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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

#pluralistic #competition #advertising #surveillance advertising #saving the news from big tech #link taxes #trustbusting #competition and markets authority #uk #ukpoli #Ad Tech Collective Action #digital markets unit #Competition Appeal Tribunal

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girlactionfigure · 1 year ago

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In the wake of the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy in a Chicago suburb, Jewish groups across the religious spectrum are pleading with Americans to not allow anti-Muslim hate to spread because of Israel’s war with Hamas.⁠ ⁠ Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist umbrella bodies have joined a statement spearheaded by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a national public policy group, and two Orthodox groups have released their own statements.⁠ ⁠ “This is a moment of deep Jewish pain, mourning the lives taken and praying for the safe release of the hostages in Gaza – and this pain and fear is compounded by a horrific rise in antisemitism here in the United States and around the globe,” said the JCPA statement, which in addition to the religious movements was also signed by the American Jewish Committee, J Street, Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women, among other groups.⁠ ⁠ “We also know that we are not the only ones being targeted in this moment,” it said. “Our Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian American neighbors are facing bigotry, threats, and violence – including the despicable murder of a six-year-old child this weekend outside Chicago, by a man who reportedly espoused anti-Muslim hate.”⁠ ⁠ Police on Saturday charged Joseph Czuba, 71, with stabbing the boy, Wadea Al-Fayoum, to death, and seriously injuring the boy’s mother, in Plainfield, Illinois. Police said Czuba was motivated by anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias. Reports quoted Czuba’s wife as saying he was moved to rage by conservative media coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas.⁠ ⁠jtanews

#Palestinian American #anti-Muslim hate #Israel /Hamas War #Jewish groups

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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WASHINGTON (JTA) — In the wake of the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy in a Chicago suburb, Jewish groups across the religious spectrum are pleading with Americans to not allow anti-Muslim hate to spread because of Israel’s war with Hamas.

Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist umbrella bodies have joined a statement spearheaded by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a national public policy group, and two Orthodox groups have released their own statements.

“This is a moment of deep Jewish pain, mourning the lives taken and praying for the safe release of the hostages in Gaza – and this pain and fear is compounded by a horrific rise in antisemitism here in the United States and around the globe,” said the JCPA statement, which in addition to the religious movements was also signed by the American Jewish Committee, J Street, Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women, among other groups.

“We also know that we are not the only ones being targeted in this moment,” it said. “Our Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian American neighbors are facing bigotry, threats, and violence – including the despicable murder of a six-year-old child this weekend outside Chicago, by a man who reportedly espoused anti-Muslim hate.”

The Anti-Defamation League separately condemned the attack and two Orthodox groups, Agudath Israel of America and the Orthodox Union, put out statements expressing horror at the crime.

“Agudath Israel condemns this heinous crime and sends its sincere condolences to the bereaved family members and their entire community,” it said in a statement.

The Orthodox Union said in a statement that “we reject anti-Muslim bigotry along with all forms of hate against individuals based on their faith and absolutely reject revenge attacks against innocent Muslims and Arab Americans in this country or anywhere.”

Police on Saturday charged Joseph Czuba, 71, with stabbing the boy, Wadea Al-Fayoum, to death, and seriously injuring the boy’s mother, in Plainfield, Illinois. Police said Czuba was motivated by anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias. Reports quoted Czuba’s wife as saying he was moved to rage by conservative media coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas.

The killing has spurred fears of an increase in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence, including expressions of concern by President Joe Biden and J.B. Pritzker, Illinois’s Jewish governor. A group of Chicago area rabbis attended Al-Fayoum’s funeral.

Also signing the JCPA statement were an array of local Jewish Community Relations Councils, which often work with local Muslim and Arab groups.

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archtroop · 5 months ago

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Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

How Will the Israel-Hamas Urban War Influence Future Wars?

Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, June 24, 2024

Statements from political leaders saying “the correct number of civilian casualties is zero” would mean don’t fight a war. This is the first war I’ve ever observed where not only did people believe there could be a daily civilian casualty count, but they took the word of a terrorist organization on what it would be and just started parroting a terrorist organization’s numbers, which is the exact strategy that they want, in order to get the world, the UN, and U.S. to force Israel to be defeated.

