In a decision that the largest U.S. Muslim civil rights organization called “cowardly,” the University of Southern California announced Monday that it would not allow a Muslim valedictorian to speak at its commencement ceremony, citing safety concerns. USC’s 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, is a first-generation South Asian Muslim student majoring in biomedical engineering with a minor in…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Thank God for the German Hate Police! Or heil … or whatever the appropriate salutation is for these unsung heroes. They just saved us all from “hate” again!
Yes, that’s right, once again, democracy-loving people here in New Normal Berlin and all across the New Normal world were right on the brink of being exposed to “hate,” and would have been exposed to “hate,” had the Hate Police not sprang into action.
You probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
OK, what happened was, some pro-Palestinian activists organized a “Palestine Congress,” and attempted to discuss the situation in Gaza, and call for solidarity with the Palestinians, and so on, right here in the middle of Berlin, the epicenter of European democracy, as if they thought they had a right to do that. The German authorities were clearly intent on disabusing them of that notion.
Early Friday morning, hundreds of black-clad Hate Police descended on the congress location. Reinforcements were called in from throughout the nation. Metal barricades were erected on the sidewalks. Hate Police stood guard at the entrance. The German media warned the public that a potential “Hate-Speech” attack was now imminent. Berliners were advised to shelter in place, switch off their phones and any other audio-receptive communication devices, and wad up little pieces of toilet paper and ram them deep into their ear canals to prevent any possible exposure to the “hate.”
Sure enough, minutes into the congress, the anticipated “Hate-Speech” attack was launched! A Palestinian activist — Salman Abu Sitta — who had written an article that allegedly “expressed understanding of Hamas,” and thus had already been placed on the official German “No-Speak” list, started speaking to the congress on Zoom or whatever. Or … it isn’t quite clear whether he actually started speaking. According to a Hate Police spokesperson, they raided the congress because “there is a risk of a speaker being put on the screen who in the past made anti-Semitic and violence-glorifying remarks.”
Anyway, the Hate Police stormed the venue, pulled the plug, dispersed the crowd, and banned the rest of the “Palestine Congress,” which was scheduled to continue on Saturday and Sunday. Then they arrested a Jewish guy who was wearing a Palestinian-flag-kippah, presumably out of an abundance of caution.
But the “Hate-Speech” attack wasn’t over yet. It was one of those multi-pronged “Hate-Speech” attacks, or at least it involved one other prong. Earlier that morning, or perhaps while the Hate Police were still neutralizing the threat at the venue, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a prominent British surgeon, who had volunteered in Gaza and was due to speak at the congress, was intercepted by the Berlin Airport Hate Police, refused entry into Germany, and forced to return to the UK. The Airport Hate Police informed the doctor that he was being denied entry in order to ensure “the safety of the people at the conference and public order,” Abu Sitta told the Associated Press.
Kai Wegner, Berlin’s mayor, presumably feeling a bit nostalgic for the fanatical days of 2020 to 2023 when one could persecute “the Unvaccinated” with total impunity, took to X to celebrate the Hate Police’s thwarting of this “Hate event.”
The pro-Palestinian activist community also took to X and expressed their displeasure. Yanis “Vaccinate Humanity” Varoufakis, who was one of the organizers and was scheduled to speak, was particularly incensed over the new German “fascism,” which apparently he has just now noticed, despite the fact that it has been goose-stepping around in a medical-looking mask for the last four years.
Yanis was not alone in his outrage. An increasing number of mainstream German journalists, authors, academics, and other members of the professional “progressive” classes are stunned that the new totalitarian society that they fanatically ushered into being during the so-called “Covid Pandemic” era — or stood by in silence and watched it happen — is now unleashing its fascistic force against them.
Which, OK, I get it. I mean, if I had just spent the last four years behaving like a Nazi, you know, persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” demonizing everyone who refused to wear the insignia of my fascist ideology on their face, and parroting official propaganda like an enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument, or just stood by in silence while other people did that, I would probably want to act like that never happened, and pretend that Germany was suddenly going “fascist” over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and just memory-hole the whole “Covid” thing.
I would probably be highly motivated to do that — if that were how I had behaved for the past four years — so that I didn’t appear to be a fucking hypocrite who will start clicking heels and following orders the moment the authorities declare another fake emergency and jack up the Fear.
Sorry … I’ve been trying to be less vituperative, but this memory-holing bullshit makes me go ballistic. If there is one demographic that I do not need to hear sanctimonious exhortations to speak out against the global crackdown on dissent from, it’s recently ex-Covidian-Cult leftists.
In any event, thank God for those Hate Police! If it weren’t for them … well, just imagine the horror, if the activists at that Palestine Congress had been allowed to express their opinions about Israel. They might have even said the word “genocide,” or made reference to a “river” and a “sea.”
Who knows what that kind of unbridled “hate” could lead to? Perhaps the end of democracy. Maybe even World War III.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The photo is a screen shot from Press TV showing a demo protest against the shutdown of the conference.
A three day Palestine conference in Berlin was forcibly shut down after three hours on Friday. Electricity was abruptly terminated in the midst of the presentation by Salman Abu Sitta, the 87 year old author of the authoritative “Atlas of Palestine”.
Former Greek Finance Minister and leader of DIEM25, Yanis Varoufakis, was prevented from entering Germany to attend the conference. He went on Twitter/X to send a message:
Do you know that the German Interior Ministry has just banned me from entering Germany? Indeed if that were not enough, I have been banned from talking to you via zoom, or indeed through a video message like this, exactly like this. The threat being that I will be tried in Germany for breaking German law. Why? Because of a speech that I published yesterday on my blog calling for universal human rights in Israel- Palestine …. So my question to my German friends, to Germans in general whether you agree with me or not doesn’t matter. … Is this (banning) in your name? Is it something that you feel comfortable happening in your democracy? From my perspective this is essentially the death knell of the prospects of democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Another banned guest speaker was UK citizen Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. He reported on Twitter/X:
I have just returned from Germany where I was prevented from entering the country for attending a conference in Germany to give evidence on the war in Gaza and my witness statement as a doctor working in its hospitals. This morning at 10 I landed in Berlin to attend a conference on Palestine where I had been asked … to give my evidence of the 43 days that I had seen in the hospitals in Gaza, working in both Shifa and al-Ahli Hospital. Upon arrival I was stopped at the passport office. I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport where I was questioned for around 3.5 hours. At the end of 3.5 hours I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil and that this ban will last the whole of April. Not just that … if I were to try to link up by Zoom or Facetime with the conference even if I were outside Germany or if I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to have a fine or even up to a year in prison.
Dr. Abu Sitta further commented:
Germany is defending itself against Nicaraguan charges that it is an accomplice to genocidal war as described by the International Court of Justice. This is exactly what accomplices to a crime do. They bury the evidence and they silence or harass or intimidate the witnesses. …. This crackdown on free speech is a dangerous precedent… We are watching the first genocide unfold in the 21st Century and for Germany to become implicated as an accomplice in silencing the witnesses of this genocide does not bode well for the rest of the century.
A large contingent of police invaded the conference and shut off the electricity. Organizers told the reported 250 conference attendees to not provoke the police to violence. Afterward, organizers held a press conference reporting on the behaviour of police before and during the crackdown. Even before the conference, police tried to intimidate supporters of the conference and the owner of the conference venue. They threatened the venue owner might not be able to hold events in future if the conference went ahead. An organizer asked, “Are these the methods of the mafia or democracy?”
Western and Israeli media reported the closure was to prevent “anti semitism” or “hatred of Israel”. On this dubious and hypothetical basis, public education about a real ongoing massacre and mass starvation was made illegal.
The post Germany confirms its collaboration with genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Shortly after the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed that denounced an educational program called Woke Kindergarten, the right-wing echo chamber kicked into high gear. Tiger Craven-Neeley, the author of the op-ed and a third-grade instructor at Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, was incensed that the district had spent $250,000 on workshops and one-on-one mentoring for teachers…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.
Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.
With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.
But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.
Israel deeply regrets the tragic incident which claimed the lives of seven humanitarian aid workers.
Our hearts go out to their families and to their home countries.
The IDF is conducting a swift and transparent investigation and we will make our findings public.
Israel…
— Benjamin Netanyahu – ?????? ?????? (@netanyahu) April 2, 2024
Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.
In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.
Not this time.
Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”
Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.
When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were“indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?
'It could've been our missiles that killed them.'
@NickFerrariLBC calls for the suspension of arms sales to Israel after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza killed seven aid workers, including three Brits. pic.twitter.com/HK4PfHy2JU— LBC (@LBC) April 3, 2024
Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”
The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.
A salutary equation indeed.
British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.
But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.
British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.
But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.
Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.
They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.
Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.
Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.
But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Israel needed to take firmer action.
The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.
This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the region to protect its volunteers, while Israel formally banned the group from accessing the occupied territories.
Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.
Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.
The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.
With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.
The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.
The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.
That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.
Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.
The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.
The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.
Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.
And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.
This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.
Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.
Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.
The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.
WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.
Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.
Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.
Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.
The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.
Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.
Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.
According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.
Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.
Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.
An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.
Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”
That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.
Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.
Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”
This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.
Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.
If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.
Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.
Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.
Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.
That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.
Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.
Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.
What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.
But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.
The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.
The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.
His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.
Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.
Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.
Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.
Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.
And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.
Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.
Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.
Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.
Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.
Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.
Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.
Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.
The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.
The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.
Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.
Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.
The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists running around loose, making fun of you and your propaganda. No, you need to get the culture business under control, and dictate what is and isn’t “art,” and what types of art are “harmful to society,” and demonize them, and the artists who created them, and censor them, or otherwise erase them.
The Nazis went about this process in their characteristically ham-fisted fashion …
“In September 1933, the Nazis created the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Chamber oversaw the production of art, music, film, theater, radio, and writing in Germany. The Nazis sought to shape and control every aspect of German society. They believed that art played a critical role in defining a society’s values. In addition, the Nazis believed art could influence a nation’s development. Several top leaders became involved in official efforts on art. They sought to identify and attack ‘dangerous’ artworks as they struggled to define what ‘truly German’ art looked like.” — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
One of the most ham-fisted events in the course of this process of ideological “synchronization” (a process known as “Gleichschaltung” in German) was the Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich in 1937 …
New Normal Germany is not Nazi Germany, so there is no “New Normal Chamber of Culture,” and no new “Degenerate Art” exhibition. The New Normal is a new form of totalitarianism, one which can’t afford to be perceived as totalitarianism, and thus the Gleichschaltung process works a bit differently.
I’m going to use my prosecution as an example, again. I apologize to any regular readers who are sick of hearing me go on about it. I know, I promised not to go all “Late Lenny Bruce,” but the Germans keep providing me with new comedy material. If you’re not one of those regular readers and thus are unfamiliar with the background of my case, you can read about it in The Atlantic, Matt Taibbi’s Racket News, and in various independent media outlets.
The short version is, back in 2022, I posted two Tweets criticizing mask mandates and making fun of Karl Lauterbach, the German Health Minister. Both Tweets included an image from the cover artwork of my latest book, The Rise of The New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).
The German authorities did not appreciate those Tweets, so they (1) had them censored by Twitter, (2) had Amazon ban my book in Germany, and (3) dragged me into criminal court and prosecuted me on trumped-up “hate crime” charges. I was acquitted of those charges at my trial in January, but the Berlin State Prosecutor has appealed the verdict.The latest bit of comic material the German authorities have provided me with is a copy of the prosecutor’s grounds for the appeal. In it, the Oberstaatsanwältin als Hauptabteilungsleiterin (i.e., “The Senior Public Prosecutor and Department Head”) argues that my Tweets do not express opposition to the Nazis, which … she’s right, they don’t. They express opposition to the mask mandates, and lies of the German authorities, and their violation of the German constitution.
My Tweets do not express my opposition to the Nazis because my Tweets assume opposition to the Nazis. They assume that all decent people understand and take it for granted that the Nazis were … well, Nazis, vicious, sadistic, mass-murdering fascists, with zero respect for democracy and the rule of law, who were obsessed with imposing their fanatically insane ideology on the entire planet. They (i.e., my Tweets) assume that comparing a contemporary group of power-intoxicated, constitution-violating, official-propaganda-spewing psychopaths — for example, the current German authorities — to the Nazis is not exactly a compliment.
The Senior Public Prosecutor and Head of Department, who is clearly not only an expert on the law, and political commentary, but is also an expert on art, and subtlety, and other elements of aesthetics, explains the other problem with my art (i.e., in addition to the problem of opposing the German authorities’ unconstitutional dictates when I should have been opposing the Nazis) in her “Revisionsbegründung” (“Grounds for Appeal”) … too much subtlety, not enough “clarity” and “obviousness.”
Here’s an excerpt from the Revisionsbegründung (translation, clarification, and emphasis mine).
“The general politically-critical presentation [of the Tweets] does not even begin to express opposition to the NSDAP [i.e., the Nazi Party] and its ideology in an equally obvious and unequivocal way.” […] “Ultimately, the representations express that the accused wanted to emphasize his concerns about the measures in the Corona policy by adding the so-called swastika and the implicit reference to National Socialism. The implication is diametrically opposed to the required obviousness and clarity.”
If only someone had told me about the importance of “obviousness” in works of art when I was back in film school or starting out as an avant-garde playwright in New York City, who knows, I could have been somebody! Instead, I got myself all confused by artists like … well, for example, John Heartfield. The title of this 1936 piece is “HAVE NO FEAR – HE’S A VEGETARIAN.”
In light of The Senior Public Prosecutor’s argument, I don’t know what to think about this piece anymore. What was Heartfield trying to say? Was he pro- or anti-Hitler? More importantly, was he pro- or anti-vegetarian?
And what are we supposed to think about this? Is Barbara Kruger pro- or anti-shopping?
And here’s an illustration by Anthony Freda, the artist who designed the cover of my book, and who is clearly suffering from a “clarity and obviousness” deficiency!
Oh, and speaking of inadequate “clarity” and “obviousness,” and the displaying of swastikas on German Twitter, here’s a Tweet by Die Tageszeitung, the big “left” newspaper here in Berlin …
Back in November, my attorney filed a complaint about that Tweet with the Public Prosecutor, as an experiment, just to see how they would respond. Of course, they declined to investigate, and prosecute, and cited the same exceptions to the ban on displaying swastikas that apply in my case, and which the judge also cited when she acquitted me in January.
I asked my attorney to carry out that experiment, because, at the time, I was terribly confused about whether Die Tageszeitung opposed the Nazis, or was trying to promote the Nazis, or what, exactly, all those swastikas and smirking Nazis were doing in a Tweet about “German Muslims” and other “migrant people” and how they think about the Holocaust. In the end, I decided the Twitter operators at Die Tageszeitung were probably working under the same assumption about how people view the Nazis as I was when I posted my two Tweets, i.e., the assumption that the Nazis were bad and that you do not have to reiterate that to the general public each and every time you include a photograph of them, or a swastika, in your social-media artwork.
But, seriously now, as I noted in court, my case has nothing to do with the Nazis or The Senior Public Prosecutor’s understanding of art. It’s part of the crackdown on political dissent that is being carried out, not just here in Germany, but in countries all throughout the West. Yes, it’s particularly fascistic in Germany — if you can read German, here is yet another example of a case like mine, but under a different pretext — and it is absolutely focused on critics of the official Covid narrative and the Covid restrictions, but it isn’t focused exclusively on us. If you can set aside your allegiance to whatever side of whatever you have pledged it to, and have a look at what is coming down the pipe, or is already all the way down the pipe, in the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, France, and various other countries … well, I strongly recommend that you do that, preferably before we all get “gleichgeschaltet.”
If you need a place to start, I posted links to a few articles on Matt Taibbi’s Notes thing …’
OK, that’s it … I need to finish this column and go and up my “clarity and obviousness” game. The last thing I’d want to do at this point is post some other non-obvious art and accidentally “delegitimize the state.” I’m already in enough trouble as it is! Thank God I have The Senior Public Prosecutor’s Revisionsbegründung to refer to!
I tell you, I don’t know where I’d be without these Germans!
The post Degenerate Art in New Normal Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Academia has always been a political battleground. In recent years, those battles have been fought over issues of free speech, academic freedom and racial justice. As the world enters the sixth month of Israel’s current assault on the Palestinian people, scholars who advocate for Palestinian liberation, human rights and decolonization continue to find themselves in the crosshairs of right-wing…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says he will “act immediately” to ban Al Jazeera in the country after the Knesset passed a law Monday that allows the government to shut down foreign news networks deemed to be threats to national security. Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets with local reporters in Gaza, denounced the move and said it was part of a pattern of Israeli attacks on the Qatar…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, likens the ongoing fight against legislation intended to restrict what teachers can teach to a game of whack-a-mole. “There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors to ramp up harmful bills against educators and librarians,” she told Truthout. While she says that a wide array of so-called “parent’s rights” groups — in addition to well-known…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The New York-based media watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists says the announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of his intention to ban Al Jazeera follows a similar pattern of media interference, including the killing of media workers.
“We’ve seen this kind of language before from Netanyahu and Israeli officials in which they try to paint journalists as ‘terrorists’, as ‘criminals’. This is nothing new,” Jodie Ginsberg told Al Jazeera.
“It’s another example of the tightening of the free press and the stranglehold the Israeli government would like to exercise. It’s an incredibly worrying move by the government.”
Netanyahu wrote on X on Monday that “Al Jazeera harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the October 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers.
“The terrorist channel Al Jazeera will no longer broadcast from Israel. I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel’s activity.’
The Israeli parliament approved a law granting the government authority to ban foreign news networks, including Al Jazeera. PM Netanyahu pledged to “act immediately” to close the network’s local office
pic.twitter.com/L2RXOzVi5t
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 2, 2024
The Qatar-based network rejected what it described as “slanderous accusations” and accused Netanyahu of “incitement”.
“Al Jazeera holds the Israeli Prime Minister responsible for the safety of its staff and network premises around the world, following his incitement and this false accusation in a disgraceful manner,” it said in a statement.
‘Slanderous accusations’
“Al Jazeera reiterates that such slanderous accusations will not deter us from continuing our bold and professional coverage, and reserves the right to pursue every legal step.”
