Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The Orientalist eye, it seems, is keen to imbue the landscape with greater enigmatic significance - and Parris concludes his street-corner musings with the melodramatic lines: “Everywhere the concrete was gashed with black mould. But that’s how concrete does stain, in the rain. Visitors to Beirut must learn to love the stains.”

Parris’ foray into the realm of Orientalist lecture would appear to be relatively benign compared to those of contemporaries such as, say, the British travel writer who penned “Boobs, Botox and the Babes of Beirut” - in which we learn that “in Lebanon the women look like Cleopatra” but that plastic surgery fiascos can result in a situation in which “some look as if a drunken Picasso has drawn a face on to a balloon”.

Thomas Friedman’s determinations that Israel’s bombing of Lebanese civilians is “logical”, that Palestinians are “gripped by a collective madness”, or that Iraqis need to “suck on this”.

the West’s ongoing addiction to Orientalism

Nowadays, there are increasing efforts among reductionist Orientalist circles to market Beirut as the resurgent “Paris of the Middle East”, a glamorous hub of hedonism boasting all manner of extravagant money-spending opportunities - yet one that still retains the requisite exotic elements, such as the ever-astounding coexistence of miniskirts and hijabs, Hezbollah and billboard lingerie ads. 

the glorification of elite excess and materialism directly serves the interests of a global neoliberal order predicated on obscene socioeconomic inequality

Syria did not respond in court to the lawsuit, and Mr. Assad has publicly blamed Ms. Colvin for her own death, saying she had been “working with terrorists.”

the first court decision drawing on a pool of smuggled Syrian government documents that are being used in criminal prosecutions of Syrian officials by courts in Germany, France and elsewhere.

While the standard of proof is higher in criminal cases, war crimes lawyers welcomed the success of the Colvin lawsuit as an indication that the archive contains convincing evidence.

The plaintiffs detailed, through government records and defectors’ and other witnesses’ accounts, how the Syrian government had made a policy of cracking down on journalists and their assistants; how security officials tracked Ms. Colvin through informants and intercepted communications; how Syrian forces killed Ms. Colvin, hours after her last broadcast from Homs, by shelling the makeshift media center where she was staying; and how officials celebrated her death.

Ms. Colvin, a Long Island native who was 56 when she was killed, was a star of the British press, known for dedication and pushing the limits of risk to tell the stories of civilians affected by war. She was less of a household name in the United States, but the court’s decision comes amid a wave of new attention to her life and death.She was played by Rosamund Pike in the recent feature film “A Private War,” and was the subject of a biography by a fellow journalist, Lindsey Hilsum, and a documentary by Paul Conroy, the photojournalist who was her longtime reporting partner. He was seriously wounded in the attack that killed Ms. Colvin and Remi Ochlik, a French photojournalist.

journalists under-report incidents they consider minor, commonplace or part of the job, or where they fear reprisals.

most corruption reporting did not take place in the mainstream media, except in France, Germany and Scandinavia, where journalism had a better standing. Independent and non-profit media outlets were among the most vulnerable to financial pressures and the target of frequent threats, whether in terms of staff safety or lawsuits

Media concentration has become a growing issue for journalists across EU35, notably in Hungary.

The assassination of independent Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in a car bomb on 16 October 2017 marked a dark new trend emerging in the EU35: the murder of three investigative journalists in less than 12 months. Caruana Galizia’s death was followed by the murder of Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner Martina Kušnírová on 26 February 2018, and the rape and murder of Bulgarian journalist Viktoria Marinova on 6 October 2018. Authorities say Marinova’s death is not connected to her being a journalist, a claim some colleagues have disputed.

“The Council of Europe study on self-censorship among journalists has shown that the main form of pressure is ‘psychological violence’, which is mainly visible by intimidation used by public authorities which has a clear chilling effects on media freedom. We are convinced that many investigative journalists are the target of this type of bullying,”

For journalists reporting on corruption, the threat of legal action is a very serious one, which impacts what one is able to write, particularly for investigative centres with limited resources

Official willingness to discredit and defame journalists is a Europe-wide phenomenon, but one that is especially acute for independent media outlets that specialise in investigative journalism into official corruption.

charges being considered by the South Sudanese authorities included treason and terrorism, both of which carry the death penalty

After The Post sent inquiries to the company’s executives, the website for Twenty Lake Holdings was replaced with a page saying “Our website is under construction.” Company president Joseph E. Miller declined to comment.