Israel was condemned for the use of a 2,000-pound bomb in an urban area. The U.S. used over 15,000 in the first Gulf War, because it’s a very standard military munition to hit an enemy in a bunker underground. When Israel is following every rule that’s ever been thought of, and implementing ones that nobody’s tried, it then gets told that, well, you’ve got to find a different way.

If you ban the use of bombs in urban combat, then you’re going to see a lot more urban combat around the world, because a weaker force will say, look, all I have to do is get into the urban area and you can’t touch me unless you come in here, and I turn it into a meat grinder where you lose tens of thousands of soldiers and I achieve my political goals. This double, triple standard that Israel is being held to will come back to bite the world in the future.

Israel waited over three weeks after October 7th to allow civilians to leave. And the world said, well, you can’t do that. You can’t evacuate a million people out of northern Gaza and into southern Gaza, into the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone. Israel did this for over 850,000, which is 85% of the population. Israel handed out maps of safe areas to help evacuate the civilians. No military in the world has ever handed out maps. This also telegraphed the IDF’s moves to Hamas. They also used advanced technologies, flying drones with speakers, using cell phone presence to know where the civilian presence was and then not going into those areas until they’ve been evacuated.

Everybody gave Israel advice on the way to bring the hostages home. Don’t launch a ground invasion. Just use raids. Look, I know it’ll take you a few years to get your hostages home, but just use raids and strategic strikes to take out Hamas leadership. That’s anti-historical, it has never happened. No military has ever been successful in doing something like that. Hamas spent years developing an environment with the sole purpose to get civilians killed if Israel ever entered that environment.

What would America have done in the same situation? Gen. Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, We would have used overwhelming military force to achieve our objectives of bringing our people home and securing our borders and protecting our nation as quickly as possible. Step one would be ensuring not a single rocket emanated out of enemy territory, headed towards our civilian areas like Los Angeles. Gen. Milley has been very vocal, saying we would have used overwhelming force, immediate force.

I’m a researcher, and what the case studies show is that failing to do this will result in a protracted war and increased suffering. All of these groups who want to limit the suffering of war have in this case increased the suffering, not because of Israel, but because of Hamas and international pressure. The way Israel was forced to execute this campaign has caused hostages to stay in captivity longer. This way has caused civilians to die. This way has caused civilian suffering.

Maurice Hirsch: Welcome to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs War Room update. We are over 260 days into the war with the terrorists in Gaza. It started on the October 7, 2023, with the murder of 1200 people and the taking of over 250 hostages into Gaza.

Today we’re joined by Major John Spencer, who’s the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Could we have your impressions of what’s actually going on on the ground in Gaza.

John Spencer: What’s going on the ground is a very restrained use of force to achieve the goals set by Israel in Gaza. Within the political context of the world that Israel lives in, where they’re held to a double standard, if not a triple standard. Actually, based on my research of over a decade of urban warfare. Israel is held to a standard that doesn’t exist, a standard that no military has ever followed.

As Israel launched the operation to achieve its goals to bring the hostages home, to remove Hamas from power, to dismantle their military, and to secure the border, I knew that Israel used very strong restraints – from evacuating cities to the use of munitions.

Basically, everything that’s been said about the IDF has actually been the opposite of what I’ve observed in reality – to include frontline forces, their demeanor, the restraints on the use of force that all militaries impose, the use of tactics that no military has ever tried in order to prevent civilian harm, and doing the job despite the constraints of the world – where statements from political leaders say things like, “the correct number of civilian casualties is zero.” That would mean don’t fight the war.

This is also the first war I’ve ever observed in my long history as a both as a serviceman in the U.S. Army and as a student where not only did people believe there could be a daily civilian casualty count, but they took the word of a terrorist organization on what it would be and just started parroting a terrorist organization’s numbers, which is the exact strategy that they want, in order to get the world, the United Nations, United States, to force Israel to be defeated.

Hamas wants Israel to be forced to accept a Hamas victory. If anybody thought that Hamas was going to give up the hostages or conduct a unilateral surrender or disarmament, that’s just foolish, based on Hamas’s history, let alone war.

