The Ayman Mohyeldin Thing at NBC

I was quite struck by Ayman Mohyeldin's reporting from Gaza for Al Jazzera during the horrid Cast Lead operation by Israel against Gaza; he was intrepid, obviously trying to true and accurate reporting, and he was clearly affected by the carnage he witnessed and the lies of the Israelis about it. All of this made for compelling news.

Later, he was assigned to the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and he appeared to be one of the only reporters on the scene who actually knew what was going on, who the major players were, and who could conduct his investigations in native Arabic and thus get closer to the truth than most other reporters. Richard Engel also speaks Arabic and has been widely respected for his reporting on events in the Middle East, but Ayman was able to get even closer to the principals and the action.

Ayman was on Democracy Now! in 2010 and gave a fairly comprehensive account of his background.

When Ayman joined NBC News, apparently at a huge increase in salary, his reports were somewhat less intense and frequent, but they were sometimes more informative and often quite personal, making the people he featured into real and very human, mostly victims, of the carnage unleashed upon them.

The other day, he was a witness to the slaughter of four children on a Gaza beach and the wounding of several more in front of his hotel. He helped to rescue and treat the survivors. He reported quite passionately what he saw and did during the incident, and his reports were widely considered outstanding first-hand accounts of a terrible tragedy.

Strangely, though, his reports were not featured on NBC Nightly News, in fact, there was not mention of him. Richard Engel, reporting from Tel Aviv was made the lead reporter on the story, a story which was covered extensively on the program, and during which Engel appeared to report accurately and pulled no punches, using footage shot by Ayman's team.

It was just that Ayman himself was missing from the story and the reporting. It seemed odd to say the least.

The next day, Glenn Greenwald reported that Ayman had been abruptly "pulled from Gaza" by an NBC executive and was not being permitted to report on the story any more. The story of the 4 children killed on the beach in Gaza was modified to include Israeli defenses of it, and eventually the story was all but scrubbed, or at least was no longer featured on news cycles.

Down the Memory Hole?

Or something even more sinister? Observers noted that as the story of the children killed on the beach faded, more and more Israel-centric stories appeared, often with no recognition of a Palestinian point of view, and featuring intense denunciations of Palestinians/Hamas to the exclusion of any reporting on the miseries and death the Palestinians -- especially in Gaza --  are enduring as a result of Israeli operations and bombardments. As the death toll rises, the victims more and more are being dehumanized and blamed.

As a rule, Engel has not engaged in that kind of reporting, and to the extent I know anything about it, Ayman never did.

Many are questioning Ayman's removal from Gaza reporting for NBC, but if I recall correctly, he was also expelled by the Israelis from Gaza during the Cast Lead operation and had to report from the border fence rather than from inside Gaza. Engel is widely respected in the field, so he's not the worst replacement for Ayman under the circumstances. The issue is that Ayman was replaced at all without explanation or reason given. He was just gone suddenly, completely and inexplicably.

Of course Greenwald is speculating on motives the way he does, but NBC is keeping mum, and apparently Mohyeldin has been successfully gagged.

Americans have fewer and fewer reliable sources of news from areas of conflict, and while he was reporting from Gaza, Ayman Mohyeldin was one of the few whose reports could be considered both informative and accurate. While I wouldn't consider Richard Engel to be a complete propagandist and tool, he does have a very different approach, one that is based in a certain viewpoint about the United States and its role in the Middle Eastern conflicts (not necessarily a positive one, but one that starts from the American viewpoint) and so his focus tends to be less involved with the realities of Palestinian life under siege and attack -- which was a specialty of Mohyeldin's -- and more how it all looks from an American perspective.

Some of Ayman's reports before he was pulled:

Innocent and Gone: Israeli Strike on Gaza Kills Four Children

All in with Chris Hayes

 Andrea Mitchell Reports

He also Tweeted extensively about the events he witnessed and provided numerous images on his Instagram account.

By now, we all know that commercial as well as much alternative news is very tightly controlled in the West and the United States in particular in order to promote a particular version of events; we could go into extraordinary detail about how our "news" is often intended not so much to inform as it is to shape opinion and promote propaganda, to set narratives, and to extend the power of elites. 

Ayman was not immune from the pressures to conform to those interests, but his reporting was a distinct contrast to those who saw their role as one to support rather than challenge or provide other insights than the dominant narrative (which we have notices is nearly universal throughout the media).

