The Harold Wilson-ian observation that “a week is a long time in politics" could be gainfully employed to capture the tectonic destruction of West Asia wrought by the world’s most powerful and malevolent military machine, propelled by a partnership forged between the malign forces of neo-colonialism and Zionism (by the way, it is West Asia, not the Middle East, a term once employed by the colonial Home Office).

So the week just ending began with Israeli F-15 jets swooping down and rendering lifeless Iran’s top leadership, including its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The fogged out media did not immediately get a sense of these multiple assassinations when they took place, and even went on to issue standby notices about Khameini’s imminent address to the public, possibly as part of an elaborate tactic of distraction.

It was only a day later, after the Israel Defense Forces released footage of these strikes, and an image of US President Donald Trump pumping his fist floated on television screens, that the world came to understand the full import of those unconscionable strikes that violated every canon of international law. 

On that very first day came evidence that there were to be no guardrails on the savagery unleashed by a machine that had already pulverised over 70,000 lives in Palestine. An Iranian elementary school in Minab was incinerated killing over 168, most of whom were very young children. What followed was convoluted subterfuge.

The international media immediately tried to exonerate the US-Israeli forces for the assault. The New York Times claimed that the school just happened to be next to a facility operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which was the primary target. Implicit in the reportage was the conclusion that “civilised” western forces were incapable of targeting children, an observation echoed through the US political establishment, whether in statements by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt or Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State.

Also read: How India’s Alignment with US-Israel Will Devastate Its Interests in War Against Iran

A pretence of “investigating” the incident then followed. The “we are investigating it” line was a useful one to fob off uncomfortable questions at press conferences until, six days later, came the admission from Washington that US-Israeli forces were, in all probability behind it.

The script conjured up by the Trump-Netyanhu combine was straightforward and TV anchor-turned-US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth summed it up succinctly: “Death and destruction from the skies, ALL DAY LONG”. It was diabolic posturing at its most mendacious which is why Hegseth is known as the Secretary of War.

Comic Dan Pulzello pleads with a straight face, “Leave Hegseth alone. He’s under a lot of pressure doing war crimes. First you do the crime, then you cover it up, gaslight the media, find a scapegoat. That is all unpaid overtime.” But really do the media need to be gaslit when they are perfectly capable of doing the gaslighting themselves?

Iran clearly had another script in mind. It launched its own version of Operation Shock and Awe with ballistic missiles and drones tracing their path through incandescent night skies, even as glass and chrome fronted high rises collapsed like paper castles, and oil refineries were engulfed in smoke. The world to this day doesn’t know the true human costs that Israel is paying for Netanyahu's appetite to flatten Iran, because its censors threaten to imprison anyone found putting out footage on what is really happening over its airspace and on its streets.

So while we can quite easily access the death toll in Iran – over 1,300 – and Beirut – over 217, you will be hard-pressed to come across credible data on Israeli deaths caused by Iranian bombing, just as the deaths of US military personnel have long hovered around six. Underlying this is also the racist formulation that Israeli and American lives are far more precious than Iranian and Lebanese ones. 

But what Israel cannot to do is to hide the bombed out buildings of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that are fast being rendered into the formless ghost shapes that its genocide in Palestine left behind, just as the US cannot veil the fact that its multi-trillion-dollar worth of military and cyber hardware is being rendered into duds across US bases in the Gulf. The third day of the conflict saw the IRGC ring fence the Strait of Hormuz, which had accounted for the transportation of at least 20% of the global crude, hitting the world economy in the gut.

Ordinary men, women, and most of all children, are paying the heaviest price for this hubristic military onslaught. It will be the ordinary citizens who will have to suffer through its economic consequences.

Each phase of this saga has brought its own troves of media images and reportage. The massacre of the Ayatollah, which set the air waves alive in the initial period, had created a happy buzz of a Venezuela like in-and-out operation. But that receded into the background under frantic questions about how long this war, which is costing at least a billion dollars a day, would continue – how long would arsenals last? How soon would it be before Iran collapsed? None of these have easy answers despite the armies of commentators and vloggers that have mushroomed on media platforms, many of them contributing, intentionally or not, to thickening the fog of war.

The Gulf region has been the primary theatre of war since World War II. These conflicts have also seen the media being used as a supplementary arm of military establishments that have, in turn, led to info-tech leapfrogging. It was here that the CIA, in cahoots with MI-6, conducted a propaganda campaign to oust Mohammad Mosaddegh, painting him as a stooge of the former Soviet Union (USSR) for nationalising Iranian oil, and creating the conditions for the 1953 coup. It was this region that also saw the rise of 24-hour news television, with Peter Arnett of CNN dispatching live updates from Baghdad of a war conducted in the early 1990s by US President George Bush senior.