I’ve picked apart every allegation from the use of starvation as a form of war, indiscriminate bombing, all these libels, or genocide. It’s more than just a misunderstanding of the laws of war. It is because it’s Israel. I am very concerned that the standards that the world are trying to apply would then become a standard not just against terrorism but in war in general.

I think the use of bombs in urban areas is one of the examples where Israel was condemned for the use of a 2,000-pound bomb in an urban area, despite it being a very heavily used munition in past wars. The United States used over 15,000 in the first Gulf War, over 5000 in the invasion of Iraq in less than a month, because it’s a very standard military munition to hit an enemy in a bunker underground. The U.S. used 35,000 artillery rounds in a five-month battle in Raqqa, Syria.

We know Hamas built its whole strategy to use its tunnels and to continue to go at a deeper depth. So you couldn’t get to them. And then they put people on top of them, civilians that they want to sacrifice. But there’s been this growing interest in the human rights community to ban the use of all bombs, missiles, mortars, artillery in urban areas, period. Then they said, how dare you use a munition of that size in an urban area, even if you’ve evacuated all the civilians.

We still, because of the moral values of our nation, follow the laws of war and the application of force in war. But if this is the standard – well, you can’t do that. You can’t go into a city unless you’ve evacuated it – all of these would actually have huge implications to the point where nations can’t wage war.

The laws of war were put in to put limits on the brutality of war, especially the Geneva Conventions after World War Two. We’re never going to indiscriminately bomb civilians to try to force their leadership to give up the will to fight. But when Israel is following every rule that’s ever been thought of, and implementing ones that nobody’s tried, it then gets told that, well, you’ve got to find a different way.

The human rights activist groups do great work. But their actual agenda is to prevent all war. And if you ban war, again, there’s a long history of trying to put limits on war, which has actually led to more destruction.

The invasion of Israel that happened was an act of war of Hamas. Israel, in accordance with the UN Charter, article 51, responded in self-defense. This war is the first time in history that I’ve ever seen where one side – not the Nazis, not the Japanese, not even ISIS – did things to get their entire population killed and says that’s how they want to achieve their political goals.

If you’re going to say that Western militaries should follow these laws we all agreed to, but here are some additional things that you need to follow, including “Don’t fight in urban areas,” it’s going to be very problematic for the future of all nations.

When I say that Israel is being held to a standard that nobody else is following, this is because the experts who are criticizing Israel’s operations in this war are using a standard called the Civilian Harm Mitigation guidelines, which were created over the last 20 years through best practices of commanders on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq during counterinsurgency and counter-terror operations.

It’s a collection of those practices that have actually never been implemented in totality. It’s a best practice. Like if you can, do these things. Even evacuating cities isn’t what you do in an invasion of another territory. That’s not what we did in invading Panama, invading Iraq, invading Afghanistan.

The whole purpose of war is to end it quickly so that it does limit the suffering of the populations that are caught in between. You do it with overwhelming force, surprise and speed. But this is a hangover from the war on terrorism, the counterterrorism, counterinsurgency period.

Hamas has learned from wars with Israel in 2008, 2014, 2021, that they need to go deeper with their tunnels, making it more of a challenge to get to them because their goal is not to fight. Their goal is just to wait the Israelis out until the international community stops Israel and tells them they can’t go another step, which has happened in the past.

Hamas is not an insurgency. Hamas has governed Gaza for 15 years. It’s not a state. They had all administrative control, built a massive military base, squandered billions of dollars instead of improving the lives of the Palestinian people in Gaza to build this terror military complex.

So the idea of even applying these standards, first. Okay, don’t go in with amazing speed to overwhelm the enemy and make them believe that they shouldn’t resist because they’ve lost the will to fight, which is the goal of war.

Israel waited over three weeks after October 7th to allow civilians to leave. And the world said, well, you can’t do that. You can’t evacuate a million people out of northern Gaza and into southern Gaza, into the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone. They said you couldn’t and Israel effectively did for over 850,000, which is like 85% of the population. Even in a counterinsurgency war, that would be a very high standard of success of evacuating the civilians, then launched their ground invasion. And then Israel started handing out maps of safe areas to help evacuate the civilians. No military in the world has ever handed out maps.