Netanyahu has long sought to shut down broadcasts from Al Jazeera, alleging anti-Israel bias, the network reports on its website.
The law, which passed in a 71-10 vote in the Knesset, gives the prime minister and communications minister the authority to order the closure of foreign networks operating in Israel and confiscate their equipment if it is believed they pose “harm to the state’s security”.
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that an Israeli move to shut down Al Jazeera would be “concerning”.
“The United States supports the critically important work of journalists around the world and that includes those who are reporting in the conflict in Gaza,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.
“So we believe that work is important. The freedom of the press is important. And if those reports are true, it is concerning to us.”
The legislation’s passage comes nearly five months after Israel said it would block Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen. It refrained from shutting Al Jazeera at the same time.
Move with closure
After the vote on Monday, Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said he intended to move forward with the closure. He said Al Jazeera had been acting as a “propaganda arm of Hamas” by “encouraging armed struggle against Israel”.
“It is impossible to tolerate a media outlet, with press credentials from the Government Press Office and offices in Israel, acting from within against us, certainly during wartime,” he said.
According to news agencies, his office said the order would seek to block the channel’s broadcasts in Israel and prevent it from operating in the country. The order would not apply to the occupied West Bank or Gaza.
Israel has often lashed out at Al Jazeera, which has offices in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
In May 2022, Israeli forces shot dead senior Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin.
A UN-commissioned report concluded that Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” in the killing, violating her “right to life”.
During the war in Gaza, several of the channel’s journalists and their family members have been killed by Israeli bombardments.
On October 25, an air raid killed the family of Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, including his wife, son, daughter, grandson and at least eight other relatives.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 32,782 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.
Pacific Media Watch and news agencies.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
EDITORIAL: By Pip Hinman and Susan Price
Meta, the giant social media corporation, has “unpublished” Green Left’s longstanding Facebook page, which had tens of thousands of followers.
We had been regularly posting stories, videos and photographs on the page from our consistent reporting of the news and views that seldom get into the mainstream media.
But our recent interviews with veteran Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled have resulted in what appears to be a 10-year ban, imposed without warning, nor an avenue of appeal.
Khaled, 79, is a member of the Palestinian Council (Palestine’s parliament) and a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She lives in political exile in Jordan.
She is recognised as the Che Guevara of Palestine; she has enormous respect from Palestinians and millions of progressive people around the world.
The Facebook banning came shortly after Zionist organisations combined with right-wing media (SkyNews and the Murdoch media) to pressure Labor to say it would prevent Khaled from addressing Ecosocialism 2024 — a conference GL is co-hosting in Boorloo/Perth in June — by not only denying her a visa, but even banning her from speaking by video link.
Multiple visits
As GL reported, the excuse for such political censorship is, as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry alleged in its letter to Labor, that allowing Khaled to speak “would be likely to have the effect of inciting, promoting or advocating terrorism”.
This is nonsense.
Khaled has visited Britain on multiple occasions over the past few years. Israel issued her a visa to visit the West Bank in 1996.
She has visited Sweden and South Africa and, on one of her multiple visits, met Nelson Mandela (once also labelled a “terrorist” by the West), who warmly welcomed her.
A growing number of human rights activists, academics, journalists and community leaders have protested against this blatant political censorship. Their statements are here and we urge you to join in by sending us a short statement.
Khaled told GL the real reason for this censorship is to “make us shut up about what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank today”.
Meta has been exposed for carrying out “systematic online censorship”, particularly of Palestinian voices.
Suppression of content
In December 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented “over 1050 takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses”.
Meta did not apply the same censorship to pro-Zionist posts that incited hate and violence against Palestinians.
HRW noted that “of the 1050 cases reviewed for this report, 1049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel”.
Other studies have described the systematic “shadow banning” of pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram.
AccessNow, which defends the “digital rights of people and communities at risk” reports that Meta is “systematically silencing the voices of both Palestinians and those advocating for Palestinians’ rights” through arbitrary content removals, suspension of prominent Palestinian and Palestine-related accounts, restrictions on pro-Palestinian users and content, shadow-banning, discriminatory content moderation policies, inconsistent and discriminatory rule enforcement.
Social media corporations, such as Meta and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), exercise a lot of power to manipulate people’s social and political views. This power has grown exponentially as more people access their news, views and information online.
Break this power
The search for ways to break this power will go on.
In the meantime there is one way readers can break the social media bans and restrictions on GL’s voice-for-the-resistance journalism: become a supporter and get GL delivered to you.
It has always been a struggle to keep people-power media projects alive. But GL has been going since 1991 and, with your help, we will not let the giant social media corporations silence us.
Republished with permission from Green Left.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
When the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was introduced in Congress two years ago, it set off alarm bells for many LGBTQ+ groups. The broad and vague bill that aimed to “protect children online” seemed like a censorship nightmare, empowering state attorneys general to determine what kind of content harms kids. The fears that KOSA would be used to shut down LGBTQ+ content were not unfounded.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The heralded arrival of the Internet caused flutters of enthusiasm, streaks of heart-felt hope. Unregulated, and supposedly all powerful, an information medium never before seen on such scale could be used to liberate mind and spirit. With almost disconcerting reliability, humankind would coddle and fawn over a technology which would, as Langdon Winner writes, “bring universal wealth, enhanced freedom, revitalized politics, satisfying community, and personal fulfilment.”
Such high street techno-utopianism was bound to have its day. The sceptics grumbled, the critiques bubbled and flowed. Evgeny Morozov, in his relentlessly biting study The Net Delusion, warned of the misguided nature of the “excessive optimism and empty McKinsey-speak”, of cyber-utopianism and the ostensibly democratising properties of the Internet. Governments, whatever their ideological mix, gave the same bark of suspicion.
In Australia, we see the tech-utopians being butchered, metaphorically speaking, on our doorstep. Of concern here is the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023. This nasty bit of legislative progeny arises from the 2019 Digital Platforms Inquiry conducted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The final report notes how consumers accessing news placed on digital platforms “potentially risk exposure to unreliable news through ‘filter bubbles’ and the spread of disinformation, malinformation and misinformation (‘fake news’) online.” And what of television? Radio? Community bulletin boards? The mind shrinks in anticipation.
In this state of knee-jerk control and paternal suspicion, the Commonwealth pressed digital platforms conducting business in Australia to develop a voluntary code of practice to address disinformation and the quality of news. The Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation was launched on February 22, 2021 by the Digital Industry Group Inc. Eight digital platforms adopted the code, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. The acquiescence from the digital giants did little in terms of satisfying the wishes of the Morrison government. The Minister of Communications at the time, Paul Fletcher, duly announced that new laws would be drafted to arm the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with the means “to combat online misinformation and disinformation.” He noted an ACMA report highlighting that “disinformation and misinformation are significant and ongoing issues.”
The resulting Bill proposes to make various functional amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (Cth) as to the way digital platform services work. It also proposes to vest the ACMA with powers to target misinformation and disinformation. Digital platforms not in compliance with the directions of the ACMA risk facing hefty penalties, though the regulator will not have the power to request the removal of specific content from the digital platform services.
In its current form, the proposed instrument defines misinformation as “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm.” Disinformation is regarded as “misinformation that is intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm.”
Of concern regarding the Bill is the scope of the proposed ACMA powers regarding material it designates as “harmful online misinformation and disinformation”. Digital platforms will be required to impose codes of conduct to enforce the interpretations made by the ACMA. The regulator can even “create and enforce an industry standard” (this standard is unworkably opaque, and again begs the question of how that can be defined) and register them. Those in breach will be liable for up to $7.8 million or 5% of global turnover for corporations. Individuals can be liable for fines up to $1.38 million.
A central notion in the proposal is that the information in question must be “reasonably likely […] to cause or contribute serious harm”. Examples of this hopelessly rubbery concept are provided in the Guidance Note to the Bill. These include hatred targeting a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability. It can also include disruption to public order or society. The example provided in the guidance suggests typical government paranoia about how the unruly, irascible populace might be incited: “Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure.”
The proposed law will potentially enthrone the ACMA as an interventionist overseer of digital content. In doing so, it can decide what and which entity can be exempted from alleged misinformation practices. For instance, “excluded content for misinformation purposes” can be anything touching on entertainment, parody or satire, provided it is done in good faith. Professional news content is also excluded, but any number of news or critical sources may fall foul of the provisions, given the multiple, exacting codes the “news source” must abide by. The sense of that discretion is woefully wide.
The submission from the Victorian Bar Association warns that “the Bill’s interference with the self-fulfilment of free expression will occur primarily by the chilling self-censorship it will inevitably bring about in the individual users of the relevant services (who may rationally wish to avoid any risk of being labelled a purveyor of misinformation or disinformation).” The VBA also wonders if such a bill is even warranted, given that the problem has been “effectively responded to by voluntary actions taken by the most important actors in this space.”
Also critical, if less focused, is the stream of industrial rage coming from the Coalition benches and the corridors of Sky News, where Rupert Murdoch ventriloquises. Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman called the draft “a very bad bill” giving the ACMA “extraordinary powers. It would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.” Sky News has even deigned to use the term “Orwellian”.
