marathon01

Here is yet another example of stunningly craven journalism from the Guardian, entirely illustrative of what is going on across the British establishment media in its coverage of Israeli war crimes in Gaza for the past 18 months.

We are now a month on from Israel executing 15 paramedics and hiding their bodies in a mass grave. Since then, video footage has surfaced of that atrocity, showing Israeli soldiers firing on a convoy of emergency vehicles that were clearly marked and with their warning lights on. We have had postmortems of the victims showing they were shot from close-range in the head and torso. And we've had eye-witness accounts of the killings.

All of that, of course, is on top of compelling circumstantial evidence. Israel sought to destroy the evidence of its war crime by crushing the emergency vehicles and then burying them, along with the bodies of the 15 crew members, presumably in the hope that they would decompose and make it hard to forensically determine exactly what had happened.

The latest evidence to emerge, reported by Israel's Haaretz newspaper this week, shows that Israeli soldiers fired continuously for three and a half minutes on the convoy, despite the emergency vehicles being clearly marked.

According to details from an internal investigation by the Israeli military leaked to the paper, the soldiers fired from near-point-blank range and even while the emergency workers were trying to identify themselves. (Not surprisingly, the other parts of the investigation, those made public, have been a whitewash, suggesting only “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”.)

In other words, this new evidence confirms that Israeli soldiers intentionally murdered most of the occupants of the emergency vehicles with a prolonged hail of bullets. Those who survived, the postmortems suggest, were executed with shots to the head or torso. Then the evidence was hurriedly buried.

None of this is surprising. We have known for some time, as repeatedly reported by the Israeli media, that the Israeli military has created undeclared “kill zones”, where anything that moves is shot – even children, aid workers and emergency crews.

As has also been evident for most of the past 18 months, Israel is implementing a policy to destroy Gaza's health sector, including its hospitals and ambulances, and killing or kidnapping medical staff – on top of wrecking the rest of the enclave's infrastructure. The goal is to force the Palestinian population out of Gaza, driving them into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.

Israel is carrying out a genocide to facilitate its ethnic cleansing plan.

The murder of the 15 paramedics entirely fits with this picture.

The video evidence has already proven that Israel's original claim that the ambulances and fire engines were “advancing suspiciously” – whatever that is supposed to mean – was utterly untrue.

Israel's other implausible claim, that several of the emergency crew were really Hamas fighters in disguise, has been thoroughly debunked too. The biographies of those murdered by Israel show they have long been emergency workers. Israel has been relying on this kneejerk excuse every time it gets caught lying about its latest atrocity.

So how on earth is the Guardian still writing a headline like this:

New details on killing of paramedics in Gaza appear to contradict IDF’s account

Or writing a first paragraph like this one:

New developments have come to light in the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip last month, with evidence reportedly contradicting the Israel Defense Forces’ claim that soldiers did not fire indiscriminately at the medical workers.

The “evidence” cited by the Guardian is a reference to the Haaretz report of Israeli soldiers firing for three and a half minutes on the convoy.

The Guardian’s wording falsely suggests two things. First, that the Israeli military's account of the killings still has enough credibility that it needs contradicting. And second, that Haaretz’s latest evidence only “appears to contradict” an account that has already been so repeatedly contradicted that it cannot be entertained as true on any level whatsoever.

The Guardian’s phrasing is also utterly subservient to Israel. The Israeli military framed its internal investigation as if its aim was to determine whether soldiers fired “indiscriminately” or not – so that it can then claim to have concluded that they did not fire indiscriminately.

That presumably means the Israeli military wants us to believe its soldiers shot at the emergency vehicles with precision and intention – in this case, to kill those “Hamas fighters” invented retroactively by the Israeli military to justify its atrocity.

The Guardian buys into this framing, suggesting that the unpublished part of the investigation found that the three and a half minutes of live fire at the vehicles was actually “indiscriminate” rather than intentional.

The reality is far worse: it was both. Israeli soldiers fired indiscriminately at the vehicles with the intention of killing all of the emergency workers inside. The issue of “discrimination” is meant only to serve as a red herring.

Before Haaretz’s new disclosure it was already clear that the Israeli military’s account was a pack of lies. So why is the Guardian not doing its job? Why is it still pretending a month on that the Israeli military’s version has not already been thoroughly discredited?

Even a highly cautious headline from the Guardian ought to read like this:

New details on killing of paramedics in Gaza further discredit IDF’s account

And the text should read:

New developments have come to light in the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip last month, with an internal Israel Defense Forces’ investigation reportedly finding its soldiers fired a prolonged hail of bullets from close range at a clearly marked convoy of emergency vehicles.

Any rookie journalist knows the Guardian is reporting this all wrong. It keeps giving Israel the benefit of the doubt, even after the case against Israel has been proven. It keeps fudging the story. It keeps suggesting that Israel’s guilt is not already an incontrovertible, established fact.

