managing media. killing journalists

The first war photographs ever shot were not the ones by the famous Roger Fenton,  of the 1955 Crimean War .

 Calotypes shot by  a  British doctor in  Afghanistan should  take that prize.   Fredrick Scott Archer's 1851 calotypes  of the first  British Afghan war were the one sided  viewpoints of an obviously embedded , participant in  the British Empire's wars..Even though there was no control on what he could and  could not photograph, the limits of  the technology he used and and his official status in the  invading army, defined his images. He did not risk being shot by his own side. 

Things are very different now. Armies and the governments have learnt  their lessons from the Vietnam war. 

Media, today, has to be managed. Perceptions of the wars  have to be be carefully  controlled. The costs of losing the media wars is just too  high .  High enough to make the murdering of media an acceptable media management exercise.  

In the Iraq War, 136 journalists were killed. At least 15 of them -- about 11% of the total -- were killed by US forces, sometimes apparently with deliberate intent. (Consider that if some 500,000 US troops rotated through Iraq over the course of the way and 4000 of them were killed, that meant soldiers had a 1:125 chance of being killed there. With 136 dead journalists, there would have had to be more than 14,000 journalists covering the war for them to have the same odds of getting killed. It seems clear it is much more dangerous being a journalist in a US war than being a soldier!)

Back in 1983, the US, in one of the more ludicrous military actions in its long history of war, invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, on the pretext that it feared Cubans were building a military airbase there (actually Cuba had sent construction workers to the impoverished isle to help the country build a better commercial airport so as to improve its tourism business). During that invasion, which was conducted with a total media blackout despite almost no opposition (the main “enemy” putting up any resistance was a group of Cuban construction workers!), a group of seven journalists, including a reporter from the New York Times, attempted to reach the island on a small boat. They were blocked by a US destroyer, which warned them over a loudspeaker to turn around or be “blown out of the water.” The journalists gave up and retreated.

That little “war,” which was conducted from beginning to end with no reporters allowed in the battle zone, marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Pentagon and the press -- one where the military maintains complete control over access and information, both what is provided to the media, and what the public gets to learn.

Wikileaks released this video of a helicopter crew slaughtering civilians and two Reuters cameramen in Baghdad

When the US launched its invasion of Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait in 1991, it required all journalists covering the attack to be “embedded” with US forces. Prior to that time (with the exception of the Grenada War mentioned above), journalists, for example in Vietnam, were free to go anywhere in the war zone and to report what they saw. They were not tied to, or restricted to, specific military units. They faced risks, but the risks, as evidenced by the deaths of war correspondents, were caused by either land mines they encountered, or by enemy fire, not by fire from US forces.

That all changed with the Iraq War in 2003. At that time, the Pentagon continued with the same methods developed in the Gulf War, requiring journalists to be “embedded” with specific invading, or later, occupying units. Those journalists who chose not to be embedded were warned that they were putting themselves at much greater risk of being targets.

We know, from documents that were obtained and released by Wikileaks, that the Bush-Cheney administration considered, but fortunately eventually decided against, bombing the main studio and office building of Al-Jazeera Television in Qatar in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were known to be furious at what they considered to be the biased reporting on that war by the Arab-language TV news organization. This aborted plan to blow up the whole station, which would have resulted in huge casualties, casts in a very suspicious light the rocket and machine gun attack on the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad on April 8, 2002, during the US assault on Iraq’s capital city just a few weeks into the invasion. In that attack, Tareq Ayyaub, an Al-Jazeera cameraman, was killed and another journalist was injured. The US claimed it had inadvertently struck the Al-Jazeera building because of “shots fired from nearby,” but an investigation disclosed that Al-Jazeera had given the coordinates of its facility to US forces so it was known to be a press site, not a military target.

Furthermore, there was another attack that same day, this time by a US tank, which fired a 120 mm round at a balcony of the Palestine Hotel, where US forces knew that virtually the entire foreign press corps were holed up during the invasion. Killed on the balcony were Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and the Spaniard Jose Couso of Telecinco TV.