Alden has moved more aggressively to make money off its real estate than competing media companies. For Alden, the Commercial Appeal’s building may not have been an afterthought but its main target.

While Gannett is resistant to Alden’s hostile bid for the company’s newspapers, Gannett has already sold at least six of its buildings — at least five of them within the past year — to Twenty Lake Holdings or an affiliate

Gannett sold Twenty Lake the headquarters of the Asheville Citizen-Times in North Carolina for $3.2 million. In a transaction the county recorded on the same day, Twenty Lake flipped the property to a local developer for $5.3 million

the newspaper industry, which lost 45 percent of newsroom positions between 2008 and 2017

At several Digital First newspapers, employees now must work at home or from coffee shops, their brick-and-mortar newsrooms sold and replaced with the most profitable alternative: nothing.

At the dozen Digital First publications represented by the NewsGuild, the number of union jobs has declined nearly 70 percent, from 1,552 in 2012 to 487 in 2018. University of North Carolina researchers found, based on 12 newspapers, that Digital First has cut staff at a rate more than twice the national average during that time.

a pure liquidation strategy

After Alden acquires a newspaper, the team of companies it backs moves to monetize every square foot of its real estate.

In January, layoffs at BuzzFeed and HuffPost accentuated the difficulty of growing a digital news business. On Jan. 24, Gannett began laying off dozens more newsroom staffers around the country.

At the Delaware County Daily Times in Pennsylvania, the staff shrunk from 125 people to 25 in six years, said Bill Ross, executive director of the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia. Digital First sold the paper’s old building for $2 million in 2016; reporters and editors now work out of a converted CVS and bicycle repair shop.

The union that represents reporters at Digital First has tried to persuade Duke — to which his family has been a major donor — to remove Heath Freeman from the advisory board of the Freeman Center for Jewish Life because of his role in “weakening American news collection and disserving American democracy.”

“You’re going to take the profits that you reap as a result of cutting our staff and hurting the community that we serve, and you’re going to use it to buy stock in Fred’s pharmacy and then lose all that money?” Brandt said. “That’s what our purpose is? That’s what our sacrifice was for?”

"Ironically, government supporters themselves don’t read pro-government newspapers. Best-selling newspapers lost their circulation after they were seized by government-friendly businesspeople."

Ismail Caglar, an analyst at Ankara-based conservative think tank SETA, says Turkey’s rising profile in the region attracts foreign interest. Foreign companies make media investments in Turkey to propagate their point of view and take part in domestic political debates, he said

A report by US government-funded think tank the Rand Corporation said last year that Sputnik Turkiye and other Russian media outlets were trying to undermine NATO by fomenting mutual suspicion between Turkey and its Western allies, enlisting Ankara’s support and impeding its opposition to Russian actions in the Middle East.

Sputnik Turkiye published an article on 2 December 2015 with the headline “Russia: Erdogan and His Family Directly Involved in ISIS’s Illegal Oil Shipment in Syria”. Turkey later banned Sputnik Turkiye’s website and revoked its bureau chief’s work permit and visa, but Sputnik Turkiye radio continued to broadcast. Following the rapprochement between two countries in 2016, Sputnik Turkiye’s website began to freely operate again. Its Twitter account has roughly 600,000 followers.

"As Turks look for fresh perspectives and alternate sources of information in a tightly controlled media environment, Sputnik Turkiye draws readers in through its shockingly open coverage on domestic issues,"

Other outlets, such as Germany's Deutsche Welle Turkce, have also taken a generally critical line. Prominent journalist Nevsin Mengu, whose newscasts on YouTube are watched by thousands of Turks, has recently joined its ranks.

BBC Turkce, which has been broadcasting since 1939, is known for an editorial style perceived to be critical of the current Turkish government. 

“There is this sense that stories edging on activist journalism have been regularly published because they think it will generate traffic,” 

BBC Turkce has more than 3 million followers on Twitter.

Caglar, the SETA analyst who is also preparing a report on the subject, criticised BBC Turkce for being opaque about its staffing and operational information. “They didn’t even want to acknowledge with how many people they have in their staff.”

