obligation to me regarding my freedom to determine the contents of my blog, simply because it didn't like what I wrote. This is censorship.

As the Index on Censorship points out, the "absence of direct state-sponsored, highly visible censorship, which prevails in many countries around the world, may contribute to the commonly held view that there is no censorship in this country and that it is not a problem." However, "contemporary UK censorship, which sits within a liberal democracy" can come "in many different forms, both direct and indirect, some more subtle, some more overt."

Invisible barriers

Ironically, a few days later, I was contacted by the editor of The Ecologist  one of the world's premier environment magazines  who wanted to re-print my Gaza gas story. After publishing an updated version of my Guardian piece, The Ecologist also published my in-depth follow up in response to objections printed in The National Interest (ironically authored by a contractor working for a US oil company invested in offshore gas reserves overlapping the Gaza Marine). Obviously, having been expelled by The Guardian, I could not respond via my blog as I would normally have done.

British Foreign Office files show that the UK government agrees with Israel that Gaza's gas could be a cheap "stop-gap" energy source while bringing Israel's own fields into production

That follow-up drew on a range of public record sources including leading business and financial publications, as well as official British Foreign Office (FCO) documents obtained under Freedom of Information. The latter confirmed that despite massive domestic gas discoveries in Israel's own territorial waters, the inability to kick-start production due to a host of bureaucratic, technological, logistical and regulatory issues  not to mention real uncertainties in quantities of commercially exploitable resources  meant that Israel could face gas supply challenges as early as next year. Israel's own gas fields would probably not be brought into production until around 2018-2020. Israeli officials, according to the FCO, saw the 1.4 trillion cubic meters of gas in Gaza's Marine (along with other potential "additional resources" as yet to be discovered according to the US Energy Information Administration) as a cheap "stop-gap" that might sustain both Israel's domestic energy needs and its export ambitions until the Tamar and Leviathan fields could actually start producing.

By broaching such issues in The Guardian, though, it seems I had crossed some sort of invisible barrier  that this topic was simply off-limits.

Energy is part of the environment, wait, no it isn't, not in Palestine anyway

To illustrate the sheer absurdity of The Guardian's pretense that a story about Gaza's gas resources is "not a legitimate environment story," consider the fact that just weeks earlier, Adam Vaughan, the editor of the Guardian's environment website, had personally assented to my posting the following story: Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction  West's co-optation of Gulf states' jihadists created the neocon's best friend: an Islamist Frankenstein.'

An Islamic State' (ISIS) convoy of Toyotas. Apparently, ISIS is an environment story. But not Gaza. Hmmmm.

Proposed headlines for stories that environment bloggers work on are posted on a shared Google spreadsheet so that editors can keep track of what we're doing and planning to publish. Adam had seen my proposed headline and requested to see the draft on the 16th June: "… would you mind sending this one by me on preview, please, before publishing? Just conscious it's very sensitive subject," he wrote in an email.

I sent him the full article with a summary of what it was about. Later in the day, I pinged him again to find out what he thought, and he replied: "thanks, sorry, yes  I think it's fine."

A Palestinian boy surveys the wrecked environment of Gaza after Israel's military incursion this summer
So an article about ISIS and oil addiction is "fine," but a piece about Israel, Gaza and conflict over gas resources is not. Really? Are offshore gas resources not part of the environment? Apparently, for The Guardian, not in Palestine, where Gaza's environment has been bombed to smithereens by the IDF.

The Blair factor

Meanwhile, the Israel-Gaza gas saga continues. Just over a week ago, Ha'aretz carried some insightful updates on the strategic value of the whole thing. Quoting Ariel Ezrahi, energy adviser to Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair (the Quartet representing the US, UN, EU and Russia), Ha'aretz noted that there was a reason why Jordan  which had recently signed an agreement with Israel to purchase gas from its Leviathan field  had simultaneously announced that it intended to purchase gas from Gaza. As Israel attempts to reposition itself as a major gas exporter to regional regimes like Egypt and Turkey, the biggest challenge is that "it's very hard for them to sign a gas contract with Israel despite their desperate need," due to how unpopular such a move would be with their domestic populations.