That said, the incidence of journalists being killed by US forces in recent US conflicts has been much, much greater than it ever was in earlier wars, such as the one in Vietnam, or in Korea or World War II, which inevitably begs the question of whether some of the journalist killing has been deliberate, perhaps with the intent of keeping journalists in line.

Certainly the White House discussion about whether to bomb Al-Jazeera’s main offices shows that there is a willingness, all the way up to the top of the US government, to view journalists as the enemy, and even to contemplate killing some of them to affect the coverage of a war. The bombing of the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad in the early days of the US invasion appears to have been a brazen attempt to do just that.

 During this latest Israeli assault and bombardment of the prison-territory of Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force fired several missiles directly at a building housing not only the Gaza Al-Aksa TV station, but a number of offices of foreign journalists. Two Al-Aksa cameramen were killed in the strike. Several other buildings housing foreign journalists have also been struck, and the Foreign Press Association for Israel and Palestinian Territories has stated that it believes the IDF is well aware of the locations of offices of foreign reporters in the territory. Israel has admitted to targeting the two Al-Aksa victims, claiming that working for the Hamas-owned station means they are Hamas “terrorists.” But as to whether the strikes on buildings occupied by foreign reporters is meant to be a message, or to keep them from covering the IDF attack on Gaza, that remains, like the US attacks on and killing of journalists, an open question.

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1438

amitav ghosh. great interview. a must read

The US and Australia are good examples—what happened was that European populations arrived on continents that were relatively underpopulated and had enormous resources. Basically, they created these extremely wealthy, but also extremely spend-thrift civilizations.

That quote echoes  what I have long believed.  The land grab, the plunder  of resources that actually belonged to   people  who were  wiped out is what created the wealth  of  so called western civilizations. 

The idea of "Nations" that narrowly define , contain and constrict people within narrow boundaries and narrower visions of themselves  is also an invention of  the West. 

I found this interview  worth every second i spend reading it.  It clarified some of my own thinking,  about  so many things. 

Guernica: You have written that in India, politics are a part of normal conversation; it’s not considered even talking about politics, it’s just speaking.

Amitav Ghosh: That’s right. When I call my mother on the phone—my mother is now 81—you would think that we would sit around asking “Oh, how are you? How is this?” Not a bit of it! The first thing she tells me, ‘Do you know what that demonstration was about yesterday?” I mean, it is just part of the fabric of our lives.

Guernica: That is a nice counter-balance to the US, which has a lot of apathy.

Amitav Ghosh: Yes, it’s true. Not just apathy, but a deliberate depoliticization.

Guernica: In a recent speech for the European Cultural Foundation, you addressed migration and climate change as factors contributing to the “crisis” and “catastrophe” our earth is now facing. You also said, “Nationalism is indeed one of the most pernicious threads in this helix of disaster.” How does nationalism contribute to our current situation? Is this the same patriotism that Captain Mukheriji spit in the face of?

Amitav Ghosh: Yes, I think it is in many ways a perfect example of that. If you take two examples, the US and Australia, both have made perfectly clear that they will make no move on climate change. At all costs they want to preserve their own standard of living if it be at the expense of destroying the whole world. It is nationalism carried to its greatest and most absurd extreme. Essentially what we are seeing is an absolute refusal to address any of the issues, to reach any kind of compromise geared toward the world community and absolute insistence on maintaining their own standards of living which are unbelievably wasteful and which have really essentially created the problem in the first place.

Guernica: Right. We know that if everybody in in the world were to live by the same environmental standards as people in the United States or Australia, it would be completely unsustainable. You mentioned in your speech that collective ideals and sacrifice for the greater good are values that have really disappeared from the US or Australia in that sense.

Amitav Ghosh: The US and Australia are good examples—what happened was that European populations arrived in continents that were relatively underpopulated and had enormous resources. Basically, they created these extremely wealthy, but also extremely spend-thrift civilizations that are just big predators; just sucking everything up. There has been incredible resource extraction, to a point where now their own ecosystems are collapsing. Most of all in the US, where the aquifers have been drained and they are no longer able to sustain agriculture. It all grew out of this idea that everyone should pursue their own profit at all costs and no value is attached to the common good. The common good is a principle that literally doesn’t exist in the US discourse anymore.

