David Cronin
The daily press briefing at the European Commission seldom fails to illustrate the cozy relationship between journalists and the powerful. So harmonious is this rapport that many of its attendees “graduate” from being spoonfed stories by official EU spokespersons to eventually becoming spokespersons themselves.
Michael Mann offers a case in point. He used to be on the staff of The Financial Times. Today, he commands a higher salary as a mouthpiece for Catherine Ashton, the Union’s foreign policy chief. Part of his job involves regurgitating Israeli propaganda.
This week he issued a statement which claims that Israel’s latest bombardment of Gazaconstitutes “retaliatory fire.” Everything is in response to rockets launched by Palestinians, he suggested.
There is no acknowledgement that Israel has been subjecting Palestinian civilians tocollective punishment – in clear violation of international law. There is no mention of the seven-year siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza. There is no recognition that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has used the murder of three Israeli teenagers as a pretext to kill much higher numbers of Palestinian children in recent days (more than twenty children have been killed in Gaza over the past few days, a death toll that is likely to rise).
Instead, there was an anodyne call for “restraint.”