Misinformation, squawked Coleman, was defined so broadly as to potentially “capture many statements made by Australians in the context of political debate.” Content from journalists “on their personal digital platforms” risked being removed as crudely mislabelled misinformation. This was fascinating, u-turning stuff, given the enthusiasm the Coalition had shown in 2022 for a similar muzzling of information. Once in opposition, the mind reverses, leaving the mind to breathe.
The proposed bill on assessing, parcelling and dictating information (mis-, dis-, mal-) is a nasty little experiment in censoring communication and discussion. When the state decides, through its agencies, to tell readers what is appropriate to read and what can be accessed, the sirens should be going off.
The post Censors Celebrated: Misinformation and Disinformation Down Under first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
…What we see at work is not an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs of political life.
— Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, p. 343.
We entered the massive marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and at this date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and off the books to insure that ruling power maintains control over American capitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal control officer or president of the United States. Given that, the spending and consciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befitting a system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity than American voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status of an American empire making more people rich than ever before while making multitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nations is not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economic organism.
As the fading rulers of western capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead of leaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, mass murder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mental condition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking human beings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approaches the worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires of hell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that might make the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblical times when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as ruling wealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political and media servants of rulers do today.
The continuing since 1917 American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a point in the current war using Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hope of winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various of the NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urge broadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists in their fevered minds, said fever having been planted by America since the end of the second world war.
Meanwhile, the center of global anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloody horror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened and expressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948 when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been a haven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would be like Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making all others second class citizens once they took over, changed the language and culture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans ever had.
In only one of thousands of contradictions of logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continue calling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semites commit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western world have their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everything else in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearing an end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changes underway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seem more dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of the imperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-pot dictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other past murderers.
While it seems that the horrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will be the same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans have grown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both parties increase alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or national disorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracy in substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people who are told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economic form of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street are merely getting close to nature.
While political madness depicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned and operated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimes committed by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps and hustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially Congress and the white house, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed by American taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what the world needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in the planning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to pass if Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late. Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil of the two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that does not involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handful become billionaires.
The opening quote is from someone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term not even vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easily understandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, a socialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those same billions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts about people, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjust and work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by ending warfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as our pre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after we clear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx in his own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderous detractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand about why our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.
The post Private Profits vs. Social Prophets first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On December 31, 2021 the interview that I recorded with Joe Rogan went live and the internet went crazy. This is old news, as is the fact that both Neil Young and a favorite artist of my youth, Joni Mitchell, pulled their music collections from the Spotify catalog – due to the “misinformation” that was spread during that show. Of course, nothing I said on that show was misinformation. Over the past two years – what was said during the interview has been validated again and again.
This week, major main-stream-media outlets report that Neil Young has decided to put his music back on Spotify – good for him, I suppose. Article after article in legacy media is covering his return, all indicating that he left in protest of “misinformation”, but never mentioning the Joe Rogan/Malone episode or discussing what the claimed “misinformation” actually consisted of. And not a single article from any conservative media outlet pushing back against the approved legacy media narrative. No one has asked me for an interview on this topic. Seems like that might be relevant, don’t you think, as I was the one evidently spreading the “misinformation” ?
For me, I am still banned or shadow banned on many platforms – including a permanent ban on Linked-in. State sponsored media still has no interest in reporting on facts surrounding the pandemic lock-downs, masks, vaccine safety, a corrupted vaccine pre-clinical and clinical trials process, adverse events associated with the jab, the corruption of academic journals – including capture by the WEF. The fact is that the world went crazy and transnational corporations used that season of madness to increase profits and market share.
That particular episode (#1757) is almost impossible to find on the googleweb or on the spotify search engine. However, in response to the widespread censorship efforts a transcript was entered into the congressional record.
People have asked me again and again, when is “Joe” going to have you back on. Of course, Joe Rogan never asked me back on his show. He basically ghosted me after that episode. I guess it was to be expected, the blow back from Spotify must have been huge. But still – it was (and is) kind of weird. And now Rogan has done another deal and cut himself loose of the Spotify exclusivity.
As of February this year, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is no longer exclusive to Spotify. The host signed a new multi-year deal, believed to be worth $250m (£196m), that allows the podcast to be distributed by other platforms including Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music.
— The Guardian: “Neil Young to return music to Spotify as he attacks ‘disinformation’ across streaming services”
So, here I am – still standing. Still strong. Still banned from main-stream-media. My very name has been made toxic on Facebook. Thousands of essays on Substack, and none can be found via Google search engines. Permanently banned on Linked In. Gaslight, defamed, stereotyped and slandered by both legacy media and a wide range of professional on-line trolls and malcontents who post lies daily. Wikipedia still promotes a variety of lies about me, but at least it is more accurate than it once was.
Not once has Neil Young or Joni Mitchell ever reached out to discuss their concerns. Not that I expected them to. The once-rebels have turned into the status-quo. No better than their fathers or mothers or big government.
Will mainstream State-sponsored media ever change their spots and do some real reporting? It appears not. The deep state, including President Trump, just doubles down on the “safe and effective” false narrative, despite all the evidence to the contrary. This saddens me. An opportunity lost for the science and government to evolve and learn from these public policy mistakes, which have caused a huge amount of suffering and unnecessary loss of life.
Now the World Health Organization thinks that it should rule the world – with its new pandemic treaty and amended International Health Regulations to lead the way to its version of a better future for the world – a totalitarian technofascist future. The New World Order is not a conspiracy theory – international law will take control of the world and is now the top dog. Controlling the regulatory capture that is occurring may not be doable in my lifetime. Scary thought.
All “we” can do is continue to fight. To fight the increasing regulatory burden that is placed upon us each and every day. To fight for our rights to be free. The right to privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms and all our other rights are more critical than ever.
I am strong. I am still standing. Let’s stand together and fight to make America free again.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.
Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:
My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)
Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:
The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.
But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:
The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.
I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.
Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.
In 2013, Simpson opined:
The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…
Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.
Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:
World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked
Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:
Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy
Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:
Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…
The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.
Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.
The BBC headline reporting this story read:
Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO
Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.
Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:
If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.
Needless to say, that was not to be.
On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:
Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:
Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.
On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:
As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals
Author Assal Rad responded:
Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.
The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’
What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:
Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid
And:
Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks
USA Today’s headline was surreal:
112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers
On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:
More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy
The standfirst (sub-heading):
Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush
Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.
It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:
ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104
Compare also its standfirst:
ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries
On 1 March, Associated Press reported:
The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)
The following day, a BBC headline read:
Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza
A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:
After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)
The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:
They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.
And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.
It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.
Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.
On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:
The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.
Brown commented on video footage:
Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.
Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.
“Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”
Brown added:
Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”
Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?
As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:
The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).
The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).
This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.
A BBC report on 5 March stated:
Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.
Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.
Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?
According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:
After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.
Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.
Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:
“It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.
”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.
”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”
CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:
We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.
On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:
UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
“Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”
The UN added of its experts:
They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.
“Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.
None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:
During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.
Conclusion
It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:
Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows
Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:
Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.
The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.
On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:
The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)
See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’
Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.
We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)
With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:
What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)
The answer, of course, was oil.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On 12 March 2024 the U.S. and European Union issued new joint guidance on Monday for online platforms to help mitigate virtual attacks targeting human rights defenders, reports Alexandra Kelley,
Staff Correspondent, Nextgov/FCW.
Outlined in 10 steps, the guidance was formed following stakeholder consulting from January 2023 to February 2024. Entities including nongovernmental organizations, trade unionists, journalists, lawyers, environmental and land activists advised both governments on how to protect human rights defenders on the internet.
Recommendations within the guidance include: committing to an HRD [human rights defender] protection policy; identifying risks to HRDs; sharing information with peers and select stakeholders; creating policy to monitoring performance metric base marks; resource staff adequately; build a capacity to address local risks; offer safety tools education; create an incident reporting channel; provide access to help for HRDs; and incorporate a strong transparent infrastructure.
Digital threats HRDs face include target Internet shutdowns, censorship, malicious cyber activity, unlawful surveillance, and doxxing. Given the severity and reported increase of digital attacks against HRDs, the guidance calls upon online platforms to take mitigating measures.
“The United States and the European Union encourage online platforms to use these recommendations to determine and implement concrete steps to identify and mitigate risks to HRDs on or through their services or products,” the guidance reads.
The ten guiding points laid out in the document reflect existing transatlantic policy commitments, including the Declaration for the Future of the Internet. Like other digital guidance, however, these actions are voluntary.
“These recommendations may be followed by further actions taken by the United States or the European Union to promote rights-respecting approaches by online platforms to address the needs of HRDs,” the document said
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
In March 2023, when my book on the case against Julian Assange was published, the detained WikiLeaks founder was waiting to find out if an appeals court in London would allow him to appeal extradition to the United States.
Now, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange [review] has been available on bookshelves for one year—and Assange still does not know if he has permission to appeal.
Such limbo has developed into a feature of the prosecution against Assange. The march of time whittles away at Assange while cold-blooded authorities keep him in arbitrary detention.