The IDF handed out their maps to the civilians and to Hamas, and telegraphed every move they were making. They also used advanced technologies, flying drones with speakers, using cell phone presence to know where the civilian presence was and then not going into those areas until they’ve been evacuated.

Counterinsurgency operations are different. One of the differences is time. So everybody gave Israel advice on the way to do it, on the way to bring the hostages home. Don’t launch a ground invasion. Just use raids. Look, I know it’ll take you a few years to get your hostages home, but just use raids and strategic strikes to take out Hamas leadership. That’s anti- historical, it has never happened. No military has ever been successful in doing something like that. So why would you think that would be working? It’s crazy, right? It’s not even a double standard. It’s like a standard that doesn’t exist. It’s never been in place, to include, don’t use any munition that will reach somebody in a bunker. Go send your soldiers in to be sacrificed. And don’t strike the enemy before you get there with a military munition, even if the city is empty of people. They literally are saying, don’t use those munitions in a city, even if you’ve emptied the entire city of people, even if you’ve done everything you can to mitigate civilian harm.

There’s never been a war in the history of humans where there’s been zero civilian casualties. Yes, we’ve created all kinds of things to limit civilian casualties. But Hamas spent years developing an environment with the sole purpose to get civilians killed if Israel ever entered that environment. Then there are all the libels of Israel not helping with the humanitarian crisis, when the UN has a thousand trucks are sitting at the Kerem Shalom crossing right now and the UN says, it’s not safe enough for us to deliver it, and there are armed groups taking the aid, so we’re just not going to do it.

It’s very problematic, and not just for Israel, because if this was another country with somebody telling them, hey, look, what you’re doing there, you can’t keep doing that. You need to find a different way to achieve your goals. Legitimate goals. We all recognize it. It’s a just war. Those are legitimate goals. But you need to find a different way. Well, what are your recommendations? Well, just don’t do it.

What would America have done in the same situation if somebody had just invaded our borders and taken hundreds of hostages, and started bombarding with 4,000 rockets launched on October 7th and 9,000 more since then?

General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for two presidents, said, what do you think I would have recommended to the U.S. president for us to do? We would have used overwhelming military force to achieve our objectives of bringing our people home and securing our borders and protecting our nation as quickly as possible.

Step one would be ensuring not a single rocket emanated out of enemy territory, headed towards our civilian areas like Los Angeles. General Milley has been very vocal, saying, of course, we would have used overwhelming force, immediate force. We have multiple divisions within a few hours of readiness that would have launched immediately to achieve our goals.

The number of civilian deaths reported by Hamas is a lie, is not accurate. There are not that many civilian casualties. But some of them are because of the way you forced Israel to execute this campaign. This way has caused hostages to stay in captivity longer. This way has caused civilians to die. This way has caused civilian suffering. The problem with applying this to the future is that you would increase the brutality of war.

There has never been a case like this where they’re taking the word of a terrorist organization, who admittedly will not tell you if any of the casualty numbers they are providing are actual combatants, individuals partaking in the hostilities. In the recent hostage rescue operation that Israel did, the world immediately started reporting on the numbers of civilians killed. If you’re a civilian holding a hostage, you’re partaking in the hostilities and you are not a part of the numbers of civilians. You’re no longer so.

The numbers that have been announced by Hamas do not count for a single combatant or a person partaking in the hostilities. I’ve never seen a war or a battle where somebody asked during the war, what’s the civilian to combatant ratio? It’s never been done, especially in urban combat where there is this mixing of civilians and combatants, when combatants are using human shields, and Hamas is using them for human sacrifice, literally saying they want as many of them to die as possible and acting to fulfill that. I’ve never seen anybody take a terrorist’s word for the number of casualties.

They use these numbers to wage libels against Israel, that they’re intentionally causing civilian harm, when every bit of evidence shows that they are doing the opposite. They’re trying to prevent civilian harm despite Hamas’s actions. In past wars, it was months, if not years, after an urban battle that they developed what the civilian death toll was.

