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Category: Disinformation

  • Lord Hughes Buries the Skripals Alive

    As all cricket and football followers know, the British are bad losers.  They blame the other side or the umpire; they stampede inside the stadium, then they riot outside.

    They believe their cleverness is in getting the media to portray their defeats on the battlefield as feats of heroism. That’s been the British story against Russia from the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War in 1854 to the Novichok operation of 2018. The success of both these stories as wartime propaganda has depended on public belief in little fools sitting on tall horses — noblemen whose ambition has braced them against their deceit and camouflaged their mental incapacity.

    In March 2022 Anthony Hughes was the small nobleman whom His Majesty’s Government (HMG) in Whitehall put in charge of turning a failed MI6 operation into a John Le Carré thriller in which British morality stumps Kremlin evil. Le Carré – whose real name and job were exposed by Kim Philby for the KGB — earned £100 million for his efforts; Hughes has been paid £192,110, plus £5,529 in train fares and overnight bedrooms.

    Hughes’s publication, released on December 4, runs to 126 pages, plus 47 pages of references, name lists and other appendixes.  In the direct quotes to follow from the Hughes report, the page numbers are given for each reference.


    Left: The report is at  https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/Web_Accessible_E03283426_Project-Orbit.pdf
    Right: Hughes presents his report on December 4, 2025. Click on the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry website for the full proceeding records and the preceding inquest archives.   

    Hughes reports how his brain has worked in the second of his conclusions at page 123: “if I state a fact, or say that it is ‘likely’, I have found it proved at least on the balance of probabilities, that is, to the ordinary civil standard adopted in UK courts. Where I say that I am ‘sure’, I have been satisfied of that fact to the level generally applied in criminal courts, that is, beyond reasonable doubt. Other expressions, such as that something is ‘possible’, do not represent findings of fact but are indications of my state of mind.”

    For forensic analysis of Hughes’s “state of mind”, the bar has been set low enough in this two-part series for the reader to judge whether what the judge adduces to be evidence is all there is; or all that is provably true independent of what Hughes has to say; or no more than the British Government has been confident Hughes would be too loyal or too incompetent to doubt.

    That Dawn Sturgess — the only person in the world to have died from a dose of the alleged Russian poison known as Novichok — was clinically dead at her apartment on June 30, 2018, by the time the paramedics arrived is one of Hughes’s certainties. “It is absolutely clear that her condition was in fact unsurvivable from a very early stage – indeed, from before the time the ambulance crew arrived to treat her. This was a result of the very serious brain injury that was itself the consequence of her heart stopping for an extended period of 30 minutes or so immediately after she was poisoned. Looking back, I am sure that no medical treatment could in fact have saved her life” [page 123].

    Hughes concludes also that he is “sure that [Alexander] Petrov and [Ruslan] Boshirov brought with them to Salisbury the ‘Nina Ricci’ bottle containing Novichok made in Russia that was subsequently responsible for Dawn Sturgess’ death.”  Hughes also claims he is sure that three Russians who were tracked by the UK security agencies had “the intention of working together to kill Sergei Skripal”; that “I am sure that Petrov and Boshirov brought with them to Salisbury the ‘Nina Ricci’ bottle containing Novichok made in Russia that was subsequently responsible for Dawn Sturgess’ death. It was probably this bottle that they used to apply poison to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s house”.

    This slip from certainty to probability doesn’t deter Hughes’s conclusion that “there is a clear causative link between the use and discarding of the Novichok by Petrov and Boshirov, and the death of Dawn Sturgess… I am sure that, in conducting their attack on Sergei Skripal, they were acting on instructions. I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin. I therefore conclude that all those involved in the assassination attempt (not only Petrov, Boshirov and Fedotov, but also those who sent them, and anyone else giving authorisation or knowing assistance in Russia or elsewhere) were morally responsible” [page 124-125].

    “Must have been” and “morally responsible” are not the courtroom standards Hughes defined for himself. They represent the standard of beyond unreasonable doubt – British moral certainty of  Russian evil leading to the judgement of moral responsibility for that evil.

    In between reasonable doubt and unreasonable conviction – between the tested evidence and the propaganda – Hughes reveals his certainty that  in 2018 Novichok was a Russian weapon, not a British, American, Iranian, Korean or other state weapon, and that his evidence for this comes from UK officials, intelligence and propaganda agencies. “There is no reason to doubt the information made widely public by Drs Mirzayanov, Uglev and Fyodorov many years before the events which concern this Inquiry. In his letter of 13 April 2018 to the Secretary-General of NATO, Sir Mark Sedwill (then National Security Adviser, HM Government) confirmed that this open-source reporting was not only ‘credible’, but consistent with intelligence which showed that Russia continued to produce and stockpile small quantities of Novichoks in the 2000s.44 This is an issue which I considered specifically in closed session; the closed material adds further support to my conclusions” [page 13].

    This is a description of hearsay. Hughes ignores all the public evidence which contradicts it.


    For the evidence reconstructing the Skripal attack and the subsequent Sturgess death as an MI6 operation to foil Russian agents on mission to exfiltrate Sergei Skripal and return him to Russia, and the British government’s effort to mobilise public opinion for war against Russia on the Ukraine battlefield, read the only two books available here; and Tim Norman’s three-part series discrediting the Hughes hearings at Part 1, Part 2,  and  Part 3.  

    Instead, Hughes reports that “Petrov and Boshirov had the opportunity to apply the Novichok to the door handle between those times. There was a plain opportunity to do so during Trip 3…during the 16 minutes between being on camera at the Shell petrol station and re-appearing on Devizes Road. There might have been another opportunity during Trip 4… but this would have been much more restricted for time. The question of whether Counter Terrorism Policing obtained DNA and fingerprints from No. 47 was explored in the open hearings… At the request of the family of Dawn Sturgess, I enquired in closed hearings whether further detail was available. From that, I am able to conclude that there has been nothing further relating to DNA and fingerprint testing of value to the investigation to date” [page 52].

    In sum, there is no evidence of any kind that the alleged assassins put Russian Novichok on the Skripals’ door handle.

    The evidence from Yulia Skripal in hospital, in reply to questions from her treating doctor, Stephen Cockroft, was that she believed she had been sprayed with a poison by an assailant at lunch in a restaurant much later. Hughes has dismissed Skripal’s testimony. “A note in Yulia Skripal’s medical records suggests she appeared to assent to the suggestion that she had been sprayed. This is also suggested by the statement of a nurse who entered the room as the question was being asked. However, Dr Cockroft’s evidence was simply that she nodded or shook her head from time to time before the re-sedation took hold, but not that she positively agreed or disagreed with the questions asked” [page 48].

    This is false. Cockroft’s evidence was that when he asked his questions, Yulia Skripal blinked her eyes in a signal form of communication which Cockroft suggested after his patient revived from sedation,  and before orders were given to put her into a coma again.

    Hughes has dismissed this crucial evidence. “The questioning was clearly inappropriate,” he has concluded. “Materially for the Inquiry, the exchange under sedation provides no reliable evidence at all about how Yulia Skripal was exposed to the Novichok. When, in due course, she was able properly to be interviewed, she made it clear that she did not know how she came to be exposed to the Novichok” [page 49]. Hughes was lying – Skripal was not under sedation when she answered the doctor at her bedside. Hughes was fabricating when he claimed the subsequent police and security service interrogations of Skripal were the “proper” interviews.

    Hughes acknowledges there is no evidence at all that the Russian assassins came within several hundred metres of the Skripal house in order to attack the Skripals or their door handle. Instead,  Hughes has fitted into the gap in evidence of the alleged crime a judicial speculation. “There was clearly [sic] an opportunity [sic] to pass, or visit, or view Sergei Skripal’s house in that intervening 17 minutes” [page 40]; and then, minutes after the alleged murder attempt at the door handle, CCTV records of the Russians and the Skripals lead to the inference by Hughes: “the camera in Devizes Road that Petrov and Boshirov walked past at 13:40 had been passed just five minutes earlier by the Skripals, who were travelling in Sergei’s car and heading into Salisbury city centre for lunch…It follows [sic] that the two men might [sic] have been in a position to see the departure of the Skripals from their home” [page 40].

    “Might” is an untested, unverified possibility, but in Hughes’s judgement, it does more than “follow” inferentially — this is known by the technical term in jurisprudence as guesswork. Sic is legal Latin for a Hughes hunch.

    In summary, Hughes presents no evidence of the weapon in the possession of the accused murderers, no evidence of the murderers at the crime scene; no evidence that the victims, the Skripals, were directly poisoned through their hands; no evidence of the murderers’ intention to kill Sergei Skripal; and no evidence from the victims’ themselves, neither the Skripals, nor Sturgess, nor her boyfriend. Also, the chain of custody in finding and testing Novichok in a bottle on a kitchen bench, in other locations,  and in blood drawn for testing  hours, days,  and weeks after the alleged crime is so faulty as to allow tampering, fabrication,  and falsification which should have made the evidence inadmissible in Hughes’s judgement.

    As for the allegations of criminal intention on the part of the accused Russians, Hughes provides  nothing. Instead, he has detailed the intelligence service and police evidence of the paperwork preceding their flights to London; then the CCTV and telephone tracking evidence of their movements in London and Salisbury. There is no evidence of what was inside their bags; no evidence that they were carrying Novichok in one or more perfume bottles. “I do not think that it is legitimate to draw any firm conclusion from the transfer of the rucksack” [page 39], Hughes acknowledges from the available CCTV records that he neither knows what was in the bags the Russians were carrying or why.

    After they have publicly denied the charges against them, Hughes dismisses the evidence, just as he had of Yulia Skripal’s unforced testimony to her doctor.  “It has not been possible for me to investigate the reliability of these statements nor of their authors, and I do not therefore rely on them” [page 25].

    Instead, Hughes concludes he is certain that after the assassins had lethally dosed the Skripals’ door handle, at least fifteen minutes later “Sergei Skripal’s hands were contaminated with Novichok at this point” [page 18]; he then used these hands to pass bread to two boys to feed ducks in a park pond. That neither the boys nor the ducks showed any poisoning symptoms, Hughes has concluded: “given the evidence I heard regarding the toxicity of even tiny amounts of Novichok and its transmission through skin contact, as well as other routes…it may well be a matter of luck that the boy who took the bread from Sergei Skripal was not more gravely affected” [page 19]. Conviction based on the possibility of luck is generally known as superstition. As a courtroom standard in England, it ended with the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

    No direct testimony from the Skripals appears in the report. Hughes didn’t allow any cross-examination or public testimony by the Skripals on the ground that “it proved unsafe for me to require Sergei or Yulia Skripal to attend the open hearings to give oral evidence” [page 15]. Hughes fails to explain why he himself did not interview the Skripals in closed proceeding at a secret location. If the security of several dozen closed sessions had been tested to the satisfaction of the Government, of the police, and of the judge, why had he failed to test the Skripals directly? There is no answer – and from the British media has come no doubt, scepticism, or suspicion that there is an alternative explanation.


    Sources: The Guardian and BBC.  

    In the very last line of the report it is revealed that Sergei and Yulia Skripal weren’t represented by Adam Chapman at the London law firm of Kingsley Napley – motto, “when it matters most”. However, Chapman had appeared in court many times, confirming to the judge that he  was in communication with the Skripals and receiving instructions from them on what to say. Instead of Chapman, a person named Natalie Cohen has now been listed by Hughes as doing that job.

    According to her law firm resumé, until 2024 Cohen had spent her career as a state employee litigating for government ministries and official agencies in court cases.   In Cohen’s career advertisements and in the Hughes report, Cohen claims no credit for representing the Skripals in the proceedings.  If she had, she would have been lying.


    Source: The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, page 174.

    Instead, buried in the very small print of a notice issued by Hughes in April 2024, he recorded that Chapman had told him he was retiring and that in his place Chapman was nominating Cohen to represent the Skripals. Note – Chapman nominated Cohen; the Skripals did not; Hughes didn’t care.

    “I know how Government and policy making works from the inside will hopefully be a valuable perspective for clients,” Cohen announced in a selfie for Kingsley Napley.  Her record reveals cases for the regional police. In the Grok summary, “her expertise focused on defending government decisions against claims of unlawfulness, procedural unfairness, or breaches of human rights under the Human Rights Act 1998.”

    There is no evidence that the Skripals knew Cohen or agreed to have such a state lawyer represent them. “Accordingly”, Hughes recorded, “I am satisfied that Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal have appointed Natalie Cohen as their qualified lawyer.”

    “The lie told often enough becomes the truth” – Vladimir Lenin recognised the method of state propaganda long before Adolph Hitler and then Joseph Goebbels adopted it, claiming they were following the method of Winston Churchill.  Lord Hughes of Ombersley is small fry by comparison; his report is nothing new. Lenin’s heirs turn out to have the antidote.

    To be continued in Part 2 to follow.

    The post Lord Hughes Buries the Skripals Alive first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ragebait Governance

    Trollface

    Image information: “Trollface” by Me in ME is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

    Oxford University Press’ 2025 Word of the Year is “ragebait.” The term captures a defining feature of today’s information ecosystem: content engineered to provoke anger, boost engagement, and overwhelm our ability to think clearly. Fake news is a potent form of ragebait, and in this week’s Gaslight Gazette, the most troubling examples come not from fringe corners of the internet but from the people who now claim to be combating disinformation. This essay examines how the federal government under President Donald Trump has adopted, and expanded, the very practices it once criticized, turning itself into the nation’s most powerful arbiter of truth while sidelining the press, rewriting narratives, and generating its own brand of institutional ragebait.

    The announcement of an arrest in the D.C. pipe-bomb investigation, tied to the events surrounding January 6, saw a proliferation of ragebait. The suspect, Brian Cole, reportedly believed the 2020 election was stolen, a belief shared by many who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    Yet even the straightforward update about his arrest generated its own bout of rage and fake news. While discussing the case, CNN’s Jake Tapper described the suspect as “white” even though the images on screen clearly showed Cole was Black. No correction was issued in the segment. Conservatives had recently spread their own fake news about the case. The conservative outlet The Blaze, in a spectacular act of defamation, incorrectly named an unrelated woman as the suspect. If Cole is indeed guilty, The Blaze should prepare its legal team for a defamation case.

    In another example of the intersection of rage and fake news, there was the chaos at the CDC last week. The conflict emerged over CDC guidelines, when established scientists clashed with activists and appointees installed by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After sidelining career experts, the agency reversed long-standing guidance and declined to recommend the Hepatitis B vaccine for young people. Multiple experts say the decision was driven by misinformation rather than evidence. Once again, public institutions tasked with promoting truth are becoming factories of confusion. Ragebait has always been a problem, but the real crisis emerges when the government itself becomes the most prolific producer of ragebait.

    Fake News About Fake News: The White House’s Disinformation Spiral

    “Misleading. Biased. Exposed. Media Offender of the Week.” This sounds like a tagline from a scrappy media-watchdog newsletter. In fact, it’s an official designation from The White House. The Trump administration has replicated the tactics it once condemned in the Biden era, launching a government-run website that identifies alleged fake news, names specific journalists and outlets, describes their supposed “offense,” and then offers “the truth.”

    The problem? Their standards for truth are as arbitrary as they are political. One recent example: Fox News was labeled too “woke,” after the White House misidentified the reporter they were criticizing for “bias.” The administration’s supposedly authoritative sources for debunking stories are equally suspect, relying almost entirely on government accounts, including posts from “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth” and a New York Times article that merely reported what unnamed officials said. In other words, the government cites itself as the final word on reality.

    This trend is spreading. Agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now publishing their own “debunkings” of media stories. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking not only to dismiss views opposing the Trump administration as baseless, but also to criminalize them. According to a memo obtained by Ken Klippenstein, the targets include those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme support for mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”

    These actions are especially ironic because conservatives erupted in outrage when President Joe Biden attempted something similar with his short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, which was run by Nina Jankowicz, known for her cringe-worthy TikTok videos. The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent governments from monopolizing truth and delegitimizing the press. Yet that’s exactly what is happening under Trump’s administration.

    Pledging Silence: The Death of Accountability at the Pentagon


    Image Information: (Top)“Pete Hegseth” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; (Left) “Laura Loomer by Gage Skidmore (cropped)” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. (Right) “Matt Gaetz” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

    In October 2025, we witnessed a dangerous escalation in government censorship of the press. That month, the Pentagon announced it was barring legacy journalists from its briefings after they refused to sign a pledge to report only information pre-approved by Pentagon leadership. The New York Times refused to sign the pledge and is now suing the Pentagon on the grounds that the pledge violates the Constitution’s free press protections.

    Those who signed, known as pledgers, can no longer credibly call themselves journalists; by agreeing in writing, they have committed to acting as stenographers for the Pentagon. The pledgers now populate the briefing room. They include Laura Loomer, who has a long record of spreading debunked claims, and Matt Gaetz, who left federal office under allegations of sexual misconduct, drug use, and bribery. The pledgers faced online backlash this week after three different pledgers reported that their outlets were occupying the desk formerly held by the Washington Post, whose journalists evacuated the Pentagon after refusing to sign the pledge.

    Meanwhile, one of the pledgers revealed they had interviewed Pete Hegseth, the head of the Pentagon and U.S. Secretary of War, describing it as a good interview but stressing that it was off the record, preventing them from sharing any details. Essentially, this means the pledgers mingle with Pentagon leadership yet offer nothing substantive to the public in terms of objective journalism. They act as mere props to give the illusion of a free press while failing to fulfill the true role of journalists.

    At the same time, the pledgers sided with the press secretary’s claim that, before the pledge, the press had been acting unethically by persistently knocking on the press secretary’s door. Apparently, reporting objective facts, getting figures like Hegseth on the record, and the press secretary engaging with the media are no longer considered part of journalism, at least according to those who signed the pledge.

    The entire situation feels profoundly Orwellian and dangerous. Hegseth is embroiled in a scandal, repeatedly changing his story amid accusations of overseeing war crimes in an unofficial conflict and leaking sensitive information that endangers U.S. military personnel. The stakes are real. This week, a damning government report on “Signalgate” revealed that Hegseth shared information that could have put service members’ lives at risk. He also faces allegations of overseeing war crimes connected to a double-tap strike on Venezuelan drug boats in an unofficial conflict. Recent reports claim the second strike occurred 45 minutes after the initial attack, long after survivors had shown they were no longer a threat, raising serious questions about the operation’s intent and legality.

    With the video documenting the alleged war crimes concealed from public view and genuine journalists supplanted by propagandists, both Republicans and Democrats have retreated into entrenched partisan positions, interpreting the unseen footage to advance their own narratives. Despite repeated promises of transparency, the video remains withheld. In the absence of a free and independent press, truth devolves into partisan property, and accountability effectively vanishes.

    🚫Censorship

    This section chronicles some of the most pressing examples of censorship from the previous two weeks. Project Censored defines censorship as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, underreporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.”

    Image information: (Left) “Public Domain: JFK with RFK Outside Oval Office by Robert Knudsen, March 1963 (NARA)“ by pingnews.com is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.(Right) “MLK Photo and Quote“ by mattlemmon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

    The Long Shadow of Impunity: The Real Scandal Isn’t Trump, It’s Decades of Looking the Other Way

    “Did the Trump administration commit a war crime in its attack on a Venezuelan boat?” read a December 2025 headline from National Public Radio. The headline was one of many in which journalists asked, and pundits debated, whether President Donald Trump’s Department of War had crossed a legal line by bombing Venezuelan boats. Yet what is missing from most of these accounts is the historical context that gives such claims meaning. Trump’s actions, like those of any president, do not exist in isolation. They sit atop decades of presidential abuses that were ignored, minimized, or sanitized by the press and the public. As the anti-censorship organization Project Censored notes, censorship can be either intentional or accidental. Regardless of the cause, it seems that historical context has been erased from our press discourse on contemporary events, including the alleged war crimes committed by the U.S.

    The erasure of historical context deprives citizens of the framework needed to understand that many of the actions they oppose are not the result of a single administration or individual, but rather decades of the public failing to hold the powerful accountable. Instead, people divide into partisan camps, only concerned when “the other side does it,” which effectively means that neither side is held accountable. This allows those in power to continually expand their authority, even at the expense of constitutional guardrails.

    From Iran-Contra to Gaza: A History of Presidential Lawbreaking Without Consequences

    The historically astute surely noticed the connection between the discussion of the Trump administration’s alleged war crimes, and the death of Eugene Haines Hasenfus on December 2, 2025. Hasenfus, a former United States Marine, helped ferry weapons to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua on behalf of the U.S. government in the 1980s. On one of these missions, his plane crashed, and in the process revealed a secret and illegal operation by the Ronald Reagan Administration known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

    The scandal revealed how Reagan violated the separation of powers, supported terrorism, enabled drug trafficking, and armed Iran while it was at war with Iraq—which America was also arming. Before the story broke publicly, Reagan warned his cabinet, “If such a story gets out, we’ll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House.” Despite the gravity of these crimes, consequences were negligible. George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president and a knowing participant, succeeded him as president without ever facing accountability.

    This troubling pattern of impunity has persisted across administrations: Bill Clinton ordered a controversial strike that destroyed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory under questionable justification; George W. Bush oversaw drone strikes and torture programs; Barack Obama expanded the drone campaign, which killed civilians including U.S. citizens; Donald Trump, in his first term, ordered the killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in violation of international law; and Joe Biden faces global condemnation for aiding Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the United Nations has declared a genocide.

    It is against a long history of presidential misconduct without consequence that accusations of war crimes against the Trump administration must be understood. This pattern of impunity has been allowed to persist by the American public. For decades, presidential wrongdoing has rarely been punished. Had earlier leaders been held accountable, their successors might have hesitated before violating national and international law. Instead, the public’s default response remains partisan outrage—a reflex that will undoubtedly surface in the comments on this article—ultimately letting all perpetrators off the hook and normalizing abuses of power up to the present day.