Ayman Mohyeldin's reporting was actually a small portion of a whole, and his removal doesn't affect that whole to any great extent. What it does is narrow the narrative NBC has been marketing. That's a business decision that will mean that the public which relies on NBC News will have less information by which to understand events in the Middle East, and the less information they have, the more closely the public opinion can be manipulated.

The more we see this happening, the fewer alternative points of view we have to consider. 

None of this is new, but to see it again, so starkly, is more than a little disturbing.

I'm sure we will see more examples as time goes by and the grip of the oligarchs tightens. 

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UPDATE: According to word out of NBC, breathlessly announced and spread via internet outlets, Mohyeldin will be returning to Gaza this weekend. NBC's announcement is terse and uninformative, the way they tend to be, but Mohyeldin twitted thus:

 

Thanks for all the support. Im returning to #Gaza to report. Proud of NBC's continued commitment to cover the #Palestinian side of the story
— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) July 18, 2014

There is a good deal of high stepping blogger triumphalism at the moment, but exactly what happened is still as murky and mysterious as ever, and we will likely never know the full story.

The Alexander Cockburn Thing -- "Occupy Is Dead -- or Something"

Occupy Is Dead. Long Live Occupy. Poster announcing Occupy Oakland Anti-Repression Committee benefit to be held on July 19, 2012.

Yes, well.

As I was yakking with friends and buying some art yesterday, the topic of the Occupy came up, specifically Occupy Oakland, as the artist involved lives in Oakland, and the main comment was that Occupy Oakland "just went away."  It was so active for a while, and then all of a sudden, it seemed to vanish. At least to all appearances.

I thought, no, this isn't right. Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Commune are still strident and still going strong... aren't they? They were, at any rate, the last time I checked a month or so ago. Oh. Has it been that long? Jeeze.

So I opened up the OO website, and sure enough it is still there, still appears to be going great guns, just took its first harvest from the Gill Tract, who could ask for anything more? Ah, but there have been fewer -- far fewer -- clashes with the police lately, and there has been much less bloodshed and tear gas and stun grenades than once was the case. Furthermore, the Tent Phase of the Occupy is pretty much over with (there are exceptions, of course.)

I got to wondering what it all means, this notion that "Occupy Is Dead" when I did a virtual tour around the Occupy sites I keep track of and found almost all of them at least minimally active, and some quite creative and effervescent despite the summer heat.

The Alexander Cockburn piece, "Epitaph to a Dead Movement" was sort of thrust in my face as I was checking out the Occupy haps. The Philadelphia National Gathering had just concluded, and I had just made it back to my now temporary California home. I had some issues with the Occupy Caravan. But that was not the National Gathering, and I thought that from what I saw, mostly on Nate's stream, the National Gathering was terrific. The key to it was the Visioning. But I'll get to that in a bit. I still have several more installments of "The Peril of Fascism" to post. (It takes me a while because I'm transcribing...)

Cockburn's piece struck me rather like Chris Hedges' ill-advised and ill-informed denunciation of Black Bloc participation in Occupy. This is someone from the "old-guard left" who literally doesn't know what he is talking/writing about and is so gutless and full of himself, he has no wish to find out. I run into these kinds of people all the time; they know not, they don't know they don't know, and they have no interest in knowing. They simply blow hard. And claim they are right because they say so. When they are shown to be wrong, not just factually but fundamentally, they blow it off. Because they are who they are, they have to be right. It's that simple.

Hedges declares the immanent demise of the Occupy, unless the "Black Bloc Anarchists" -- whatever they are, and he, obviously, doesn't know or care -- are purged forthwith. Cockburn declares the Occupy Movement "dead" not because of the Black Bloc -- which has only been actively present at a few Occupy events (for a long time, it was only the one, in Oakland on General Strike Day last November) -- but because it hasn't turned out like Cockburn, in his reverie of Teh Revolution, imagined Occupy was saying it would.

Again, ignorance and arrogance go hand in hand.

There's a strong class element in this ignorance and arrogance as well. Occupy was never really amenable to take charge experts, highly educated fools, business school hucksters and the like. In fact, I would say most if not all Occupys rejected the leadership of the well-connected and well-to-do, the would be High and the Mighty. Even Occupy New Haven seemed to reject the Yalie overlay of "expertise," and focused much more on the needs and issues of New Haven's growing underclass. This wasn't the well-off directing the activities of the underclass, it was the underclass itself taking charge of its own interests and affairs.