ISIS was an insurgency in Iraq, holding territory that it was allowed to hold it for two years and built up its defenses. In the 2016-17 battle in Mosul, it was a year later that they came up with a number of civilian casualties which ranged from 10,000 to 40,000. Nobody in the moment was saying, hey, ISIS, how many civilians have died inside the city? That just crazy. And if somebody thinks that’ll be the standard for the next war, that when the war begins, you can ask what’s the civilian death toll right now? It’s impossible. There’s nobody who could ever do that.

All these laws of war, like hospitals are protected, for Israel has become, hospitals are untouchable, which is literally a vignette of the problematic misapplication of what the law actually says. What Hamas has done in convincing the world that these things are legal and mass media propagates those despite what’s actually happening on the ground, even if it’s not a. law. There’s so many things that people believe are laws that aren’t laws, like the fact that hospitals were untouchable.

Now hospitals are very protected and Hamas used every hospital in Gaza for military purposes, on purpose, because it’s a highly protected area where you’re required by law to announce to the enemy who’s using it to stop using it, and then take all precautions to prevent the harm to the wounded, to the medical staff, which Israel did. People have asked me, is that right? Is Israel violating the laws of war? No, they’re actually going above and beyond all the laws of war.

People don’t understand. Hamas is not trying to defeat the IDF. Hamas’s strategy, which the world has fallen into, is to convince the world that Israel is doing something wrong and that there is this great misbelief on what Israel is actually doing, and that all the suffering will just stop if Israel stops. No. the suffering for the Palestinian people will increase and will continue because Hamas says they don’t care about their own people.

This is the crazy world we live in where Israel has had to justify its right to defend itself. There’s a failure to recognize that while people say they don’t want another front, the fact is that Hezbollah began viciously attacking Israel in an act of war on October 8th and has launched thousands of rockets, drones, mortars, artillery at Israel to where 80-100,000 citizens are homeless for over eight months. Any other nation would find that unacceptable, but Israel has to justify its right to defend itself. This is the point where we’re at, where we continue to say, we don’t want escalation. Nobody wants a second front. But then, put pressure on the other party attacking Israel to stop doing that.

Israel has had to make very hard decisions about what it would need to defend itself against Hizbullah, a much greater threat than Hamas, with over 100,000 advanced munitions, over 100,000 rockets and missiles. The world says, well, figure out a way to make them stop. But don’t launch a self-defense war. I think it’s very problematic. I think Israel has tried every means, especially diplomatic and signaling, preparations to defend themselves, trying to convince the other combatant, in this case, Hizbullah, who is Iran’s cherry of a proxy since they’re all Iranian-backed proxies, as Iran pursues its grand strategy for the Middle East.

But this is the dilemma, and we don’t even have time to talk about Iran, a state actor attacking Israel during the midst of all of this, with a massive barrage to cause massive harm to civilians with over 300 cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones on April 13th, while this is all happening, and all the pressure is on Israel to do things a certain way and to not escalate things while it’s being attacked by so many enemies, all at once. That would be unacceptable to any other nation of the world.

In some ways, everybody’s fallen into the Hamas strategy of trying to force Israel to not achieve its goals, to not remove Hamas from power, to not bring their hostages home immediately, and to not respond to Hizbullah. But every nation’s primary goal is survival and the protection of its population, to include just the immediate but the grander picture.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the North, but I can tell you from logical military analysis that the current status cannot continue. The fact that it’s been allowed to continue thus far is very unfortunate for the Israeli people, but it cannot continue that Hizbullah attacks northern Israel at a massive cost to the Israeli nation, and that 100,000 Israelis are homeless.

I think Israel is absolutely winning the war, but I can’t tell you if they’re going to win the war. I think they’re achieving the military goals systematically. Despite all the constraints, the IDF are doing amazing things that blew my mind when I visited the forces in Gaza, and what they’ve been able to achieve despite the constraints put on them by the international community.

Just like Israel has in the past done the unachievable, things that people can’t even imagine, the IDF and Israel have found a way, despite the constraints, to not lose against Hamas, to continue to put military pressure to systematically dismantle its military capabilities in Gaza, things that people thought would never be possible and at great cost to Israel and the IDF. They’ve figured out a way to do the unimaginable. They need to continue that because they’re close to dismantling Hamas’s military capability.