If this isn’t clear to you, just imagine how this story would have been reported were the executed paramedics Ukrainian and the soldiers responsible Russian. Not like this, you can be sure.

Why are a whole team of highly experienced Guardian journalists still getting this story so wrong? It is not because they are incompetent. They get it wrong because it is their job to do so: they work for a corporate media outlet, one that exists within a corporate news system that serves a corporate financial system that is protected by corporate political structures.

Or for shorthand, these journalists – whether they understand it or not – work for the British establishment, advancing British foreign policy goals that are subservient to Washington’s imperial demands for global full-spectrum dominance.

The role of corporate advertising is clear. It is there to make us want to consume, to encourage us to feel that we need more to be complete, to cultivate an aspiration in us to a materially “better” way of life. People in the advertising industry don’t think of themselves as monsters. Nonetheless, the profession’s goal is to create an endless demand for resources on a finite planet. Ultimately, it is to will the suicide of our species.

The role of the corporate media is no different. It is there to create the illusion that we are the masters of our own thoughts. It is there to make us think we have reached an independent understanding of the world, even though that understanding has been carefully crafted for us from birth. It is there to cultivate a worldview in us that aligns precisely with the privileging of a tiny corporate elite whose wealth depends on the relentless pillaging of the planet for their benefit.

Journalists don’t think of themselves as monsters either. Nonetheless, they are part of a media machine whose goal is to lull us into passivity as our leaders actively collude in the perpetration of a genocide, as our corporations, militaries and intelligence services press ahead with endless wars for resource control, and as the tripwires of nuclear confrontation grow ever more numerous and entangled.

No one wants to think of themself as a monster. But we keep doing monstrous things.

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After fervently denying that they relied on financial support from the US government, the supposedly “independent” Russian language paper Meduza has been thrown into existential crisis following the Trump administration’s pause on foreign development assistance Alexey Kovalev, a self-described “Russian journalist currently living in exile for fear of persecution back home,” had spent much of his career at Meduza, the leading opposition media outlet in Russia. Since leaving the paper under mysterious circumstances in the summer of 2023 and relocating to London, Kovalev has split time writing commentaries for Foreign Policy and attacking reporters at The Grayzone, whom he has falsely painted as Russian assets, while calling for their imprisonment.

“The Grayzone is Russia’s US-based disinformation laundromat,” Kovalev ranted in a July 2024 blog post. “This conspiracy blog’s founders, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal, help the Kremlin disseminate its false narratives in exchange for favors from a senior Russian government official Dmitry Polyansky, the country’s deputy ambassador to the UN. They act as unregistered foreign agents and should be investigated by the Department of Justice for possible FARA violations.”

“Independent” journalist Alexey Kovalev left Meduza under mysterious circumstances, and has spent much of his time since clamoring for Grayzone reporters to be persecuted by the US government. Nearly every word Kovalev wrote was false; The Grayzone has no financial or political relationship with the Russian government, and none of its reporters have received favors from Polyansky or any other Russian official.

Now that the self-exiled troll’s former employers at Meduza have been plunged into a financial crisis by the Trump administration’s pause on foreign development assistance, Kovalev’s smears of The Grayzone have been exposed as an exceedingly embarrassing exercise in projection.

As The New York Times reported this February 26, grants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) reportedly accounted for 15% of the outlet’s budget. So while The Grayzone accepts no foreign state support, it turns out that Meduza can not survive for a day without a constant cash infusion from its government sponsors in Washington.

Meduza’s covert US funding was revealed in a New York Times article lamenting the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts in funding for various US-financed destabilization and regime change programs across the world. According to the Times, the cuts to USAID could potentially damage Meduza’s operations more than “cyberattacks, legal threats and even poisonings of its reporters.”

The outlet went on to note that while a handful of other Western countries like Germany and Norway “contribute to independent media,” their share is “tiny in comparison with American funding.” Simultaneously, “many traditional media supporters” – including the CIA-connected Ford Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, a “giant grant maker” – have “abandoned much of [their] media funding.” A Columbia University lecturer complained the Trump administration’s aid pause was “really a blood bath.”

While a 2021 investigation by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed several grants and pledges of assistance from NATO states to Meduza, the outlet’s leadership fervently denied any suggestion of foreign sponsorship. The new revelations by the Times reveal Russia’s top opposition outlet as anything but the “independent” paper they marketed to the public.