Ideas that developed in the new world have for the last 40 or 50 years been promoted as the model of a kind of ideal global civilization where every country and people everywhere are supposed to just squeeze out everything they can from wherever they are at the cost of everyone else.

Guernica: Do you think that we can come to a point where nations that have been in a position of supremacy could have some sort of a realization? What would it take?

Amitav Ghosh: At this point I have to say that I feel very despondent, as I think everybody does. I have friends who are scientists and climate scientists and, even though they won’t say so in public, they all recognize that the game is over. By 2030, they are going to see a catastrophic impact. Look at New York City last year, this year. Two freakish storms. Clearly there are global warming impacts on these two storms. But even the newspapers don’t mention it. It is just completely suppressed. So what can you say? The whole idea of free speech, free press, free expression, is that the truth is spoken. But what we see now is that the U.S. and Great Britain, these countries with so much clout, free speech and free press, have created a system of press and politics whereby what stares you in the face cannot be said. I would say it is even worse in a way than the sorts of things that we saw happening under forms of totalitarianism.

Amitav Ghosh: Two things have happened of late in the world of writing: One is that increasingly the world of literature/writing is becoming absorbed into this culture of diversion and entertainment, and I think some of these festivals are a part of that. Essentially, it is a part of the whole process of global distraction, which presents itself as a sort of contribution to writing, but it is nothing of the kind; it is just a field of distraction. I feel that it is important for writers like myself to have an interface with the public and I think the Internet does allow this. So why should I bother with festivals? I can address people directly through my blog. And my blog gets around half a million hits a month. I can address people directly without that sort of mediation which corporate media requires. The big media always wants you to tell their story and [my blog] is the clever way for me to talk about things that I want to talk about.

Guernica: You mention the dangers of an author becoming a spectacle or a performer from new sources of pressure—not from a tyrannical or suppressive government but from private interest groups, social groups, political groups who are disseminated through the internet. Do you still feel this pressure because you are actively using the internet and your blog?

Amitav Ghosh: The pressure doesn’t just come from the inside. What I would say today is that the primary threat to free speech and expression, the ways in which it has changed since the 20th century, is that the primary threat to freedom of expression comes from non-state actors. All the instruments that we have for defending free expression are essentially related to the state. We have various writers groups like PEN and so on, and they honed their skills and tactics to deal with repressive states. But they don’t have any tactics for dealing with extremist groups, and that is a much more real threat to writers today than it used to be. And in many ways, these extremists have actually won. There are many sorts of things that nobody will say anymore—or they have to find other ways of saying it. I feel that the way that people are addressing the question of freedom of speech and freedom of expression today continues to be rooted in the 20th century, that hasn’t made the transition to the 21st century.

What can you say? In a way our mammalian instincts have left us unprepared to deal with something so new.

I can tell you as a practicing writer that we feel much more alone today than we did ever before. Suppose someone writes something that is offensive to X group, and the X group says “we are going to do this and that to you.” What can we do? There is nothing to protect the writer. In fact, we live in a circumstance where the writer appeals to the state: “Protect me!” And, more often than not, it is the state that is providing that protection. We see this even in India, let alone in the West. So in a sense, the tools we have developed are tools that are geared toward something else. I don’t what the answer is, but it seems to me that if PEN were to pick up the problem, they should develop a fund where writers offer protection to other writers.

In societies like the ones we would like to live in, it is the journalists whose rights must be most urgently protected because they have to tell us what is going on. And of course that is one of the reasons we have to be very wary and suspicious of what the state does. But, what is perfectly clear now, is that we have to be much more wary and suspicious of corporations, because in fact so much of the suppression of freedom of speech comes from corporations rather than the state. Just consider the U.S. or Britain: they guarantee freedom of speech in their constitutions, but corporations routinely make their employees sign confidentiality agreements. How is that even possible?




 But, the thing is that it is a mistake to think that these things can be addressed at an individual level. And that is the catastrophic mistake that we have made in thinking about it. These things have to be addressed collectively. For me to reduce my own carbon footprint, while the oil industry is encouraging everyone to expand their footprint, it is incensed. It is like trying to cut down a tree by eating its leaves; it will never happen that way.

http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/amitav-ghosh-products-of-folly/

of hegemonies and demonisation

 What would/could one find wrong with what Ahmedinejad says? It is, after all, the reality  of the world that  he is describing.  Yet , the demonisaton of the man and his country , will make many just suspicious and angry with what he  lays out so clearly.