Ali Duran Topuz, the editor-in-chief of independent news portal Gazete Duvar, told MEE that the current media structure in Turkey made it easier for foreign-owned outlets to operate. “It could be also financially profitable for the investors. Fox, for example, is mildly criticising the government and it posts profit. Because of large numbers of unemployed journalists, the labour cost is also very low,"

lower-level officials self-censor dealings with critics of the administration abroad

“The reality in which political decisions or presidential pettiness directs top U.S. diplomats’ choices over whose human rights work is mentioned in the public sphere and whose is not is a really scary reality.”

She often debunks misinformation spread online and comments on major news events related to propaganda and election interference, including Brexit and the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into links between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign. She has regularly tweeted criticism about Trump’s sharp political rhetoric and attacks on the press

After first being notified she would get the award, Aro filled out forms and questionnaires at the request of officials and cancelled paid speaking engagements to travel to Washington to attend the March 7 ceremony in Washington. The State Department also sent her an official invitation to accept the award and planned an itinerary for a corresponding tour of the United States, complete with flights and high-profile visits to newspapers and universities across the country.

In 2014, Aro pursued reporting on a Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg that aimed to alter western public opinions. Long before the U.S. elections in 2016, which propelled Russian disinformation campaigns to the spotlight, she unearthed evidence of a state-sanctioned propaganda machine trying to shape online discourse and spread disinformation. After she published her investigation, Russian nationalist websites and pro-Moscow outlets in Finland coordinated smear campaigns against her, accusing her at times of being a Western intelligence agent and drug dealer, and bombarding her with anonymous abusive messages. She also received death threats.

reserved the right to seek damages, due to Aro having to cancel paid speaking events

weeks of mass demonstrations against Bouteflika's plan to extend his 20-year rule

"All eyes are on the army now. Is the army going to let new protests to happen next Friday?... With Bouteflika aside, the army is going to have its say as to what kind of position they will accept." "Now it seems the regime of Bouteflika is done but [the question is] are we going to get back the state civilly without... any pressure on all these people who have been using the state for their interest for so long? "If we look at the Tunisian transition for example, we saw that  we could not avoid having the old elite come back, but they did so through new institutions; it was more or less easier for people to control this outcome."

“Typically somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of readers get that what they read was actually an advertisement.”

“the reason these advertorials exist is to fool at least some readers into thinking they are legitimate editorial content, or at least imbued with the rigor of Reuters reporting.”

“All Reuters Plus content on Reuters.com is clearly labeled to differentiate it from editorial content,”

One potential benefit of publishing a counter message on the same platform where the bad publicity originated, Wojdynski says, is having positive content appear alongside negative stories in search results.

the fact that Reuters itself has covered this issue makes the ad even more noteworthy than other paid stories. He notes that early last year the agency’s charitable arm, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, published pieces pointing out that traffickers were still forcing people into the seafood industry despite reforms. “Publishing this sponsored content without the conflicting context provided by Reuters’s own reporting on this issue seems pretty unethical to me,”

The commotion over the sponsored piece raises questions not just about the ethics of native advertising, but about news providers’ broader relationships with governments. Where and how should publications draw the line when taking money from governments? Should certain clients be completely off limits, and if so how does one decide which ones?

deciding which messages are harmful requires making political and moral judgements, even if they’re unacknowledged

“Many viewers saw this vision as biased, as it addressed only Abdel Nasser’s flaws and neglected his virtues, while glorifying Mohammad Naguib with no reliable proof,” Shennawi told Al-Monitor. “Egyptian cinema suffered a lot in the era of Abdel Nasser, who exploited cinema to promote the ideas of the July 23 revolution and gradually root out any opposing ideas. Egyptian cinema started breaking free from those restrictions with the film ‘Al-Karnak’ [1975], which criticized Abdel Nasser’s era, and ‘Ahl al-Qima’ [People on the Top, 1981], against [President Anwar] Sadat’s Egypt.”

many Nasserists and supporters of the 1952 revolution have harshly criticized the film. Last month, Magdy Eltayeb, film critic for the newspaper Al-Qahira, posted on his personal Facebook page, “Diamond dust is poisonous. … [The film] adopted a stance against the 1952 revolution. … It showed excessive sympathy with the Jews to the extent that this has undermined this work’s aesthetic value as a film noir.”