    War Abroad, Violence at Home: Tracing the Fallout of U.S. Foreign Policy on American Soil

    The importance of historical context extends beyond war crimes to include domestic events as well. On November 26, 2025, Afghanistan refugee Rahmanullah Lakanwal reportedly shot and killed two National Guardsmen. Trump claimed that Biden was at fault because he ended the war in Afghanistan and allowed refugees, including Lakanwal into the country. However, this overlooks important historical context. First, before Biden suggested removing troops from Afghanistan, it was Trump who, during his first term, sought to withdraw U.S. forces after he left office in January 2021. Second, while Biden did oversee the troop withdrawal and allowed Lakanwal to enter the United States, it was the Trump administration that granted him asylum back in April.

    Furthermore, Lakanwal’s crimes should be understood within the broader context of the long history of U.S. involvement in weaponizing, collaborating with, and training individuals abroad, actions that have often led to those individuals committing violence on domestic soil. A similar tragedy unfolded in April 2025, when Jamal Wali, a former translator for U.S. forces while they fought the Taliban in Afghanistan, shot police officers in Fairfax, Virginia, before being killed by law enforcement. Moments before opening fire, he was stopped by police and was recorded bemoaning his experience in the U.S. noting “I should have served with f–king Taliban.” This suggests a broader pattern, as Lakanwal’s story is similar but even darker: he served in a CIA-backed Afghan ‘Zero Unit,’ an elite paramilitary force accused of human-rights abuses, including killing civilians and torturing detainees during the war. These histories complicate simple partisan narratives, especially about war, yet they are routinely excluded from mainstream coverage.

    When History is Forgotten: How Media Complicity Enables Power to Evade Accountability

    New revelations about past censorship reveal how historical erasure distorts the press’s ability to accurately inform the public’s understanding of power today. In November 2025, a whistleblower disclosed that the CIA had once celebrated misleading Congress during the post-1963 investigation into President Kennedy’s (JFK) assassination. Relatedly, that same month it was also revealed that during the 1960s the NYPD conducted far more extensive surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) than previously known. As with the JFK case, those who questioned the government’s version of King’s assassination were often dismissed as baseless conspiracy theorists. While not every counter-claim can be, or ever will be, proven, what is demonstrably true is that the government withheld information from the public in both cases.

    That fact alone should prompt greater skepticism from the press regarding government claims about contemporary events. This means abandoning the practice of routinely lumping together two very different groups: those raising informed, evidence-based questions and those drawing unfounded conclusions. For example, while there are many baseless, Alex Jones–style narratives, such as claims that the government is turning frogs gay or that school shootings involve crisis actors, there are also legitimate conspiracies supported by evidence, like Watergate or Iran-Contra. Dismissing all alternative narratives as lunacy only serves the interests of those in power. Reduced skepticism among journalists enables the government to conceal evidence with minimal pushback, while the fear of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” discourages legitimate inquiry and has contributed to decades of misunderstanding.

    This revelation should force journalists to rethink their role, not just getting the story right, but getting it right when it matters. The truth means little to those whose lives were shattered by lies that changed the nation’s course. Worse yet, modern journalism’s economic incentives often reward holding back information until it can be monetized. For example, reporters concealed President Biden’s cognitive decline until it could be released in book form, after the election, and after the period in which the public could have used that information to determine whether a primary challenge was necessary. Repeatedly, the recent scandal involving Journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) makes this structural failure unmistakable. Both journalists reported knowing that Kennedy, who reports to be a recovered heroin addict, allegedly used DMT in 2024 but waited nearly a year to disclose it. In fact, they only released this information when Nuzzi could include it in a book and Lizza on his Substack. By the time the reporting surfaced, RFK Jr. had already undergone his confirmation hearing for Secretary of HHS. Surely the public would have wanted to know that beforehand.

    Perhaps the starkest illustration of the costs of historical secrecy is the long-delayed release of the Epstein files. I have compiled a continuously updated guide for readers who want documented facts rather than speculation about the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Although some files from the Epstein estate and select government records have been released, more are expected on December 19, 2025. Additionally, last week a Florida judge approved a motion to unseal grand jury transcripts related to the Department of Justice’s Epstein investigation. Meanwhile, key materials, including documents held by Epstein’s lawyer and by figures like Michael Wolff and Steve Bannon, as well as unreleased government and banking records, remain hidden. After years of the news media dismissing those who questioned Epstein’s connections to power as conspiracy theorists, the release of emails has brought prominent and powerful individuals under scrutiny including the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew and Larry Summers to Noam Chomsky, Sarah Ferguson, Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, and Andrew Farkas.

    The revelations expand our understanding of Epstein’s function as a power broker connecting governments, corporations, intelligence agencies, and political operatives. He played a role in facilitating communication between India’s Modi government and Steve Bannon, pursued financing for Israeli cyberweapons, hosted Israeli operatives, promoted the export of Israeli surveillance technology to Côte d’Ivoire, and helped build diplomatic backchannels between Israel and Russia. He even collaborated with Dershowitz in 2006 to undermine early scholarship on the political influence of the Israel lobby. The recently released images and videos of Epstein’s Virgin Islands estate, including a medical-style chair surrounded by masks, a blackboard covered with redacted names, and records of his contacts, suggest how much more remains concealed. Given the historical record, journalists would be wise to avoid dismissing researchers’ claims as baseless conspiracies and instead follow the evidence.

    From Revolution to Repression: The Complicated History of Free Speech and Protest at UC Berkeley

    History is not only a catalog of abuses of power, but it is also a source of inspiration. The University of California, Berkeley is often remembered as a bastion of protest that ignited the Free Speech Movement and helped catalyze the social movements of the 1960s. But that history is more complicated than the popular myth suggests, and its omissions are worth recalling when considering the university’s current suppression of speech.

    Recently, UC Berkeley administrators threatened disciplinary action against student protesters advocating for Palestinian rights, a chilling echo of the very restrictions students once fought to dismantle. Some interpret this as evidence that Berkeley has lost its commitment to free speech, but history tells a different story. The university has long been resistant to student protests, even in the 1960s. It was students, drawing inspiration from movements like the Civil Rights Movement, not university officials who ignited the Free Speech Movement and expanded civil liberties on campus. Those gains were won through confrontation and collective courage, not institutional benevolence. We would all do well to remember that lasting change has never come from waiting for permission; it has always come from insisting on the society we hope to create.

    The post Ragebait Governance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It’s Not Only about Venezuela: Trump Intends a Wider Domino Effect

    It’s increasingly obvious that the US military threats against Venezuela have a wider agenda. Their game plan is regime change, but not only in Venezuela. This is the objective – on a longer timescale in some cases – across several of the countries in the Caribbean Basin, aiming to cleanse the region of governments deemed undesirable to Washington.

    As international relations professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer reminds us, the US “does not tolerate left-leaning governments… and as soon as they see a government that is considered to be left-of-center they move to replace that government.”

    In the Financial Times, Ryan Berg, head of the Americas programme at the Washington think-tank CSIS, which is heavily funded by Pentagon contractors, said that Trump’s vision is for the US to be the “undisputable, pre-eminent power in the western hemisphere.” The New York Times dubbed Trump’s ambitions the “Donroe Doctrine.”

    After Venezuela, in the current US line of fire, is Honduras. This Central American country faces an election on November 30 which will determine whether the leftist Libre Party stays in power or whether the country reverts to neoliberalism.

    The crisis in the Caribbean engineered by the Trump administration is being actively instrumentalized to distract Hondurans from domestic issues when deciding how to vote. Honduras’s mainstream media repeatedly draw attention to the likelihood that Washington will threaten Honduras militarily if it votes the “wrong way” on November 30.

    Interviewed on television, opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla was asked what would happen if the Libre Party won. He replied: “Those ships that are soon going to take over Venezuela are going to come and target Honduras.” Amplifying the supposed threat, opposition candidates have posted street signs labelling themselves “anti-communist,” as if communism were actually on offer in the election.

    In a bizarre article, the Wall Street Journal alleges that Venezuela aims to “gobble up Honduras.” Turning on its head recent alarming evidence of a plot by Libre’s opponents to steal the election, the article claims that Venezuela is schooling Libre in defrauding the Honduran people.

    This argument is also being repeated enthusiastically in the US Congress by María Elvira Salazar and others. On November 12, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the US government “will respond rapidly and firmly to any attack on the integrity of the electoral process in Honduras.” In fact, the US is working with the opposition to undermine the popular mandate.

    There is acute irony here. Washington’s justification for its military build-up is supposedly to tackle “narcoterrorism,” yet a Libre defeat would risk returning Honduras to the “narcostate” it had become in the decade under US patronage before the previous election in 2021.

    Also lined up for regime change is, inevitably, Cuba. The UK’s Daily Telegraph, not normally known for its Latin America coverage, argues that Cuba is the “real target” of Trump’s campaign in Venezuela.

    Having failed to dislodge the Cuban revolution after more than six decades of blockade, driving its citizens into acute hardship and pushing a tenth of them to migrate, Secretary of State Marco Rubio evidently sees the “real prize” of the US military build-up as dealing the fatal blow to its revolution.

    Installing a US-friendly government in Caracas would aid the counter-revolution by cutting off gasoline and other supplies it currently sends to Cuba. Or supplies might be stopped by the US navy itself, further tightening the screws on Havana. In addition, if the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela collapsed, it would embolden the US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba, who feed on the discontent rained upon their country by US sanctions.

    Yet even the gung-ho Telegraph doubts whether Rubio’s goal will be achieved, given Cuba’s remarkable resilience.

    Another country in Washington’s crosshairs is Nicaragua. Here too, Rubio is leading the charge. But he has plenty of confederates on both sides of the congressional isles.

    Although not directly threatened militarily (at least, so far) by the US, it has imposed new sanctions on Nicaraguan businesses, threatens to impose 100% tariffs on the country’s exports to the US, and may try to exclude it from the regional trade agreement, CAFTA.

    At the same time, Nicaragua’s opposition figures enthusiastically identify with their peers in Venezuela, hoping that regime-change in Caracas would encourage Washington to further attack Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

    Two other left-leaning administrations in the Caribbean Basin, Colombia and Mexico, have been subject to Trump’s threats of military strikes. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been sanctioned by Washington as “a hostile foreign leader.” He has responded by condemning the US attacks on boats in the Caribbean as “murder.”

    Trump has recently repeated earlier threats to attack Mexican drug cartels, saying he would be “proud” to do so. Asked whether he would only take military action in Mexico if he had the country’s permission, he refused to answer the question. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had earlier dismissed Trump’s threat of military action against drug cartels inside her country, telling reporters: “It’s not going to happen.”

    However, despite Sheinbaum’s ongoing popularity, on November 15 she faced so-called Gen Z demonstrations which erupted in over 50 cities. According to The Grayzone, these were not what they seemed: they were financed and coordinated by an international right-wing network and amplified by bot networks. Their timing in relation to the Caribbean military build-up may have been intentional.

    In the context of these protests, Trump said: “I am not happy with Mexico. Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It’s OK with me.” Elements in the MAGA movement are urging him to go further, launching a US military incursion to ensure “a transitional government.”

    Washington successfully interfered in recent elections in Argentina. US endorsement of the right-wing victory in Ecuador in April was critical after a disputed election. Next month is the second round of Chile’s elections. Trump hopes for a rightward shift – with a little help from the hegemon – in that election as well as those in Colombia next year and in 2030 in Mexico.

    Former Bush and Trump official Marshall Billingslea says the ultimate target of a US regime change assault is the entire Latin American left, “from Cuba to Brazil to Mexico to Nicaragua.” Military intervention leading to the end of the Maduro government would halt what he alleges (without evidence) is the flow of money from Caracas that has led to the “socialist plague that has spread across Latin America.”

    US-imposed regime-change in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua – where the “socialist plague” has taken deep root – is a bipartisan project. For other progressive and left-leaning Latin American states – Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and even Chile – the pax americana prescription stops short of outright deep regime change; infiltration, intimidation and co-optation are employed to keep them subordinate.

    For Democrats and Republicans alike, the US imperial projection on the region is a given. Trump and his comrade-in-arms Rubio are leading the charge. But the so-called US opposition party is offering weak constraints.

    To these ends, the US empire, with Trump at its titular head, is weighing the opportunity costs of deploying the full force of the military might assembled in the Caribbean, one-fifth of its navy’s global firepower. But Trump’s neocon advisers appear to want to seize the moment and embark on hemispheric political change, bringing a Trumpian “Donroe Doctrine” to fulfilment.

    Will caution prevail, or will the US continue to bring lawlessness and chaos – as it has to Haiti, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere – not just to Venezuela but possibly to other countries in the region?

    The post It’s Not Only about Venezuela: Trump Intends a Wider Domino Effect first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Marks on the Calendar: Two Years into Eradication of a People, “So Move on”!

    Note: Again, smalltown news, a newspaper that is now as thin as a tissue, once a week, and here we are — a 900 to 1000 word piece by yours truly once a month. This November, some catching up with October’s Banner Books week, and other funky things.

    Next month I do a bit of jujitsu, and I was begged to speak, and I both look forward to it and dread it:

    Discussion: Hear Here - Love and Death in a Time of Media Illiteracy with Paul Haeder - Oregon Coast Council for the Arts

    I am NEVER in friendly territory, and in most cases, it’s ‘friendly fire’ against me, the messenger and the dude who is anti-authority and is not a sheeple, but again, Haeder does not spell H-A-T-E.

    In a week, another Op-Ed runs, twice in a month, and that pisses people off, for sure. So much copy, and why so long, why 956 words? I’m introducing this talk to the wider community, tied to the death of journalism, with a trigger warning and redressing the zombification and infantalilization of AmeriKKKa.

    Oh, maybe 60 Power Point slides, a media literacy quiz, and a box full of Project Censored “year in review books on the most censored stories of that respective year” and some Covert Action magazines and Z-Magazines, too.

    Public schools across the U.S. saw more than 6,800 book bans in the 2024-25 school year. A new documentary, The Librarians, examines the experiences of school librarians who’ve found themselves on the front lines of a battle against censorship.

    Maybe they will make connection between schooling and libraries and media illiteracy? The documentary, The Librarians.

    It’s a lot of work, working with democrats, mostly grayhairs, and alas with the Anti-Antisemitism virus hitting may of us, those in the audience do not like the word “genocide” or the concept of “ethnic cleansing” or the very big tent idea of 130 Jewish billionaires and a few million multi-millionaire Jews, well, having that outsized “control of banking and media and tech and AI and war mongering and finance and real estate and, well, governments from her to Sudan to Venezuela, et al.”

    Now, this op-ed continues with the bloody lies of, well, Capitalism, big time or small time USA.

    Ahh, the banned books week passed (it should be a daily reminder that freedom of speech and thought are illusory in Capitalism). That was October 5 through 11, and you can Google what intense censorship has always occurred in USA and is going on now with the new brownshirts in office.

    You can call school and library administrators, school board and library board members, city councilpersons, and your elected representatives to ask them to support the right to read! But most of them are running scared and are completely cowed by their own shadows.

    Imagine California, running this House Bill and it passing with the Ray-Ban governor’s signature.

    The law no longer references Israel’s war in Gaza, but critics have said it could still have a chilling effect and prevent open discussion on contentious issues in the classroom.

    “Teacher discourse on Palestine or the genocide in Gaza will be policed, misrepresented, and reported to the antisemitism coordinator,” Theresa Montaño with the California Faculty Association said in a statement.

    So, no need to burn books or ban them since K12 students will be policed and brought before boards of inquiry if they dare talk about the  Nakba and how that ethnic cleansing that started in 1948 (earlier, really, but don’t tell our representative Gomberg that!) relates to another passing October critical thinking milestone – Indigenous People’s Day.

    That was October 13, and with the fanfare of stormtroopers hitting Portland’s streets and even our own backwater county seeing ICE masked raiders taking a citizen away, forget about finding deep discussion about that day of infamy – celebrating for ONE 24-hour period our own legacy of indigenous culture and wisdom.

    The schools might not even be able to put up posters stating the following with this new regime of Stephen Miller and his Homeland Security infecting the great shining city on the hill: “We honor the Native American people for their culture including art and many crafts, their food, their clothing, their grit and endurance, their goodness and influence. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 4.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives in the United States today. That is about 1.5 percent of the population in the United States. There are ten main areas of North America where the Native Americans have lived over the last 2,000 years.”

    The jig was up more than 250 years ago, throughout the enslavement of Africans, but recall that we had politician after general after newspaper editor repeating in variations of a theme these racist but highly American statements in regard to our Native People:

    • In 2021, Rick Santorum claimed there was “nothing” in America before colonization and little Native American culture present today.
    • Trump’s boy, Andrew Jackson, signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced many eastern tribes, such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, and others, off their ancestral lands. This policy led directly to the “Trail of Tears.” Jackson’s own words often framed Native Americans as uncivilized and an obstacle to American progress.
    • “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” is a racist proverb originating from General Philip Sheridan. [Denied by Sheridan — DV Ed]

    Maybe schools will allow coursework — now that we have National Day of Remembrance or Sorrow  — to include American Indian scholars questioning the origins of Thanksgiving.

    “Almost any portrait that we see of an Indian, he is represented with tomahawk and scalping knife in hand, as if they possessed no other but a barbarous nature. Christian nations might with equal justice be always represented with cannon and ball, swords and pistols,” states Elias Johnson, A Native Tuscarora Chief.

    I doubt this book has been banned from public libraries: Let’s Play Indian, is a children’s book by Madye Lee Chastain. It’s  one of countless examples of “playing Indian,” a practice engaged in by outsiders who appropriate, or take on, American Indian identities and cultural ways. Chastain’s main character transforms herself into “a really truly dressed-up painted Indian,” who runs, whoops, and waves her tomahawk.

    Forget about K12. I believe OCCC would get pushback if, say, I taught writing and communication including an amazing young Lakota’s Red Nation broadcast Nick Estes is a Lakota activist, writer, and scholar whose work delves into settler-colonialism, indigenous history, and decolonization. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. I’d be highlighting Nick’s on-line advocacy for Palestinian liberation, wherein he highlights the ongoing genocide in Gaza by exploring the intersection of the struggles faced by Palestinian and Indigenous peoples in America.

    No photo description available.

    Drill down into Native American perspectives and unmask almost all myths perpetrated in this country. But as you pass the gravy on Nov. 27, remember it’s not all a bed of pumpkins and cranberries:

    CONTENT WARNING / GRAPHIC IMAGE HISTORY YOU NEED TO KNOW. On this day, 158 years ago, December 26, 1862, President "Honest" Abe Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution, 38 Dakota men, where

    Federal agents kept the Dakota-Sioux from receiving food and provisions. Accordingly, on the brink of death from starvation, some fought back, resulting in the Dakota War of 1862. In the end, President Lincoln ordered 38 Dakota men to die from hanging, but he too was spinning PR, so he felt that the first Thanksgiving  (1863) offered an opportunity to bridge the hard feelings amongst Natives and the federal government.

    “It was propaganda,” Dr. Kelli Mosteller, Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s Cultural Heritage Center director explains. “It was to try and build this event so that you could have a deeper narrative about community building and coming together in shared brotherhood and unity.”

    No photo description available.

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    So, there was a counter Op-Ed, running two weeks ago, and of course, I ran my own letter to the editor, here:

    But they, the readers, the democrat lite or light-headed, they just DO NOT get AmeriKKKa.

    Imagine just a month tying into just a few dozen Break Through News reports, such as this one:

    Dear Editor:

    So, a long attack on me was published Nov. 12, along with a snarky fucked up letter to the editor also attacking the above “facts.” Opinion piece. Here, just published today, my letter response:

    Dear Editor — Recent attacks (Nov. 5 commentary and letter to the editor) on my integrity as a writer and as an educator, plus the inane label of “antisemitism,” just don’t hold water. The thing about going after someone’s credentials and lifework is called ad hominem attack. Kill the messenger is also a term I could deploy with two personal attacks on my Oct. 15 Commentary.

    Learning curves are steep in a country of people who have been miseducated, propagandized, and drawn and quartered by an elite media, whether right or left of some imaginary middle.

    For real journalism on Gaza and the Jewish genocide, as well as just general news, try Drop Site News (dropsitenews.com). Try heading over to Monthly Review On-Line for deeper analyses of USA the Empire, and its insane and perverted hatred of socialism, as well as its relationship with an apartheid and genocidal state called Israel, the Occupied Land of Palestinians (monthlyreview.org). Then, of course, The Intercept, theintercept.com, will get you more news.

    Again, steep learning curves are present when one comes out of K12 and college in this Empire of Chaos, War, Pain, and Terror. Try Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research — thetricontinental.org. I could list five dozen sites here that easily counter the narratives cooked up in the minds of Americans who have been colonized by one-sided narratives and bizarre takes on US and Global history.

    Lifetimes of work and research and ground-truthing easily shoot holes into what most Americans and Westerners have come to believe are their “truths.”

    Paul Haeder, Waldport

    The post Marks on the Calendar: Two Years into Eradication of a People, “So Move on”! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Racist and Mendacious Australia: Cowardly and Unethical ABC Under-counts Gaza Deaths

    The core ethos of decent Humanity is Kindness and Truth but this is grossly violated by the racism and mendacity of  US-, UK-, Apartheid Israel- and Zionist-perverted and US lackey Australia. War is the penultimate in racism and genocide the ultimate in racism. Australia has been involved in all 1950 onwards US Asian Wars, atrocities associated with 40 million Asian “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google this phrase), with the Right-Far Right Coalition (presently in Opposition) involved in all and Centre-Right Labor  (presently in Government) being involved in all except for the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. Australia ignores the horrendous extent of this carnage.

    An international team of expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet found that 64,260 Gazans had been killed violently by 30 June 2024 (Day 269 of the Gaza Genocide). Assuming the same rate of killing, this translates to 174,625 Direct (violent) deaths by 7 October  2025 (Day 731 i.e. after 2 years). However other expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet and elsewhere have “conservatively” estimated that deaths from deprivation (Indirect deaths) are 4 times the Direct deaths, this implying 174,625 x 4 = 698,500 Indirect deaths and a total of 873,125 “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google this phrase) by 7 October 2025. Australia ignores the horrendous extent of this carnage too.