Assange was 38 years of age when WikiLeaks garnered praise for publishing disclosures from US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Assange was an ardent, nimble, and sharp-witted advocate for the truth. But at 52, Assange is increasingly frail as delays in proceedings compound physical and mental health problems that he must endure in Belmarsh prison.
President Joe Biden’s administration may prefer the limbo to an unprecedented trial that will invite global condemnation. No Biden official has expressed any reservations when it comes to charging Assange.
Biden officials still sidestep reporters, who ask why the US government won’t drop the charges against Assange. Biden’s National Security Council spokesperson said in October, “This is something the Justice Department is handling, and I think it’s better if you go to them on that.”
But the State Department has not always been so disciplined. On World Press Freedom Day in 2023, State Department spokesperson Verdant Patel endorsed the prosecution that was launched under President Donald Trump.
“The State Department thinks that Mr. Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history. His actions risked serious harm to U.S. national security to the benefit of our adversaries,” Patel stated.
Patel added, “It put named human sources to grave and imminent risk and risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention.”
What the State Department uttered was familiar. This is how officials responded when WikiLeaks first published US diplomatic cables in 2010.
To be clear, Assange’s “role” was that of a publisher who received documents from Manning and engaged in standard newsgathering activities.
A 2011 Associated Press review of sources, whom the State Department claimed were most at risk from publication of the cables, uncovered no evidence that any person was threatened. In fact, the potential for harm was “strictly theoretical.”
Despite the stagnation of the case against Assange, an international movement to free him has only grown stronger. Lawmakers in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Mexico sent letters to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding an end to the case.
Twenty unions affiliated with the European Federation of Journalists showed solidarity by granting Assange honorary membership in each of their organizations.
On March 4, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that he hoped the British courts would block extradition, which is remarkable given Germany’s status as a powerful NATO country.
More significantly, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed a motion passed by the Australian Parliament that called on the US government—a close military and intelligence partner—to “bring the matter to a close” so that Assange may return home to his country.
Assange is one of the world’s most well-known political prisoners. If the US government puts the WikiLeaks founder on trial, it will not only threaten the First Amendment in the United States but also imperil investigative journalism everywhere around the world.
It is unlikely that the legal system in the United Kingdom or the United States will save us from the damage to global press freedom that officials are inflicting on our collective rights. To prevent further damage, we will have to find a way to shame the US government into abandoning the case. Otherwise, even more of us may find ourselves prosecuted for committing acts of journalism.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Guess who threatened them? The Girl Scouts of the United States.
Stories abound of retaliation against those who express concern over Israeli ethnic cleansing – from censoring news reports to reprimanding faculty, mass arrests, and suppressing students’ right to protest. A well-orchestrated campaign against Palestine’s right to exist is spreading like Covid across the US. Now, it has hit a new low.
The national Girl Scouts are threatening legal action against a St. Louis troop for the crime of making bracelets to raise money for Gaza’s children.
A story in the March 25, 2024 St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Aisha Sultan documents that the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri and the Girl Scouts of the United States have written scout leader Nawal Abuhamdeh of her failure to follow proper procedure and “sent her instructions on how to leave the organization.”
For four years Abuhamdeh had coordinated the group’s cookie sales. But after witnessing what happened to her parents’ Palestinian homeland she brought the idea of raising money to the diverse group of girls whose families are from Somalia, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and India.
Not just these countries, but most others around the world are horrified at the Zionist “final solution” against Palestinians.
With reports of IDF forces summarily killing captive Palestinians, Ralph Nader’s question of the scarcity of reports on Israeli POW camps becomes salient. Has Netanyahu given the order for “No prisoners” even after Palestinians have surrendered?
Though there are now reports of 30,000 Palestinian deaths, Israeli efforts to block food, water and human waste management means that death by starvation, thirst and infectious diseases may vastly exceed deaths via weapon annihilation.
As of February 21, US representatives have stymied efforts to have the UN call for a cease-fire four times. While Biden calls for “restraint” by Israel out of one side of his mouth, the other side continues to order that weapons of mass destruction be sent.
The targeting of hospitals continues as the deaths of children mount. These facts are consistent with a Zionist goal of obliterating the future of Palestinians as a people.
These scenes are not lost on the girls in Abuhamdeh’s troop. Videos of the war crimes are highly disturbing.
One video shows a Palestinian father using a shopping bag to collect pieces of his slaughtered children. Another depicts a doctor who must amputate a leg of his 16-year-old niece on the dinner table without anesthesia. In one, viewers see that “A wailing 4-year-old tried to get up and look for his parents — both of whom were killed, and his own legs amputated.”
Particularly revealing are the comments published at the bottom of the Sultan article. Though most were supportive of the St. Louis scouts, several identified with Zionist disdain for Palestinians. A person self-identifying as “kuuindhater” wrote “Helicopter Mom with an article dripping in victimology.” “medi8r” added “I fear this sort of one sided propaganda leads to misplaced hate toward Israel and Jews.”
One called “billikenforever” exuded general dislike: “What a crock! The Girl Scouts have partnered with Planned Parenthood for years in promoting the elimination of innocent babies.”
The St. Louis scout troop had posted on social media that supporters could buy bracelets for $5 or $10, with the funds going to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF). The Girl Scouts of the US then wrote to them that it was impermissible to raise money for “partisan politics.” Agreeing with them, “lucygirl” posted in the comments “Does the PCRF fund Hamas? The Girls Scouts are correct in not wanting their organization accused of having members donate to an organization that fund terrorist groups.”
Interestingly, the Girl Scouts had no problem with raising money for those injured in Ukraine. Abuhamdeh pointed out the similarity and the absence of reprisals for that effort. Defending this double standard, “MOgal2” commented that “This is a political war unlike Ukraine. Ukraine was invaded by an unprovoked army. They are fighting back on their own land. Israel was attacked in a heinous way.”
Yes, the propaganda machines control millions of minds in colonizing countries. Slicing through the Gordian knot of twisted logic, “zap973” simply noted “It’s obvious that Ukrainians are perceived as white westerners therefore deserving of compassion. Palestinians are not. End of story.”
The post Girl Scouts Threatened for Supporting Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Washington D.C., February 16, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern on Friday about Israeli government plans to make it illegal to publish leaked details from security cabinet meetings without approval from the military censor, saying this restriction would severely damage press freedom.
“We urge Israel to drop this plan and ensure that the media can report freely. The Israeli government must not hide information about its conduct in the Israel-Gaza war,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “We need press freedom in time of war and in time of peace. It is our firewall for democracy and our antidote to the fog of war. Censorship must end both in Israel and Gaza.”
CPJ has documented numerous cases of censorship, threats, and intimidation against Israeli and Palestinian journalists since the start of the war.
Israeli forces have killed an unprecedented number of journalists since October 7, refused to give any guarantees to international news organizations regarding the safety of their employees in Gaza, and only allow foreign media to enter Gaza on escorted military tours provided they agree to submit pre-publication coverage for military approval. In January, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected a petition by the Foreign Press Association for military authorities to allow foreign journalists to report inside Gaza.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A Florida bill seeking to tighten regulations on educator certification and school leader preparation programs has advanced in the state Senate, edging closer to a potential vote. The bill, SB 1372, marks the latest effort by right-wing lawmakers to strip teachings on systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege from educational programs. “Today, the Senate Appropriations Committee on…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Governments colluded to shut down and destroy @RussellBrand. This is his first interview since that happened. It’s one of the most brilliant explanations of the modern world you’ll ever hear.
The post Russell Brand Responds to Coordinated Smear Campaign Against Him first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Before the commencement of the 55th session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) on 26 February 2024, ongoing human rights violations in Bahrain have been exposed. This is despite the government’s vigorous efforts to conceal these violations, particularly the freedom of opinion and expression, by claiming superficial reforms before the international community. However, monitoring the human rights situation in the country reveals the gloomy reality in the field of suppressing freedoms and criminalizing freedom of opinion and expression. As a result, self-censorship has become a prevailing pattern for Bahraini citizens out of fear of government prosecution.
The concept of “self-censorship” spread in Bahrain after the government suppressed the popular movement demanding reform and democracy. It launched a campaign that continues to this day against any opinion opposing or contrary to its policies. This concept is not limited to the self-censorship practiced by media and journalists due to the laws restricting the freedom of the press and media in Bahrain. However, it also includes a much wider spectrum, extending to all segments of Bahraini society. By criminalizing freedom of expression by the Government of Bahrain and resorting to a systematic pattern of violations against any official orientation, self-censorship has become the best solution for Bahraini citizens. It helps them avoid the consequences of legal prosecution and political retaliation for violating the regime, criticizing it, or even expressing an opinion on any public matter in detail.
This topic presents one aspect of the breakdown of Bahrain’s human rights situation. As a retaliatory measure, the Government monitors and tracks anyone who contravenes its orientation or goes beyond self-censorship by participating in public decisions, criticizing government policies, or merely demanding reform. In response, their security services carry out summonses and investigations and force individuals to sign pledges not to express opinions again. This can often lead to more severe retaliation by fabricating terrorism charges, bringing the individual to trial, and sentencing them to imprisonment, simply for stating their opinions.