"If I were Israel's prime minister," Blair's energy adviser said, "I'd think how I could help the neighboring countries extricate themselves from the jam, and if Israel closes the Palestinian gas market, that's not a smart thing." So Israel has to find a way to open the Palestinian gas market and integrate it into the emerging complex of Israeli export deals: "… it would be wise for Israel to at least consider the contribution of the Palestinian dimension to these deals," said Ezrahi. "I think it's a mistake for Israel to rush into regional agreements without at least considering the Palestinian dimension and how it can contribute to Israeli interests."

Israel, backed by its allies in the west, wants to use the Palestinians "as an asset as they strive to join the regional power grid, and as a bridge to the Arab world," by selling Palestinian "gas to various markets," or promoting a deal with the corporations developing Israel's "Tamar and Leviathan [fields] that will allow for the sale of cheap gas to the [Palestinian] Authority."

But there is a further challenge when considering the Palestinian dimension, namely Hamas: "I can't meet with people linked to Hamas," said Blair's energy adviser. "It's a very firm ban dictated by the Quartet. [emphasis added] The Americans don't enter Gaza either." So it is not just Israel that has ruled out any gas deal with the Palestinians involving Hamas. So have the US, EU, UN and Russia.

But Israel has no mechanism to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza strip  except, as far as Moshe Ya'alon is concerned, military action to change facts on the ground.

Over the 70 odd articles I'd written for The Guardian, not a single piece falls outside the subject matter I had been commissioned to write on: the geopolitics of interconnected environment, energy and economic crises. The conclusion is unavoidable: The Guardian had simply decided that resource conflicts over the Occupied Territories should not receive coverage. It should be noted that before my post, the paper had never before acknowledged a link between IDF military action and Gaza's gas. Now that I'm gone, I doubt it will ever be covered again.

Well, at least Ya'alon, and his boss Netanyahu, will be happy.

Not to mention Tony Blair.

Boy, that winning smile never gets old, does it?

Liberal gatekeeping

When I began speaking in confidence to a number of other journalists inside and outside The Guardian about what had happened to me, they all consistently told me that my experience  although particularly outrageous  was not entirely unprecedented.

A senior editor of a national British publication who has written frequently for The Guardian's opinion section, told me that he was aware that all coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue was "tightly controlled" by Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's executive editor for opinion.

Another journalist told me that a Guardian editor commissioned a story from him discussing the suppression of criticism of Israel in public discourse and media, but that Freedland rejected the story without even reviewing a draft.

Several other journalists I spoke to inside and outside The Guardian went so far as to describe Freedland as the newspaper's unofficial gatekeeper' on the Middle east conflict, and that he invariably leaned toward a pro-Israel slant.

These anecdotes have been publicly corroborated by Jonathan Cook, a former Middle East staff reporter, foreign editor and columnist for The Guardian, who is currently based in Nazareth where he has won several awards for his reporting. A profile of Cook at the progressive Jewish news site Mondoweiss points out that a key turning point in Cook's career occurred in 2001 when he had just returned from Israel, having conducted an investigation into the murder of 13 non-violent Arab protestors by Israeli police during the second intifada the year before.

The police, Cook found, had executed a "shoot-to-kill policy" against unarmed victims  as was eventually confirmed by a government inquiry. But The Guardian suppressed his investigation, and chose not to run it at all. Cook says that while the paper does contain some exemplary reporting and insights, and even goes out of its way to condemn the occupation, there are certain lines that simply cannot be crossed, such as questioning Israel's capacity to define itself as simultaneously an exclusively Jewish and democratic state, or critiquing aspects of its security doctrine.

Cook's scathing criticism of his former paper in a 2011 Counterpunch article is highly revealing, and relevant, for understanding what happened to me:

"The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested  both financially and ideologically  in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.