Nobody walked out when he delivered his speech. There were no protests on the  streets outside.. And the visa to attend the meeting probably came without the problems Iranians face  when they have to attend meetings in even, the UN.

One has to remember that it was the decision Iran made  to use the profits from its oil industry for its own people that made  the USUK  overthrow its democratically government in the middle of the last century.And it is this policy that is still the reason for more than just the demonisation of the country and its President.  The crippling sanctions Iran faces have a lot do do with its refusal  to accept the USUK hegemony.



"Former colonial powers and slave masters in a new guise and with new slogans are using different methods and tactics to dominate and plunder resources of nations on the basis of the same hegemonic doctrines," he said.

"Militarism, occupations and violation of other countries' national sovereignty have been rising as in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, the president added. "Because of their predominance over the world monetary system, worthless paper assets were printed to loot and deplete systematically the wealth and resources of nations."

He added that a fundamental change and establishment of a new humane order require a firm resolve and joint efforts of all.



"We can and we must cooperate to exploit appropriately these resources and potentials towards the prosperity of our nations and for reforming the present world order," he said.

"We all seek to put an end to hegemony, unilateralism, occupation, arms race and violation of countries' sovereignties," he noted.

http://en.trend.az/regions/iran/2091224.html

terror , technology and tearing up the constitution and humanity

It's easy to forget sometimes, but here's the world we're living in: over the past several years, the United States has conducted hundreds of drone strikes under the secret authority of the CIA—which is accountable to no one—resulting in the deaths of several thousand people. These people are killed based on a process that creates a secret list that is disclosed to no one outside of the intelligence community elite, and executed via flying robots, which track humans from above and then blow up them up with Hellfire missiles in the sovereign territory of other countries.

According to members of the panel selected by Kucinich's office, the CIA frequently engages in the practice of "double tapping"—firing a second Hellfire volley after the initial blast, often killing emergency workers and first responders, and clearly violating international law. Reports of CIA targeting "chips" were also mentioned, a shadowy practice wherein the CIA distributes tracking chips to lock in Hellfire strikes, presumably planted on suspicious targets by trusted local informants. Increasingly, though, the panel reported, the chips are now used as a black market currency, allowing tribal Pakistanis to buy an assassination against, say, a local foe, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Kucinich: No, not at all! It isn't a question of whether the technology is so far out of the box that we can't roll it back, the question is have we put the Constitution in a box and buried it. That's the question

Gizmodo: What do you think that does to our humanity, as a country that wages war that way?

Kucinich: It is not just a target that is obliterated, it is our own humanity. So we are moving into a world and creating a time and space which may become post-human. Food that's genetically engineered. Robots that fights wars. A surveillance society that gathers pieces of information and stores them for use at a later date. Cloning. Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that the greatest technological advances of mankind are processes that all but destroy the societies in which they occur

The Obama administration isn't going to budge a micron when it comes to the business of secret robot killing. The CIA is, well, the CIA—secret killing is its bread and butter. But the tragedy of people who either shrug, "Drones, sure"—or don't even know the campaigns happen—is a massive one. Our America is one ignorant of its robot war, the most advanced, secretive, and concerning in military history. Humans have simply never killed each other this way before. And it's too secret for us to know almost anything about.

But the notion of inscrutable extrajudicial death from above rubs you the wrong way, talk about it. Think about it. Tell someone else about it. Argue about it. Disagree with me. Disagree with Congressman Kucinich. Maybe you don't find CIA drone strikes disturbing. But to conduct a war by tiny robots and put it out of mind, silent, like a bad spring break? That's something that should make us all ill.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/new-army-arsenal/?pid=1651&viewall=true

mapping the thanksgiving take, take, take

Would be interesting to see a similar map of Palestine .