The second Gulf War, launched by Bush's son, in 2003, witnessed the emergence of the Pentagon-created phenomenon of embedded journalists. These men and women traded their professional independence for a ride on US tanks. It also saw internet media arrive as a platform for war journalism, and there came the phenomenal Salam Pax, who regularly posted on the situation in Baghdad as the US advanced. He came to be known as ‘Baghdad Blogger’. 

Wars, the occupation of Palestine and their crises, also led to some positive developments for the media. In January last year, I interviewed Alladdin Hammad, an Al Jazeera editor. He described how his channel emerged as a platform to put out a ‘real-time, anti-hegemonic narrative from an Arab perspective’. In time, Al Jazeera was able to upend the influence of Western media channels in the region – to the extent that, in 2003, even CNN was using its footage on broadcasts. 

The present war has seen many innovative uses of internet-based media, principally through 'Insta reels' that allow possessors of smart phones to self-communicate on what is happening in their neighbourhoods and lives. And, of course, it allows them to vent over a certain White House resident who discusses his choice of curtains while briefing the media on the war: “Four service members have been killed in the Epstein Distraction War in Iran, but the useless Puke in Chief ‘saved curtains’. WE ARE IN F----G HELL.”

So effective were these reels that Dubai authorities, ever conscious of the need to keep its cultural capital intact, seems to have incentivised people, particularly Malayali expats, to convey that all was well in the city. One Dubai resident posted these words: “This is not a country in chaos. This is a country that actively protects itself and the people living in it… The world is not perfect. The region is complex. But when I look at the preparation, the technology, the coordination and the calm leadership, I feel safe raising my family here.”

This shows how exceedingly easy it is, in such conditions, to circulate fake news and disinformation which could have dangerous real time impacts.

(I have not dealt with the Indian dimension of this conflict given lack of space and would therefore request readers to look out for my next column.)

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Women’s Day Reminder

Tomorrow is Women’s Day and it stands as a mark of an exceptional gender solidarity forged across the world over the years. Many strong women have peopled this landscape, women like Sojourner Truth, a slave who freed herself and took to preaching. It was during a women’s convention in Ohio in 1851 that she shouted out the words, ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’: “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?”

That voice spoke for and to her sisters across the ages. Decades later, Women’s Day came to be marked on the international calendar, shaped on the anvil of trade unionism, women’s conferences and Left and feminist politics, including the suffragette movement for women’s right to vote. The first Women’s Day march is said to have taken place in New York in February 1909. Tragedies like the fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that consumed the lives of 123 women workers, many of them yet children, in downtown New York in 1911, highlighted how the lives and well-being of women were being overlooked by the world. Post-revolution Russia saw the architect of that revolution, Vladimir Lenin, officially declare March 8 as Women’s Day, and it has remained so ever since, with the UN declaring it International Women’s Day in 1977. 

The question, at this point, a little over a century after Lenin's announcement, is this: has the age of the Epstein Files seen the complete mangling of the brave, once-new idea of gender equality? Five reasons signal why this seems the case.

One, it has seen women being rendered into malleable objects for sexual gratification, with the tender, unformed bodies of pre-teens and teenagers the most sought after.

Two, women’s bodies have been rendered into fungible assets, to be traded among those who constitute the international elite. Three, among the most powerful people in the world today, many appear to have rejected the most basic notions of gender equality. Four, access to power creates a moral blindness, evident in the words of two high-octane individuals who share a first name – ‘Bill’. Both aver that they saw no signs of abuse during their close association with Epstein.

Five, justice systems have uniformly failed the victims and survivors of the monstrous abuse documented in the Epstein Files, which reflects the larger reality that gender justice has proved a frail and elusive construct in a world plummeting to newer depths of moral depravity.

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Readers write in…

Film as Hate Speech

Rahul Easwar on Kerala Story-2

This film is based on a fake story. It is also a cheap story.

Muslims forcing Hindu women to eat beef"? I don't eat beef but have no problem with anyone else eating beef. Goa is the one state that consumes beef, as also the states of the Northeast. Kerala Story 2 is a case of Modern Urban Nazis using Hitler's strategy: that if a lie is told a 100 times it will become true. Kerala Story 2 was made with the intent to deceive us good Hindus, to hurt our Muslim brothers, and circulate cheap and vulgar propaganda. It reflects the mind of the Godse-vadis who killed India's Father, Mahatma Gandhi. It is a reprehensible effort that is treasonous, furthers hate politics and markss new lows in movie-making. 