The paper's role, like that of its rightwing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough leftwing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed."

Last month, Cook highlighted ongoing subtle but powerful insensitivities of language employed by The Guardian coverage's of the Gaza crisis which, in effect, served to "disappear" the Palestinians. He specifically identified Freedland as a major player in this phenomenon. "The Guardian's pride" in having helped create Israel is "still palpable at the paper (as I know from my years there)," especially among certain senior editors there "who influence much of the conflict's coverage  yes, that is a reference to Jonathan Freedland, among others."

Gaza after Israel's Operation Protective Edge'
===

UPDATE 4th Dec 2014 (10.13AM): Jonathan Freedland has offered a response this morning via TwitLonger, as follows:

"Your piece for Medium implies I was involved in the end of your arrangement with the Guardian. I don't wish to be rude, but I had literally not heard of you or your work till seeing that Medium piece, via Twitter, a few hours ago. (The Guardian environment website, where you wrote, is edited separately from the Guardian's Comment is Free site, which I now oversee.) I had no idea you wrote for the Guardian, no idea that arrangement had been terminated and not the slightest knowledge of your piece on Gaza's gas until a few hours ago. What's more, I was abroad  on vacation  on the days in July you describe. To put it starkly, my involvement in your case was precisely zero. I hope that as a matter of your own journalistic integrity, you'll want to alter the Medium piece to reflect these facts. Perhaps you'll also share this on Twitter as widely as you shared the Medium piece yesterday."

However, Freedland's reading of this piece is incorrect. I am not implying that Freedland was "involved" in the end of my Guardian tenure. I have no clue about that, and to be sure, I did not make any such claim above.

My simple point is that my experience of egregious Guardian censorship over the Gaza gas story  which Freedland does not address beyond denying his involvement  has a long and little-known context, suggesting that rather than my experience being a mere bizarre and accidental aberration, it is part of an entrenched, wider culture across the paper of which Freedland himself has allegedly played a key role in fostering.

It is not my fault that the range of journalists I spoke to all described Freedland as the Guardian's resident unofficial "gatekeeper" on Israel-Palestine coverage. Notably, Freedland fails to address their allegations that he has previously quashed stories which are critical of Israel on ideological grounds rather than reasons of journalistic integrity.'

END

===

This is perhaps not entirely surprising. A book commissioned by The Guardian, Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel, by Daphna Baram, documents clearly the connection between the newspaper and Zionism, noting for instance that Guardian editor CP Scott had been central to the negotiations with the British government resulting in the Balfour Declaration and the very conception of the state of Israel. Her conclusion is that despite becoming increasingly critical of the occupation after 1967, The Guardian remains staunchly pro-Zionist, its staff devoting "inordinate time and effort" to ensure "fairness to Israel."

Toward a media revolution

The Guardian, quite rightly, has a reputation for breaking some of the most important news stories of the decade  among them, of course, playing a lead role in releasing Edward Snowden's revelations about mass surveillance and related violations of civil liberties. Yet hidden in the cracks of this coverage is the fact that while disclosing critical facts, The Guardian has been unable to raise the most fundamental and probing questions about the purpose and direction of mass surveillance, why it has accelerated, what motivates it, and who benefits from it.

Questions must therefore be asked as to why a newspaper that sees itself as the global media's bastion of liberalism, has engaged in such grievous censorship by shutting down coverage of environmental geopolitics  a phenomenon which is increasingly at the heart not just of conflict over the Occupied Territories, but of the chaos of world affairs in the 21st century.

If this is the state of The Guardian, undoubtedly one of the better newspapers, then clearly we have a serious problem with the media. Ultimately, mainstream media remains under the undue influence of powerful special interests, whether financial, corporate or ideological.