I’ll leave you with one comment. The innovations of Israel and the IDF will save the lives of Americans in the future, from their approach to active protection systems on their vehicles, to how to deal with tunnel warfare, to how to preserve and protect civilians in combat, it will save lives in the future. Just like their innovations after the Yom Kippur War, how they did the unthinkable, changed the entire U.S. military land doctrine. It will save lives in the future. So that’s, for me, another reason why I do what I do. Because I know the amazing things that the IDF are doing will save lives around the world in the future.

John Spencer is Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch served as Director of the Military Prosecution for Judea and Samaria. Since retiring from the IDF, Hirsch worked as the Head of Legal Strategies for Palestinian Media Watch, as a Senior Military Consultant for NGO Monitor, an advisor to the Ministry of Defense, and head of an advisory committee in the Ministry of Interior. Hirsch was the architect of the Israeli law that strips citizenship from Israeli terrorists who have been convicted for terror offenses, sentenced to a custodial sentence, and receive a payment from the Palestinian Authority as a reward for their acts of terror.

#john spencer #war #research #haza #terrorist organization #urban warfare #consequences #military

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beardedmrbean · 2 years ago

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Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, recently threatened to boycott U.S. news outlets on its platform if Congress passes a law giving said outlets "greater power" to acquire a larger share of the platform’s ad revenue.

Media companies in favor of the law claim that Meta generates massive income from their news articles, while the social media platform pushed back by saying that Meta drives viewership to news sites.

BBC News reported on this brewing feud between the social media giant and news outlets, pending the passage of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA).

MARK ZUCKERBERG TELLS JOE ROGAN FBI WARNED FACEBOOK OF 'RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA' BEFORE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

The piece opened, stating, "Meta has threatened to remove news content from Facebook in the US. It objects to a new law that would give news organizations greater power to negotiate fees for content shared on Facebook."

The bill has yet to be enacted by Congress, however BBC News indicated that it has bipartisan support. It was first introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., with the intention of "tackling the dominance of Big Tech," BBC News claimed.

As the outlet reported, "It would give publishers and broadcasters greater powers to collectively bargain with social media companies for a larger share of ad revenue."

Media companies that support the bill claim that "Meta generates huge sums of money from news articles shared on the platform," while many outlets, especially local news, have "struggled during the pandemic."

FBI MET WEEKLY WITH BIG TECH AHEAD OF THE 2020 ELECTION, AGENT TESTIFIES

American Economic Liberties Project research director Matt Stoller claimed that media outlets have been "eaten alive" by Meta, and slammed the tech company for coming out against the bill. He added, "Meta's efforts to blackmail Congress prove again why this monopoly is a threat to democracies worldwide."

In a recent statement, Meta communications director Andy Stone blasted the bill, calling it "ill-considered," and characterizing it as government overreach.

He stated, "If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscription."

He added, "The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act fails to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line — not the other way around."

Stone claimed that the bill would be turning Meta into a "cartel-like entity which requires one private company to subsidize other private companies."

The BBC News report noted that in 2021, Meta – back when it was still called Facebook – suspended Australian news outlets because of a similar law passed in that country. It added, "The company quickly reversed the decision after wide-ranging criticism - brokering a deal with the Australian government."

#nunyas news #you want me to pay you to host your content

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roboe1 · 2 years ago

Link

#nancy pelosi

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 5 months ago

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“Israel is being measured by double and triple standards” in its fighting in Gaza, a standard “that does not exist anywhere in the world,” said John Spencer, head of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, at a recent “War Room” briefing in collaboration with the Jerusalem Institute for Public and State Affairs (JCPA).

Spencer, the world-renowned urban warfare who served for 25 years as an infantry soldier and did two tours in Iraq, has publicly and repeatedly defended and praised the Israel Defense Forces' performance during the Gaza War in recent months.

“The IDF uses tactics that no army has ever seen to prevent harm to civilians and still fulfill its mission,” Spencer told the JCPA after visiting the soldiers of the IDF’s 98th Division in the field.

He also stridently rejected international accusations that Israel was using starvation as a weapon, bombing indiscriminately or committing genocide.