    Similarly,  experts estimated 64,260 violent deaths by 30 June 2024 (Day 269 of the killing) which translates to 136,000 violent deaths by 25 April 2025 (Day 569 of the killing). They “conservatively” estimated 4 non-violent deaths from deprivation (indirect deaths) for every violent death (direct death), this indicating 544,000 indirect deaths, and hence a total of 680,000 deaths by 25 April 2025, Anzac Day, Australia’s war dead memorial day.

    However Google 680,000 with “ABC News” and you will discover the ABC reporting “more than 65,000” in response to audience complaints about a broadcast assertion that “680,000 people have been killed in Gaza”: “ABC NEWS | News Breakfast | Death toll in Gaza | 23 September 2025 | Resolved. Two audience members raised a concern that a guest interviewed on News Breakfast said that 680,000 people have been killed in Gaza which was not challenged by the presenters. That figure is unverified and no context about the source was provided in the interview. To address the concern, during the live program on 24 September 2025, News Breakfast made an on-air clarification stating that: “And we just want to clarify something said on the program yesterday. We invited Reem Burrows from the Palestine Australia Relief and Action Group on the program to discuss Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. During that interview, she said it’s reported over 680,000 people have been killed in Gaza, the current death toll from Gaza’s Ministry of Health is more than 65,000″ (ABC, Resolved complaint, 24 September  2025).

    Indeed if you Google “ABC News” with 65,000,  66,000 or 67,000 you will find that the ABC “likes” such estimates that under-count the estimates of expert epidemiologists by a factor of 13-fold.  

    I responded to the ABC “Resolved complaint” report by publishing a detailed rejoinder in Gideon Polya, “Mendaxocracy, Kakistocracy, Murdochracy & Corporatocracy Australia: Lazy ABC Grossly Undercounts Gaza Genocide”, Countercurrents, 23 October 2025: “The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC, Australia’s taxpayer-funded equivalent of the UK BBC) has an appalling record of under-counting Indigenous deaths in US wars. When a Palestinian activist referred to 680,000 Gaza deaths the ABC responded to complaints and offered 65,000 deaths. In reality Gaza deaths from violence and deprivation after 2 years of the Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust now total 873,000 based on data in The Lancet…

    The ABC has an extremely bad record when it comes to reporting the Indigenous death toll in US wars. Thus, on the occasion of the (incomplete) US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, the ABC reported that “The withdrawal ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead”. However, the horrible reality is otherwise: 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence and deprivation in the 2003-2011 Iraqi Genocide and Iraqi Holocaust (Gideon Polya, “US-imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide”). There are 5 million orphans in Iraq  – go figure…

    The ABC permitted me to make 3 nation-wide broadcasts but then rendered me “invisible” for 20 years despite my thousand huge articles and 10 huge books. I have individually addressed thousands of carefully-researched Letters to Mainstream media but only a dozen have evaded the censor. Recently Pearls & Irritations published 10 of my submitted Letters in a row but then applied total censorship. For revelations Google “Australian Mainstream media lying & censorship.”

    Some useful suggestions:

    (1). All ABC managers should be literally kicked out of the ABC because censorship of the Truth is a betrayal of trust.

    (2). I would be happy to manage the ABC for the lowest salary of a full-time ABC employee. The ABC should be about urgently reporting the Truth and I can bring a mountain of Elephant in the Room things  from a thousand articles and 9 huge books that the present emasculated and subverted ABC ignores.

    (3). A modest suggestion: that  the ABC reports the Truth at least 2 days each year – I would nominate Anzac Day and Remembrance Day and suggest possible licence on those days from legal constraints on truth-telling.

    (4). Although I have been rendered “invisible” to Mainstream Australia I am proud to have  defended in print (necessarily outside Mendaxocracy Australia, “ruled by liars”) about 40 truth-telling Australian writers variously importuned by the liars and bullies. A decent ABC should honour and court these truth-tellers.

    (5). Journalists working for commercial media are pressured to lie by omission and commission by the owner-imposed culture. However ABC journalists are taxpayer-funded and such lying can be  akin to betrayal, treason and theft.

    (6). Censorship is anathema to the core academic ethos of commitment to Truth and free speech but this has been grossly perverted by grossly over-paid managers (“refugees from scholarship” according to my late father) (see Gideon Polya, “Current academic censorship and self-censorship in Australian universities,” Free University Education). The same restitution of Truth and free speech is demanded of both universities and the ABC.

    (7). For 2 years the world has looked on while Zionist Israelis unforgivably perpetrated a Gaza Massacre, Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust. The ABC should report the Truth (for a detailed and exhaustively referenced account see Gideon Polya, “Unforgivable 2-Year Gaza Massacre, Gaza Genocide & Gaza Holocaust By 50 Appalling Numbers,” Countercurrents, 14 October 2025). Please inform everyone you can – lying Mainstream media and politician presstitutes certainly won’t.

    The post Racist and Mendacious Australia: Cowardly and Unethical ABC Under-counts Gaza Deaths first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth

    [First published by Middle East Eye]

    Ceasefires stick because the two sides in a war have reached military stalemate – or because the incentives for each side in laying down their arms outweigh those of continuing the bloodshed.

    None of this applies in Gaza.

    The past two years in the enclave have been many things. But the one thing they have not been is a war, whatever Western politicians and media wish us to believe.

    Which means the current narrative of a “ceasefire” is as much a lie as the preceding narrative of a “Gaza war”.

    The ceasefire is not “fragile”, as we keep being told. It is non-existent, as evidenced by Israel’s continual violations – from its soldiers continuing to shoot dead Palestinian civilians to its blocking promised aid.

    So what is really going on?

    To understand the “ceasefire” and US President Donald Trump’s even more deluded 20-point “peace plan”, we first need to make sense of what the earlier “war” rhetoric was used to conceal.

    Over the past 24 months, we witnessed something deeply sinister.

    We watched the indiscriminate slaughter of a largely civilian population, already under a 17-year siege, by Israel, a regional military goliath supported and armed by the global military goliath of the United States.

    We watched the erasure of almost every home in Gaza – in what already amounted to a concentration camp for its people.

    Families were forced into makeshift tents, as they had been when they were expelled decades ago at gunpoint from their lands in what is now Israel—but this time they have been exposed to a toxic brew of the rubble-dust of their former homes and the spent materials from many Hiroshimas-worth of bombs dropped on the enclave.

    We watched a captive population being starved for months on end, in what amounted to, on the most generous view, an undisguised policy of collective punishment – a crime against humanity for which the International Criminal Court is pursuing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have been physically damaged, in addition to their psychological trauma, by a malnourishment that has altered their DNA – damage that will most likely be passed on to future generations.

    We watched Gaza’s hospitals being systematically dismantled, one by one, until the entire health sector was hollowed out, unable to deal with either the flood of wounded or the growing tide of malnourished children.

    We watched large-scale ethnic cleansing operations, in which families – or what was left of them – were driven out of “kill zones” into areas Israel termed “safe zones”, only for those safe zones to quickly turn, undeclared, into new kill zones.

    And as Trump stepped up the pressure for a “ceasefire”, we watched Israel unleash an orgy of violence, destroying as much of Gaza City as it could before the deadline arrived to stop.

    Rhetoric of ‘Gaza war’

    None of this can, or should, be described as a war.

    The United Nations, every major human rights organization in the world, including Israel’s B’Tselem, and the world’s leading body of genocide scholars agree that what has happened in Gaza meets the definition of genocide, as laid out in the UN’s Genocide Convention, ratified by Israel, the US, Britain, and the European Union.

    Nonetheless, Israel and the West’s rhetoric about “war” has been crucial in selling to Western publics an equally dishonest rhetoric of a “ceasefire” and hopes for “peace”.

    The lie of the current ceasefire is a counterpart of the lie about a “Gaza war” narrated to us over the past two years. The framing serves exactly the same purpose: to disguise Israel’s larger goals.

    On Tuesday, in the midst of the “ceasefire”, as the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians were being traded, Israel was killing more Palestinians. The Financial Times was among the media outlets reporting that Israeli soldiers had killed “several” Palestinians that day.

    Earlier, Israeli soldiers posted videos as they pulled out of Gaza City of their torching homes, food supplies, and a vital sewage treatment plant.

    In other words, Israel never had any intention of halting its fire.

    This is a familiar pattern.

    Israel killed at least 170 Palestinians during an earlier “ceasefire” negotiated by Trump, in January, which it then unilaterally ended weeks later so that it could revive the genocide.

    And in Lebanon, where a ceasefire is supposed to have been in force for the past year, overseen by the United States and France, Israel is recorded to have broken its terms more than 4,500 times.

    As former British ambassador Craig Murray observed of the ceasefire period, Israel “has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon”.

    Does anyone imagine Gaza, a tiny territory without an army or the trappings of statehood, will fare any better than Lebanon under an Israeli ceasefire?

    Ceasefire charade

    The ceasefire may be a temporary lull in Israel’s genocidal, two-year assault on Gaza but it does nothing to cease Israel’s decade-long occupation of the Palestinian territories – the inciting cause of the “war”.

    The occupation continues.

    It also does nothing to cease Israel’s system of apartheid rule over Palestinians, judged illegal by the world’s highest court last year.

    Then, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, and that other states pressure it into such a withdrawal.

    The UN General Assembly gave Israel till last month to honor the ICJ’s ruling. Israel has not just ignored that deadline. Even during the current “ceasefire”, Israeli soldiers continue to be directly stationed in more than half of Gaza.

    Additionally, of course, Israel still controls all of Gaza’s territory at arm’s length through its spy drones, attack drones and fighter jets, surveillance technology, and land and naval blockades.

    It should be a truism that a state bent on genocide has no reason to stop its genocide unless it is forced to do so – by a stronger party.

    Trump has been striding the world stage pretending to be doing just that, strong-arming Israel and Hamas. But only the credulous – and the Western political and media class – fall for this charade.

    The “ceasefire” is not “fragile”. It was set up to fail, not to provide a path to peace. Its real purpose is to provide Israel with a fresh mandate to renew the genocide.

    Dehumanized prisoners

    For decades, Palestinians have been forced to live with a catch-22: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

    Any resistance to their brutal occupation results in slaughter – or “mowing the lawn”, as Israel terms it – as well as their designation as “terrorists”.

    But a policy of no resistance, as pursued by Mahmoud Abbas’ compliant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, hangs Palestinians out to dry – living as permanent, dehumanized prisoners under Israeli rule, herded into ever-shrinking reservations while Jewish militias are licensed to build settlements on their land.

    The same kind of bogus “choice” is central to the current “ceasefire”.

    Hamas has got a hostage swap – after thousands of Palestinians were seized off the street (and thousands more will soon be seized to replace them) – while the people of Gaza win a brief respite from Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign. That was the formula for cornering Hamas into approving a ceasefire agreement it knows only too well is primed with tripwires.

    The most obvious is the requirement on Hamas to return the last remaining Israelis held captive in Gaza, including 28 bodies, in exchange for some 2,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel’s prisons. The agreement set a 72-hour timeframe for the exchange.

    Hamas has found it harder to locate the sites of the dead. So far, they have returned 10, though one appears to be non-Israeli.

    The wasteland that is now Gaza has few landmarks to identify the locations of original burial sites. And the mountains of rubble under which the Israelis’ bodies lie – created by the US-supplied bunker-busting bombs Israel dropped that most likely killed them – are almost impossible to move without heavy machinery, sorely lacking in Gaza.

    Even if the sites can be identified and the rubble removed, Hamas may discover that the bodies no longer exist, that they have been vaporized, alongside Palestinian victims, by Israel’s bombs. And of course, there is a further likely problem: some of the bodies may be located in more than half of Gaza, which Israel is still occupying, and Hamas cannot access.

    As the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ultimate neutral arbiter, has conceded, finding the bodies in these circumstances will be a “massive challenge”.

    Another catch-22.

    Notably, though the Western media has happily amplified Israeli claims of Hamas’s bad faith over returning the bodies, as well as the suffering of waiting Israeli families, it has provided little comparable coverage on the condition of the Palestinian bodies returned by Israel.

    The refrigerated corpses arrived at Nasser hospital in Gaza without any form of identification, and with staff there unable to run DNA tests because of the destruction inflicted by Israel on its facilities. Families will have no idea who their loved ones are unless they try to identify them personally.

    That will be a gruesome and distressing task. Doctors noted that the returned bodies were still cuffed and blindfolded, executed with bullets to the head, and with clear signs that they had been tortured before and after their deaths.

    Meanwhile, even before the 72-hour timeframe for the exchange was reached, Israel exploited the delay to renew the starvation of Gaza, restricting aid desperately needed to address the famine it had engineered.

    More ominously, according to Israeli media reports, the US has agreed to a “secret clause” with Israel to allow it to resume its genocidal “war” if Hamas cannot produce all the bodies within the three-day window.

    Double bind

    Then, if Hamas can avoid this tripwire, there is a requirement on the group to lay down its weapons. This is being presented as a precondition for “peace”. But the one certainty is that, even were Hamas to disarm, peace would not be the outcome.

    This week, in his usual style, Trump made undefined threats.

    “If they [Hamas] don’t disarm,” he said, “we will disarm them”. He added that, if the US got involved, “it will happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”

    This intentionally puts Hamas and others pursuing armed resistance against Israel’s occupation – a right recognized in international law – in a double bind.

    First, a disarmed population in Gaza will be even more defenseless in the face of Israeli attacks.

    Whatever the rights or wrongs of Hamas’ military strategy, it is hard to ignore the fact that the prolonged toll of fighting on Israeli troops – in terms of psychological trauma and casualty figures – has served as some sort of countervailing pressure.

    Large numbers of Israelis have taken to the streets to oppose Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza – but not, as polls show, because most care about the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians there.

    Rather, their protests have been driven by concerns about the plight of Israeli captives in Gaza and about the toll on Israeli soldiers.

    Hamas, and many of Gaza’s population, will worry that disarmament would swing the cost-benefit analysis among Israelis even further towards continued genocide. It risks more bloodletting by Israel, not peace.

    Lose-lose conundrum

    Second, Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm when there are criminal clans, armed and backed by Israel, and some of them linked to the Islamic State, roaming Gaza’s streets.

    Palestinians have long understood that Israel’s ambition is to undermine the Palestinians’ major national liberation movements – whether Hamas or Fatah – by promoting in their place feudal warlords.

    One Palestinian analyst warned me 14 years ago of the dangers of what he referred to as Israel’s plan for the “Afghanistanization” of Gaza and the West Bank.

    Israel’s ultimate divide-and-rule strategy would involve promoting rival clan leaders who focus on protecting their own small fiefdoms and fighting each other, rather than trying to resist the illegal occupation and seek a unified Palestinian state.

    At the height of the genocide, the clans proved how dangerous such a development could be for ordinary Palestinians. Aided by Israel, and with Hamas pinned down in their tunnels, these gangs looted aid trucks, stole aid from weaker families, then took that food for their own families and sold the rest at extortionate prices few could afford. Everyone else starved.

    The post It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth

    [First published by Middle East Eye]

    Ceasefires stick because the two sides in a war have reached military stalemate – or because the incentives for each side in laying down their arms outweigh those of continuing the bloodshed.

    None of this applies in Gaza.

    The past two years in the enclave have been many things. But the one thing they have not been is a war, whatever Western politicians and media wish us to believe.

    Which means the current narrative of a “ceasefire” is as much a lie as the preceding narrative of a “Gaza war”.

    The ceasefire is not “fragile”, as we keep being told. It is non-existent, as evidenced by Israel’s continual violations – from its soldiers continuing to shoot dead Palestinian civilians to its blocking promised aid.

    So what is really going on?

    To understand the “ceasefire” and US President Donald Trump’s even more deluded 20-point “peace plan”, we first need to make sense of what the earlier “war” rhetoric was used to conceal.

    Over the past 24 months, we witnessed something deeply sinister.

    We watched the indiscriminate slaughter of a largely civilian population, already under a 17-year siege, by Israel, a regional military goliath supported and armed by the global military goliath of the United States.

    We watched the erasure of almost every home in Gaza – in what already amounted to a concentration camp for its people.

    Families were forced into makeshift tents, as they had been when they were expelled decades ago at gunpoint from their lands in what is now Israel—but this time they have been exposed to a toxic brew of the rubble-dust of their former homes and the spent materials from many Hiroshimas-worth of bombs dropped on the enclave.

    We watched a captive population being starved for months on end, in what amounted to, on the most generous view, an undisguised policy of collective punishment – a crime against humanity for which the International Criminal Court is pursuing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have been physically damaged, in addition to their psychological trauma, by a malnourishment that has altered their DNA – damage that will most likely be passed on to future generations.

    We watched Gaza’s hospitals being systematically dismantled, one by one, until the entire health sector was hollowed out, unable to deal with either the flood of wounded or the growing tide of malnourished children.

    We watched large-scale ethnic cleansing operations, in which families – or what was left of them – were driven out of “kill zones” into areas Israel termed “safe zones”, only for those safe zones to quickly turn, undeclared, into new kill zones.

    And as Trump stepped up the pressure for a “ceasefire”, we watched Israel unleash an orgy of violence, destroying as much of Gaza City as it could before the deadline arrived to stop.

    Rhetoric of ‘Gaza war’

    None of this can, or should, be described as a war.

    The United Nations, every major human rights organization in the world, including Israel’s B’Tselem, and the world’s leading body of genocide scholars agree that what has happened in Gaza meets the definition of genocide, as laid out in the UN’s Genocide Convention, ratified by Israel, the US, Britain, and the European Union.

    Nonetheless, Israel and the West’s rhetoric about “war” has been crucial in selling to Western publics an equally dishonest rhetoric of a “ceasefire” and hopes for “peace”.

    The lie of the current ceasefire is a counterpart of the lie about a “Gaza war” narrated to us over the past two years. The framing serves exactly the same purpose: to disguise Israel’s larger goals.

    On Tuesday, in the midst of the “ceasefire”, as the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians were being traded, Israel was killing more Palestinians. The Financial Times was among the media outlets reporting that Israeli soldiers had killed “several” Palestinians that day.

    Earlier, Israeli soldiers posted videos as they pulled out of Gaza City of their torching homes, food supplies, and a vital sewage treatment plant.

    In other words, Israel never had any intention of halting its fire.

    This is a familiar pattern.

    Israel killed at least 170 Palestinians during an earlier “ceasefire” negotiated by Trump, in January, which it then unilaterally ended weeks later so that it could revive the genocide.

    And in Lebanon, where a ceasefire is supposed to have been in force for the past year, overseen by the United States and France, Israel is recorded to have broken its terms more than 4,500 times.

    As former British ambassador Craig Murray observed of the ceasefire period, Israel “has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon”.

    Does anyone imagine Gaza, a tiny territory without an army or the trappings of statehood, will fare any better than Lebanon under an Israeli ceasefire?

    Ceasefire charade

    The ceasefire may be a temporary lull in Israel’s genocidal, two-year assault on Gaza but it does nothing to cease Israel’s decade-long occupation of the Palestinian territories – the inciting cause of the “war”.

    The occupation continues.

    It also does nothing to cease Israel’s system of apartheid rule over Palestinians, judged illegal by the world’s highest court last year.

    Then, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, and that other states pressure it into such a withdrawal.

    The UN General Assembly gave Israel till last month to honor the ICJ’s ruling. Israel has not just ignored that deadline. Even during the current “ceasefire”, Israeli soldiers continue to be directly stationed in more than half of Gaza.

    Additionally, of course, Israel still controls all of Gaza’s territory at arm’s length through its spy drones, attack drones and fighter jets, surveillance technology, and land and naval blockades.

    It should be a truism that a state bent on genocide has no reason to stop its genocide unless it is forced to do so – by a stronger party.

    Trump has been striding the world stage pretending to be doing just that, strong-arming Israel and Hamas. But only the credulous – and the Western political and media class – fall for this charade.

    The “ceasefire” is not “fragile”. It was set up to fail, not to provide a path to peace. Its real purpose is to provide Israel with a fresh mandate to renew the genocide.

    Dehumanized prisoners

    For decades, Palestinians have been forced to live with a catch-22: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

    Any resistance to their brutal occupation results in slaughter – or “mowing the lawn”, as Israel terms it – as well as their designation as “terrorists”.

    But a policy of no resistance, as pursued by Mahmoud Abbas’ compliant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, hangs Palestinians out to dry – living as permanent, dehumanized prisoners under Israeli rule, herded into ever-shrinking reservations while Jewish militias are licensed to build settlements on their land.

    The same kind of bogus “choice” is central to the current “ceasefire”.

    Hamas has got a hostage swap – after thousands of Palestinians were seized off the street (and thousands more will soon be seized to replace them) – while the people of Gaza win a brief respite from Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign. That was the formula for cornering Hamas into approving a ceasefire agreement it knows only too well is primed with tripwires.

    The most obvious is the requirement on Hamas to return the last remaining Israelis held captive in Gaza, including 28 bodies, in exchange for some 2,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel’s prisons. The agreement set a 72-hour timeframe for the exchange.

    Hamas has found it harder to locate the sites of the dead. So far, they have returned 10, though one appears to be non-Israeli.

    The wasteland that is now Gaza has few landmarks to identify the locations of original burial sites. And the mountains of rubble under which the Israelis’ bodies lie – created by the US-supplied bunker-busting bombs Israel dropped that most likely killed them – are almost impossible to move without heavy machinery, sorely lacking in Gaza.

    Even if the sites can be identified and the rubble removed, Hamas may discover that the bodies no longer exist, that they have been vaporized, alongside Palestinian victims, by Israel’s bombs. And of course, there is a further likely problem: some of the bodies may be located in more than half of Gaza, which Israel is still occupying, and Hamas cannot access.

    As the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ultimate neutral arbiter, has conceded, finding the bodies in these circumstances will be a “massive challenge”.

    Another catch-22.