Given the scale of the converging crises we face in terms of climate change, energy volatility, financial crisis, rampant inequality, proliferating species extinctions, insane ocean acidification, food crisis, foreign policy militarism, and the rise of the police-state  and given the bankruptcy of much of the media in illuminating the real causes of these crises and their potential solutions, we need new reliable and accountable sources of news and information.

We need new media, and we need it now.

As print newspapers go increasingly into decline, the opportunity for new people-powered models of independent digital media is rising exponentially. That's why I've launched a crowdfunder to help support my journalism, and to move toward creating a new investigative journalism collective that operates in the public interest, precisely because it is funded not by corporations or ideologues, but by people. If we can create new journalism platforms that are dependent for their survival on citizens themselves, then it is in the interests of citizens that those platforms will function. Until then, fearless, adversarial investigative journalism will always be in danger of being shut down or compromised.

I believe that together, we can create a new people-powered model of journalism that will make the old, hierarchical media conglomerates dominated by special interests and parochial paternalistic visions of the world obsolete. So, if you like, pop along to my Patreon.com crowdfunder for INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a truly independent people-powered investigative journalism collective that will remain dedicated to breaking the big stories that matter, no matter what. Pledge as little or as much as you like, and join the coming media revolution☺

[Danny Jarman]

I own most of Nafeez's books, he's a good researcher and they are loaded with well researched facts but he tends to leave the dot connecting and conclusion drawing to the reader. I'd say he's most probably aware.

[Albert Doyle]

On Amazon the lead review in favor of Cass Sunstein's book Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas ​is written by "The Guardian". The review is an exercise in disingenuous wordsmithing in favor of Sunstein's brute call for government censorship.

[James Ruby]

After 40 plus years of buying 'The Observer' and 'The Guardian' my wife and I have recently given it up as a (very) bad job. Now we do the cryptic crosswords on her tablet and simply print out the fiendish Azed Sunday challenge. No more financial support for these hypocrites.

And Arsebridger sports the worst wig in the world.

[Magda Hassan]

Just look at how they handled Wikileaks and Assange.

[David Guyatt]

After 40 plus years of buying 'The Observer' and 'The Guardian' my wife and I have recently given it up as a (very) bad job. Now we do the cryptic crosswords on her tablet and simply print out the fiendish Azed Sunday challenge. No more financial support for these hypocrites.

And Arsebridger sports the worst wig in the world.

On the other hand they're both excellent wraps for fish and chips and are also first class for husbanding some household waste into the rubbish bin.

Also, we have found in the past that the Daily Telegraph is the best suited for used cat litter and The Times for potato peel.

[Magda Hassan]

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[TD="width: 100%"] 08 December 2014
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Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog

In July, regular Guardian contributor Nafeez Ahmed examined claims that Israel is seeking to create a 'political climate' conducive to the exploitation of Gaza's considerable offshore gas reserves - 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, valued at $4 billion which were discovered off the Gaza coast in 2000.
Ahmed quoted Israeli defence minister, Moshe Ya'alon, to the effect that military efforts to 'uproot Hamas' were in part driven by Israel's determination to prevent Palestinians developing their own energy resources. Ahmed also cited Anais Antreasyan who argued, in the highly-respected University of California's Journal of Palestine Studies, that this is part of a wider strategy of:

'separating the Palestinians from their land and natural resources in order to exploit them, and, as a consequence, blocking Palestinian economic development. Despite all formal agreements to the contrary, Israel continues to manage all the natural resources nominally under the jurisdiction of the PA [Palestinian Authority], from land and water to maritime and hydrocarbon resources.'