A hit, “Diamond Dust” has so far earned 27.6 million Egyptian pounds ($1.5 million) at the box office.

152 front pages relating to Islam or Muslims in a negative way

Possibly the most revealing part of the study relates to opinion writers at the Murdoch press. We all know their positions. Yet it is striking to see their obsession with Islam quantified. All of them write about Islam a lot. Miranda Devine, one of the least devoted Islam bashers, made 16 per cent of her 185 op eds about Islam. Janet Albrechtsen weighed in at 27 per cent, a bit less than Greg Sheridan at 29 per cent. Andrew Bolt and Rita Panahi came in at 38 per cent and 37 per cent – particularly impressive for Bolt, who produced 473 opinion pieces in the year (I suspect this counts blog items). Jennifer Oriel wrote 48 op eds, and over half were about Islam.

a kind of one-sided cultural war.

there is no serious mainstream contestation of this constant drumbeat of anti-Muslim and anti-Islam stories and op eds. These are hundreds of op eds demonising Islam, without any real response. There are apparently no Muslims working at (say) ABC or Fairfax to give a different take on these issues, or complain about what the Murdoch press is doing.

70 per cent of Australians think they know “little to nothing” about Islam and Muslims. Which raises an obvious question about what public opinion might be like if the media in Australia did its job differently

The UAE, while liberal in many regards compared to its Middle Eastern neighbors, has strict laws governing expression. Journalists working in the country require government-issued press cards. People also have been jailed for their comments online.

Before the recent - and most likely politically motivated if not sponsored - spate of Turkish Ottoman history-based dramas, Turkish television programming was still a major hit in the Arab world

there has been pressure for a long time now to block Turkish programmes that often take up prime time slots from both Lebanese and Egyptian producers and filmmakers

To many Middle Eastern viewers, drawn-out Turkish soap operas combining love affairs, drama and mystery more than just being quality television productions represented hope that it was possible to harmoniously merge east and west without sacrificing local identity

depiction of a lifestyle choice that is not an option in the Gulf

“Producers and TV/film firms have their costs covered before they commence filming via the deals they make with domestic broadcasters,” he said.“Other than that Turkish television has never been more popular. It has a market in eastern Europe, Africa and even Latin America.”

“There are so many dimensions to this ban. Another one is that Bin Salman has also launched a big drive on restoring historical places in the kingdom. But with their own Saudi interpretation," Hayek said."And then you have these Turkish historical-based programmes being beamed into peoples’ homes who are very keen to learn about their past and heritage. They can’t be happy about that”.

YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens

“If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.”

94 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service

YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides. It has allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences, and has helped once-obscure commentators build lucrative media businesses

Bellingcat, an investigative news site, analyzed messages from far-right chat rooms and found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause of members’ “red-pilling” — an internet slang term for converting to far-right beliefs

The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents. He was smart, but shy and socially awkward, and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk. He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters. Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.

they rallied around issues like free speech and antifeminism, portraying themselves as truth-telling rebels doing battle against humorless “social justice warriors.” Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera, with a constant stream of new heroes and villains. To Mr. Cain, all of this felt like forbidden knowledge — as if, just by watching some YouTube videos, he had been let into an exclusive club. “When I found this stuff, I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,” he told me. “I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”

YouTube’s executives announced that the recommendation algorithm would give more weight to watch time, rather than views. That way, creators would be encouraged to make videos that users would finish, users would be more satisfied and YouTube would be able to show them more ads.

A month after its algorithm tweak, YouTube changed its rules to allow all video creators to run ads alongside their videos and earn a portion of the revenue they generated.

the bulk of his media diet came from far-right channels. And after the election, he began exploring a part of YouTube with a darker, more radical group of creators. These people didn’t couch their racist and anti-Semitic views in sarcastic memes, and they didn’t speak in dog whistles. One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like “‘Refugee’ Invasion Is European Suicide.” Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke.

Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years. The executives, the people said, rarely considered whether the company’s algorithms were fueling the spread of extreme and hateful political content.