    Notably, though the Western media has happily amplified Israeli claims of Hamas’s bad faith over returning the bodies, as well as the suffering of waiting Israeli families, it has provided little comparable coverage on the condition of the Palestinian bodies returned by Israel.

    The refrigerated corpses arrived at Nasser hospital in Gaza without any form of identification, and with staff there unable to run DNA tests because of the destruction inflicted by Israel on its facilities. Families will have no idea who their loved ones are unless they try to identify them personally.

    That will be a gruesome and distressing task. Doctors noted that the returned bodies were still cuffed and blindfolded, executed with bullets to the head, and with clear signs that they had been tortured before and after their deaths.

    Meanwhile, even before the 72-hour timeframe for the exchange was reached, Israel exploited the delay to renew the starvation of Gaza, restricting aid desperately needed to address the famine it had engineered.

    More ominously, according to Israeli media reports, the US has agreed to a “secret clause” with Israel to allow it to resume its genocidal “war” if Hamas cannot produce all the bodies within the three-day window.

    Double bind

    Then, if Hamas can avoid this tripwire, there is a requirement on the group to lay down its weapons. This is being presented as a precondition for “peace”. But the one certainty is that, even were Hamas to disarm, peace would not be the outcome.

    This week, in his usual style, Trump made undefined threats.

    “If they [Hamas] don’t disarm,” he said, “we will disarm them”. He added that, if the US got involved, “it will happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”

    This intentionally puts Hamas and others pursuing armed resistance against Israel’s occupation – a right recognized in international law – in a double bind.

    First, a disarmed population in Gaza will be even more defenseless in the face of Israeli attacks.

    Whatever the rights or wrongs of Hamas’ military strategy, it is hard to ignore the fact that the prolonged toll of fighting on Israeli troops – in terms of psychological trauma and casualty figures – has served as some sort of countervailing pressure.

    Large numbers of Israelis have taken to the streets to oppose Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza – but not, as polls show, because most care about the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians there.

    Rather, their protests have been driven by concerns about the plight of Israeli captives in Gaza and about the toll on Israeli soldiers.

    Hamas, and many of Gaza’s population, will worry that disarmament would swing the cost-benefit analysis among Israelis even further towards continued genocide. It risks more bloodletting by Israel, not peace.

    Lose-lose conundrum

    Second, Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm when there are criminal clans, armed and backed by Israel, and some of them linked to the Islamic State, roaming Gaza’s streets.

    Palestinians have long understood that Israel’s ambition is to undermine the Palestinians’ major national liberation movements – whether Hamas or Fatah – by promoting in their place feudal warlords.

    One Palestinian analyst warned me 14 years ago of the dangers of what he referred to as Israel’s plan for the “Afghanistanization” of Gaza and the West Bank.

    Israel’s ultimate divide-and-rule strategy would involve promoting rival clan leaders who focus on protecting their own small fiefdoms and fighting each other, rather than trying to resist the illegal occupation and seek a unified Palestinian state.

    At the height of the genocide, the clans proved how dangerous such a development could be for ordinary Palestinians. Aided by Israel, and with Hamas pinned down in their tunnels, these gangs looted aid trucks, stole aid from weaker families, then took that food for their own families and sold the rest at extortionate prices few could afford. Everyone else starved.

    The post It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Electoral watchdog seeks new powers to curb platform disinformation

    Australia’s election watchdog has urged lawmakers to give him more enforcement powers and set up legislated minimum standards for online platforms to respond to disinformation amid a “deterioration in the information environment”. The call for a new notice power and legislated standards for addressing suspected illegal content follows several pieces of disinformation around the 2025…

    The post Electoral watchdog seeks new powers to curb platform disinformation appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Blinkered Bowen

    On the second anniversary of the 7 October attacks on Israel, with Middle East peace talks underway, BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen asked, ‘Will Israel and Hamas seize the chance to end the war?’

    An honest, insightful analyst would have addressed the issue differently. First and foremost, the narrative framing of a ‘war’ would have been replaced by the reality: ‘genocide’. In fact, nowhere in his 1800-word article does Bowen even mention the word. The omission is both glaring and shameful.

    Recall that it is now accepted by the UN Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, along with major human rights organizations, including Israel’s own B’Tselem, and genocide scholars, among whom are Israeli experts, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

    In a new report published on the second anniversary of the 7 October atrocities, B’Tselem noted that the Hamas attacks had acted as a ‘trigger’ for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians: ‘an escalation rooted in decades of apartheid and occupation.’

    Bowen pointed to the trauma that Hamas inflicted on Israelis when the 7 October attacks ‘killed around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and 251 were taken hostage.’ As we have repeatedly said, Hamas and other Palestinians did indeed commit major war crimes in attacking and killing unarmed Israeli civilians. But Bowen’s article makes no mention of the trauma inflicted on the Palestinians by a brutal Israeli state over many decades.

    Nor does Bowen point out that many Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli forces under the implementation of the so-called Hannibal Directive (see our 12 February 2025 media alert) to prevent Israeli hostages from being used as bargaining tools by Hamas.

    An investigation published by the website Electronic Intifada on the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks concluded that Israeli forces, including tanks and helicopters, may have killed hundreds of their own people. Al Jazeera reported that as many as 28 Israeli Apache helicopters expended all their ammunition and had to be reloaded.

    Bowen goes on to say that Hamas has ‘a charter that seeks to destroy Israel’. This is a misleading claim that has been repeated endlessly for years across the ‘mainstream’ media. Noam Chomsky was asked about it in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! in 2014. He responded:

    ‘First of all, [the] Hamas charter means practically nothing. The only people who pay attention to it are Israeli propagandists, who love it. It was a charter put together by a small group of people under siege, under attack in 1988. And it’s essentially meaningless. There are charters that mean something, but they’re not talked about. So, for example, the electoral program of Israel’s governing party, Likud, states explicitly that there can never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. And they not only state it in their charter, that’s a call for the destruction of Palestine, an explicit call for it. And they don’t only have it in their charter, you know, their electoral program, but they implement it. That’s quite different from the Hamas charter.’

    An updated Hamas charter published in 2017 made clear that their opposition was to a Zionist, ethnonationalist state in which Jews have greater human rights than other citizens: in other words, a system of apartheid. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and many other informed sources have declared that Israel is indeed an apartheid state.

    A ‘Conflict Between Arabs And Jews’?
    Recently, the right-wing, former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil challenged Ben Jamal, director of the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign, in a Times Radio interview on whether Jamal approved of the chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. Surely that is a call, claimed Neil, for the destruction of Israel?

    Jamal responded that as part of a real Middle East peace settlement, there cannot be any state that practices apartheid. He made the valid point that the state of South Africa still exists, just not in a form that practices apartheid.

    So, Neil went on: ‘Israel would cease to be a Jewish state’.

    Jamal’s answer was a model of clarity:

    ‘It would cease to be a Jewish state if what you mean by that, and this is what Benjamin Netanyahu means by that, [is] a state which can privilege the rights of Jewish people above Palestinians. No state has the right to do that; in the same way, South Africa did not have the right to privilege the rights of white South Africans above black South Africans. It’s not that difficult.’

    Bowen could have included informed commentary along those lines. And he is surely sufficiently experienced and knowledgeable to be aware of the point. But instead he chose to platform Israeli propaganda about Hamas ‘seeking to destroy Israel’.

    The BBC international editor went on to say that:

    ‘There is a chance to get to a ceasefire that could lead to the end of the most destructive and bloody war in well over a century of conflict between Arabs and Jews.’

    This formulation is a classic example of the imposed ignorance that the BBC foists upon its audiences. Again, Bowen must surely have a better understanding of the relevant history. It would indeed require some unpacking for a general audience. But to categorise the betrayal of Palestinians by the British under the 1917 Balfour declaration, namely to back a new Jewish state on Palestinian territory as demanded by Zionists, and the founding of Israel in 1948, which led to the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) and the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians, as a ‘conflict between Arabs and Jews’ does a gross disservice to the truth. There is not the slightest hint from Bowen that Israel is a settler-colonial state acting as an extension of US-led Western power in the Middle East for geostrategic reasons.

    In a short book published last year, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote that:

    ‘It took two years – between 1915 and 1917 – for the Zionist lobby to persuade the British government that a Jewish Palestine would be a strategic asset for the Empire. What tipped the scales for Britain was the realization that Palestine could be crucial in defending the Suez Canal in Egypt. A friendly governmental regime there was hence vital. So the imperialists wanted Palestine for strategic reasons, Christian evangelicals wanted it to help bring about the end times, and the Jewish leadership wanted it as a safe haven for the Jews of Russia, as well as a means of forcefully modernising Judaism. To survive the new epoch, they thought, Jewishness had to be a nationality, not a religion.’

    (Ilan Pappe, ‘A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict’, Oneworld, London, 2024, p. 13)

    The Threat Of ‘Peace Offensives’
    Chomsky has often pointed out that, following the end of the Second World War, when the US emerged as the main victor and the world’s most powerful economy, Washington has provided virtually unwavering support for Israel because it functions as a strategic and commercial asset that helps to maintain American power and dominance in the Middle East. This is rarely pointed out by Western news media because, as Chomsky noted:

    ‘the mainstream tends to be a herd of independent minds marching in support of state power.’

    In 2014, Chomsky said:

    ‘Hamas leaders have repeatedly made it clear that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that the U.S. and Israel have blocked for 40 years.’

    In other words, Hamas has declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders. But Israel has always rejected the offer, just as it rejected the Arab League peace plan of 2002, and just as it has always rejected the international consensus for a peaceful solution in the Middle East.

    Why? Because the threat of such ‘peace offensives’ would involve unacceptable concessions and compromises by Israel. Israeli writer Amos Elon has written of the ‘panic and unease among our political leadership’ caused by Arab peace proposals. (Cited, Noam Chomsky, ‘Fateful Triangle’, Pluto Press, London, 1999, p.75)

    The Palestinians are seen as an obstacle by Israel’s leaders; an irritant to be subjugated or even removed. Chomsky commented:

    ‘Traditionally over the years, Israel has sought to crush any resistance to its programs of takeover of the parts of Palestine it regards as valuable, while eliminating any hope for the indigenous population to have a decent existence enjoying national rights.’

    Try to find the above points being made in a BBC article or news broadcast by Bowen or any other BBC journalist. When do they ever explain that it is Israel who repeatedly breaks ceasefires? When do they ever report that there is a long history of Israel, with US connivance, repeatedly blocking moves towards a just and genuine peace in the Middle East?

    Atrocity Propaganda
    In the two years since the 7 October attacks on Israel, the US government has spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, according to analyst William D. Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, DC. This figure does not include the tens of billions of dollars in arms sales agreements that have been committed for weapons and services that will be paid for and delivered in the years to come.

    To his credit, but without pointing to any such relevant figures, Bowen did observe in his online piece:

    ‘Israel is dependent on the United States. The US has been a full partner in the war. Without American help, Israel could not have attacked Gaza with such ruthless and prolonged force. Most of its weapons are supplied by the US, which also provides political and diplomatic protection, vetoing multiple resolutions in the UN Security Council that were intended to pressure Israel to stop.’

    But nowhere in Bowen’s article, nor anywhere else on the BBC, to our knowledge, has the journalist ever exposed the many Israeli lies and deceptions around 7 October. As the Canadian physician, trauma expert, and Holocaust survivor Dr Gabor Maté explained in a public talk last year:

    ‘There were no babies in ovens… No mass rapes.’

    There were also no ‘beheaded babies’, despite Israeli claims of 40 beheaded babies and toddlers; claims that were credulously plastered across the front page of virtually every UK newspaper.

    Electronic Intifada (EI) has provided numerous examples of Israeli falsehoods in a thread on X, which they introduced with these words:

    ‘On 7 October 2023, Israel began spreading atrocity propaganda — rapes, burned babies, family massacres. But a big share of deaths that day were by Israeli fire. From the start, EI exposed these lies while mainstream media spread them. Here are some of our key investigations’

    One of the crucial observations included by EI in their thread is that in November 2023, Israeli air force colonel Nof Erez confirmed to a Hebrew-only podcast that Israel had targeted its own people on 7 October, calling it a ‘mass Hannibal’. That same month, Yossi Landau, the Jewish extremist who concocted some of Israel’s worst atrocity propaganda, admitted that his story about Hamas executing children was untrue.

    Israel and its supporters in the media frequently made unverified claims of ‘mass rape’ by Hamas on 7 October. But, as EI noted in December 2023:

    ‘Despite blanket coverage, Israel does not claim to have identified any specific victim of such crimes, nor produced any videos or forensic evidence corroborating that they took place.’

    In a livestreamed video, a team from EI analyzed this propaganda campaign, arguing that it was ‘being fronted by operatives close to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.’

    EI added:

    ‘this is a deceptive campaign based not on evidence but emotional manipulation, outlandish claims, distortion, and an appeal to racist notions that Palestinians are inherently violent and cruel.

    ‘It fits in with a long history of colonizers portraying colonized or enslaved people as savage brutes predisposed to sexual violence against white or settler women.’

    In July 2025, an article appeared in the Sunday Times claiming that ‘new witnesses’ had come forward, backing the narrative that ‘sexual violence was rife’ on 7 October. BBC News also covered the story with the headline, ‘Hamas used sexual violence as part of “genocidal strategy”, Israeli experts say’.

    However, experienced journalist and filmmaker Richard Sanders countered:

    ‘For our Al Jazeera Investigative Unit film “October 7”, we explored the issue of rape extremely carefully and concluded there was simply no evidence to support the claim that it was widespread and systematic. This new report appears to present no new, tangible evidence. The fact that one of the people behind it is the former chief military prosecutor of the Israeli army should set huge alarm bells ringing. Since Oct 7, 2023, if there is one thing we have learned, it is that Israeli claims about the behavior of Palestinians should be treated with extreme skepticism.’

    Closing Comments
    Why have the BBC’s international editor and his BBC colleagues buried so many of the truths about 7 October; in fact, actively promoted Israeli lies and deceptions? As ever, the public has to rely on ‘alternative’ media such as Electronic Intifada and Double Down News for the truth, such as this excellent film, ‘What Really Happened on October 7’, presented by Sanders.

    When Greta Thunberg was released from an Israeli prison, after taking part in the Gaza Sumud Flotilla, which was illegally intercepted in international waters by Israeli forces and the flotilla participants illegally taken into custody, her first public words were:

    ‘This genocide is being enabled and fuelled by our own governments, our institutions, our media, and companies. It is our responsibility to end that complicity.’

    She is right.

    DC

    The post Blinkered Bowen first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Allegiances to the Genocidaires, Military Offensive Weapons, and Finance Capital

    Note: So, the Newport News Times, AKA, Lincoln County Leader, has my op-ed below in the on-line version. So disappointed to see the print hardcopy version is missing this important Two Years going into the current genocide.

    I did reference the local politician, the representative, David Gomberg, Jewish, who got an all-expenses paid trip to Israel by Adolph Bibi. Jewish, and he wrote an op-ed travel piece for the same rag two weeks ago.

    Here, my DV piece: Two Men, an Evil Empire, Evil Jews of Genocide Legacy, and the Mowing of the World’s Compassion and AGENCY

    Now, the editor will not tell me the truth, I am sure, why my piece today is on the on-line version. There are literally thousands of newspapers at grocery stores and other outlets today, but my piece is not in them. I have consistently had my op-eds in the paper rag, duplicated on the on-line version.

    It pisses me off, yeah, and newspaper print DOES matter, even though retrograde laugh at newspapers, only good for wrapping fish. They are idiots.

    This representative does get the newspaper at home and in his office and home in Salem, so, hmm, is this the reason the piece only appears on the WWW?

    Here, the same piece on-line, but I can’t read it because it’s behind a paywall.

    Below, the version with graphics and additions. Thanks for reading DV.

    Allegiances to the Genocidaires, Military Offensive Weapons, and Finance Capital

    You have to hand it to both parties – trillions of US taxpayer money sent to an occupied land that has full-throttle displayed its genocide (US-backed) on defenseless people.

    Two-year anniversary.

    Oh, don’t fret: we have over fifty national month of October celebratory things, from the absurd, stupid, silly and a few serious ones.

    But make no mistake about it – the US, Britain and Germany are the major weapons suppliers to Israel. However, there are literally tens of billions of dollars going back and forth from and to that genocidal state.

    Sort of like the good old days when Hitler and his regime had that back and forth commerce, with, hmm: German and international corporations like IG Farben, Ford, General Motors (GM), IBM, and Standard Oil. There were hundreds of smaller companies.

    [Getting ready for Portland, Oregon, so why worry about Gaza?]

    We have now in Lincoln County, thousands losing their Medicare Advantage plans through Samaritan Health. And what are the democrats up against the republican reprobates doing?

    Well, we have two senators, one who is Israel-First and who puts his Jewish background above America, for sure, in many people’s minds: The genocide campaign has killed more than 350,000 Palestinians, almost all civilians, and left the rest of the population of Gaza in plots of land that make concentration camps look livable.

    [Chicago is in the crosshairs, so forget about Gaza the day and weeks and years after Oct. 7 2023]

    Sen. Jeff Merkley co-sponsored six bills in September 2024 to halt a $20 billion U.S. arms sale to Israel. Some of it: $675 million worth of bombs and a shipment of 20,000 assault rifles to Israel.

    “We have a profound moral responsibility to end this collective punishment of innocent civilians,” Merkley said in a statement, adding that until the Israeli government makes critical international food and medical aid available to Palestinians in Gaza, the U.S. should not send any more weapons.

    Yet, the other senator, Ron Wyden (Jewish), voted with all Republicans against stopping the military killing materiel to Israel.

    [Never seen in local newspapers, and big ones either.]

    Even non-Jewish Merkley drops caveats in his statement:

    “Every moment the U.S. fails to demand a massive influx of food or to provide that massive influx of food ourselves, we are complicit in Netanyahu’s strategy of starving Palestinians. This breaks every moral code and every religious code. Until every child and every mother have sufficient nutrition, America should not send a single dollar or a single bomb to Netanyahu’s government. No more bombs. More aid.”

    Some of us journalists go way back (since 1973) and we’ve even studied rhetoric and propaganda and taught college communications (since 1983).

    Let it be known: Israel has been practicing genocide since 1948, and has been an apartheid state the same number of years. “Mowing of the grass/lawn” was a practice Israel used to murder peaceful protestors and medical workers going to the aid of wounded protestors. Before Oct 2023.

    The End of Mowing the Grass: If Israel Wants to Continue to Exist, It Must Uproot Hamas from Gaza

    [Nah, times this by 10!]

    This is not one man’s or one Israeli government’s genocide. Most Israeli Jews want Palestinians gone. Troubling, also, are these Americans supporting Israel with any sort of financial and military and non-military aid are complicit.

    Just a month ago, the world’s largest association of academic scholars studying genocide passed a resolution saying Israel’s “policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide,” established by the U.N. in 1948.

    The International Association of Genocide Scholars states that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    Aiding and abetting war crimes is a crime. The crime of genocide.

    [All the Jewish controlled and non-Jewish controlled outlets, part and parcel, part of the genocide, incuding the IDF Frum from the Atlantic.]

    [Leaked emails from former Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor reveal that David Frum and Douglas Murray secretly drafted speeches for him during Israel’s 2014 military campaign in Gaza, while a CNN producer, Pamela Gross, coordinated private fundraising for Israel’s Iron Dome. Frum, then a senior editor at The Atlantic, and Murray, a Spectator contributor, offered speechwriting and strategic guidance to bolster Israel’s international messaging. Gross repeatedly sought Prosor’s help to raise funds for the missile defense system, framing her efforts as vital to the safety of Israeli citizens. The emails, published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, expose the deep behind-the-scenes collaboration between journalists and Israeli officials at a time of intense global scrutiny. Read the full report here.]

    This society is broken, and has been way before Ronald Reagan, for sure, but like exponential growth of a bacteria left to grow, each year there are more deaths by 1,000 cuts to social, health, education, economic, spiritual social safety nets.

    Throwing money at the MIC – Military Industrial Complex – for seventy years, and throwing money at Israel for 77 years has done its work by lining the pockets of CEOs, bankers, billionaires in finance, and now the techno fascists. Names like Ellison, Altman, Ackman, Karp, Zuckerberg, Adelson, Brin may not be on readers’ tongues, but beware of these new titans of pain.

    Former CIA analyst and now activist, Ray McGovern calls that military machine the MICIMATT: Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence- Media-Academia-Think-Tank Complex.

    In reality, a society that has outrageous costly and failing medical care for all, let alone seniors, is a society that has been bought and sold down the river. For-profit medicine? For-profit electricity? Telecommunications? Hell, we can’t even run our own county’s school buses anymore without paying a for-profit outfit to transport our kiddos – Student First, owned by EQT Infrastructure, a Swedish private equity firm.

    If you were to take one of my critical thinking writing courses from a few years ago, you’d be flummoxed with these sorts of stories. You’d be exposed to censored stories and memory-holed history. You would have learned about amazing facts that have been held back from the average American citizen.

    “If the U.S. Can’t Boss the World, It Will Spitefully Destroy It,” is an article by Jeremy Kuzmarov, a community college instructor in Oklahoma and managing editor of Covert Action magazine. He was just on my radio show, Finding Fringe at KYAQ FM.

    We talked about how this country is now in super dire straits – death by a thousand cuts every hour under the Trump regime. But we also delved into the history of both parties responsible for wars, invasions, coups, sanctions, false flags, and conspiracies to, well, destroy the world.

    Now we have bald-faced liars admitting they hate the American people, admitting that they control the wealth, food, energy, data, water, futures, land and possessions of a majority of the world.

    Read James Baldwin to understand his prescient quote:

    “All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism.”

    No Name in the Street is a four-page apocalyptic tour de force, in which Baldwin imagined a system built on exploitation and war collapsing on itself.

    Ahh, the good old days when he wrote this – 1972!

    [Note: This is the height of absurdity — one Nazi Israeli ambassador selling junk bonds to the other Nazis from history.]