Self-censorship refers to the restrictions imposed on oneself concerning freedom of expression, either due to fear of violating Bahraini domestic laws restricting freedoms, or fear of retaliation by authorities for opposing their decisions or vision. This trend gained momentum after 2015, with Bahraini courts beginning to issue malicious sentences for charges related to freedom of expression. They handed down prison sentences for posting tweets on the X platform (previously known as Twitter) against activists Hameed Khatam and Taiba Ismaeel. Ismaeel, a mother of three, was accused of insulting the King and inciting hatred of the regime. A group of clerics, including Sayed Majeed Mishal, President of the dissolved Shia Clerics Council, Sayed Yassin Qasim, Sheikh Aziz Hasan Salman, and artistic director Yasser Nasser, were sentenced to imprisonment for their participation in a sit-in in Duraz.
There is a prevailing understanding that many topics have become prohibited. Expressing opinions on domestic policies, such as objection to elections, the performance of ministries and government agencies, violations of the rights of political prisoners in deplorable conditions in prisons, or expressing opinions on economic and monetary policies, like demanding a halt to widespread corruption, is discouraged. Additionally, expressing opinions on foreign policies like normalization with Israel or participation in the American coalition against Houthis in Yemen in the Red Sea is also discouraged. With the crackdown on the popular movement in the streets and the imprisonment of many who participated in anti-government gatherings and rallies, attempts have shifted to rooting out any dissenting opinion online. Published opinions are used as evidence to fabricate cases against the defendants and issue harsh sentences against them.
A campaign of intimidation for those who violate the self-censorship guillotine
The recent war in Gaza has sparked widespread global outrage over the ongoing genocide – as deemed by UN experts – against Palestinian civilians. The Palestinian civilians face exposure to ethnic cleansing, as characterized by UN experts, amidst the silence of governments regarding the killing of thousands of children and women there. In response, social media activists and civil society members worldwide, including Bahrain, stood in solidarity with the Palestinians. They expressed their condemnation and opinions on various social media platforms. However, the Bahraini government responded punitively and retaliated against this segment of activists. On 19 December 2023, Bahraini authorities arrested a prominent Bahraini activist and opposition leader in the Waad Society, Ebrahim Sharif. This arrest was against the backdrop of a tweet where he openly expressed his opposition to the normalization of his country with Israel and strongly rejected its participation in the American coalition against Houthis in Yemen. He believed the coalition aimed to protect Israeli interests in the Red Sea. Sharif had posted many tweets about his rejection of normalization and his country’s position on the war in Gaza. However, to some extent, he subjected it to self-censorship corresponding with his ideas and did not provide a reason for authorities to summon and arrest him. He was previously arrested in 2016 over a speech in which he was accused of inciting hatred.
After the tweet’s publication, he was summoned to appear before the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) and subsequently arrested. Utilizing the Cybercrime Law, the Public Prosecution Office (PPO) decided to detain him for seven days under investigation. He was charged with promoting hatred against the regime and supporting a terrorist group, solely because he supported the Palestinians. Following the arrest, Bahrain’s streets became the scene of a popular movement calling for the release of activist Sharif. 209 figures from various intellectual, cultural, political, and social sectors within Bahraini society signed a petition. They demanded his immediate release, emphasizing that his expressed views represent the majority of the Bahraini people. An electronic campaign has also emerged on social media, condemning Sharif’s arrest merely for expressing his opinion, a right guaranteed by the Constitution, the National Action Charter, and relevant international conventions that Bahrain has signed.
In a similar case, Bahraini authorities arrested Sheikh Mohamed Sanqoor on the background of his sermon on Friday 19 May 2023, in which he discussed his refusal to change educational curricula to the satisfaction of the Israeli side. The CID charged him with delivering speeches containing legal violations, including “insulting the authorities and publicly inciting hatred of a sect of people and contempt for them”. However, the sentiment on the Bahraini streets is in support of the Palestinians, rejecting normalization with Israel, and expressing this through near-daily demonstrations.
In November 2023, the Bahraini historical researcher Jasim AlAbbas was arrested for ten days on the background of publishing a video in which he discusses the historical context for the emergence of Islam and the Shia sect in Bahrain. This topic falls within the framework of his specialization in the field of historical and academic research. A post by the blogger and researcher Jassim AlAbbas about a historical mosque in Bahrain was previously deleted from his Instagram account, and his blog “Years of Al-Juraish”. This deletion occurred after he discussed a former ruler in Bahrain before the arrival of the AlKhalifa family to power. Subsequently, he was arrested and accused of spreading false information against the background of this post.
The activist Ali Muhanna continues to face repeated summonses, the latest being in January 2024, due to his participation in peaceful gatherings and protests, and his open expression of opinions. The total number of summonses from April 2021 to September 2022 reached 24 summonses. Muhanna has been forced to sign multiple pledges related to his participation in protests calling for the release of prisoners of conscience and his social media posts regarding prisoners facing mistreatment.
Bahrain is deemed ‘not a free country’
Using various forms of repression, including harassment through repeated summons, arbitrary detention, and torture, the Government of Bahrain has successfully crushed civil society. According to Amnesty International, “most peaceful critics now feel that the risks of expressing their views have become too high in Bahrain”. These practices have had a detrimental impact on freedoms in the country, as dissenting voices are silenced. Additionally, citizens are apprehensive about criticizing the government or participating in public decisions due to the potential repercussions, fearing a fate similar to that of opposition leaders, human rights defenders, and civil society activists. These figures have experienced unfair trials, politicized charges, and retaliation for their peaceful activities, intensifying the overall climate of fear.
Due to the vague provisions of these laws and the government’s harsh repression of freedom of expression, prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab was sentenced to a total of seven years in prison for posts on Twitter. Despite his release in 2020 under alternative sanctions, he remains under the threat of re-imprisonment, warning that any critical speech on social media could lead to his incarceration again. Consequently, he engages in self-censorship over his online content to some extent to continue his human rights activism. The blogger, freedom of expression activist, and founder of the Bahrain Online website, Ali AbdulEmam, faced targeting and harassment for his online activities. He was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison after being forced to flee the country.
In the face of the reality of stifling freedoms and the criminalization of free expression, the trend towards self-censorship has become one of the means employed to evade potential retaliatory repercussions. These repercussions may extend across various dimensions, including physical, psychological, professional, and legal. Due to limitations imposed by laws and the Constitution, citizens are adopting caution in what they openly declare in public. They are reviewing their social media posts for fear of exceeding the boundaries set by the government. However, the line between what is permissible and prohibited remains unclear, prompting individuals to refrain from expressing their views on public matters to avoid authoritarian oversight.
This repression extended into cyberspace as well. Bahrain intensified its crackdown on online activity and social media platforms. It prosecuted several public figures for their posts on social media and authorized the use of spyware programs to monitor the content of activists, targeting them accordingly. An investigation by Citizen Lab revealed that Bahrain used the Pegasus spyware to target three activists who had criticized the Bahraini authorities, highlighting Bahrain’s interest in Israeli NSO technology.
Freedom House scored Bahrain 28/100 on its Freedom of the Next index, marking it as a country that is not free on the internet. This is primarily due to its practice of blocking websites, removing content critical of the government, and imposing criminal penalties and extrajudicial harassment of activists. These actions contribute to high rates of self-censorship driven by the fear of online surveillance and intimidation. From June 2020 to May 2021, at least 58 people faced prosecution, detention, or arrest in connection with their online activities. This includes a woman who was deported from the country and a lawyer whose practicing license was revoked.
This reality underscores the challenge that digital platforms pose to government control. Authorities consistently endeavor to curtail freedoms, extending from traditional media to electronic, alternative, and even social media platforms for citizens. According to Human Rights Watch, “the shift from harsh court sentences to increased summonses for interrogation and short-term detentions has become a prevalent method to intimidate and dissuade individuals from future criticism.” It quoted an expert as saying that self-censorship has been growing. The number of arrests has decreased because people have become conditioned to refrain from speaking out and avoiding anything critical, leading to an increase in self-censorship. As a consequence, citizens refrain from direct criticism of the ruling family, fearing repercussions. This fear extends to criticizing all security services run by members of the ruling family, including the Ministry of Interior. Due to fear of the censor’s scissors, Bahrainis refrain from criticizing ministers and various government agencies associated with the ministers, even if these entities lack decision-making authority.
Even government supporters fear potential misinterpretation of their opinions, as any dissent could lead to accountability. The expanded scope of fear correlates with an increase in summonses by security services, especially after the militarization of social media platforms. While citizens increasingly face summonses and investigations for their online posts, there are no clear statistics on these violations. This is due to the lack of transparency in state security services and because citizens avoid declaring what they are exposed to, fearing repercussions on their lives. In fear that their opinions may disturb the official authorities and subject them to investigation and accountability, many write tweets on social media platforms but delete them before publishing. In contrast, others keep them in unsent tweets.
Self-Censorship among Journalists
Self-censorship is described as the act of a journalist or media professional refraining from addressing controversial or problematic subjects out of concern that it may violate the law or lead to harassment and threats from authorities. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the government’s imposition of stringent restrictions on freedom of expression. The stigmatization of any opinion conflicting with official directives also exacerbates this phenomenon, leading to charges of terrorism, incitement, and posing a threat to security.