Google Brain’s researchers wondered if they could keep YouTube users engaged for longer by steering them into different parts of YouTube, rather than feeding their existing interests. And they began testing a new algorithm that incorporated a different type of A.I., called reinforcement learning. The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.

YouTube’s recommendations system is not set in stone. The company makes many small changes every year, and has already introduced a version of its algorithm that is switched on after major news events to promote videos from “authoritative sources” over conspiracy theories and partisan content. This past week, the company announced that it would expand that approach, so that a person who had watched a series of conspiracy theory videos would be nudged toward videos from more authoritative news sources. It also said that a January change to its algorithm to reduce the spread of so-called “borderline” videos had resulted in significantly less traffic to those videos.

Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible.

As Mr. Molyneux promoted white nationalists, his YouTube channel kept growing. He now has more than 900,000 subscribers, and his videos have been watched nearly 300 million times. Last year, he and Ms. Southern — Mr. Cain’s “fashy bae” — went on a joint speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, where they criticized Islam and discussed what they saw as the dangers of nonwhite immigration. In March, after a white nationalist gunman killed 50 Muslims in a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mr. Molyneux and Ms. Southern distanced themselves from the violence, calling the killer a left-wing “eco-terrorist” and saying that linking the shooting to far-right speech was “utter insanity.” Neither Mr. Molyneux nor Ms. Southern replied to a request for comment. The day after my request, Mr. Molyneux uploaded a video titled “An Open Letter to Corporate Reporters,” in which he denied promoting hatred or violence and said labeling him an extremist was “just a way of slandering ideas without having to engage with the content of those ideas.”

Unlike most progressives Mr. Cain had seen take on the right, Mr. Bonnell and Ms. Wynn were funny and engaging. They spoke the native language of YouTube, and they didn’t get outraged by far-right ideas. Instead, they rolled their eyes at them, and made them seem shallow and unsophisticated.

“I noticed that right-wing people were taking these old-fashioned, knee-jerk, reactionary politics and packing them as edgy punk rock,” Ms. Wynn told me. “One of my goals was to take the excitement out of it.”

Ms. Wynn and Mr. Bonnell are part of a new group of YouTubers who are trying to build a counterweight to YouTube’s far-right flank. This group calls itself BreadTube, a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 book, “The Conquest of Bread.” It also includes people like Oliver Thorn, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, where he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism and Marxist economics.

The core of BreadTube’s strategy is a kind of algorithmic hijacking. By talking about many of the same topics that far-right creators do — and, in some cases, by responding directly to their videos — left-wing YouTubers are able to get their videos recommended to the same audience.

What is most surprising about Mr. Cain’s new life, on the surface, is how similar it feels to his old one. He still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.

It’s possible that vulnerable young men like Mr. Cain will drift away from radical groups as they grow up and find stability elsewhere. It’s also possible that this kind of whiplash polarization is here to stay as political factions gain and lose traction online.

I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.

The plan, to be funded by private Saudi and Emirati investors and executed by Egyptian firms that helped broaden the Suez Canal, also envisions the construction of five hotels, two ports and a free trade zone.

The $750 million project would have the dump ready for when Saudi Arabia inaugurates the first two of its 16 planned nuclear reactors in 2027. Saudi Arabia is reviewing proposals to build the reactors from US, Chinese, French, South Korean contractors and expects to award the projects in December.

Qatar’s more liberal Wahhabism of the sea contrasts starkly with the Wahhabism of the land that Prince Mohammed is seeking to reform. The crown prince made waves last year by lifting a ban on women’s driving, granting women the right to attend male sporting events in stadiums, and introducing modern forms of entertainment like, music, cinema and theatre – all long-standing fixtures of Qatari social life and of the ability to reform while maintaining autocratic rule.

A traditional Gulf state and a Wahhabi state to boot, Qatari conservatism was everything but a mirror image of Saudi Arabia’s long-standing puritan way of life. Qatar did not have a powerful religious establishment like the one in Saudi Arabia that Prince Mohammed has recently whipped into subservience, nor did it implement absolute gender segregation. Non-Muslims can practice their faith in their own houses of worship and were exempted from bans on alcohol and pork. Qatar became a sponsor of the arts and hosted the controversial state-owned Al Jazeera television network that revolutionized the region’s controlled media landscape and became one of the world’s foremost global English-language broadcasters.