“It’s all a lie,” Spencer declared, noting that if the standards currently applied to Israel were applied to Western countries in the future, it would make anti-terror warfare almost impossible.

Such standards include requiring the massive evacuation of a population before entering an area, not using heavy “bunker-buster” bombs to reach enemies hidden away underground, and the demand to prevent any and all civilian casualties.

“It’s impossible and unimaginable,” Spencer stressed.

“When ISIS ruled Iraq, it held the territory for about two years and built up its defenses. In the battles against the terrorist organization, the number of dead ranged from 10,000 to 40,000 people, and the numbers were reported only after a year,” Spencer said, criticizing the use of unreliable Hamas casualty numbers to determine the proportionality of Israel’s actions.

“No one posed a question to the United States then, how many civilians were killed? And no one asked ISIS that question. It’s simply impossible.”

“This imaginary standard of zero civilian casualties in a war where Israel is required to meet a new standard is very problematic,” Spencer emphasized.

He has made this point repeatedly over the past months. In an article in Newsweek in March, Spencer brought up the IDF’s operation at Al-Shifa Hospital as an example of the lengths the army goes to prevent civilian harm in Gaza.

“Israeli media reported that doctors accompanied the forces to help Palestinian patients if needed. They were also reported to be carrying food, water and medical supplies for the civilians inside,” Spencer wrote.

“None of this meant anything to Israel's critics, of course, who immediately pounced. The critics, as usual, didn't call out Hamas for using protected facilities like hospitals for its military activity.”

youtube

“In their criticism, Israel's opponents are erasing a remarkable, historic new standard Israel has set. In my long career studying and advising on urban warfare for the U.S. military, I've never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy's civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings.”

“The international community, and increasingly the United States, barely acknowledges these measures while repeatedly excoriating the IDF for not doing enough to protect civilians… Instead, the U.S. and its allies should be studying how they can apply the IDF's tactics for protecting civilians,” Spencer wrote.

#israel #double standards #double and triple standards #john spencer #urban warfare #idf #starvation as a weapon #Youtube

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bighermie · 2 years ago

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Cocaine Mitch strikes again

#nancy pelosi

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wouldnt-it-be-hilarious-if-i · 2 years ago

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New additions to the Reading List (Judaism edition)

currently listening to: mirrorball by taylor swift

Okay.

So, I'm currently reading Woke Antisemitism by David L. Bernstein and definitely realizing I can't avoid reading about Israel and Zionism if I want to understand anything about this topic on a genuine level. The book is super interesting, and I think it's a great read with a lot of very hot takes that are definitely at times a bit...questionable at first but if you hear him out, the points do make a lot of sense. I'm not talking about the antisemitism points, which I already agreed with. But some of his takes on white privilege, black culture, and feminism are a bit interesting.

One topic does keep coming up in the book, likely because it's very important. While I understand the points that he's making about how anti-Zionism, while not inherently antisemitic (from what I understand, like I said, I still need to do research), is often used as a vehicle for pretty blatant antisemitism on the left. He also talks a lot about how the left allows antisemitism to run rampant because of some of the topics I named above, and I actually agree with him. I can definitely see how an oppressor/oppressed hierarchy leaves out a lot of grey areas that Jews would historically fall into. It's an interesting take, and I'm glad to read it and get closer to understanding a bit about what it must feel and be like to be Jewish today. Obviously, this is only one man's opinion, but I do value every opinion I read because it matters to me that I read about this from every angle that I possibly can so that I am well-informed on how to be a better ally. To add to that, this man isn't just some guy. He's extremely qualified to speak on these issues, not just because he's a Jewish person living in the world today experiencing these issues, but because of his education and experience as well.

In 2016, He was President and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), Executive Director of The David Project ( from August 2010 to September 2014, and held senior roles with the American Jewish Committee (AJC). During his undergrad at Ohio State studying Philosophy and Jewish studies (he later goes on to get his masters in International Relations), he served on the National Jewish Student Leadership Board and was a huge pro-Israel activist on campus. Just after undergrad, he worked with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. It goes on an on, and his work has been centrally about progressive values, diversity and inclusion. He has also written tons of articles about antisemitism in the left since at least the 80s, and did a 44 minute interview regarding his book with a talk show.