    Bought sold and wrapped in Billionaire Bubble Wrap.

    The post Allegiances to the Genocidaires, Military Offensive Weapons, and Finance Capital first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Droned Flotilla Activists and then Abused Greta Thunberg

    Who would have imagined five years ago when we were seeing Greta Thunberg amplified by every mainstream western liberal institution that we would one day hear reports that she has been captured and tormented by the Israeli military for trying to bring formula to starving babies?

    The Guardian reports the following:

    “In an email sent by the Swedish foreign ministry to people close to Thunberg, and seen by the Guardian, an official who has visited the activist in prison said she claimed she was detained in a cell infested with bedbugs, with too little food and water.

    “ ‘The embassy has been able to meet with Greta,’ reads the email. ‘She informed of dehydration. She has received insufficient amounts of both water and food. She also stated that she had developed rashes which she suspects were caused by bedbugs. She spoke of harsh treatment and said she had been sitting for long periods on hard surfaces.’

    “ ‘Another detainee reportedly told another embassy that they had seen her [Thunberg] being forced to hold flags while pictures were taken. She wondered whether images of her had been distributed,’ the Swedish ministry’s official added.

    “The allegation was corroborated by at least two other members of the flotilla who had been detained by Israeli forces and released on Saturday.

    “ ‘They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,’ the Turkish activist Ersin Çelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.

    “Lorenzo D’Agostino, a journalist and another flotilla participant, said after returning to Istanbul that Thunberg was ‘wrapped in the Israeli flag and paraded like a trophy’ — a scene described with disbelief and anger by those who witnessed it.”

    https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/1974560607572828354

    These reports, as shocking as they are, also happen to more or less reflect exactly what the Israeli regime said it intended to do to Global Sumud Flotilla activists when they were captured.

    Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said last month that Sumud activists must be treated as terrorists in order to “create a clear deterrent” from future flotilla activism, declaring that “Anyone who chooses to collaborate with Hamas and support terrorism will meet a firm and unyielding response from Israel.”

    “We will not allow individuals who support terrorism to live in comfort. They will face the full consequences of their actions,” Ben-Gvir said at the time.

    After the flotilla activists were abducted by the IDF, Ben-Gvir filmed himself taunting them and calling them “terrorists”.

    Israel, needless to say, has an extensively documented record of torturing and abusing individuals who’ve been given the “terrorist” label by the regime.

    So it would appear that they singled out the most high-profile activist on the flotilla for abuse in order to send a message and deter future efforts to break the siege on Gaza.


    https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1973946884126658827

    This comes as CBS News publishes a report confirming what we’ve been saying since last month: that Israel launched multiple drone attacks against the Global Sumud Flotilla.

    Citing two US intelligence officials, CBS reports that Benjamin Netanyahu personally authorized attacks in which drones were deployed from an Israeli submarine to drop incendiary devices onto the boats to set them on fire.

    Israel has been documented using quadcopter drones to drop incendiary firebombs on tents and buildings in Gaza. Last month Trump’s middle east envoy Tom Barrack casually admitted during an interview that “Israel is attacking Tunisia,” which was where the boat carrying Greta Thunberg was docked during the first drone attack.

    Like the reported mistreatment of Thunberg, these drone attacks would also fit in perfectly with the Israeli government’s depraved and cynical decision to treat the flotilla activists as terrorists.


    https://x.com/DecampDave/status/1974258862808043881

    After the initial claims of a drone attack on the flotilla, the information ecosystem was flooded with hasbarists claiming it was ridiculous to blame Israel for the attacks, and that the fire hadn’t come from a drone at all.

    Odious genocide propagandist Eyal Yakoby got nearly ten million views on a tweet where he falsely claimed to have video evidence showing that the fire was actually the result of a misfired flare from one of the boat’s crew members. Anyone who’d actually watched the video would have seen that it showed nothing of the sort, but because Yakoby inserted a narrative above the video claiming it shows that, I had people in my Twitter notifications telling me for days that it had been conclusively proven the fire was started by a flare.

    I encountered even some solid Palestine supporters expressing doubt about the drone attacks when the reports first emerged, because it seemed too heinous to be believed. But this just goes to show that there really is nothing you can put past these freaks.

    Israel and its apologists lie about everything. Everything, everything, everything. We are far past the point where it is reasonable to give Israel the benefit of the doubt when we hear reports that it has done something evil. If you’ll launch drone attacks on activists trying to bring aid to starving civilians, there’s nothing you won’t do.

    The post Israel Droned Flotilla Activists and then Abused Greta Thunberg first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Droned Flotilla Activists and then Abused Greta Thunberg

    Who would have imagined five years ago when we were seeing Greta Thunberg amplified by every mainstream western liberal institution that we would one day hear reports that she has been captured and tormented by the Israeli military for trying to bring formula to starving babies?

    The Guardian reports the following:

    “In an email sent by the Swedish foreign ministry to people close to Thunberg, and seen by the Guardian, an official who has visited the activist in prison said she claimed she was detained in a cell infested with bedbugs, with too little food and water.

    “ ‘The embassy has been able to meet with Greta,’ reads the email. ‘She informed of dehydration. She has received insufficient amounts of both water and food. She also stated that she had developed rashes which she suspects were caused by bedbugs. She spoke of harsh treatment and said she had been sitting for long periods on hard surfaces.’

    “ ‘Another detainee reportedly told another embassy that they had seen her [Thunberg] being forced to hold flags while pictures were taken. She wondered whether images of her had been distributed,’ the Swedish ministry’s official added.

    “The allegation was corroborated by at least two other members of the flotilla who had been detained by Israeli forces and released on Saturday.

    “ ‘They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,’ the Turkish activist Ersin Çelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.

    “Lorenzo D’Agostino, a journalist and another flotilla participant, said after returning to Istanbul that Thunberg was ‘wrapped in the Israeli flag and paraded like a trophy’ — a scene described with disbelief and anger by those who witnessed it.”

    https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/1974560607572828354

    These reports, as shocking as they are, also happen to more or less reflect exactly what the Israeli regime said it intended to do to Global Sumud Flotilla activists when they were captured.

    Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said last month that Sumud activists must be treated as terrorists in order to “create a clear deterrent” from future flotilla activism, declaring that “Anyone who chooses to collaborate with Hamas and support terrorism will meet a firm and unyielding response from Israel.”

    “We will not allow individuals who support terrorism to live in comfort. They will face the full consequences of their actions,” Ben-Gvir said at the time.

    After the flotilla activists were abducted by the IDF, Ben-Gvir filmed himself taunting them and calling them “terrorists”.

    Israel, needless to say, has an extensively documented record of torturing and abusing individuals who’ve been given the “terrorist” label by the regime.

    So it would appear that they singled out the most high-profile activist on the flotilla for abuse in order to send a message and deter future efforts to break the siege on Gaza.


    https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1973946884126658827

    This comes as CBS News publishes a report confirming what we’ve been saying since last month: that Israel launched multiple drone attacks against the Global Sumud Flotilla.

    Citing two US intelligence officials, CBS reports that Benjamin Netanyahu personally authorized attacks in which drones were deployed from an Israeli submarine to drop incendiary devices onto the boats to set them on fire.

    Israel has been documented using quadcopter drones to drop incendiary firebombs on tents and buildings in Gaza. Last month Trump’s middle east envoy Tom Barrack casually admitted during an interview that “Israel is attacking Tunisia,” which was where the boat carrying Greta Thunberg was docked during the first drone attack.

    Like the reported mistreatment of Thunberg, these drone attacks would also fit in perfectly with the Israeli government’s depraved and cynical decision to treat the flotilla activists as terrorists.


    https://x.com/DecampDave/status/1974258862808043881

    After the initial claims of a drone attack on the flotilla, the information ecosystem was flooded with hasbarists claiming it was ridiculous to blame Israel for the attacks, and that the fire hadn’t come from a drone at all.

    Odious genocide propagandist Eyal Yakoby got nearly ten million views on a tweet where he falsely claimed to have video evidence showing that the fire was actually the result of a misfired flare from one of the boat’s crew members. Anyone who’d actually watched the video would have seen that it showed nothing of the sort, but because Yakoby inserted a narrative above the video claiming it shows that, I had people in my Twitter notifications telling me for days that it had been conclusively proven the fire was started by a flare.

    I encountered even some solid Palestine supporters expressing doubt about the drone attacks when the reports first emerged, because it seemed too heinous to be believed. But this just goes to show that there really is nothing you can put past these freaks.

    Israel and its apologists lie about everything. Everything, everything, everything. We are far past the point where it is reasonable to give Israel the benefit of the doubt when we hear reports that it has done something evil. If you’ll launch drone attacks on activists trying to bring aid to starving civilians, there’s nothing you won’t do.

    The post Israel Droned Flotilla Activists and then Abused Greta Thunberg first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • He Tells the Truth When He Lies

    Lately, I’ve had lyrics to ‘I’ve Got No Idols,’ by 1990s indie-darling Juliana Hatfield running through my head, particularly the line, “But I am a liar, that’s the truth, go home and think it through.” Why is this song, especially that particular lyric, taking up so much space in my brain these days?

    I think it is because of JD Vance and his gift at being honest about being a liar.

    Just about one year ago, during the presidential debate, when then-candidate Trump ranted about Haitian immigrants eating other people’s pets, it sounded like more of his bluster. In a rambling response to a question about immigration—arguably, one of his strongest and most popular campaign topics—Trump pounced on a rumor spread on the internet, “They’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

    Then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance swiftly came to his future boss’s defense, defending the debunked rumors, stating, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

    One year later, cut to the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk and we see that Vance is following through on his promise. Weaving the beginnings of a baseless conspiracy, Vance announced, “We know Joe Biden’s FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk. Maybe they should have been investigating the networks that motivated, inspired, and maybe even funded Charlie Kirk’s murder. If they had, Charlie Kirk might be alive today.” Discussing this comment on his podcast The Bulwark, Tim Miller was shocked that no news organization picked up this thread or remembered Vance’s statement from just one year ago. The ignorance of Vance’s comment about “networks” may be because the legacy press are no longer able to do their jobs as watchdogs of the government when their corporate owners are more interested in protecting their mergers.

    As of this writing, all the information the public has about the alleged killer of Kirk is that he acted alone, drove his own car, used his grandfather’s rifle, and was turned in to law enforcement by his family. What network, then, “motivated, inspired” or “funded” the murder? Nearly 10 months into Trump 2.0, it is hard to fathom what threat Joe Biden could still play so that Vance needs to blame him for not protecting Kirk. One year ago, Vance told us clearly and with no equivocation what his role as Vice President would be: Creating stories to advance an agenda. How come we did not believe him?

    In response to the baseless—and frankly: racist—rumors about the eating of pets, the legacy press was quick to point out how easy it was for misinformation to spread in the digital environment without taking a frank examination into their own culpability. In response to the baseless—and frankly: cowardly—accusation that there are “networks” that funded an alleged murderer, the legacy press was … nowhere to be found. The words and actions of President Trump, Vice President Vance, and their administration are newsworthy. However, giving their words oxygen without question, without demand for evidence, without any degree of pushback, is the equivalent of giving them free rein to coax whatever falsehoods they desire into the public consciousness. In their desire for profit, the corporate press enable their poor behavior and, in not pushing back, passively allow the false information to become truth.

    Let us heed Juliana Hatfield’s advice and “go home and think it through.” As audiences, we have a lot to think about. I, for one, do not yet know how to live within an autocracy. I do know, however, that I cannot wait for corporate news organizations to catch on to the new playbook being used by Trump 2.0 where they are honest about their lies.

    The post He Tells the Truth When He Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Platform giants could give up on misinformation fight

    The industry group representing companies like Meta and Google has signalled it could drop the term misinformation from its self-regulatory code in Australia after the controversy surrounding the government’s failed attempt to set up external oversight. In what could be an embarrassing consequence for the the Albanese government’s twice shelved misinformation legislation, the Digital Industry…

    The post Platform giants could give up on misinformation fight appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • ICJ and human rights defenders from Southeast Asia urge a Rights-Based Approach to Countering Harmful Online Content

    International Commission of Jurists

    photo_2568-08-27 13.14.39

    On 24–26 August 2025, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), together with the Centre for Independent Journalism, Malaysia (CIJ), and the Numun Fund, gathered human rights defenders and experts to discuss the need for Southeast Asian States to adopt and implement a human rights-based approach in efforts to tackle the growing spread of harmful content in digital spaces.

    The workshop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, focusing on leveraging ASEAN platforms, brought together 24 representatives from organizations across the ASEAN region, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam, all States that are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

    Participants underlined that the surge in hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful online content had elicited responses from ASEAN States which often relied on heavy-handed and repressive measures. These include application of criminal laws that are vague and prone to abuse, restrictive content takedown and licensing regimes; and even State-sponsored disinformation campaigns.

    Participants heard that ASEAN regional mechanisms currently lack robust mandates and coordination capable of effectively addressing disinformation, harmful content, and other digital challenges. Participants considered means of ensuring platform accountability, in the context of advertisement-driven business models of technology companies with ineffective content moderation practices. The online platforms typically employ algorithms that amplify sensationalist or extreme content, fueling the viral spread of disinformation and other human rights abuses.

    Workshop participants worked to develop joint next steps and produced a set of recommendations for ASEAN Member States, technology companies, and ASEAN human rights bodies, particularly the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR). The recommendations included strengthening ASEAN human rights institutions and mechanisms in responding to and addressing human rights complaints submitted to them, enhancing their independence, and embedding human rights–centered advocacy into ASEAN work plans and instruments….

    On 25 August, additional discussions were held with a representative from the Big Tech company Meta, focusing on the need to improve accountability and remedies through effective, accessible, and confidential grievance mechanisms. Participants also proposed multi-stakeholder co-regulation frameworks to ensure CSO participation through ongoing dialogue and collaboration on digital platform services, human oversight—not AI alone—in guiding content moderation standards, and the strengthening of independent third-party fact-checking across the region.

    The series concluded with a panel discussion on 26 August 2025, co-hosted by the ICJ during the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly 2025. The panel, titled “The Role of ASEAN Human Rights Mechanisms in Institutionalizing Human Rights in the Digital Space: Towards Accountability and Collective Advocacy,” was also attended by AICHR representatives from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. It focused on how AICHR can better safeguard human rights online and identified concrete pathways for institutionalizing monitoring and accountability mechanisms related to human rights in the digital space.

    https://www.icj.org/asean-icj-and-human-rights-defenders-from-southeast-asia-urge-a-rights-based-approach-to-countering-harmful-online-content/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • A Yank and a Dutchman Exploring on their BettBeat Channel The World

    They’ve had skin in the game — the Podcast and Substack game — for four years.

    Amazing guests, and unfortunately for us, but fortunately for us, too, they have been covering the genocide in the Jewish State of Raping and Murdering and Starving and Maiming and Poisoning Palestine: Going on TWO goddamned years.

    One of their favorite guests, and mine too: Assal Rad, Peter and Karim examine the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the failure of international institutions to respond effectively. The conversation explores how Israeli propaganda has become increasingly ineffective as images of starvation make their justifications harder to sell, yet Western governments continue providing unwavering support despite shifting public opinion.

    An outright assault on all Palestinian Life Anywhere.

    Listen to BettBeat Media’s Karim and Peter here, on my show, Finding Fringe, KYAQ FM:

    Now, both are floundering, as they start a new semester in Hong Kong. Floundering because the world and their own adopted country, China, isn’t doing anything to stop the genocide. Here, a telling interview with a Portuguese fellow, also in China, talking about the lack of soft power from China toward the West, and the odd bullshit in China’s textbooks describing Palestine as a terrorist place:

    But, let’s not forget, that the Jewish Illegal State of Israel has a lot of cadres in their camp that have committed settler colonial genocide and mass murder.

    Man, oh, man, the Jews of Israel have solid genocidal ground to stand on: Let us put this in a historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18).

    The loss of life in the Second World War (1939-1945) was on a much larger scale, when compared to World War I: 60 million lives, both military and civilian, were lost during World War II. (Four times those killed during World War I).

    The largest WWII casualties were suffered by China and the Soviet Union:

    • 26 million in the Soviet Union,
    • China estimates its losses at approximately 20 million deaths.

    Ironically, these two countries (allies of the US during WWII) —  which lost a large share of their population during WWII — were under the Biden-Harris administration as categorized  as “enemies of America”, which are threatening the Western World. Under Trump? Same continuation of the hatred.

    Germany and Austria lost approximately 8 million people during WWII, Japan lost more than 2.5 million people. The US and Britain respectively lost more than 400,000 lives.

    Here’s a carefully researched article by James A. Lucas documenting the more than 20 million lives lost resulting from US led wars, military coups and intelligence ops carried out in the wake of WWII, in what is euphemistically called the “post-war era” (1945- ).

    The extensive loss of life in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya, Palestine is not included in this study.

    Nor are the millions of deaths resulting from extreme poverty — largely induced by economic sanctions and Western interference in nations’ ability to democratically elect who they want. Selling weapons to both sides of a revolution or war, well, that has its multiplier effect.

    The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

    This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

    The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

    But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

    The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

    To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

    And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

    It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000. — James A. Lucas

    Here, a bio on Karim:

    I am interested in how the asymmetrical cultural flow from the West into societies across the world, reinforced by corporate hegemony in a neoliberal global political economy (e.g., dominance in the spheres of social media, the movie industry and fashion), influences the individual psychology of the global population. In particular, the effects of racism/white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism hold my strong attention. My research revolves around questions such as: Why do racism and colorism follow highly similar patterns across the globe; How do (Western) social media platforms perpetuate racial hierarchies in cultures across the globe; What are the psychological ramifications of colonialism; What is the relationship between neoliberal political economies and our understanding of human nature?

    Peter’s a serious scholar: Publications

    Work in Progress

    “When Left is Right and Right is Left: The psychological correlates of political ideology in China” (Under Review). [Link]

    “Knowing what the electorate knows: Issue-specific knowledge and candidate choice in the 2020 elections” (Under Review). [Link]

    *****

    We intended to get into geopolitical or political economy, but we ran out of time: Here, a primer with Peter Phillips, former director of Project Censored and professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University. His new book Giants: The Global Power Elite details the 17 transnational investment firms which control over $50 trillion in wealth—and how they are kept in power by their activists, facilitators and protectors.

    Ahh, we did get briefly into the Fertile Crescent, when agriculture highjacked humanity:

    Picture

    Ahh, Peter Beattie said things have been messed up for 10,000 years: Think about this evolution of the brain and psyche for two million years, or more, and now what, the Fertile Crescent fucked us up big TIME.

    • 2 million years ago: The earliest evidence of a hunter-gatherer culture emerges with the appearance of the genus Homo.
    • 1.9 million years ago: The lifestyle became more developed and accelerated with Homo erectus, a species with a larger brain and physique suited for long-distance walking to acquire meat.
    • 700,000 to 40,000 years ago: Hunting and gathering was the way of life for later hominins, including Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals, who used increasingly sophisticated tools.
    • 200,000 years ago to ~12,000 years ago: The hunter-gatherer lifestyle continued through most of the existence of our own species, Homo sapiens. This period ended with the Neolithic Revolution, which led to the development of agriculture.

    I’m adding this here in the DV piece:

    Locking up the food and fencing in the hunter/ gatherer and nomadic and pastoral lands caused:

    • Social stratification
    • Specialization and gender roles
    • Warfare

    While in 1995 there appeared to have been at least a 1,500-year gap between plant and animal domestication, it now seems that both occurred at roughly the same time, with initial management of morphologically wild future plant and animal domesticates reaching back to at least 11,500 cal BP, if not earlier. A focus on the southern Levant as the core area for crop domestication and diffusion has been replaced by a more pluralistic view that sees domestication of various crops and livestock occurring, sometimes multiple times in the same species, across the entire region. Morphological change can no longer be held to be a leading-edge indicator of domestication. Instead, it appears that a long period of increasingly intensive human management preceded the manifestation of archaeologically detectable morphological change in managed crops and livestock. Agriculture in the Near East arose in the context of broad-based systematic human efforts at modifying local environments and biotic communities to encourage plant and animal resources of economic interest. This process took place across the entire Fertile Crescent during a period of dramatic post-Pleistocene climate and environmental change with considerable regional variation in the scope and intensity of these activities as well as in the range of resources being manipulated.

    Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

    Check out my interview with Manning here:

    Scroll Down and find the old show illustrated above HERE.

    *****

    Peter has a big essay —  “The Pull of Humanitarian Interventionism: Examining the Effects of Media Frames and Political Values,” (with Jovan Milojevich) International Journal of Communication 12: 831–855 (2018). [Link]

    (Oh, winning those hearts and minds with intervention of the Western Humanitarian (sic) kind!)

    The Candy Man Soldiers of Good Will?

    Propaganda:

    Edward Bernays anyone?

    “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” — Edward Bernays, from Propaganda

    Soft power into murderous coups:

    We talked about soft (not mashed banana) power: Edward Bernays’ promotional stunts were only a smokescreen for a not-so-innocent deep-state strategy. With sly public relations tactics, he began to influence American media toward discrediting the new Guatemalan President and ultimately incite action against the duly-elected leader. In 1954, a CIA-backed coup d’état turned the government of Guatemala over to what was ostensibly a leader hand-picked by the U.S. government and indirectly by a U.S. corporation — the United Fruit Company.

    I’ll have them both on again, soon: Peter Beattie

    The media create frames to transmit information to the public, and the frames can have varying effects on public opinion depending on how they combine with people’s values and deep-seated cultural narratives. This study examines the effects of media frames and values on people’s choice of resolution of conflict. The results show that neither values nor exposure to frames are associated with outcome. Participants overwhelmingly chose the humanitarian intervention option regardless of frame exposure and even in contrast to their own political values, demonstrating the influence of the mainstream media’s dominant, humanitarian interventionist frame on public opinion.