Bahrain enacted media freedoms by introducing the Law Regulating the Press, Printing, and Publishing in 2002, which extended its scope to encompass electronic media. However, instead of fostering a free journalistic environment, Bahrain became the instigator of a harsh crackdown on independent journalistic work. This campaign unfolded with the closure of AlWasat newspaper in 2017, marking the end of independent media in Bahrain as it was the last remaining independent newspaper.
The law is primarily employed to impose stringent restrictions on journalists, reporters, and bloggers, encompassing 17 different types of penalties that can lead to fines or imprisonment. As of late 2020, six journalists are behind bars, according to Freedom House, which categorizes Bahrain as a ‘non-free’ country, ranking it among the four worst Arab countries in terms of suppressing freedoms.
The Carnegie Institute asserts that the developments in Bahraini media since February 2011 unequivocally demonstrate the demise of freedom of the press, expression, and professional journalistic practices. Following the constraints imposed on traditional media, Bahrain extended its control to electronic media through Resolution No. 68/2016, an amendment to the Bahraini Press Law of 2002 (issued by Royal Decree No. 47). This ministerial decision mandates that obtaining a license requires providing a list of social media accounts, website addresses, and responsible individuals. Failure to comply may lead to summary prosecution if the content is deemed in violation.
Former Al Wasat newspaper employee Mahmood Al Jaziri was indeed sentenced to 15 years in prison and stripped of his citizenship. Additionally, award-winning photojournalists Ahmed Hamidan and Sayed Ahmed AlMoussawi are still incarcerated, with the latter also being deprived of citizenship. Furthermore, photojournalist Hasan Qambar received a sentence exceeding 100 years in prison for covering peaceful protests.
In its annual Human Rights Report 2022, the US State Department noted that Bahrain continues to impose severe restrictions on freedom of expression and media, employing censorship and the enforcement or threat of criminal defamation laws. The report emphasized that Bahrain restricted freedom of expression and freedom of the press by prosecuting individuals under defamation, slander laws, and national security laws. The law prohibits any speech authorities perceive as challenging public order or morals. This leads individuals to express critical opinions on local political and social issues in private, particularly after those who shared such opinions, whether in traditional or social media, faced public confrontations and potential consequences.
In addition to the presence of dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers, and activists behind bars for expressing their opinions, authorities employ other punitive measures. These include preventing the renewal of credentials for journalists working with foreign media outlets and obstructing the granting of licenses to media outlets. Consequently, Bahrain’s ranking plummeted to the bottom of the press freedom list, reaching 171 out of 180 countries by 2023. This decline is attributed to the lack of freedom of expression and the diminishing space available for independent press, ultimately transforming the media into a mere propaganda mouthpiece for the royal family and those associated with it.
Bahrain Violates UN Communications and Recommendations
In February, a new session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) will convene, reiterating demands for genuine reforms and an end to the policy of repression and persecution of citizens. However, the effectiveness of these demands hinges on the government’s commitment to implementing reforms, particularly concerning counterterrorism and media freedom laws, given its past evasion of such obligations.
United Nations experts recently issued a communication in 2023, warning of the human rights risks associated with Bahrain’s new counterterrorism law. They expressed concern about the broad definition of terrorism within the legislation, highlighting its potential negative impact on due process, freedom, personal security, the exercise of freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom of peaceful assembly and association. The experts called on the government to review and reconsider certain key aspects of the law to ensure its alignment with Bahrain’s international human rights obligations.
In July 2018, the Human Rights Committee expressed concern about numerous reports of reprisals against Bahraini defenders and journalists, especially when they collaborated with treaty bodies and the Human Rights Council. Subsequently, in November 2022, the Human Rights Council adopted the report from the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on Bahrain’s human rights situation. The report included 245 recommendations, approximately 26 of them addressing freedom of the press and expression of opinion. It’s worth noting that the Kingdom did not endorse all of these recommendations.
In March 2021, the European Union swiftly adopted a draft resolution condemning human rights violations in Bahrain after an overwhelming majority voted in favor. The resolution emphasized the imperative for Bahrain to cease arbitrary harassment, imprisonment, torture, and punishment of individuals exercising their civil and political rights, whether online or offline.
These violations indicate that the government of Bahrain persists in criminalizing any speech critical of the government, violating Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which encompasses freedom of expression and opinion through any means. Additionally, it contravenes Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty ratified by Bahrain. In light of these violations, Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) asserts the right guaranteed to all citizens for freedom of opinion and expression. ADHRB calls on the government of Bahrain to adhere to the international laws and treaties it has ratified, urging an end to summonses and arrests on the grounds of expressing opinion, and demanding a halt to persecution, espionage on activists and opponents, and reprisals against them.
The post Self-censorship: Bahrainis’ Refuge from the Guillotine of Government Pursuit appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
Sevinc Vaqifgizi is one of 13 independent journalists detained since snap presidential vote announced
In late November last year, the investigative journalist Sevinc Vaqifgizi was arrested upon arrival at Heydar Aliyev international airport in Azerbaijan and accused of smuggling foreign currency.
Shortly before takeoff the 34-year-old editor had learned that her close colleague, Ulvi Hasanli, had been detained hours earlier. The two journalists ran Abzas Media, a small, independent Azerbaijani news outlet known for its investigations. They deny the charges.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup that the U.S. regime hid behind popular 2013-2014 anti-corruption demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kiev and so turned that nation into a battering-ram against the U.S. regime’s top target for conquest, which is Russia right next door to Ukraine.
In both examples — both domestic and foreign — the U.S. regime’s motivation was to increase and to intensify the power of its owners, whom it serves and who are never satisfied with the immense power that they already have but always crave to acquire yet more.
How It Does Domestic Oppression
On 4 May 2020, Jordan Smith headlined “MISSOURI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AN INNOCENT MAN IN PRISON: Despite ample evidence that Lamar Johnson was wrongfully convicted, Eric Schmitt is sparing no effort to keep him locked up as the coronavirus spreads”, and reported that:
The police had nothing concrete to go on. But by the time they finally interviewed Elking, they had already latched onto a suspect: 20-year-old Lamar Johnson.
Johnson would soon be arrested and tried for the October 1994 murder on thin and troubling evidence. …
In 1995, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Still, he has long maintained his innocence — and now has a powerful ally in his corner: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis.
Gardner ran on a reform agenda and in 2016 became the first black elected prosecutor in the city’s history. She won federal funding to start a conviction integrity unit and in 2018, at the behest of the Midwest Innocence Project, began investigating Johnson’s case. A year later, she concluded that he was innocent.
In July 2019, Gardner filed a motion with Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan conceding that Johnson was wrongfully convicted. She asked the judge to grant a hearing on the matter and, ultimately, a new trial for Johnson. “When a prosecutor becomes aware of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of a crime that the defendant did not commit — the position in which the circuit attorney now finds herself — the prosecutor is obligated to seek to remedy the conviction,” Gardner wrote in the court filing.
But [Judge] Hogan balked, questioning whether Gardner had the power to challenge the conviction. She called in Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to see what he had to say about it. Schmitt argued that not only did Gardner lack that authority, but the court couldn’t even entertain the matter. Hogan aligned herself with Schmitt and dismissed the case without considering the evidence Gardner had uncovered.
Hogan’s decision sparked a unique legal battle that, on April 14, culminated in a video conference hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction. …
Gardner’s yearlong inquiry revealed that Johnson’s conviction had been marred by extensive police and prosecutorial misconduct. She found that police had fabricated witness statements in an effort to frame Johnson (the witnesses said they’d never told police the things that had been attributed to them) and had pressured Elking into making an identification after he’d repeatedly told them he did not know who had attacked Boyd that night. Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.
Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.
Gardner learned that Elking had been paid more than $4,000 in exchange for his testimony and that prosecutors had also fixed a string of traffic tickets for him. None of this information was turned over to Johnson’s defense. … The state also failed to tell the defense that the jailhouse informant, Mock, had an epic criminal history (some 200 pages long) and a history of testifying for the state. … There was also the fact that Johnson had an alibi: He was with his girlfriend, child, and two friends several miles away at the time of the shooting.. … On top of it all, Gardner learned that not long after Johnson was convicted, two men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, had each separately confessed to killing [Markus] Boyd. Both insisted that Johnson had nothing to do with it. … Given the breadth of the misconduct, Gardner felt she had to find a way to make things right — after all, it was her office that was responsible for Johnson’s conviction. …
Not everyone agrees with that position. Schmitt’s office has since doubled down in opposition to Gardner with a mind-numbing array of arguments. …
No prosecutor in the state of Missouri has the power to undo a wrongful conviction, sys the attorney general. … Schmitt says that Johnson can vindicate his rights by following regular post-conviction procedure: File a challenge based on the evidence Gardner has supplied and let the legal system work its ordinary, slogging magic. …
Even if Johnson’s appeal were to survive a procedural challenge, the process would only draw out his already wrongful incarceration. …
Unless the Missouri Supreme Court steps in, prosecutors in the state may remain hobbled, which is essentially what Schmitt is advocating: Keep the power to vet these claims in his hands and dismiss from the process elected prosecutors like Gardner, who vowed on the campaign trail to work toward a more equitable criminal justice system. …
Reform prosecutors across the country have faced varying degrees of backlash from the entrenched power structures they’ve challenged, and they’ve repeatedly had their discretion questioned as they’ve sought changes that upset the old guard. …
On 15 February 2023, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bannered “Judge frees Lamar Johnson after 28 years in prison: Original murder case was ‘suspect at best’”, and reported:
Lamar Johnson walked out of the downtown courthouse Tuesday afternoon, a free man for the first time in decades.