At the time of writing, Ahmed's July 9 piece has received a massive 68,000 social media shares and is far and away the most popular Guardian article on the Gaza conflict. In the event, however, it was the last article published by him in the Guardian. The following day, his valuable Earth Insight blog, covering environmental, energy and economic crises, was killed off.
The Earth Insight series had accrued around three million views and was the most popular Guardian environment blog. It published stories which went viral, generating global headlines, such as Ahmed's interview with ex-CIA official Robert Steele on the 'open source revolution' (44,000 Facebook shares); the Pentagon's Minerva project and Ministry of Defence initiatives targeting domestic activists and political dissidents (47,000 shares); and the little-understood link between NSA mass surveillance and Pentagon planning for the impact of climate, energy and economic shocks.
Ironically, given that the Guardian has just dumped him, Ahmed recently won a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for a Guardian article on Ukraine, published earlier this year. He also won a 2014 Project Censored award for his first Guardian article, published in 2013, which was about food riots as 'the new normal'. This year, Ahmed was also included as one of the Evening Standard's 'Power 1000' most globally influential Londoners, in the 'Campaigners: Ecowarriors' section.
Former Guardian and Observer journalist Jonathan Cook comments:

'Ahmed is that rare breed of journalist who finds stories everyone else either misses or chooses to overlook; he regularly joins up the dots in a global system of corporate pillage. If the news business were really driven by news rather than a corporate-friendly business agenda, publications would be beating a path to his door.'

High praise indeed. At first sight, then, the Guardian's ditching of Nafeez Ahmed is counter-intuitive, to say the least.

A 'Riled And Rushed' Response From The Guardian

Ahmed has now published the 'inside story' of how he 'was censored by The Guardian'. As a regular and trusted online blogger since April 2013, he had approval to post his pieces direct to the Guardian website. Ahmed describes what happened after he uploaded his Gaza piece in July:

'The day after posting it, I received a phone call from James Randerson, assistant national news editor. He sounded riled and rushed. Without beating around the bush, James told me point blank that my Guardian blog was to be immediately discontinued. Not because my article was incorrect, factually flawed, or outrageously defamatory. Not because I'd somehow breached journalistic ethics, or violated my contract. No. The Gaza gas piece, he said, was "not an environment story," and therefore was an "inappropriate post" for the Guardian's environment website.'

Ahmed was 'shocked' and 'more than a little baffled' by this 'over-reaction'. Any concerns could surely be amicably resolved. But Randerson 'refused point blank, instead telling me that my "interests are increasingly about issues that we don't think are a good fit for what we want to see published on the environment site."'
This was curious indeed because the agreed remit with the Guardian was for Ahmed's column to address 'the geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises.' Indeed, when he had first applied to blog for the newspaper, he had submitted a portfolio that included an earlier piece on the link between Israeli military operations and Gaza's gas. However, Ahmed's polite protests fell on deaf ears. Within an hour, he received an email from the Guardian rights manager telling him that his contract had been terminated. And yet, according to Ahmed, he had committed no breach of his contractual obligations with the Guardian:

'On the contrary, The Guardian had breached its contractual obligation to me regarding my freedom to determine the contents of my blog, simply because it didn't like what I wrote. This is censorship.'

This 'grievous censorship' was all the more blatant given the Guardian's publication of Ahmed's June 2014 piece: 'Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction  - West's co-optation of Gulf states' jihadists created the neocon's best friend: an Islamist Frankenstein.' Adam Vaughan, the editor of the Guardian's environment website, had approved the piece, telling Ahmed, 'yes - I think it's fine'.
As Ahmed notes ironically:

'So an article about ISIS and oil addiction is "fine," but a piece about Israel, Gaza and conflict over gas resources is not. Really? Are offshore gas resources not part of the environment? Apparently, for The Guardian, not in Palestine, where Gaza's environment has been bombed to smithereens by the IDF.'

Cook comments on the link between Israeli policy and Gaza's resources:

'This story should be at the centre of the coverage of Gaza, and of criticism of the west's interference, including by the UK's own war criminal Tony Blair, who has conspired in the west's plot to deny the people of Gaza their rightful bounty. But the Guardian, like other media, have ignored the story.'

Cook is scathing about the reasons given by the Guardian for Ahmed's dismissal:

'the idea that an environment blogger for the liberal media should not be examining the connection between control over mineral resources, which are deeply implicated in climate change, and wars, which lead to human deaths and ecological degradation, is preposterous beyond belief.'