Click on this map , created by Lousiana State professor Sam B. Hillard, to see the rapid loss of land by the Native Americans--starting from when Columbus "discovered" the America and ending in 1895, when native people retained only 2.3 percent of their original land.

http://www.alternet.org/immigration/map-destruction-how-europeans-stole-native-land?akid=9709.293530.DieBL2&rd=1&src=newsletter748607&t=18

"a pre-eminent state propagandist and censor by omission " the bbc

Just heard the "new '  Director General of the Beeb,  a former head of its news division, talk about how inherently important  the BBC was to British Identity and 'what an incredible impact" it has around the world. And then I came across this article . Perfect timing. Great coincidence.   A pointer to the future where nothing will change - will not be allowed to change.

What happened to The War Game is the function of the state broadcaster as a cornerstone of Britain's ruling elite. With its outstanding production values, often fine popular drama, natural history and sporting coverage, the BBC enjoys wide appeal and, according to its managers and beneficiaries, "trust". This "trust" may well apply to Springwatch and Sir David Attenborough, but there is no demonstrable basis for it in much of the news and so-called current affairs that claim to make sense of the world, especially the machinations of rampant power. There are honourable individual exceptions, but watch how these are tamed the longer they remain in the institution: a "defenestration", as one senior BBC journalist describes it. 

This is notably true in the Middle East where the Israeli state has successfully intimidated the BBC into presenting the theft of Palestinian land and the caging, torturing and killing of its people as an intractable "conflict" between equals. Standing in the rubble from an Israeli attack, one BBC journalist went further and referred to "Gaza's strong culture of martyrdom". So great is this distortion that young viewers of BBC News have told Glasgow University researchers they are left with the impression that Palestinians are the illegal colonisers of their own country. The current BBC "coverage" of Gaza's genocidal misery reinforces this.

The BBC's "Reithian values" of impartiality and independence are almost scriptural in their mythology. Soon after the corporation was founded in the 1920s by Lord John Reith, Britain was consumed by the General Strike. "Reith emerged as a kind of hero," wrote the historian Patrick Renshaw, "who had acted responsibly and yet preserved the precious independence of the BBC. But though this myth persisted it has little basis in reality... the price of that independence was in fact doing what the government wanted done. [Prime Minister Stanley] Baldwin... saw that if they preserved the BBC's independence, it would be much easier for them to get their way on important questions and use it to broadcast Government propaganda."

Unknown to the public, Reith had been the prime minister's speech writer.  Ambitious to become Viceroy of India, he ensured the BBC became an evangelist of imperial power, with "impartiality" duly suspended whenever that power was threatened. 

This "principle" has applied to the BBC's coverage of every colonial war of the modern era: from the covered-up genocide in Indonesia and suppression of eyewitness film of the American bombing of North Vietnam to support for the illegal Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the now familiar echo of Israeli propaganda whenever that lawless state abuses its captive, Palestine. This reached a nadir in 2009 when, terrified of Israeli reaction, the BBC refused to broadcast a combined charities appeal for the people of Gaza, half of whom are children, most of them malnourished and traumatised by Israeli attacks. The United Nations Rapporteur, Richard Falk, has likened Israel's blockade of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto under siege by the Nazis. Yet, to the BBC, Gaza - like the 2010 humanitarian relief flotilla murderously attacked by Israeli commandos - largely presents a public relations problem for Israel and its US sponsor.

Mark Regev, Israel's chief propagandist, seemingly has a place reserved for him near the top of BBC news bulletins. In 2010, when I pointed this out to Fran Unsworth, now elevated to director of news, she strongly objected to the description of Regev as a propagandist, adding, "It's not our job to go out and appoint the Palestinean spokesperson".

With similar logic, Unsworth's predecessor, Helen Boaden, described the BBC's reporting of the criminal carnage in Iraq as based on the "fact that Bush has tried to export democracy and human rights to Iraq". To prove her point, Boaden supplied six A4 pages of verifiable lies from Bush and Tony Blair. That ventriloquism is not journalism seemed not to occur to either woman.

Understanding the BBC as a pre-eminent state propagandist and censor by omission - more often than not in tune with its right-wing enemies - is on no public agenda and it ought to be.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33126.htm

targeting journalists.