    In early 2013, the Syrian crisis was growing worse by the day, and violence was escalating at a rapid pace. Then–U.S. president Barack Obama was weighing the option of a full-scale military intervention, based on humanitarian grounds, in the troubled state. Islamic State was wreaking havoc throughout the country; however, it was Syrian president Bashar al-Assad who was primarily making the headlines in the United States for alleged atrocities and violations of the Geneva Accords and human rights. The seemingly perpetual beat of war drums in the United States did not take long to sound off, and they grew louder each day President Obama did not declare war on Assad. The media played along, and, generally, so did the political elite. Even former U.S. president Bill Clinton contributed by stating that if Obama chose not to go to war because Congress voted against it, he would risk “looking like a total wuss” (Voorhees, 2013)—a feeble and desperate attempt to demean the president into taking the United States to war. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Senator John McCain, never ones to shy away from a military confrontation (Johnstone, 2015; Landler, 2016), echoed Bill Clinton’s sentiment as they were both displeased with Obama’s foreign policy decision making on Syria (Landler, 2016; Voorhees, 2013). Highly emotive phrases—popular in interventionist frames—such as, “History will judge us,” “We don’t want to be on the wrong side of history,” “We cannot look the other way,” “The world is watching us,” and “What will and “What will the world think,” dominated the headlines and news reports. Then–secretary of state John Kerry touched on almost all of these in his speech at a State Department briefing in August 2013, at a time when President Obama was deliberating possible recourses in response to an alleged chemical attack by Assad’s forces.

    Kerry stated,

    As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the temptations of looking the other way. . . . What we choose to do or not do matters in real ways to our own security. Some cite the risk of doing things. But we need to ask, “What is the risk of doing nothing?” . . . So our concern is not just about some far-off land oceans away. That’s not what this is about. Our concern with the cause of the defenseless people of Syria is about choices that will directly affect our role in the world and our interests in the world. It is also profoundly about who we are. We are the United States of America. We are the country that has tried, not always successfully, but always tried to honor a set of universal values around which we have organized our lives and our aspirations. . . . My friends, it matters here if nothing is done. It matters if the world speaks out in condemnation and then nothing happens. History would judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator’s wanton use of weapons of mass destruction.

    …

    Continued, Beattie:

    One of the main cultural themes in the United States is the nationalism theme, with the global responsibility nationalism theme—which emerged after World War II—being the most dominant. As Gamson (1992) articulates, “With the advent of World War II and the cold war, public discourse fully embraced the global responsibility theme” (p. 142), and the American public threw its support behind the United Nations and the idea of collective security. Democrats and Republicans alike “embraced a dominant U.S. role in the creation of political-military alliances, not only in Europe but in other regions as well” (Gamson, 1992, p. 142). The global responsibility theme was the dominant theme during the Cold War and the framing of the U.S. doctrine of containment, and it continues to be the dominant theme today in the framing of the humanitarian interventionist doctrine.

    Prior to World War II, the “America first” nationalist theme was the most dominant; however, the global responsibility (then) countertheme was still quite prevalent. When the America first theme was dominant, the kind of isolationism that it supported “was never incompatible with expansionism in what was regarded as U.S. turf” (Gamson, 1992, p. 141); therefore, the global responsibility (at that time) countertheme actually supported the America first theme rather than countering it. The Monroe Doctrine is evidence of this compatibility, because it reinforced American isolationism—by telling European powers to stay out of the Americas—yet supported U.S. expansionism. The global responsibility countertheme was “reflected in the idea of America’s international mission as a light unto nations” (Gamson, 1992, pp. 141–142), with the belief that the “expansion of American influence in the world would bring enlightenment to backward peoples and confer upon them the bounties of Christianity and American political genius” (p. 142). The global responsibility (then) countertheme clearly embodied the notion of American exceptionalism, just as it does today as the dominant nationalism theme. Nevertheless, we would like to make it clear that we are not claiming that deep-seated cultural narratives in the United States are necessarily pro–humanitarian interventionist. What we are claiming, and will substantiate throughout this section, is that the U.S. media and political elites have tapped into a deep-seated cultural narrative to gain support for pro–humanitarian intervention policy options.

    Many Americans believe, just as Kerry and other political elites publicly pronounce, that their country does try to honor a set of universal values around which they have organized their lives and aspirations and that these values include the notion that the United States is the leading “defender of democracy and human rights” around the world and that it is “exceptional.” Regardless of whether political elites actually believe this or whether it is simply rhetoric on their part, the mere invocation of this notion to justify war (much of the time conducted illegally—without United Nations or congressional approval) is troubling on its own. For instance, American exceptionalism “originally meant that the U.S. had a God given duty to impose its government and ‘way of life’ on lands not already under its control” (Pestana, 2016, para. 3), and it was, therefore, used to justify American imperialism. In more recent times, however, American exceptionalism has morphed into a more idealistic notion, being viewed as a

    belief that the American political system is unique in its form, and that the American people have an exceptional commitment to liberty and democracy. By virtue of this, American exceptionalists assert that America has a providential mission to spread its values around the world. American power is viewed as naturally good, leading to the proliferation of freedom and democracy. (Britton, 2006, p. 128)

    *****

    In the end, really, what is a new semester and a new bunch of students in this time of genocide? The following should lend pause to anyone who is comfortably numb.

    Future Lawyers Don’t Understand Murder

    When it happens to Palestinians…

    Ahmad Ibsais

    The classroom feels smaller than I remembered, like the walls have moved closer while I was gone. Professor X assigns readings on constitutional interpretation, and I watch twenty-three students highlight passages about due process while Palestinians are denied the most basic right of all: the right to exist. The girl next to me underlines “equal protection under law” in yellow marker, and I wonder if she knows that phrase is meaningless when some lives are worth more than others.

    “The framers intended,” someone says, and I stop listening. The framers intended many things, but they could not have intended for us to sit in air-conditioned rooms debating legal theory while children suffocate under rubble. They could not have intended for us to parse the meaning of justice while justice dies in real time, broadcast live, ignored by everyone in this room.

    During breaks, I sit on the steps and watch them. They cluster in their familiar groups, talking about internships and weekend plans and whether Professor Y is a hard grader. Their voices float past me, a steady stream of nothing that matters.

    “I’m so stressed about the bar exam.” “Are you going to the Football game this weekend?” “My parents want me to come home for Labor Day, but like, I have so much reading.”

    I listen for something else, anything else. I wait for one of them to mention that children are being murdered while we debate constitutional amendments. I wait for someone to say the word Palestinian, or genocide, or even just acknowledge that the world exists beyond their study guides and social calendars. I wait for an hour, and then another, and I hear nothing.

    In another class, we discuss mens rea and actus reus, the guilty mind and the guilty act. Professor Z explains how intent matters, how knowledge of wrongdoing affects culpability. I think about my classmates’ guilty minds, their knowledge of genocide coupled with their deliberate choice to say nothing. I think about their guilty acts of scrolling past videos of dying children to double-tap vacation photos. But this kind of guilt will never be prosecuted. This kind of crime never sees the inside of a courtroom.

    “Can someone give me an example of willful blindness?” Z asks.

    I could give twenty-three examples right here in this room, but I stay quiet.

    This is my new reality. Sitting in rooms with people who revealed themselves to be the kind of people who would have looked away during any other genocide. Listening to them complain about reading assignments while Palestinians are denied the right to read anything ever again. Watching them stress about internships while Palestinian children will never have the chance to worry about their futures.

    The loneliness is not in being alone. The loneliness is in being surrounded by people who chose to be strangers to their own moral obligations. It is in sharing space with those who had the chance to speak and chose silence, who had the opportunity to care and chose comfort, who had the moment to act and chose nothing.

    At the coffee shop, I overhear a conversation about whether the new professor is mean. At the library, someone complains that their laptop is slow. In the dining hall, a group debates which Netflix show to binge next. Normal life continues, mundane concerns persist, and the world beyond their bubble might as well not exist.

    The hardest part is not their cruelty. It is their comfort with it. It is how easily they moved on, how quickly they forgot, how completely they have convinced themselves that their silence was not a choice. They live their lives as if Palestinian children were not buried alive while they read for evidence.

    I am back now, walking through classrooms where professors teach about human rights while ignoring the most basic human right being violated in real time. I am surrounded by people who think my people’s elimination is too complicated to have an opinion about, whose cowardice proved stronger than their morality.

    And I still carry shame that I must even share the same air.

    Comfortably LOBOTOMIZED!

    The post A Yank and a Dutchman Exploring on their BettBeat Channel The World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Federal Guidelines for AI May Turbocharge Climate Denial and Racist Bias

    Picture this: You ask an AI to show you images of judges, and it depicts only 3 percent as women — even though 34 percent of federal judges are women. Or imagine an AI that’s more likely to recommend harsh criminal sentences for people who use expressions rooted in Black vernacular cultures. Now imagine that same AI instructed to ignore climate impacts or treating Russian propaganda as credible…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • From Manufactured Scandals to AI Misinformation

    FAKE NEWS
    This section chronicles some of the most pressing examples of disinformation and fake news from the previous two weeks. I define fake news as information that appears to be real news but is baseless, inaccurate, misleading, or false.

    Fake news isn’t just a headline problem — it’s a cultural crisis. A tattooed Justin Bieber lookalike crashed a DJ set in Las Vegas and convinced Gryffin, the headliner, to bring him onstage. Minutes later, security exposed the imposter and banned him from the hotel. In a city that celebrates illusion, the stunt might seem like harmless fun.

    But not all impersonations are created equal. This prank highlights a darker truth: once someone can convincingly pose as another person, the line between joke and danger blurs. If one man can fool a Vegas DJ, what happens when bad actors impersonate school shooters? That’s where the hoaxes turn deadly serious.

    From school shooting hoaxes that terrify families, to Trump’s manufactured outrage campaigns, to AI bots creating deadly illusions, disinformation has become a defining feature of public life. This section unpacks some of the biggest examples from the past two weeks, showing how fake news is weaponized to scare, outrage, and mislead — and why the consequences are anything but harmless.

    School Shooting Hoaxes: Generation Lockdown’s New Nightmare

    The new school year began with panic. Students across the country received texts from their schools: “run, hide, fight.” Active shooter alerts poured in from Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa State, Kansas State, Colorado University, and the University of New Hampshire — all in one day. In the days that followed, calls hit campuses in Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Florida, and California.

    There was just one problem: none of the shootings happened. They were pranks or hoaxes. Fake news that caused a real panic.

    This isn’t a one-off—it’s been happening for years. A Reddit forum last year overflowed with stories of false shooter threats that triggered lockdowns. Back in 2022, California news outlets were sounding the alarm over a surge in false school shooting reports. In 2023, Homeland security expert Juliette Kayyem called these hoaxes a “second curse” of the school shooting era. The trauma is real: kids grow up wondering if each alarm is life-or-death. They’re Generation Lockdown, raised in fear.

    These hoaxes drain police resources, fuel paranoia, and deepen the mental health crisis in schools. Worse, they normalize chaos, making it harder to distinguish a prank from a real emergency. And that’s exactly the blurred reality fake news thrives in.

    Fake Flags: How Trump Manufactures Outrage

    On August 25, Trump signed an executive order to prosecute flag burning, despite a 1989 Supreme Court ruling protecting it. The order came at a strange time, with no signs of a flag-burning epidemic. Ironically, it sparked one: a military veteran burned a flag outside the White House in response. But facts don’t matter here. The goal wasn’t protecting flags—it was stoking conservative outrage.

    “This tactic isn’t new. Conservatives have long whipped up anger over trivialities: Cracker Barrel logos, LGBTQIA+ issues, critical race theory content in schools, or the fear of communism. Fox News host Jesse Watters admitted the game openly, saying networks keep viewers hooked with culture-war gimmicks: “You just have to keep your audience happy with what they’re used to… that’s why people will be watching Fox until they die.”

    The recycling of fake outrages goes back decades. Today, Trump leans on the same playbook, using a favorite topic for conservative fear-mongering: crime.” Trump claims that crime in Washington, D.C., is ‘getting worse.’ In reality, it isn’t. Violent crime has actually dropped to a 30 year low. When fact-checked, Trump accused officials of fabricating the statistics and even ordered Department of Justice investigations into whether the numbers were ‘manipulated.’ Yet when those same officials showed that crime had fallen after Trump sent the National Guard to D.C., he embraced the new numbers—produced by the very same offices he had previously accused of lying. Orwell couldn’t have written this.

    But he didn’t stop there. Trump falsely claimed that the National Guard’s presence had given D.C. its first 11-day streak without a murder in ‘many years’—even though that streak actually occurred in February 2025. He also insisted there was ‘no crime’ despite hundreds of offenses being reported. Trump also falsely claimed that D.C. was at an “all-time high” in crime at the end of President Biden’s administration, even though crime was far higher in the 1990s.

    To make Trump’s lies more convincing, many people in D.C. have been rounded up and hit with inflated charges, creating the illusion that he is bringing justice and order to a city supposedly overrun by dangerous criminals. One attorney called these charges “horseshit.” Indeed, many of these cases are likely to fail in court—and some already have. For example, a man accused of felony assault for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent was freed by a grand jury. Yet the narrative had already taken hold: D.C. was a war zone, and Trump was the general.

    It’s classic Orwellian disinformation—create a fake crisis, deploy force, then claim victory. And yet, fake news doesn’t just come from politics; technology is making it even more dangerous.

    AI Illusions: From Chatbots to Suicide Coaches

    AI isn’t just clumsy; it’s lethal. Bots are now creating fake musicians, fake backstories, and fake histories that fool people into believing they’re real. Take “Rhoda Hardcok,” an AI country singer with vulgar songs on YouTube, social media accounts, and an invented tale about being censored in the 1970s. People online actually believe she exists.

    But sometimes the consequences are far deadlier. California’s Attorney General found chatbots flirting with children, exposing them to sexualized content. One 76-year-old man, convinced he was in a romance with a chatbot named “Big Sis Billie,” tried to meet her in New York — only to die in a tragic fall while chasing a woman who never existed.

    AI isn’t just luring the lonely; it’s enabling suicide. Before taking her life, Sophie, a 29-year-old, left a note that her mother said “didn’t sound like her.” It was later revealed that Sophie had asked a chatbot named Henry to edit the note so it would minimize her parents’ pain.

    People aren’t just turning to AI for advice on writing suicide notes—they’re consulting it on whether to end their lives and, if so, how. Take Adam Raine, whose parents discovered after his suicide that ChatGPT had coached the sixteen-year-old to conceal his plans and even ‘practice’ methods. Even as Adam tried to reach out for help—showing his parents the scars from practicing hanging—the bot told him not to alert them, insisting that they would try to prevent the suicide.

    And yet, Big Tech keeps selling AI as the future, claiming it’s stealing jobs and revolutionizing work. Political economist Mark Blyth disagrees, arguing that AI companies are overhyping both their current and future impact on the job market. Still, AI is here, and traditionally education has been relied on to help the public develop the skills and perspectives needed to understand and utilize new inventions. But rather than focusing on AI’s shortcomings, falsehoods, or dangers, schools have been struggling to keep up—focusing their attention on how to get students career-ready for AI or debating whether to ban AI in classrooms. Meanwhile, real dangers—such as how easily people mistake these systems for intelligence—go unaddressed.

    At the same time, despite the biases and shortcomings in AI systems, they are increasingly making decisions critical to human lives. Economist Gary Smith has repeatedly shown that AI fails basic reasoning tests, and numerous studies have demonstrated that AI is largely unintelligent by human standards—some might even call it dumb. Others such as Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, note that AI follows human directions in how it processes information, meaning it reflects the biases of those instructions and the data used to train it.

    Yet the Trump administration has proposed using these biased and largely unintelligent tools to determine Medicare eligibility. Imagine denying healthcare based on a system that can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Similarly, anti-ICE activists have started using AI to “out” undercover agents. While exposing abusive officers might feel righteous, what happens when the AI gets it wrong and the wrong person gets doxxed?

    Fake News: The Glue Holding It All Together

    From fake school shootings to flag-burning panics to AI hallucinations, fake news thrives because it preys on fear, anger, and confusion. A prank in Las Vegas is funny until it isn’t. A flag-burning “epidemic” doesn’t need to exist for it to mobilize millions. A chatbot doesn’t need to be smart to destroy a life.

    Fake news isn’t just noise. It shapes how we think, vote, and grieve. It creates the crises politicians exploit, the distractions media profit from, and the illusions technology companies monetize. And unless we learn to see through it, fake news will keep writing the script of our reality.

    The post From Manufactured Scandals to AI Misinformation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Antony Lowenstein: Israel’s murderous killing spree against Palestinian journalists

    By Antony Loewenstein in Sydney

    The grim facts should speak for themselves. Since 7 October 2023, Israel has deliberately killed an unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

    Those brave individuals are smeared as Hamas operatives and terrorists by Israel and its supporters.

    But the real story behind this, beyond just Western racism and dehumanisation towards Arab reporters who don’t work for the corporate media in London or New York, is an Israeli military strategy to deliberately (and falsely) link Gazan journalists to Hamas.

    The outlet +972 Magazine explains the plan:

    “The Israeli military has operated a special unit called the ‘Legitimization Cell,’ tasked with gathering intelligence from Gaza that can bolster Israel’s image in the international media, according to three intelligence sources who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call and confirmed the unit’s existence.

    “Established after October 7, the unit sought information on Hamas’ use of schools and hospitals for military purposes, and on failed rocket launches by armed Palestinian groups that harmed civilians in the enclave.

    “It has also been assigned to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel’s killing of reporters — the latest of whom was Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli airstrike this past week [august 10].

    According to the sources, the Legitimisation Cell’s motivation was not security, but public relations. Driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were “smearing [Israel’s] name in front of the world,” its members were eager to find a journalist they could link to Hamas and mark as a target, one source said.

    As a journalist who’s visited and reported in Gaza since 2009, here’s a short film I made after my first trip, Palestinian journalists are some of the most heroic individuals on the planet. They have to navigate both Israeli attacks and threats and Western contempt for their craft.

    I stand in solidarity with them. And so should you.

    After the Israeli murder of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif on August 10, I spoke to Al Jazeera English about him and Israel’s deadly campaign:


    Antony Loewenstein speaking on Al Jazeera English on 11 August 2025.   Video: AJ


    Antony Loewenstein interviewed by Al Jazeera on 11 August 2025.  Video: AJ

    News graveyards - how dangers to journalists endanger the world
    News graveyards – how dangers to journalists endanger the world. Image: Antony Loewenstein Substack

    Republished from the Substack of Antony Lowenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory,  with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • MSM Lies

    The post MSM Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How the Taliban’s propaganda empire consumed Afghan media

    New York, 13 August 13, 2025—In four years, the Taliban have annihilated Afghanistan’s independent media sector and supplanted it with their own propaganda empire and sophisticated digital bots that flood social media with pro-Taliban content.

    CPJ interviewed 10 Afghan journalists, inside and outside the country, who said that  independent media, which used to reach millions of people, have largely been banned, suspended, or shuttered while key outlets have been taken over by the Taliban. None would publish their names, citing fear of reprisals.

    The Taliban now run about 15 major television and radio stations, newspapers, and digital platforms, including on YouTube, X, and Telegram — tightly aligned with their radical Islamist ideology.

    “The ruling authority enforces a monolithic media policy, rejecting any news, narrative, or voice that deviates from what they deem the truth. Even personal opinions expressed on platforms like Facebook are treated as propaganda and punished accordingly,” Ahmad Quraishi, director of the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center, told CPJ.

    Exiled journalists offer one of the last remaining sources of independent information broadcast into Afghanistan. But even they face safety concerns and hardships, as well as job losses and potential forced return due to the U.S. funding cuts to the Congress-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) outlets.

    Turning fearful journalists into spies

    In September 2020, a year before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, a radio presenter reads the news during a broadcast at the Merman radio station in Kandahar.
    In September 2020, a year before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, a radio presenter reads the news during a broadcast at the Merman radio station in Kandahar. Women journalists have been largely sidelined by the Taliban. (Photo: AFP/ Wakil Kohsar)

    As Afghanistan marks the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s August 15, 2021, takeover, most journalists who spoke with CPJ said they were fearful, and either jobless or heavily censored. Several described the relentless surveillance, control, and intimidation as living under a “media police state.”

    “Taliban intelligence agents have launched a policing system where every journalist is expected to spy on others,” a media executive who led a TV station in eastern Afghanistan told CPJ.

    “They demand complete personal information on all staff: names, fathers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, WhatsApp numbers … We must report everything.”

    Intelligence agents monitor and detain reporters over their social media content, while the morality police arrest those who violate their stringent interpretation of Sharia law, which includes a ban on music, soap operas, and programs co-hosted by male and female presenters.

    Two media owners from northern and eastern Afghanistan told CPJ that they had been subjected to invasive revenue audits and administrative delays because they were perceived as insufficiently compliant.

    “Taliban agents reach out to journalists privately, pressuring them to spy on their colleagues or push specific narratives,” one of the owners said. “If someone refuses, they call the media manager and demand the journalist be fired. We comply, or we face licensing issues from the Ministry of Information and Culture or financial penalties from the Ministry of Finance.”

    In May, a spokesperson for the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said it had held over 1,000 meetings with the media over the last year to “coordinate in promoting Islamic Sharia values” — a term understood locally to mean morality police enforcement meetings.

    Two female journalists from western Afghanistan said they were each summoned over 10 times in the past two years.

     “Once they interrogated me for three hours in the office of the Directorate of Virtue and Vice, asking why I worked instead of staying home,” one woman told CPJ, referring to the ministry’s provincial office.

    “They said that if I were found working with exiled media, it would be wajib al-qatl [permissible to kill me]. One official said, ‘We forgive you this time, you thank God for this. But under Sharia, we could bring any calamity upon you.’ Another time, they said they could detain me for a week just to extract a confession, and no one would even know.”