He concludes:

'It is not that Ahmed strayed too far from his environment remit, it is that he strayed too much on to territory that of the Israel-Palestine conflict that the Guardian rigorously reserves for a few trusted reporters and commentators. Without knowing it, he went where only the carefully vetted are allowed to tread.'

'Particularly Outrageous' But  'Not Entirely Unprecedented'

Ahmed went public about his dismissal on November 27. In the following few days, nobody at the Guardian so much as mentioned it, with the exception of a brief acknowledgement by columnist George Monbiot after being prompted:

'I don't know anything about this, but will make enquiries.'

Responding to our tweet, former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald commented:

'I know nothing about what happened, but he makes a very compelling case - would like to see a @guardian response'

Monbiot has yet to comment further. We asked Seumas Milne, another longstanding Guardian regular, if he would be responding to Ahmed's claim of 'grievous censorship'. After several days, Milne replied:

'Yes, we have 95% union organisation at Guardian/Observer (where I'm NUJ chair) & will follow up'

But despite repeated challenges from us and others, Owen Jones, Richard Seymour and David Wearing - regarded as fiery, independent contributors to the Guardian - have maintained a discreet public silence. As we have previously observed in our books and in media alerts, this is as predictable as it is understandable: it can indeed be career suicidal for a journalist to be openly critical of his or her media employer (or would-be employer). The best that one can hope for, apparently, is for these issues to be discussed 'in confidence'. Sure enough, Ahmed was told privately by several journalists 'inside and outside' the Guardian that his experience, 'although particularly outrageous  was not entirely unprecedented.'
He added:

'A senior editor of a national British publication who has written frequently for The Guardian's opinion section, told me that he was aware that all coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue was "tightly controlled" by Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's executive editor for opinion.'

In fact, several journalists have told Ahmed that Freedland is, in effect, the paper's 'gatekeeper' on the Middle East conflict. It certainly takes no deep reading of Freedland's own output to detect a strong pro-Israel leaning. Jonathan Cook who, as mentioned, used to work for the Guardian, and is now an independent journalist based in Nazareth - knows this only too well. He points to 'the Guardian's historic and current support for the state of Israel', steered and maintained in large part by Freedland who holds 'ugly, chauvinist opinions about Israel'. It was ironically appropriate that Freedland should be one of the recipients of this year's Orwell Prize.
On December 4, after numerous people had read Ahmed's article and prompted Freedland for a response, he told Ahmed that he had nothing to do with the termination of his contract:

'I had no idea you wrote for the Guardian, no idea that arrangement had been terminated and not the slightest knowledge of your piece on Gaza's gas until a few hours ago. What's more, I was abroad - on vacation - on the days in July you describe. To put it starkly, my involvement in your case was precisely zero.'

Ahmed responded:

'Your reading of my Medium piece is incorrect. [...] I am not implying your specific involvement in the termination of my contract - a matter about which I have no knowledge thanks to the abrupt, unethical and unlawful way in which I was dropped.'

Freedland's artfully crafted reply sidestepped the main thrust of Ahmed's piece about Guardian censorship on Israel-Palestine, and Freedland's significant role in this. Ahmed had spoken to:

'several journalists about my experience who told me that it was not unprecedented, and mentioned you by name. According to these journalists, [...] it is part of an entrenched, wider culture across the paper. These journalists who spoke to me on condition of anonymity claim that you have played a key role in fostering this culture, and that you have quashed legitimate stories critical of Israel without meaningful journalistic justification. I have merely relayed their allegations.'

By the end of last week, with the Guardian under mounting public pressure - and perhaps even internally from some of its own journalists - the paper's parent company issued a terse PR statement in a clear attempt at damage limitation. As if pulled from the pages of Orwell's 1984, the Guardian Media Group intoned:

'[Ahmed] has never been on the staff of the Guardian. His Guardian blog - Earth Insight - was about the link between the environment and geopolitics, but we took the decision to end the blog when a number of his posts on a range of subjects strayed too far from this brief.'