We are people who are proud of Kerala and India!

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Thanking the writers

Wire reader Muralidhara H.B. commends the piece titled ‘Dismissing Dalit Assertion as Victimhood Is an Insult to the Constitution’ (February 26). He writes:

Calling Dalit assertion ‘victimhood’ is not a philosophical position. It is the oldest reflex of every dominant order: discredit the claim before examining its truth”. I thank The Wire for this excellent, in-depth article on Dalit assertion, insensitively labelled "never-ending victimhood" by none other than people occupying high positions in academia and senior politicians in the temple of democracy. I wholeheartedly thank both the scholarly writers of this piece!

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Sexual harassment perpetrated by a senior doctor

A person who used the pseudonym of ‘A Concerned Individual’ would like The Wire to take note of a case of blatant sexual harassment. We have redacted the name and details of the senior doctor so accused:

I am writing to formally bring to your attention a matter of grave public concern involving repeated incidents of sexual misconduct by a faculty member in the Department of Pharmacology at Baroda Medical College, Vadodara, Gujarat.

The faculty member concerned is xxxx (name, designation, redacted).

He has been reported by multiple female students over a period of time and reflects a serious abuse of authority within an academic and examination setting. It has been repeatedly reported that during viva voce examinations, this professor deliberately deviates from the prescribed academic topic and introduces questions related to the "application of ointments", even when such topics are not relevant to the viva being conducted. Under the guise of demonstrating this technique, he forcibly takes the hand of a female student without consent and performs circular rubbing motions on the back of her hand. During this act, he makes comments such as "this is how ointment is applied", followed by SEXUALLY suggestive statements including "one finger is okay, two fingers is good, three is the best." These actions and remarks are entirely inappropriate, unprofessional, and deeply distressing for students subjected to them.

Another recurring concern involves the demonstration of techniques during viva examinations that require the use of a tourniquet. In such situations, the professor has repeatedly forcefully grabbed the upper arm of female students under the pretext of using his own hands as a tourniquet, even in circumstances where a proper tourniquet was available. This repeated physical contact is unnecessary, inappropriate, and indicative of a pattern of misconduct rather than isolated lapses in judgment.

In addition to the above, it has been reported that the professor frequently places his hands on the shoulders of female students and pulls them physically closer during interactions, including during academic and non-academic encounters within the campus. Such conduct creates an intimidating and hostile environment and cannot be justified under any academic or pedagogical pretext.

Furthermore, there have been multiple instances where the professor has personally told or messaged female students to contact him after 6:00 p.m. or late at night. These communications are unsolicited and unrelated to academic requirements, and they have caused significant discomfort, fear, and anxiety among students.

This pattern of behaviour has reportedly occurred across multiple student batches, indicating that it is not an isolated incident but a repeated and systemic issue. The most recent batch reported to have experienced such conduct is the 2024 Batch. The repeated nature of these actions suggests a sustained misuse of authority and a serious failure to uphold the ethical standards expected of medical educators.

Following these complaints, the institution took several steps. The person concerned was relieved of his administrative positions as Vice Dean and University Head of Department. He has been barred from conducting viva voce examinations and restricted from directly interacting with students. These measures are an acknowledgement that the complaint was credible and the conduct serious.

Despite these steps, the man has NOT been dismissed from his faculty post. He continues to deliver lectures, meaning he retains regular, direct access to the same female students he harassed…A partial restriction is not a resolution. As long as he remains on faculty and continues to teach, current and future student batches remain at risk. This is not accountability – this is containment.

This complaint is being submitted anonymously due to a genuine and reasonable fear of retaliation. The individual against whom these genuine allegations are raised occupies a position of significant institutional authority, and there is a credible concern that disclosure of the complainant's identity could result in academic, professional, or personal harm. The decision to remain anonymous has been taken solely to ensure personal safety and is NOT intended to diminish the seriousness or credibility of the issues raised.

In view of the seriousness of the allegations and the recurring pattern of reported behaviour, I respectfully request that this matter be taken up for appropriate inquiry and coverage in accordance with applicable journalistic standards and public interest obligations…

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END NOTE: Why paywalls sometimes work against journalism

The online views portal, India Forum, just turned seven. Quite an achievement to keep serious, long-form journalism going for seven whole years in times of shrinking attention spans and meme fests. But what struck me as exceptional was the explanation its editors gave for why they don’t have paywalls. As India Forum put it: “At a time when paywalls come around serious news and views, and fake news has a field day, we believe it is all the more important that everyone should have a place to freely access sound and sober analyses of issues that matter.” 

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