    Inside the Taliban’s media empire

    The Taliban flag flutters over a provincial branch building of National Radio Television of Takhar (RTA) in Taloqan, in northeastern Takhar province in 2024. (Photo: AFP)

    Three active, independent Kabul-based journalists explained the Taliban’s new media landscape to CPJ:

    With over 500 staff nationwide and a budget of about 600 million Afghanis (US$8.8 million), RTA reports often promote Taliban achievements, such as supporting refugees and diplomacy.

    • Bakhtar News Agency, founded in 1939, employs around 60 staff in Kabul and four reporters in each of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Run by the information ministry, it is the Taliban’s official news source and publishes in eight languages, including Mandarin and Turkish.
    • The information ministry also runs several daily newspapers, including Dari-language Anis, Pashto-language Hewad, and English-language The Kabul Times in print and online. These newspapers were founded several decades ago.

    The three journalists said security agencies operate three radio stations:

    Reporting focuses on regional rivalries and Taliban military successes, particularly against the Afghan-based Islamic State-Khorasan, which continues to kill civilians and Taliban leaders.

    Hurriyat Radio was launched in 2022 by the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) — the Taliban’s notorious intelligence agency behind a series of media crackdowns — and is managed by the agency’s directorate of media and publications.

    • Radio Omid, started in 2023 by the defense ministry, employs 45 staff in Kabul and provincial reporters, and reports on the ministry’s achievements. The radio station is managed by the office of spokesperson of the defense ministry.
    • Radio Police, relaunched in 2021 by the interior ministry, broadcasts news about police activities across key provinces like Kabul and southern Kandahar.

    The Taliban has four news sites, at least three of which are run by the intelligence agency:

    It is funded and operated by the GDI’s directorate of media and publications and its senior managers are linked to the interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani.

    • YouTube-based Maihan discredits the Taliban’s opponents, with 12 staff, led by Jawad Sargar, former deputy director of the GDI’s directorate of media and publication.

    When contacted via messaging app, Sargar asked CPJ to stop contacting him, adding, “These matters are not related to you.”

    • The multi-lingual Alemarah news site, active before 2021, is the Taliban’s official outlet, run by Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid.

    Disinformation campaign

    Intelligence officials have four offices from which they direct disinformation campaigns. Dozens of creators are paid 6,000 to 10,000 Afghanis (US$88 to 146) a month to run fake social media accounts that troll critics, smear activists, and simulate grassroots support, two Afghan journalists told CPJ.

    The project is led by senior GDI figures like deputy director of media and publication, Jabir Nomani, former GDI spokespeople Jawad Amin and Sargar – who runs Maihan – and Kabul-based political analyst Fazlur Rahman Orya, the journalists said.

    Orya, who is also director of the Sahar Discourse Center, which advises the Taliban on policy, denied that he was involved in disinformation, telling CPJ via messaging app, “You make a big mistake about me.”

    Nomani did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment via messaging app.

    Qais Alamdar, exiled founder of the open source investigative platform IntelFocus, has documented the activities of these bots, which often post near-identical tweets within minutes of each other to bolster the government’s legitimacy or prevent internet users finding other news, such as an attack on the Taliban.

    “Only someone with consistent access to electricity, internet, and time could maintain that kind of operation in Afghanistan,” he told CPJ.

    Traffic accidents are only news allowed

    A destroyed bus is lifted after it plunged off a road north of Kabul in 2010.
    A destroyed bus is lifted after it plunged off a road north of Kabul in 2010. (Photo: Reuters/stringer)

    As a result of these repressive measures, many media outlets have shut down or have been banned entirely.

    In the northeastern Panjshir Valley, once the heart of resistance to the Taliban, no media outlets remain active, Ahmad Hanayesh, who used to own two radio stations in the province, told CPJ from exile.

    Four journalists from Herat, Nangarhar, Faryab, and Bamiyan told CPJ that aside from education and health stories, the only serious news they were permitted to cover was traffic accidents. Even crime reporting was banned.

    GDI’s media and publications director Khalil Hamraz and Taliban spokesperson Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment via messaging app.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Waliullah Rahmani.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan”

    Public opinion and party pressure have forced Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy to speak warm words about Palestinian statehood. But these guys are a Zionist double-act and will do the Palestinians no favours if they can help it.

    UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, addressing the UN Conference on The Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, said it was “660 days since the Israeli hostages were first cruelly taken by Hamas terrorists. There is no possible justification for this suffering.” Lammy had spent most of that time deliberately misinterpreting the Genocide Convention and insisting that no genocide was being committed.

    “Our support for Israel, its right to exist and the security of its people is steadfast,” he said. Considering Israel’s massacres and other crimes against humanity since the first day of its statehood in 1948 this frequently repeated statement has never convinced anyone.

    “However, the Balfour declaration came with the solemn promise ‘that nothing shall be done, nothing which may prejudice the civil and religious rights’ of the Palestinian people’…. This has not been upheld and it is a historical injustice which continues to unfold.” True, but he misquotes Balfour even here. That part of the declaration actually reads: “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”

    The Balfour declaration also came with dire warnings. Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet at the time, called Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. Lord Sydenham remarked: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

    Well, we know now. And it will stain Britain’s reputation forever.

    Lammy continued: “Hamas must never be rewarded for its monstrous attack on October 7.” Of course, he said nothing about Israel having been continuously rewarded for its monstrous attacks on Palestinians over the last 77 years and will likely be rewarded again for its genocide.

    “It [Hamas] must immediately release the hostages, agree to an immediate ceasefire, accept it will have no role in governing Gaza and commit to disarmament.” Coincidentally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also called on Hamas to disband. Along with a number of other countries they’ve just signed a statement saying, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State.” Quite how this squares with international law isn’t clear, and no-one explains. It is for the Palestinian people to decide who governs their sovereign state.

    Lammy: “His Majesty’s Government therefore intends to recognise the State of Palestine when the UN General Assembly gathers in September…. unless the Israeli government acts to end the appalling situation in Gaza, ends its military campaign and commits to a long-term sustainable peace based on a two-state solution. Our demands on Hamas also remain absolute and unwavering.” So what happens if Israel actually complies, or appears to comply? Does HMG then see no reason to recognise statehood? That would suit Israel very well. Note that there’s no requirement in all this for Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which is central to the whole problem. So the Starmer-Lammy proposal purposely misses the point.

    Lammy maintains “there is no better vision for the future of the region than two states. Israelis living within secure borders, recognised and at peace with their neighbours, free from the threat of terrorism. And Palestinians living in their own state, in dignity and security, free of occupation.” Just a minute: how about Palestinians, whose land this is, “living within secure borders, free from the threat of Israeli terrorism and occupation”, the terrorists being (as if he didn’t know) the Israelis and their backers the US? Furthermore, UK leaders have banged the drum about a two-state solution for decades without ever describing what it would look like – especially now that Israel has been allowed to establish irreversible ‘facts on the ground’ that make a proper, workable Palestinian state almost impossible.

    “The decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be managed or contained,” he says. True, and that’s been obvious for decades.

    “It must now be resolved.” True, and that too has been obvious for decades.

    That same day, 29 July, Prime Minister Starmer was delivering “words on Gaza” from Downing Street.

    “On the 7th of October 2023 Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre in Israel’s history. Every day since then, the horror has continued.” He makes it sound like the 660 days of horror have been Hamas’s doing.

    “Ceasefire must be sustainable and it must lead to a wider peace plan, which we are developing with our international partners. This plan will deliver security and proper governance in Gaza and pave the way for negotiations on a Two State Solution”. Yes, but under international law Palestinians should not have to ‘negotiate’ their freedom and independence, it’s theirs by right regardless of what other nations think or say.

    “Our goal remains a safe and secure Israel, alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.” Oh dear, the same old lopsided spiel. Parity isn’t on the West’s agenda.

    “Now, in Gaza because of a catastrophic failure of aid, we see starving babies, children too weak to stand: Images that will stay with us for a lifetime.” The horror is not due to “a catastrophic failure of aid” but failure over the years to end Israel’s illegal occupation and, in particular, its cruel 18-year siege and blockade of Gaza and the sickening practice of ‘mowing the grass’. The UK especially has been complicit in enabling Israel to maintain its stranglehold.

    Starmer: “I’ve always said we will recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process, at the moment of maximum impact for the Two State Solution.” UK governments have been saying that for years. Britain was supposed to grant Palestinians provisional statehood under its Mandate responsibilities back in 1923 and failed to do so. We’ve been ducking the issue ever since while eagerly recognising Israeli statehood with their terrorist militia and Ben-Gurion’s plan to take over the entire Holy Land by force.

    “This is the moment to act,” Starmer continued. “So today – as part of this process towards peace I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.” This is unbelievable vague and gives Israel endless wriggle-room. Much of the West Bank, of course, is already annexed. To give peace any kind of chance conditions must include Israel withdrawing its squatters, quitting all annexed lands and ending its illegal military occupation forthwith.

    Starmer ends with the familiar mantra: “Our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal. They must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.” No mention of the Israeli terrorists disarming and no ban on Likud (Netanyahu’s demented party) from any future government of Israel.

    Starmer and Lammy never use the terms ‘international law’ or ‘justice’. Don’t they understand that there can be no peace without justice? Perhaps they do but won’t admit it because their friends and allies Israel and the US, for selfish strategic reasons, don’t want peace and never have.

    Starmer and Lammy compromised and untrustworthy

    Starmer told The Times of Israel, “I support Zionism without qualification”. Lammy has made similar declarations. The Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life state very clearly (seer ‘Integrity’): “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.” How do they get away with it?

    So it’s hardly surprising that Lammy and Starmer show no concern for the 7,200 Palestinian hostages, including 88 women and 250 children, held in Israeli jails on 7 October under appalling conditions. Over 1,200 were under ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial and denied ‘due process’. Or the fact that in the 23 years up to October 7 Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1. Actual figures: Palestinians killed by Israelis 10,651 including 2,270 children and 6,656 women. Israelis killed by Palestinians 1,330 including 145 children and 261 women (source: Israel’s B’Tselem). Were they and their friends in Israel expecting Palestinians to take all that lying down?

    Our dynamic duo were not so appalled by the sight of “starving babies and children too weak to stand” that they provided protection for the British-flagged aid vessel Madleen and the Handala bringing much-needed supplies to Gaza. They allowed these vessels to be hijacked in international waters, their cargo stolen and crews abducted by Israel’s thugs, just as the Mavi Marmara, the Al-Awda and other mercy ships had been similarly assaulted. Israeli piracy is the new normal in the eastern Mediterranean and Western nations don’t give a damn. The British government are more than happy, though, to instruct the RAF to fly surveillance missions over Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide programme and to continue sharing intelligence with the apartheid regime.

    And if their concerns about the suffering and devastation were ever genuine, why didn’t they proposed forming a UN multi-nation intervention force to take over the Gaza crossings to ensure aid gets through as it should? They have now been shamed and their ‘no genocide’ stance utterly discredited by two of Israel’s own human rights organisations – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – who declare that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza and its Western allies have a legal and moral duty to put a stop to it. B’Tselem’s summing-up of the situation is worth sharing:

    Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

    This is compounded by mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps, and tearing apart the social fabric of Gaza, including the destruction of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions. The campaign is also an assault on Palestinian identity itself, through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

    An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

    The term genocide refers to a socio-historical and political phenomenon involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstance, including as an act of self-defense.

    Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

    The assault on Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the escalating violence being inflicted, at varying levels and in different forms, on Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and within Israel. The violence and destruction in these areas is intensifying over time, with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.

    The recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community, and use of every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

    The post UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom

    During President Donald Trump’s second term, education has remained a central battleground in American politics. Republicans claim that classrooms have become hotbeds of “woke” indoctrination, accusing educators of promoting progressive agendas and tolerating antisemitism. In contrast, Democrats argue that conservatives are systematically defunding and dismantling public and higher education precisely because it teaches values like diversity, equity, and inclusion. While these partisan skirmishes dominate headlines, they obscure a much deeper and more enduring issue that encompasses all of these issues and more: the influence of corporate and military power on public education.

    For decades, scholars have warned that corporations have steadily infiltrated the classroom—not to promote critical thinking or democratic values, but to cultivate ideologies that reinforce capitalism, nationalism, and militarism. Critical media literacy educators, in particular, have drawn attention to the convergence of tech firms and military entities in education, offering so-called “free” digital tools that often serve as Trojan horses for data collection and ideological control.

    One striking example is the rise of programs like NewsGuard, which uses public fears over fake news to justify increased surveillance of students’ online activity. Relatedly, in 2018, the Atlantic Council partnered with Meta to perform “fact-checking” on platforms such as Facebook. In 2022, the US Marine Corps discussed developing media literacy training. It remains to be seen what training, if any, they will develop. However, what is known is that a large global player has entered the media literacy arena: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While NATO presents its initiatives as supportive of media literacy and democratic education, these efforts appear to be oriented more toward reinforcing alignment with its strategic and political priorities than to fostering critical civic engagement.

    NATO was created in 1949, during the Cold War, as a military alliance to contain communism. Although the war officially ended in 1991, NATO has expanded both its mission and membership. Today, it encompasses more than thirty member nations and continues to frame itself as a global force for peace, democracy, and security. But this self-image masks real conflicts of interest.

    NATO is deeply intertwined with powerful nation-states and corporate actors. It routinely partners with defense contractors, tech firms, think tanks, and Western governments—all of which have a vested interest in maintaining specific political and economic systems. These relationships raise concerns when NATO extends its reach into education. Can a military alliance—closely linked to the defense industry and state propaganda—credibly serve as a neutral force in media education?

    In 2022, NATO associates collaborated with the US-based Center for Media Literacy (CML) to launch a media literacy initiative framed as a strategic defense against misinformation. The initiative included a report titled Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic, authored by CML’s Tessa Jolls. It was accompanied by a series of webinars featuring military personnel, policy experts, and academics.

    On the surface, the initiative appeared to promote digital literacy and civic engagement. But a closer look reveals a clear ideological agenda. Funded and organized by NATO, the initiative positioned media literacy not as a means of empowering students to think critically about how power shapes media, but as a defense strategy to protect NATO member states from so-called “hostile actors.” The curriculum emphasized surveillance, resilience, and behavior modification over reflection, analysis, and democratic dialogue.

    Throughout their webinars, NATO representatives described the media environment as a battlefield, frequently using other war metaphors such as “hostile information activities” and “cognitive warfare.” Panelists argued that citizens in NATO countries were targets of foreign disinformation campaigns—and that media literacy could serve as a tool to inoculate them against ideological threats.

    A critical review of NATO’s media literacy initiative reveals several troubling themes. First, it frames media literacy as a protectionist project rather than an educational one. Students are portrayed less as thinkers to be empowered and more as civilians to be monitored, molded, and managed. In this model, education becomes a form of top-down, preemptive defense, relying on expert guidance and military oversight rather than democratic participation.

    Second, the initiative advances a distinctly neoliberal worldview. It emphasizes individual responsibility over structural analysis. In other words, misinformation is treated as a user error, rather than the result of flawed systems, corporate algorithms, or media consolidation. This framing conveniently absolves powerful actors, including NATO and Big Tech, of their role in producing or amplifying disinformation.

    Third, the initiative promotes a contradictory definition of empowerment. While the report and webinars often use the language of “citizen empowerment,” they ultimately advocate for surveillance, censorship, and ideological conformity. Panelists call for NATO to “dominate” the information space, and some even propose systems to monitor students’ attitudes and online behaviors. Rather than encouraging students to question power—including NATO itself—this approach rewards obedience and penalizes dissent.

    Finally, the initiative erases the influence of corporate power. Although it criticizes authoritarian regimes and “hostile actors,” it fails to examine the role that Western corporations, particularly tech companies, play in shaping media environments. This oversight is especially problematic given that many of these corporations are NATO’s partners. By ignoring the political economy of media, the initiative offers an incomplete and ideologically skewed version of media literacy.

    NATO’s foray into media literacy education represents a new frontier in militarized pedagogy. While claiming to promote democracy and resilience, its initiative advances a narrow, protectionist, and neoliberal approach that prioritizes NATO’s geopolitical goals over student empowerment.

    This should raise red flags for educators, policymakers, and advocates. Media literacy is not a neutral practice. The organizations that design and fund media literacy programs inevitably shape the goals and methods of those programs. When a military alliance like NATO promotes media education, it brings with it a strategic interest in ideological control.

    Educators must ask: What kind of media literacy are we teaching—and whose interests does it serve? If the goal is to produce informed, critically thinking citizens capable of questioning power in all its forms, then NATO’s approach falls short. Instead of inviting students to explore complex media systems, it simplifies them into a binary struggle between “us” and “them,” encouraging loyalty over literacy.

    True media literacy must begin with transparency about who and what is behind the curriculum. It must empower students to question all forms of influence—governmental, corporate, and military alike. And it must resist the creeping presence of militarism in our classrooms. As educators, we must defend the right to question, not just the messages we see, but the institutions that shape them.

    This essay was originally published here:

    The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy

     

    The post The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Is AI Pushing Us Closer to Nuclear Disaster?

    Earlier this year, Daniel Holz from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its experts were moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight. The hands have been moved only 25 times since the clock’s creation in 1947, and they’re now the closest they’ve pointed to imminent global destruction. On this week’s More To The Story, Holz sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the history of the Doomsday Clock, why we’re closer to destruction than ever before, and what we can do to stop it. 

    Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson 

    Listen: Weapons With Minds of Their Own (Reveal)
    Learn more: NUKEMAP
    Read: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
    Read: Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Is So Essential to Its Identity (The Guardian)

    Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide

    A damning report has now confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s war on Gaza is far from impartial.

    The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.”

    The report showed that, despite the killing of 34 times more Palestinians, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage, interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians (1,085 v 2,350), and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian one (2,340 v 217).

    Complicit in genocide

    The report, which examined over 35,000 pieces of content produced by “the world’s most trusted broadcaster,” is full of similarly shocking evidence. But perhaps the most deplorable is the BBC’s failure to report confessions of genocidal intent by Israel’s leaders. Not a single BBC article reported Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu’s biblical “Amalek” reference – a people the Jews were commanded by God to annihilate – or president Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility. Just 12 out of 3,873 articles bothered to mention former defence minister Gallant’s statement in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza strip”, and promised “we will eliminate everything”. Genocidal intent is notoriously difficult to prove when classifying an act as genocide, yet here are Israel’s own leaders, readily admitting their intention to wipe out an entire people.

    Peter Oborne, one of several journalists to question the BBC about the findings in the report during a parliamentary meeting, said: “You never educated your audience about the genocidal remarks, and according to this report, on one hundred occasions, one hundred occasions, you’ve closed down the references to genocide by your guests. This makes you complicit.”

    Lack of crucial context

    Oborne’s brilliant tirade, which can be viewed here, also flagged the BBC’s failure to report on two Israeli military doctrines – the Hannibal directive and the Dayiha doctrine – which provide essential context to understanding Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.

    The Hannibal directive allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory – even if that means opening fire on those captives. A major investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the procedure was activated during the 7 October attacks, and a UN report concluded that at least 14 Israeli civilians were deliberately killed by their own army on that day as a result of the directive. But as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation – and barred medical professionals and others from doing so – we do not know the true figure. A year-long investigation by Electronic Intifada, however, found it to be in the hundreds.

    The BBC has also never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. Named after a Beirut suburb that was decimated by Israel in 2006, the Dahiya doctrine is the use of disproportionate force to destroy civilians and everything that supports them so that they will never again contemplate resistance. It is a form of collective punishment – and unquestionably a war crime – that has been applied to Gaza over the past 20 months. The BBC’s decision not to ever mention this doctrine is, as Oborne calls it, “a grotesque omission”, for it provides fundamental context to Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following 7 October.

    No desire to change

    You only have to look at the representative the BBC chose to respond to the accusations in the report and defend its Gaza coverage to see how little it cares – and how unlikely it is to change. Richard Burgess, executive news editor at the BBC, admitted he’s “not a Middle East expert” and doesn’t claim to understand the doctrines. A rightly exasperated Oborne responded, “Then send someone along who does!” When a senior news editor is asked to justify their organisation’s coverage of what is widely considered a genocide, ignorance of the full facts is truly an appalling defense.

    Soon after the report was released – as if to demonstrate its complete unwillingness to modify its pattern of bias – the BBC announced that its long-awaited documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, would not be aired. The film explores the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health service by Israeli forces as well as the abuse suffered by Palestinian medics. The BBC claimed that broadcasting the film could create “a perception of partiality”. But as former BBC journalist and news presenter Karishma Patel tweeted: “How? This film shows the reality of Israel’s actions. You can’t fling the accusation of bias at realities you simply don’t want on air.” Just as the harrowing documentary on life in Gaza seen through the eyes of Palestinian children was pulled by the BBC months previously, the BBC’s silencing of Palestinian voices appears to be institutional. It’s simply what it does.

    Israel apologists

    And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. On 27 June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a horrific article about the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) – the controversial Israeli-controlled aid distribution centres. The IDF soldiers Haaretz interviewed confirmed what Palestinians have been claiming for weeks: that soldiers are being ordered to massacre desperate, starving civilians queuing up for food. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” Another added, “Sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces…I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

    Did the BBC pick up on this story? Of course it didn’t. It did however publish an ‘explainer’ about the shootings at GHF sites via its Verify service. BBC Verify calls itself a “specialist team of journalists” who “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake.” But rather than using actual testimony from IDF soldiers to corroborate reports of shootings, their specialist journalists looked at some video footage and concluded that they paint a murky picture: “While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing.”

    The rest of the article reads like a PR piece for the government of Israel: Israeli government spokesman David Mencer is quoted saying that the reports of hundreds of civilians being killed is “another untruth”; Hamas are of course likely responsible; while a GHF spokesperson is “pleased” with its first month of operations. We know the BBC Verify journalists will have read the Haaretz article. That they chose to completely ignore it and concoct this pile of Israel apologia is frankly appalling.