No explanation was deemed necessary as to what constituted 'too far'. But then, as Noam Chomsky once said, there are limits to permissible debate in even the most 'liberal' media: 'This far, and no further.' The powerful pro-Israel lobby helps to keep British politics, including media coverage, within these 'acceptable' bounds. In the absence of an informed Guardian whistleblower emerging, we cannot know exactly why Ahmed's contract was terminated so abruptly. But the paper's swift and drastic response to his insightful piece on Israel's war for Gaza's gas is glaring and highly significant.
It is to Nafeez Ahmed's credit that he has decided to speak out about what happened to him at the Guardian. He could easily have kept quiet, hoping that the paper might take him back, suitably chastened; or that he might be picked up by another 'mainstream' newspaper. He comments:

'The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I'm speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world's leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel's publicised rationale for going to war.'

If past experience is anything to go by, Ahmed will now be deemed 'radioactive' by the Guardian, other 'mainstream' outlets and most previously supportive corporate journalists. He will join the ranks of the corporate untouchables, people who broke the first rule of corporate journalism: Thou Shalt Not Criticise Thy Employer.
In similar vein, Giulio Sica worked at the Guardian as a subeditor and occasional writer between 2007 and 2013, having spent time with 'antiwar and climate change demonstrations, with what I would describe as a mixture of eco-spiritual and anarchist communities'. Sica assumed these interests would be welcome at the Guardian. Alas, in October, he wrote:
'I found to my dismay... that in fact there seemed to be a culture of open disdain at anything remotely radical or spiritual and, along with some very dubious office politics, which I openly and forcefully contested to no avail via official channels, I eventually had my contract terminated.'
The public are led to believe that 'comment is free' at a Guardian steeped in 'liberal, humanistic and left, rather than right-wing, values'. But Sica found that:

'discussions on controversial issues were not encouraged. They seemed, in fact, to be passively discouraged. For example, any comment I made even remotely critical of western mainstream media propaganda, whether from myself or others, anything suggesting that the (then Labour) government's economic policy was neoconservative, or any suggestion that Tony Blair should be tried as a war criminal for his conduct in sending the UK to war on false premises, would often result in either an abrupt put-down, or an awkward silence, rather than open, welcoming dialogue. The political narrative in office conversation seemed to be dominated by New Labour thinking.'

Instead, Sica perceived a drift to the right at the paper:

'But while the right has become more extreme in many ways since the events of September 11, 2001, the Guardian and the liberal establishment in general has appeared to veer to the right in its qualified support for war and liberal intervention and its generally dismissive attitude to what was known in the 1960s as countercultural thinking. As such it has been unable, or unwilling, to mount a successful challenge to an increasingly bigoted form of multicultural class war.'

His conclusion:
'The delusion of treating the Guardian as a leftwing liberal news organisation, which has a multicultural and multidisciplinary make-up, has to be challenged in the interests of creating a news medium that is a truly balanced representation and reflection of British leftwing radical and liberal viewpoints.'
In reality, the Guardian is part of 'an ethnic monoculture that may believe itself to be liberal, but which bears all the hallmarks of insular, upper middle-class thought'.

A Guardian Of Power

The Guardian is, as we have often noted, at the liberal end of the corporate media 'spectrum'. It portrays itself as a compassionate forum for journalism willing to hold power to account, and it makes great play of its journalistic freedom under the auspices of Scott Trust Limited (replacing the Scott Trust in 2008). The paper, therefore, might not at first sight appear to be a corporate institution. But the paper is owned by the Guardian Media Group which is run by a high-powered Board comprising elite, well-connected people from the worlds of banking, insurance, advertising, multinational consumer goods companies, telecommunications, information technology giants, venture investment firms, media, marketing services, the World Economic Forum, and other sectors of big business, finance and industry. This is not a Board staffed by radically nonconformist environmental, human rights and peace campaigners, trade unionists, NHS campaigners, housing collectives; nor anyone else who might threaten the status quo. As Ahmed observes:

'If this is the state of The Guardian, undoubtedly one of the better newspapers, then clearly we have a serious problem with the media. Ultimately, mainstream media remains under the undue influence of powerful special interests, whether financial, corporate or ideological.'