Once the underclass took charge within Occupy, I would argue, the layers of experts and and "directors" withdrew. Part of that process, of course, had to do with the increasing intensity of police suppression of the Occupy nationwide. When the police truncheons and the gas and the grenades and the mass arrests intensified, the middle class and the bourgeoisie and their offspring in their strollers departed. After all, they can't afford a day or a week in jail, and how would they explain the lump on their noggin at the club? Won't somebody think of the children? (This was, of course, Hedges' supposed point: the children in their strollers made Occupy a mass movement, and the Black Bloc ruined it. But it never was a mass movement, Chris. Real revolution never is.)

Cockburn misses the mark because he didn't do even a minimal autopsy on the "corpse" of Occupy before he launched his Epitaph.

Occupy has evolved into something quite different than the marketing campaign it started as. Yes, it was a marketing campaign initially. It isn't that any more. And that's one reason why it doesn't have quite the public or media presence it once did. It's much deeper rooted now, more dispersed, far more integrated into communities than when it began. Occupy is much more closely aligned to the growing underclass in the United States and around the world, and it is much less overt in its calls for Revolutionary Change -- in part because of the need for building the structure of such change before actually undertaking it or attempting to.

The Mic Check and the General Assembly process have become integrated into a whole range of activities going on all the time whether or not under the Occupy banner. The notion of "democracy" is undergoing a remarkable transformation among the People, while at the same time, it is being institutionally disempowered by the Ruling Class. While the institutions of democracy crumble all around us, the People themselves are taking up the cause and preserving and reactivating the essence of democracy.

The fight against foreclosures, economic extraction, police misconduct, public education privatization and so much more have established a kind of baseline that even the dumbest of Our Rulers seem loathe to cross. We'll see whether it holds.

At any rate, I would remind Cockburn that the Occupy never was the Left, and it isn't the Left today. It transcended political categories from the outset. From an Occupy perspective, the constant tug of war between the "Left" and the "Right" that characterized our political institutions is bizarre. What are they constantly fighting over? They're on the same side!
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Back to "The Peril of Fascism." Another excerpt later today if all goes well.

More on the London Riots

Overnight, the unrest spread affecting Enfield, Walthamstow and Waltham Forest in north London and Brixton in the south of the city.

Yesterday, I was more focused on the reaction among the good white burghers of Britain, and how very race-based so much of the commentary was as a relatively small but significant portion of Tottenham was left in ruins by the mischief and uncivilized behavio[u]r of the "Africans" who inhabit the place.

At that time, it wasn't all that difficult to see why the peaceful protest over the incendiary police shooting of a well-known and apparently well-liked member of the community would turn ugly. A police shooting of a citizen is very rare in Britain -- unlike the case in the United States -- and according to reports, and the complaints of the citizens of Tottenham, the police chose to turn their backs on the people most directly affected and simply clammed up about what happened and why. They offered no explanation, no consideration for the community, and when asked to be more forthcoming, they refused to speak to the people protesting their high-handedness.

Then, when the people protested what they regarded as an official insult, the police formed a cordon around the police station in Tottenham, and at least according to reports, either shoved or beat a 16 year old girl who refused to be pushed around by Authority.

All that is what it is, but Ian Welsh puts an Austerity context to the civil unrest in Britain that should have some resonance in the United States.

The Conservative austerity measures are destroying the possibility of a future for a generation of young people. There is this weird idea amongst English elites, which I encountered in person during my London visit, that the problem in England is their welfare culture. In other words,after a financial crisis virtually entirely caused by the rich, the response has been to slash spending on the poor and middle class to pay for bailouts for the rich, who, by any sane reading of the crisis, caused the disaster.

Yes. Well. That should be obvious, but for some reason it is not, and it has to be repeated over and over and over again just to be heard at all. The response to the economic crisis throughout the West is almost universally to further exacerbate the problem by slashing programs and services for the least fortunate, while simultaneously providing greater and greater amounts of money and benefits to the already hyper-rich the very people who caused the financial collapse in the first place.

Meanwhile in England, the Cameron government’s massive slashes to education hit virtually all at once, making an entire cohort of young people know exactly who just did their level best to destroy their lives. This is important, to put it bluntly, young males who don’t have enough money to settle down with a young female are extraordinarily dangerous to the state.

Surprise!

The question will be -- as it already has been in so much of the world -- what mix of repression and accommodation will be necessary to staunch the riots and rebellions and smooth the path for ever greater looting by the Overclass.

That's what's being tested in London even as we speak...

Welcome to Our Brave New World.