Controlling media is at the heart of Israeli power. Media  ownership   is at the top end of the  control system. The fear  of advertising withdrawal  keeps a lot of the international media quiet.  Flooding  media with  "public" objections  to  Israel critical content works wonders even when the media realise that most of the letters accusing them of being Anti-Semite  are coordinated, form generated mail. 

 When all the usual methods fail  killing journalists becomes the norm. Bribery, Blackmail and the use of fear seems to be normal media management for many, usually( but not always) totalitarian regimes. 

The case of the Indian journalist  who did not subscribe to  the western story line in Iraq and the Middle east comes to mind.  Syed Mohammed Kazmi was arrested in  connection with an attack on Israeli officials. He  is a well known  journalist  and had  been working for  Indian  and Iranian media organizations. He still has to be tried or released. Knowing how  the India police work   and  knowing the  the Indian media scene I  can sense  an Israeli influence that   wants his voice silenced. 

What  happened  to journalists  in Palestine is, for me,  no surprise.  The American  armed forces in Iraq  and Afghanistan  had targeted Al Jazeera's  journalists and offices, I remember. With  arrests and missiles. 

In its most recent assault on the Gaza Strip, which Israel called ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’, 162 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,100 injured. Three Palestinian journalists were killed and more than a dozen injured in targeted Israeli air strikes.

Related IPS Articles

• In Gaza, Another Eight Days of Killing
• Attacks on Gaza Unite Palestinians
• Now Netanyahu Needs an ‘Iron Dome’

According to MADA, the Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms, the Israeli army has killed 18 journalists, including two foreign journalists, in the past decade.

“They have classified journalists as enemies. They don’t want the world to know what they’re doing in Gaza, what the crimes of the Israeli soldiers are. I think they didn’t want the information to go from Gaza to outside,” Najjar, who is managing editor of the Al-Ayam daily newspaper said.

On Nov. 20, two Palestinian cameramen from Al-Aqsa TV were killed instantly when an Israeli missile hit their car, which was reportedly marked with “TV” in neon letters. The two journalists – Hussam Mohammed Salama, 30, and Mahmoud Ali al-Koumi, 29 – were on their way to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to document the admission of injured Palestinians.

The same day, a third journalist, Mohamed Abu Aisha, director of Al-Quds Educational Radio, was killed when a missile hit his car.

Reporters Without Borders called the Israeli attacks “deliberate” and, in a statement released Wednesday stated that “journalists are entitled to the same protection as civilians and should not be regarded as military targets.”

Almost a dozen reporters were also injured when Israeli air strikes hit buildings housing local and foreign media offices in Gaza City on three separate occasions. These buildings housed the offices of Al Arabiya, Agence France-Presse, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an, and Russia TV among others.

Al-Aqsa TV’s Gaza offices were completely destroyed during the offensive, resulting in a financial loss of approximately six million dollars, and the offices of the Al-Risala weekly newspaper were also damaged.

“There aren’t any red lines anymore,” Younes said. “Everything might be a target, as long as there is this political cover and as long as (the Israelis) believe that they are immune, above the law, and can do whatever they want without being investigated.”

http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/11/israel-targets-media-in-gaza/

Kazmi speaks Arabic and Persian in addition to his mother tongue Urdu (aka Hindi). Kazmi had covered the 2003 American attack on Iraq and was a regular freelance contributor to Iran’s Radio Tehran. Kazmi is also accused of being pro-Syrian government as he visited Syrian in February accompanied by John Cherian, another senior Indian journalist. On March 11, Delhi police raided John’s flat. John is also known for his strident anti-Israel views. However, police later apologized to John for the mistake.

Saeed Naqvi, a senior Indian journalist, who’s worked with Kazmi and has been arguing publicly for him, says, “He was arrested to please those pressuring the government to create a link between Iran and the attack. Muslim and Urdu journalists leave a bad odour these days.” He says it’s part of a larger campaign against journalists who seek to challenge the “global information order”, especially about unfolding events in West Asia. “For example, when the Israelis killed off Iranian nuclear scientists, the debate in the US media was not about whether this was right or wrong but about whether it helped retard Iran’s nuclear programme. Clearly, there are two sets of rules working here.”

http://rehmat1.com/2012/03/21/mossad-iran-syria-and-indias-muslim-journalist/