Header pic: detail from a Guy Smallman photo taken in Lebanon
An Israeli missile came out of the sky, without any warning, and plunged straight through the roof of the building, the blast blowing the bodies of residents out of the windows. For those who survived, there’s the option to register online for government compensation for destroyed homes.
But it’s a hard decision. Registering online is giving your personal details and whereabouts to Palantir, and it’s Palantir AI that Israel uses for targeting decisions.
That’s the kind of story you hear when you listen to real journalists at work, the kind who have to crowdfund for air fares to visit the places our western governments are destroying. But you’ll only hear those stories from independent journalists, not the usual kind these days, not the kind whose opinions and conclusions are decided by corporate media bosses before they are allowed to go out ‘investigating’ things.
We spent the evening listening to Guy Smallman. He says he doesn’t generally speak to journalists. He works alone, or with a Lebanese, Arabic speaking friend. When we asked about the rest of the world’s journalists, he pointed out that whilst no western journalists are allowed in Gaza, there is nothing to prevent them coming to Lebanon and finding out things – well, nothing except their received mindsets. He told of a roomful of students calling out ‘Are you the BBC?’ when a speaker obediently left out the name of the perpetrator of a bombing (it was Israel). He told us how when mainstream journalists talk to people in Beirut about the Israeli bombing, they constantly ask them ‘do you blame Hezbollah?’, they agitate for the responses they want to hear to the extent that Guy sees them as bullies, and tormentors of the bereaved.
When Guy showed his photographs of the ruin of the homes I describe above, he told us of one astonishing survivor. A woman who was blown out of a second-floor window fell to her death with a babe in arms. That baby survived, and will now join the growing population of orphans and refugees that Lebanon is attempting to care for.
There are believed to be over a million displaced Lebanese people now, as a result of recent Israeli actions. Their numbers add to the hundreds of thousands of refugees, mainly Syrian and Palestinian, who were already in Lebanon before the recent attacks by Israel, chased from their homes by state-instigated violence which, to a large part is funded by US money and directed by western governments’ preferences.
There are also increasing numbers of Lebanese mutual aid groups. Far from the west’s attempts to portray western Asians as inherently barbaric, violence-prone people, Guy saw plenty of evidence of an opposite human reaction, which he likened to the early days of COVID in the UK (before the government’s determined efforts to confuse and divide people took hold). People react to crises by re-connecting with their communities, and looking for ways to help – and these were the people Guy had been talking to, and it was their opinions and experiences he is now talking about in the UK.
And he’s doing it because mainstream journalists won’t. He spoke about the massive publicity for that Jesus statue that an Israeli destroyed, and compared it to the near silence in reaction to the vast number of mosques in Palestine that have been despoiled and/or destroyed by Israel.
He discussed the nonsense coming from the media and from commentators both of the left and the right about those Golders Green ambulances. He compared it to conversations with first responders in Lebanon who said (as most UK first responders no doubt would) that it’s despicable to destroy ambulances, and that first responders always serve whoever needs them, that they wouldn’t dream of selecting by race or religion when on rescue missions.
There was far, far more in Guy’s presentation, and in the Q and A and conversations we had afterwards. You can find out more, and see some of guy’s superb photographs, on his Substack and PhotoShelter…
Click here for Guy’s Substack.
… and here is a letter we handed around for signatures last night, calling on our MP to speak up against Israel’s systematic slaughter of journalists.
Click here to read the letter to Helena Dollimore MP
… and this is my regular reminder to myself and all blog–readers that it’s more important than ever now to look out for truly independent journalists, investigators and reporters, whether you’re looking online, in print, or at events out in the real world. Mainstream ‘news’ has not been news for a long time but lately, it’s been worse than nothing.
Here’s JVL’s post-mortem on a recent BBC effort.
Now, I’m off to read some independent reports on how those court cases are going (the PA ban appeal, the Filton trial and the Ukrainian rent-boy fire-raisers one) because there’s no way the BBC or the corporate newspapers are going to say anything enlightening about them or anything else.
See you on the streets!
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Kay Green 