Leaked UK files suggest Meduza’s role as NATO state-backed project Rumors about Meduza’s Western funding have swirled since its creation in October 2014, after its founder, Galina Timchenko, was fired from one of Russia’s most popular news portals for publishing an interview with the leader of Western-backed Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group, Right Sector. That same month, Meduza cofounder Ivan Kolpakov flatly refused to reveal the outlet’s funding sources in discussions with Western media:

“I can’t tell you whether those financing the Meduza Project are Russian or foreign. There’s a huge discussion about our investors among Russian journalists, with some saying we have to tell people who they are. Yes, in a fairer world we probably should, but not in Russia in 2014. We have to protect our product and we have to protect our investors.”

A leak of sensitive British Foreign Office files obtained by The Grayzone in early 2021 contained clear indications that the outlet was funded by Western governments. The documents named Meduza as one of the “specific outlets” whose “viability… as long term partners” was being assessed as part of a broader clandestine effort by London to “weaken the Russian state’s influence.” Several veteran-run contractors charged with achieving this goal named the publication as an ideal conduit for anti-Kremlin propaganda.

Chief among these shady groups was a psyop specialist firm called the Zinc Network. In confidential submissions to the British government, Zinc noted that it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” to both Meduza and MediaZona, another supposedly independent outlet launched by US-funded anti-Putin provocateurs Pussy Riot. Zinc stated, “the outlets lack the expertise and tools to understand their audience profiles or consumption habits, and to therefore promote content effectively to new audiences.”

A separate submission stated Zinc Network was “supporting Russian language media outlets across Eastern Europe by developing audience growth strategies,” under the auspices of a “pioneering media development programme for USAID,” strongly indicating its cloak-and-dagger collaboration with Meduza was financed by Washington. Elsewhere, the contractor committed to providing intensely intimate assistance to all its Russian assets, including “counselling and mental health support.” This was inspired by the politically motivated June 2019 arrest of Meduza reporter Ivan Golunov, for which law enforcement officials involved were fired.

The same document also contained a pledge to “increase search ranking and visibility” of media platforms like Meduza, by teaching them search engine optimization techniques, as well as “paid search activity for priority phrases” training in order to direct people searching for the phrase “news in Russian” away from RT. Fittingly, in a dig at the Russian state broadcaster, Meduza adopted the slogan “The Real Russia, Today,” sarcastically tweaking RT’s former name.

At the time, this journalist submitted questions to Kolpakov, as well as then-Meduza investigations editor Alexey Kovalev, about the documents suggesting NATO state support for their outlet. In one email correspondence, Kovalev alleged Meduza was financed purely by online advertising revenue from “high profile clients,” supposedly even including the Kremlin itself.

Albany expressed particular interest in Meduza’s online games, which “encourage participation through social media and mobile platforms” and “embrace political themes (e.g. “Putin Bingo,” “help Putin get to his meeting with the Pope on time” and “help the Orthodox priest get to his church without succumbing to earthly pleasures”).

The contractor hoped to assist the outlet in creating more online games, “the aim [being] to create content which is good enough to have a pull effect amongst Russian-speaking youth” in Moscow’s near abroad. Ultimately, the aim was to create “satirical games” which would demonstrate the superiority of Western European culture over Russia’s, or as (they put it) that “the offer of a fairer, respectful, and caring society is better than that of an arrogant, nationalistic regime.”

It is uncertain if this British-financed sponsorship materialized. However, these disclosures led to Meduza being labelled a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities. The outlet complained that on top of being compelled to report all the website’s income and expenses to Moscow’s Justice Ministry, the classification also had the potential to damage Meduza’s advertising revenue. The label was slammed as a gross attack on independent media by Western press rights groups, and the European Union.

These days, Meduza apparently needs all the overseas financial help it can get. As the NY Times noted, Meduza was just one “of hundreds of newsrooms in dozens of countries” collectively raking in $180 million annually in funding from USAID, the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy to “support journalism and media development.”

“Kill all the bad people”: diaries of a madman With its financial pipeline to Washington severed by the Trump administration, mass layoffs at Meduza seem inevitable. Meanwhile, after spending months falsely accusing Grayzone reporters of serving as Russian assets, the former Meduza reporter Kovalev has gradually descended into a state of apparent madness.

In a widely ridiculed Telegram post on February 13, 2025, Kovalev declared that one of his goals for 2025 was to “kill all the bad people… and oppress our enemies,” declaring, “I will need the help of the community.”

The “bad people,” he explained, were not just the Russian nationalists who follow Putin, but those among his liberal opponents who had grown weary of the Ukraine proxy war, and begun calling for a settlement to end the killing. “These are worse than the [Russian nationalists]… But it is good that it is becoming crystal clear. All the removed felt they could no longer hide, and are exposing themselves. But we will not forget and will not forgive. Stay tuned.”

Weeks later, as the lights flickered off at Meduza, Kovalev locked his Twitter/X account and continued his increasingly ravings within the confines of his digital “community.” Foreign Policy has not yet responded to a request for comment on its contributor’s call to “kill all the bad people.”