He concludes, crucially:

'Given the scale of the converging crises we face in terms of climate change, energy volatility, financial crisis, rampant inequality, proliferating species extinctions, insane ocean acidification, food crisis, foreign policy militarism, and the rise of the police-state  and given the bankruptcy of much of the media in illuminating the real causes of these crises and their potential solutions, we need new reliable and accountable sources of news and information.'

DC and DE

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This Alert is Archived here:
Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog
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[Paul Rigby]

...goes back to C.P. Scott's acquisition of it, on terms much less favourable than he had anticipated or been lead to believe. It has, after all, been a fanatical defendant of the absurd Warren Omission for half a century.

The extent to which it has supplanted the New York Times and the Washington Post as the CIA's premier English-language vehicle - the agency having abandoned the Post to the Beltway nutters and the Old Grey Lady to geriatric limousine liberals - has not been widely appreciated. In return for pseudo-scoops, particularly concerning the agency's hated rival, the NSA, and priapic undercover plods (this presumably courtesy of the Orangemen, ever anxious to please their American masters, and scupper the Met's empire-building), readers have been treated to an overt alliance with that ghastly Nazi-collaborator, Soros, and a wholesale rigging of its readers' comments section, where critics of, for example, the CIA take-over of Ukraine, are routinely censored or placed on moderation the better that NATO- and Langley-bots can churn out incomprehensible drivel without challenge. But enough of Luke Harding.

How to respond? Well, one way is to compile a list of the paper's advertisers and write to them explaining that you can no longer purchase their goods and services due to their patronage of this appalling far-right rag. This is terribly dull, and the more energetic might consider a more direct form of action, not least an Auberon Waugh-style "persecution" of the absurd Wiggy Arsebridger, who appears to me to invite a custard pie or three, not to mention a vigorous & sustained public denunciation as an agent of American state terrorism. The Grauniad, a cynical, sometime champion of direct action, would doubtless appreciate the irony, even as it turned over your on-line details to the electronic knicker-sniffers at Cheltenham. It does, after all, have a rich history of that sort of collaboration.

[Michael Barwell]

I suspect the Guardian's in the process of taking a hit from the psychic-keys cadre (piss-keys).

[Paul Rigby]

'They'll try to shut you down': Meeting Assange & the non-stop 'War on RT'

Margarita Simonyan

http://rt.com/op-edge/212587-assange-dem...ass-media/

I had barely returned from London when the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution that, among other things, calls on US officials in Europe to "evaluate the political, economic, and cultural influence of Russia and Russian state-sponsored media and to coordinate with host governments on appropriate responses."

In other words, the US would pressure Europe to kick us out of there. And that's already happening. Over the last year we've been witnessing a number of less than pleasant trends.

1. Pressuring of our employees.

The executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty writes that "young journalists are already finding that a spell at RT is a handicap in getting jobs elsewhere." And he is not alone in his opinion. Sometimes the stories are noisy (see Liz Wahl and TruthDig), at other times the pressure makes people resign quietly. Fortunately, often still, it stirs up outrage and desire to fight back and work even harder to defend your truth.

2. Hordes of Western media outlets attempting to discredit our work.

In the course of just a couple of weeks, the Guardian alone published half a dozen articles about RT that could all be summed up as why the hell is Putin's propaganda poisoning the unwitting minds of the great British land?' I can't recall a single well-known Western news outlet that hasn't published a self-righteous sermon directed at RT. I doubt anyone else could either.