Qatari conservatism is likely what Prince Mohammed would like to achieve even if that is something he is unlikely to acknowledge

“I consider myself a good Wahhabi and can still be modern, understanding Islam in an open way. We take into account the changes in the world,” Abdelhameed Al Ansari, the then dean of Qatar University’s College of Sharia, a leader of the paradigm shift, told The Wall Street Journal in 2002.

if built, the channel would suggest that geopolitical supremacy has replaced ultra-conservative, supremacist religious doctrine as a driver of the king-in-waiting’s policy

we did not test for a decay effect. We do not know how long these effects last

“Are more entertaining films more likely to elicit these responses than films that are boring? What other latent personality dispositions can be activated by films and television programs? These are questions that we are considering for our future research on entertainment media.”

The subject came out of something I lived through, growing up in a war. Something that my co-screenwriter Joelle also lived through. It’s not like we read a book or based it on a TV interview on CNN. It’s something that we lived through, all the dynamics that you saw in the film, we are very familiar with it. You know, the Palestinian point of view, the Christian point of view. These are things that are so familiar to us. You know it’s this thing that we grew up eating and drinking and living. We were stopped at checkpoints, we hid under the bombs, we lived in shelters in Beirut in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s

We could have been such a lighthouse in the midst of all these other places around because we’re so interesting. Lebanon so interesting. But it’s sad that it does not fully use its potential. You know Christians, Muslims, Shiites, Sunni, liberal, it has all the potential of making a very, very interesting place

I had a lot of prejudice towards the Christians growing up. Like incredible. My parents were very left wing pro-Palestinian. And anybody from the Christian camp, from East Beirut, was considered a traitor, the enemy. And then you meet people from East Beirut, Christians, who were part of the Christian camp, and then you sit down and they work on your movie and and then you go have a drink and then you suddenly say, “Their story’s like mine, they suffered as much as [me].”

“The Insult” is about reexamining the other side. The woman who co-wrote the film with me who became my wife — we wrote four films together — she comes from the Christian camp. I come from [Muslim] West Beirut. She wrote all the scenes of the Palestinian. And I wrote the scenes of the Christians. We swapped.

every screening we do in the states, in Los Angeles in Telluride, in Toronto people were like so emotional about it. And then they said, “We totally identified because of what’s going on in the States today. We are living in America at a period where it feels like this entire society is tearing apart a bit.” And they look at the film and suddenly it’s speaking to them, even though that was not the intention.

Sometimes the country needs to go through a tear in order to heal better.

Israeli drones are unmarked, and the Israeli jets and helicopters cover up their markings. Some fly circuitous routes to create the impression that they are based in the Egyptian mainland

In Israel, military censors restrict public reports of the airstrikes

They moved into hitting softer targets like Christians in Sinai, churches in the Nile Valley or other Muslims they view as heretics. In November 2017, the militants killed 311 worshipers at a Sufi mosque in the North Sinai.

Mr. Sisi, then the defense minister, ousted Mr. Morsi in a military takeover. Israel welcomed the change in government, and urged Washington to accept it. That solidified the partnership between the generals on both sides of the border

In November, 2014, Ansar Beit al Maqdis formally declared itself the Sinai Province branch of the Islamic State. On July 1, 2015, the militants briefly captured control of a North Sinai town, Sheikh Zuwaid, and retreated only after Egyptian jets and helicopters struck the town, state news agencies said. Then, at the end of October, the militants brought down the Russian charter jet, killing all 224 people on board. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It was around the time of those ominous milestones, in late 2015, that Israel began its wave of airstrikes, the American officials said, which they credit with killing a long roster of militant leaders.

The Egyptian government has declared the North Sinai a closed military zone, barring journalists from gathering information there

Zack Gold, a researcher specializing in the North Sinai who has worked in Israel, compared the airstrikes to Israel’s nuclear weapons program — also an open secret.“The Israeli strikes inside of Egypt are almost at the same level, he said. “Every time anyone says anything about the nuclear program, they have to jokingly add ‘according to the foreign press.’ Israel’s main strategic interest in Egypt is stability, and they believe that open disclosure would threaten that stability.”