His book heavily focuses on antizionism being used as a way to be antisemitic in the left, so I'm not even more interested in reading more about this subject than I was before so that I can understand his arguments more critically. I can't really form an opinion on something that I am neither affected by or know very little about, but I can say that his book is an incredibly insightful starting point (so far, I'm only on chapter 5 of 16) for anyone that wants an idea of different things to look into and research independently in order to gain a better understanding of the issues he's discussing (not just Zionism and Israel, but also Jewish life in the United States specifically).

Anyway, online, I found a few videos that explained the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really concisely, but I'd rather read about it a bit more than just depend on a few videos and documentaries on YouTube. I asked my friend about any suggestions she may have, and she told me that Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi was a good one (but warned that it wasn't a great intro book to everything), so I've added it to my list.

With that, here are a few books I found that (tentatively) seem to explain some things. I really want to have a well-rounded view of this subject, so I'm looking for books that discuss Israel and Palestine from all sides of the conflict. In this list, I'll separate Zionist related books from books that have to do with Israel, because from what I understand the two get conflated often even though they aren't interchangeable (as in the terms 'Jew', 'Israeli' and 'Zionist' are not often used today to mean their respective definitions, but rather the same thing, which they are not).

These books are a mixture of like textbook explanations and narrative accounts, since I like to get an idea of both the academic aspect of sensitive issues like this and the personal accounts from real people who are experiencing these things or who believe in specific things.

Books about Israel/Palestine and the conflict

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Hardcover by Ilan Pappe

Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel by Roger Mattson

Blood Brothers: The Dramatic Story of a Palestinian Christian Working for Peace in Israel by Elias Chacour

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict by Oren Kessler

Books about Zionism

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit

Zionism: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Stanislawski

A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century by Donald M. Lewis

A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel by Walter Laqueur

Notes:

I mostly chose the Short History of Christian Zionism so that I can examine my own bias in regard to Israel. I come from a conservative-lite, Catholic/Baptist, German (and African)-immigrant family, so when I was growing up, the only thing I learned about Israel was that it rightfully belonged to the Jews and was given to them after the Holocaust because of their suffering. My mom really stressed to me as a child and teenager that this was promised land.

That being said, I never learned anything about Palestine, or the conflict. A large portion of this was explained to me when I was like ten. If I did learn anything about Palestine, I think it was usually along the lines of, "Well, some people don't believe that, and they're very mad about it." Very they can stay mad sort of energy.

Now, this was my family's opinion. If I'm being honest, I didn't care one way or the other when this was explained to me as a child. But I did think, since this was the only real contact I had with the subject, that it was nice that Jews got to have Israel after so much suffering, and that they were very deserving of it since the Holocaust was so horrific. So, this was my thinking for many years until, honestly, I think when I got to college and met actual Muslims and Jews. At that point, I was actually incredibly shocked to learn that there was a whole conflict, it wasn't half as simple as it had been explained to me, and that conservative families straight up do not prepare their children for any real world understanding of international relations.

Anyways, so now here I am playing catch up to the rest of the world, per usual.

The title for The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi interests me because of the use of the words "settler colonialism." In a quick google search, I found that one argument is that "Jewish Israelis are 'settlers' who want to conquer more and more Palestinian land." I have no idea if this is true, but the term used in the title is a big part of why it's on the list, because you can immediately tell what the author's stance is and how the book may be framed. I chose My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit for similar reasons.

As I've said many times, I know very little about this and have no personal opinions about it as a result (meaning that I literally am not neutral, for or against anything rn because I need to do more research. My goal is just to understand rn.), so any titles that I choose are purely because of the reviews, popularity of the books, and/or any possible bias that I can detect naturally rather than from any real understanding of the issue. That's also why I chose a book on Christian Zionism as well, because I'm interested in how Evangelists have affected this issue as well and want to make sure I fully understand the thinking behind what I was taught as a child. Quite a few of the books I've chosen written by Israelis appear to be rather biased as well, so I think I'll be learning a lot historically and politically about this topic in such a way that I'll be able to really understand a lot of it from many different points of view.

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