Just hours earlier, a St. Louis Circuit judge vacated Johnson’s murder conviction, ruling he was wrongly imprisoned nearly 30 years ago and that there is clear and convincing evidence of his innocence.
The ruling by 22nd Circuit Court Judge David Mason comes roughly two months after a weeklong hearing in December during which another man confessed to the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd — the crime that sent Johnson to prison with a life sentence.
Cheers erupted in the courtroom as Mason read his decision. …
The ruling ends Johnson’s decadeslong fight to prove his innocence. After years of being turned down on appeals and habeas corpus petitions, Johnson’s case attracted national attention in 2019 when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit reported misconduct by the investigation’s lead detective and other constitutional errors in the 1995 trial. …
Much of Mason’s decision centered on the main witness in Johnson’s 1995 trial, Greg Elking, who said at the December hearing that police coerced his original identification of Johnson as the man who wore a ski mask and shot Boyd. Mason described that identification as “suspect at best.”
”All Elking witnessed was the assailant’s eye, giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘eye witness,’” Mason said, describing it as “yet another serious weakness in the case against Johnson.”
Without Elking’s identification, there was no case. …
Photos: Wrongfully convicted inmate Lamar Johnson set free after serving 28 years for murder he did not commit. …
Once Lamar Johnson was freed, the national press reported the case, as being an example showing that though ‘mistakes’ can happen in American ‘justice’, they can be rectified: in this ‘democracy’, such mistakes can be rectified — the Government isn’t set up so as to produce these ‘mistakes’; it’s not set up that way so as to produce the world’s highest percentage of its population (almost all of which are poor people) being in prisons. It’s only mistakes. So, the public don’t know that it’s NOT mistakes — that it’s the way ‘our’ Government functions.
On 8 November 2022, Eric Schmitt won Missouri’s election to the U.S. Senate, and became appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he joins the other key Senators that represent the interests of U.S. armaments contractors (America’s most profitable industry), such as Boeing Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer in the state and is seeking tax-breaks from people such as Schmitt.
How It Does Foreign Oppression
Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled government an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.
The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already become beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.
However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.
So: how did the U.S. regime carry out this oppression of the Ukrainian people? It was done by the same means as it had been done in the Lamar Johnson case: coercion, including coercion against the mind, which is deceit, and including coercion against public officials who might otherwise try to do the right thing in order to serve the public instead of to serve their masters who have been funding their political careers.
On 17 June 2015, I headlined “The Who’s Who at the Top of the Coup” in Ukraine, and focused upon Dmitriy Yarosh, whom Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose to run the Maidan demonstration in Kiev that provided cover for the Obama-Nuland-organized February 2014 coup in Ukraine; and, on 1 February 2015, I headlined “The Ideology of the New Ukraine”, and focused upon Andrei Biletsky (or Beletsky), who organized and ran the openly nazi Ukrainiani Azov Battalion and, unlike Yarosh, Biletsky didn’t equivocate about his being a Ukrainian Social Nationalist or (National Socialist) in the Hitler vein, but he aimed “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich],” instead of Hitler’s German “Third Reich.” Then, on 20 March 2022, I headlined “How The Western Press Handles The Ukrainian Government’s Nazism” and presented a universally hidden-in-The-West photo of Biletsky leading his men in salute to what had been Nazi Germany’s Wolfsangel insignia.
On 27 May 2019, the OBOZREVATEL online Ukrainian news site headlined (as translated into English) “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life” , the transcript of their interview with Yarosh, right after Zelensky had won the Presidential election against Poroshenko, and, in that interview, Yarosh made unambiguously clear that if as President, Zelensky were to negotiate seriously with Russia,”he will lose not his position, but his life.” Yarosh — the agent of the regime in Washington DC — was sending the new Ukrainian President the very clear message, that even if the U.S. wouldn’t get rid of such a Ukrainian President, Ukraine’s nazis would. So: Zelensky (like Poroshenko before him) was being controlled not only from above, the empire’s imperial regime in Washington, but also from below, the U.S.-empowered nazis whom the U.S. regime had used in order to take over Ukraine during February 2014.
Conclusion
The U.S. Establishment (called “neocons” in foreign policy, and “neoliberals” or “libertarians” in domestic policy, but, in any case, America’s under-1,000 billionaires and their numerous employees and other agents) work via threats, not only against heads-of-state abroad such as Zelensky, but ALSO against domestic public officials such as the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to turn the screws upon those down below (such as in plea-bargains to lie in court cases) in order to keep those billionaires on top, and everyone else down below; and this is the empire’s social and political and even international, “rules-based order.” Whereas Lamar Johnson, as an extremely lucky exception to the rule (or “rules-based order”) managed finally to get free in 2023 after entering prison in 1995 for a frame-up against him by the regime that he and other Americans are forced to fund with their taxes, few others are and will be so lucky, but America’s ‘news’-media won’t and don’t report this fact. For example: there is nothing to indicate that Lamar Johnson sees what happened to him as being a frame-up by the regime instead of just a bunch of tragic mistakes that the U.S. Government had made. Even the victims usually remain ignorant of the reality. — the ‘news’-media cover it up. But the whole operation — like that of any other empire — is based ultimately upon requiring the public officials to impose by raw coercion if necessary, their masters’ rule, in this “rules-based order.” It’s the way that any empire functions. And, in the world of today, the only empire that remains is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’).
The post How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Union members at the Australian public broadcaster ABC have today passed a vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson for failing to defend the integrity of the ABC and its staff from outside attacks, reports the national media union.
The vote was passed overwhelmingly at a national online meeting attended by more than 200 members of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union said in a statement.
Union members have called on Anderson to take immediate action to win back the confidence of staff following a series of incidents which have damaged the reputation of the ABC as a trusted and independent source of news.
The vote of ABC union staff rebuked Anderson, with one of the broadcaster’s most senior journalists, global affairs editor John Lyons, reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as saying he was “embarrassed” by his employer, which he said had “shown pro-Israel bias” and was failing to protect staff against complaints.
This followed revelations of a series of emails by the so-called Lawyers for Israel lobby group alleged to be influential in the sacking of Lebanese Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf for her criticism on social media of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that has killed 25,000 people so far, mostly women and children.
Another pro-Israel WhatsApp lobbying the ABC.
It makes me sick in the stomach to see people celebrate my sacking.
It makes me sick in the stomach to see an alleged Ita Buttrose response saying I’m now gone.
It makes me worry about the ABC’s integrity https://t.co/6qTeU7f8Wz pic.twitter.com/L9Te8A1Ynx— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) January 22, 2024
Staff have put management on notice that if it does not begin to address the current crisis by next Monday, January 29, staff will consider further action.
The acting chief executive of MEAA, Adam Portelli, said staff had felt unsupported by the ABC’s senior management when they have been criticised or attacked from outside.
Message ‘clear and simple’
“The message from staff today is clear and simple: David Anderson must demonstrate that he will take the necessary steps to win back the confidence of staff and the trust of the Australian public,” he said.
“This is the result of a consistent pattern of behaviour by management when the ABC is under attack of buckling to outside pressure and leaving staff high and dry.
“Public trust in the ABC is being undermined. The organisation’s reputation for frank and fearless journalism is being damaged by management’s repeated lack of support for its staff when they are under attack from outside.
BREAKING NEWS:
Censorship Crisis at the ABC.Senior ABC journalist accuses ABC of bowing to “a group of lawyers lobbying for a foreign power.”
“The clue is in the name: ‘Lawyers for Israel’ thought that they could run a campaign to bully an ABC journalist out of her job —… pic.twitter.com/VbyFfGqpnB
— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) January 22, 2024
“Journalists at the ABC — particularly First Nations people, and people from culturally diverse backgrounds — increasingly don’t feel safe at work; and the progress that has been made in diversifying the ABC has gone backwards.
“Management needs to act quickly to win that confidence back by putting the integrity of the ABC’s journalism above the impact of pressure from politicians, unaccountable lobby groups and big business.”
The full motion passed by MEAA members at today’s meeting reads as follows:
MEAA members at the ABC have lost confidence in our managing director David Anderson. Our leaders have consistently failed to protect our ABC’s independence or protect staff when they are attacked. They have consistently refused to work collaboratively with staff to uphold the standards that the Australian public need and expect of their ABC.
Winning staff and public confidence back will require senior management:
A further resolution passed unanimously by the meeting read:
MEAA members at the ABC will not continue to accept the failure of management to protect our colleagues and the public. If management does not work with us to urgently fix the ongoing crisis, ABC staff will take further action to take a stand for a safe, independent ABC.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.