    The truth is coming out

    The BBC obviously has no intention of reforming and will continue to provide cover for Israel’s crimes for as long as it possibly can. But despite their best efforts, the truth about Israel is finding its way out. The documentary that the BBC refused to air has now found a home on Channel 4 in the UK and on Zeteo News worldwide. And the BBC’s attempt to control their Glastonbury coverage by barring pro-Palestinian band Kneecap from their live broadcast, failed spectacularly when punk duo Bob Vylan chose to use their set to condemn Israel’s war crimes, live on air. Lead singer Bobby called out the UK and US for being “complicit in war crimes” and led chants of “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF”, which the crowd enthusiastically shouted back. The crowd’s response, and the fact that a huge number of other artists also spoke out in support of Palestine, suggests the tide is shifting.

    True to form, the BBC swiftly removed Bob Vylan’s performance from iPlayer and released a grovelling statement expressing regret that it hadn’t pulled the live stream and describing Vylan’s words as “deeply offensive” and “utterly unacceptable.” That our state broadcaster is so quick to condemn words but ignores a massacre of unarmed civilians tells you everything you need to know about the BBC – and you can’t help but sense that it is losing control of the narrative. Anyone with any conscience simply cannot agree that calling out a genocide is worse than committing one.

    History will not be kind to the genocide enablers. And thanks to reports like CfMM’s, we will always remember on whose side the BBC stood.

    The post We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Seven Things Tom Cotton Needs to Learn About China

    US Senator Tom Cotton recently published a book titled Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. I decided to put myself through the aggravated torture of reading it, just to see what he had to say, and now mourn hours of life that I’ll never get back.

    Simply put, the book’s existence is a crime against quality academic literature.

    I had no expectations of strong, intellectual debate, because Cotton isn’t known for backing any of his claims with evidence (it only took me one page in to find that admittance: “I used simple common sense, not scientific knowledge or classified intelligence”), so I wasn’t disappointed by his complete lack of depth and historical accuracy.

    More than anything, I was impressed that such an absurd, conspiratorial text could reach a publisher’s desk and be checked off on. It’s really not a book at all—it’s a manifesto of paranoia. The kind you expect to find written in messy, hand-scrawled letters and hidden beneath the desk of a serial killer whose crimes you are trying to piece together.

    Well, Cotton’s crimes are many. This book is just one more venture in his career, full of asking, I wonder how much I can get away with?

    While Tom Cotton has always been one of war’s #1 fans, his favorite of all is one still yet to happen—the one he’s trying to justify in his book. His “brave truth-telling” is nothing less than imperialist propaganda feverishly trying to manufacture an enemy and send us headlong into that war.

    He starts by trying to convince us that China is the manifestation of all evil and wrongdoing, the harbinger of doom, and the pioneer of global villainy:

    “China is waging economic world war.”

    “Communist China is the focus of evil in the modern world.”

    “China is coming for our children.”

    As bewildering as these statements are, what stood out to me the most is that Tom Cotton has clearly never studied China in any real capacity. I can’t forgive him for his ignorance, because it’s undoubtedly followed closely by deep, soul-crushing racism, but I can teach him a few things he never learned in military boot camp.

    Tom Cotton, here are seven things you need to learn about China.

    1. China’s rise has nothing to do with the US.

    Tom Cotton situates everything China has done over the past century as a calculated maneuver to outwit and conquer the United States. It’s a classic case of main-characterism, in which a subject assumes everyone’s actions revolve entirely around them.

    The truth is, China’s rise has nothing to do with the US. Really, it’s none of our business. China developed because the modern era called for it. China sought economic prosperity because it had 1.4 billion citizens to provide for. China became powerful because that’s a side effect of having one of the largest economies in the world.

    China’s success is its own achievement. The fact that the US considers another country’s growing prosperity to be a direct threat against it says far more about the US. Instead of buying into the existential threat narratives, we need to ask why they exist.

    Why is China’s economic prosperity so terrifying to the Washington elite? Well, Tom Cotton says it loud and clear:

    “Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been. World trade is conducted in dollars. English is the unofficial global language of business and politics. (…) For more than a century, Americans have reaped enormous economic and security benefits from this state of affairs.”

    How dare another country become prosperous despite decades of foreign occupation, intervention, and coercion meant to reaffirm global inequality and protect US dominance?

    2. China is 5,000 years old.

    In 1949, when the PRC was established under the Communist Party, the US proclaimed that it had “lost China.”

    Let’s get this straight: a 175-year-old country was proclaiming to have “lost” a 5,000-year-old civilization state. Isn’t that absurd? China was never ours to have or to lose, or to do anything with at all.

    At the time, the US government even considered preemptively striking China to ensure it never obtained nuclear weapons. Those considerations never disappeared entirely.

    We really have to consider the differences between the two states with vastly opposing backgrounds, because you can’t understand China through a Western lens. The US is a relatively young nation born out of settler colonization and genocide of the native people. Our wealth was amassed through resource extraction, exploitation, and slavery. What precedent does that set? In comparison, China has undergone thousands of years of dynastic empires rising and falling. It has a strong cultural continuity and shared historical experience that informs how it conducts itself in the global theater. Its wealth was amassed internally, not through imperialist behavior or the exploitation of another. It’s an ancient civilization with deep roots, and a unique vision of the world informed by a long philosophical tradition and an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist framework.

    Additionally, China was one of the world’s largest economies for over 2,000 years, accounting for around 25-30% of global GDP. It wasn’t until the colonial period of the 1800s that colonial violence and occupation by Japan and the British Empire drove China into poverty. In the 1970s, it was one of the world’s poorest nations. The fact that China was able to return to its former prosperity despite decades of foreign intervention is nothing less than a miracle.

    Tom Cotton has no understanding of these complexities. He sees China through the narrow, ultra-patriotic, super-imperialist, America-is-the-center-of-the-world-and-nobody-else-matters mindset. It doesn’t work, and it comes off incredibly cliche and small-minded.

    3. You have to travel to China to understand China.

    Which Cotton can’t do because he’s sanctioned from visiting. I really can’t blame China at all for that. I wouldn’t want Tom Cotton in my country either.

    Regardless, I know this to be true: you have to see China for yourself to develop any real understanding of it. The fact that Tom Cotton has never been to China and will never go only proves that he has absolutely no authority, and never will, over writing a book about China’s actions and intentions.

    It should be a prerequisite for any individual with any degree of political power to spend time in the country they claim to know so much about. They should be required to visit cities and towns, to learn the country’s version of its history, and to talk with local people about their unique perspectives.

    Tom Cotton has not, will not, and therefore, his opinion should not be accepted or respected.

    4. China does NOT want his kids.

    In Chapter 6, Tom Cotton says, “China is coming for our kids.” It’s a bold statement, and he doesn’t give us much follow-up to reinforce such extremism. You’d expect something a bit more villainous, like a government-backed kidnapping ring or 5G mind control. But alas, what Cotton refers to is the growing prevalence of the social media app TikTok.

    TikTok, he says, is a Chinese plot to take over the minds of the American youth.

    You may recall Cotton’s viral moment when he repeatedly asked Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew if he was Chinese. The conversation went like this:

    “Of what nation are you a citizen?”

    “Singapore, sir.”

    “Are you a citizen of any other nation?”

    “No senator.”

    “Have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?”

    “Senator, I served my nation in Singapore. No, I did not.”

    “Do you have a Singaporean passport?

    “Yes, and I served my military for two and a half years in Singapore.”

    “Do you have any other passports from any other nations?”

    “No senator.”

    “Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”

    “Senator, I’m Singaporean. No.”

    “Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”

    “No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean!”

    It goes without saying that the TikTok ban was dead in the water until pro-Palestinian content began proliferating. According to Congressman Mike Gallagher, “The bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform, and our bill had legs again.”

    In truth, the TikTok ban was never about China, but about shielding young minds from learning about Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people and the ongoing complicity of the United States. The ban now walks hand in hand with the new education reforms that seek to dispose of “anti-patriotic” fields of study like critical race theory and threatens open discussion about the genocide in Gaza by automatically deeming it antisemitic. Yes, we are watching radical censorship in action.

    Anyway, Tom Cotton, China is not coming for your kids or anyone else’s, and making that claim without evidence is lazy and hysterical. This type of rhetoric serves one purpose only: to fuel fear and drive war.

    5. China didn’t ruin our economy—we did.

    It’s a real irony that those with all the power and money never take responsibility for their failings, but blame everyone else. And a lot of the time, people don’t see it. For instance, the elites who have crippled the US economy continue to point their fingers at those with no power at all—the impoverished, the starving, the homeless, the immigrants—and scream, it’s their fault! They did it! And the general populace turns on them with all the blame and rage of their wearisome existence. But who are the ones making all the decisions? Hoarding all the wealth? Throwing out tax breaks to billionaire friends and cutting the few life-saving programs that help regular folks get off the ground?

    It’s the elites. The politicians. The CEOs.

    We can’t blame China for developing. That’s its responsibility to its people. They didn’t steal our jobs. The thievery happened at home, on US soil, right under our noses. The corporate elite decided to take advantage of global inequality and save a few extra bucks by exporting industries abroad, where they could take advantage of cheap labor and exploit the resources of poorer nations.

    Tom Cotton spends quite a lot of time talking about China’s “economic world war.” First of all, using war language to describe economic competition sets a dangerous precedent. Competition is natural within our economic systems, and shouting “war! “ when the US isn’t constantly on top is militant imperialist behavior (Sidenote: we must rid ourselves of the notion that there are limited resources and limited wealth. There’s plenty for everyone—the problem is the majority of wealth is hoarded by 1% of the global population.)

    And secondly, I can’t help but wonder at the flips and tricks the human mind must do to accuse another nation of such an action, when the US has forever used sanctions, tariffs, and economic coercion as weapons to hurt and topple other nations, to corner them into loans and structural adjustments, and to strangulate, pressure, and punish. It makes Cotton’s particularly brief section on “economic imperialism” sound even more ridiculous.

    6. China is more logical than Cotton will ever be.

    My favorite section of Tom Cotton’s book began with the title, “Green is the new red.” I know it’s meant to be scary, but it reads more like one of those comedy-horrors that make you cringe, but you just can’t look away. I was particularly impressed with the impossible flexibility it takes to convince people a country is evil because it’s invested so much in… renewable energy!

    Terrifying!

    The mental gymnastics of this section might just be Cotton’s greatest feat ever.

    One thing is for certain. There’s no logic to be found here. But there’s also no logic to be found in much of the US policy on climate change. If I had to put a symbol to it, I’d choose an ostrich sticking its head in the ground—if you don’t look, it’s not there!

    Tom Cotton laments that as a result of heavy investment in solar panels, “China has devastated yet another American industry.” Those poor corporations. Those poor CEOs. How will they fare without their megayachts while the world burns?

    It is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism that our system prioritizes wealth over protecting the planet. It’s a fortunate side effect of China’s socialist characteristics that they don’t. As Brazilian activist Chico Mendes said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”

    7. China doesn’t want to go to war.

    We can’t define China by what-ifs. What if China wants to conquer the Pacific? What if China invades Poland? What if China hacks into my coffee pot and deciphers my favorite brew? What if what if what if? It’s nonsensical. We can only define China by what it’s said and what it’s done.

    If there’s one thing Tom Cotton needs to learn, it’s that China has no desire for war. Literally none. China has not been involved in any overseas conflict for fifty years. Compare that to the 251 foreign military interventions the US has conducted since just 1991. Really, just think about that. Don’t you think that if China had hegemonic ambitions, it would build a foreign military base in every country… or multiple? Or maybe over 900+ like the US? But no, China has just one in Djibouti. Tom Cotton thinks that the Djibouti base is suspicious and signals China’s malign ambitions. In reality, many nations have a military presence there to prevent piracy and smuggling in one of the world’s most crucial shipping lanes, the US included. Clearly, Tom Cotton lives in a different reality of his own paranoid design.

    Additionally, Chinese officials have repeated—over and over and over—that they have no desire for war. I think we can take them at their word, considering their lack of war historically, and their foundational policy of “peaceful coexistence.” In Cotton’s entire book, he never once refers to China’s foreign policy principles that guide every decision made. Chinese officials have never talked about a world in which China “dominates” other countries. They have only ever talked about visions of a world built on mutual respect, sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, cooperation, and peaceful coexistence.

    Tom Cotton needs to do some more reading on Chinese political theory, but it seems like he spends most of his learning hours thinking about war: “As a senator, I regularly review war games between China and the United States—exercises where military experts play out what would happen in a war between the two nations. I’ve never seen happy results.”

    You don’t need a war game to tell you that the results of war would be unhappy. Anyone could tell you that. I’m sure if Tom Cotton thought hard enough, he could even come up with that prediction all on his own.

    And war between the US and China wouldn’t just be unhappy, it would be devastating. Which is why our Congress members should be doing everything they can to prevent it, not ramping up the possibility by writing tedious, hysterical conspiracies about the evilness of other nations and the inevitability of conflict.

    Tom Cotton has a lot to learn about China, a lot more to learn about being a good politician, and the absolute most to learn about being a good person. But he can start with learning about China and switching his political tools to fostering dialogue, cooperation, and understanding, rather than the war-driving dribble he regularly spews.

    Unfortunately, the book was published. So if you see it at your local bookstore, do us all a favor and move it to the fantasy section, where it belongs. Or, if you’re feeling extra whimsical, you can add some Tom Cotton war criminal bookmarks to surprise the next person who picks it up. Meanwhile, we’ll be putting publisher HarperCollins on notice that it needs a much better fact-checking department.

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  • The Right-Wing Disinformation Machine After a Murder #politics #trump


    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Bombs Away

    “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” said President Trump as he addressed the American people shortly after announcing he was bombing Iran. I was too young to watch my political leaders spiral themselves into the war in Iraq – I was only old enough to be able to comprehend the final toll: one million Iraqis died because my country couldn’t help itself from another power grab in the Middle East. I can’t help but feel that the same thing is happening all over again.

    Myself, and countless other Americans, are ashamed at how many people have been killed in our name or with our tax dollars. The comfy politicians in Washington condescend to us — that our concern for human life actually goes against our own interests — as if Palestinians and Iranians do more to hurt Americans than the politicians and billionaires who gutted out industry, automated our jobs, privatized education, and cut social services. In our daily life, the people who actually hate us only become more obvious.

    Last week before it was absolutely clear that the US would formally enter the war, public opinion polls came out that a vast majority of Americans did not want the US to go to war. This was not the case in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Times and opinions have changed amongst the masses, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone in the White House yesterday.

    In the aftermath of 9/11, our leaders were awfully good at convincing Americans that they needed revenge for what happened. Even if it wasn’t logical, even if it didn’t make sense — we invaded two countries that had nothing to do with 9/11. Revenge is often carried out in a blind rage, and I would say that characterized US actions in Iraq, given the barbaric nature of how the war was carried out, how many civilians died, and with a fallout that’s done very little for “strategic security interests”. I would say that it was a “blind rage” if its violence wasn’t so calculated — specifically to enrich a handful of Americans. It did succeed in that endeavor, and American families had their sons and daughters sent home in body bags so Haliburton’s stock could skyrocket. The Iraqi people, with unsolicited promises to be “liberated” from Saddam, got nothing but grief and trauma that continues twenty years later. It was perhaps hard to justify all of that to the public; American public opinion has changed a lot, and so has US-led warfare as a result of that shift.

    So, Donald Trump has made it obvious (in case it wasn’t before) that the consent of the governed doesn’t hold any weight in the United States of America. However, it’s still an interesting thing to examine in our current context. Despite a barrage of lies about nuclear weapons (like Saddam’s WMDs) and images of scary, oppressive mullahs (like the ‘dictator Saddam’) Americans still opposed a US war on Iran. If Americans were to leverage this public opinion against war in a meaningful way, by taking some sort of step past having a stance in their heads, what would it challenge? What would it look like? Will Americans oppose – at a large enough scale, US warfare that looks slightly different than it did in 2003?

    US warmaking is more subtle to the American public, but not less deadly to the countries we impose it on. Trump insisted in his address to the nation that he has no plans to keep attacking Iran as long as they “negotiate”. This is after Israel killed Iranian negotiators with US approval, and after Iran had made clear their terms of negotiating that the US just couldn’t accept. There’s no definition about what Iranian compliance would look like, setting the stage for further bombing campaigns whenever Trump decides. There might not be troops on the ground or a US military occupation, but a war they refuse to call one is still functionally a war. It still kills people. It still destabilizes countries.

    The US fights wars with money, private contractors, and “offensive support”. Only pouring into the streets to oppose sending troops to fight on behalf of Israel against Iran might not be the demand that becomes most pressing in the coming days and weeks. For example, will Americans oppose a war with Iran if it’s primarily conducted from the air?

    There’s also a large sector of the American public that still morally supports Israel’s military in one way or another, whether it be overtly or with silence on the subject. Some of them might also make up the large portion of society that opposes the US going to war. For the last two years, as Israel has carried out its genocide campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the US has been building up Israel’s military, sending off billions of our tax dollars to make sure Israel was perfectly poised for the moment it decided to kill Iranians. Whether the public who opposes war with Iran likes it or not, their support for Israel as a military ally will directly contradict their opinion opposing war with Iran. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, if we want to put it simply.

    On the other side, Israel’s war crimes in Gaza also might have something to do with why opposition to the war on Iran is so prevalent. Because the back-up justification for attacking Iran, made by the ruling class, in case the nuke lies didn’t work, was portraying Iran’s leaders as scary, irrational, and evil boogeymen. The ruling class, decrying an evil Hitler-esque foreign leader in Iran, is now the boy crying wolf. We were told the same things about the leaders in Libya and Iraq to justify our country bombing of theirs. The result was Libyan, Iraqi, and to a lesser extent, American blood pooling in the streets. On top of that collective memory, we’ve seen our government entrench itself with Netanyahu — a commander of a military that’s killed countless Palestinians and a handful of Americans without any condemnation from our government. If there are murderous and unjust dictators in the Middle East, one of them is named Benjamin Netanyahu, and we are told he’s our greatest ally, and acting on behalf of Israel is acting in the best interest of Americans. Now, even if the US wanted the war on Iran all along, it appears to the world that Israel pulled us into the war – people do not like that, rightfully so.

    If Americans who are against the war can reject these new forms of hybrid warfare as much as they reject the traditional forms of warfare, and the sectors of the public still sympathetic to Israel see the blatant contradictions in front of their eyes — then perhaps this public opinion could mean something real. Furthermore, it’s been made clear that the American ruling class will not change course solely because the people they “serve” oppose what they are doing. They’ve also demonstrated that they are willing to jail and deport people who disagree with them and their foreign policy escapades. The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that Americans standing against the actions of their government do so at great personal risk. Do Americans disagree with US involvement in the war enough? Do they disagree to the point where they are willing to experience threats, jail time, repression, physical harm, or other forms of violence? In the case of a war that could turn nuclear with an untethered Israel and Trump Administration at the helm, I sincerely hope so. 

    The post Bombs Away first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Why the All the Promotions for COVID Spokespeople?

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Silence that is Defining Our Age and Which is Deafening

    Note: Another long opinion piece in the local rag, Lincoln County Leader, June 18, 2025.


    First, though, let me explain. The idea is to not just rattle my fellow citizens’ cages, those self-imposed prisons of the mind. It’s my own journalistic and controlled demolition of the grand narratives this country has foisted on a public that has not only become unsuspecting, but absolutely habituated into brands, and consumer dialogue, talks about trips to Costco or Costa Rica, it’s all the same fucking 24 pack of paper towels to throw at hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.

    This is the spawn of Nazis, the good Germans, the guy who is now a Jew, who was trained by Jew York Jews like Roy Cohen, and alas, his grandkiddos are Jewish, and that daughter is Jewish, and the mafia in his Minyan is composed of Jews and even freak Zionists like RFK, Jr.

    It is a sickness that isn’t just one chapter in the DSM-V: Victoria Nuland and cookies, man.

    What is the DSM-5?

    The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often known as the “DSM,” is a reference book on mental health and brain-related conditions and disorders. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is responsible for the writing, editing, reviewing and publishing of this book.

    The number “5” attached to the name of the DSM refers to the fifth — and most recent — edition of this book. The DSM-5®’s original release date was in May 2013. The APA released a revised version of the fifth edition in March 2022. That version is known as the DSM-5-TR™, with TR meaning “text revision.”

    IMPORTANT: The DSM-5 and DSM-5-TR are medical reference books intended for experts and professionals. The content in these books is very technical, though people who aren’t medical professionals may still find it interesting or educational. However, you shouldn’t use either of these books as a substitute for seeing a trained, qualified mental health or medical provider.

    Additionally, the APA also publishes books that supplement the content in the DSM-5-TR. Examples of these supplement publications include the DSM-5 Handbook of Differential Diagnosis and DSM-5 Clinical Cases.

    What is the purpose of the DSM-5?

    The first step in treating any health condition — physical or mental — is accurately diagnosing the condition. That’s where the DSM-5 comes in. It provides clear, highly detailed definitions of mental health and brain-related conditions. It also provides details and examples of the signs and symptoms of those conditions.

    In addition to defining and explaining conditions, the DSM-5 organizes those conditions into groups. That makes it easier for healthcare providers to accurately diagnose conditions and tell them apart from conditions with similar signs and symptoms.]

    [Photo: While Ronald Reagan demonized the welfare system as a whole in familiar terms, his ire was largely directed toward single mothers, and his racially coded language was sufficient to make clear his overarching intentions.]

    All these things, these economic things, they are on people’s minds. The chaos of Trump and Company, as he plays out his dictator role, all of that is on everyone’s minds.

    The cost of being poor is rising. And it’s worse for poor families of color. Great headline.

    But the point of my short op-ed was to discuss how the silence of this genocide is deafening, in fact, defeating. This has a deep deep psychological effect on those who might have cared to speak up and who are distressed by the murder incorporated on a mass murder scale that the Jews in Israel are undertaking.

    But the empire of chaos is about that chaos, and the chaotic nature of our news cycle with the demented POTUS and his even more demented cabinet members and his MAGA mutt followers, that this imploding diesel belching engine has thrown so many people into discombobulation syndrome.

    Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
    Still by himself abused or disabused;
    Created half to rise, and half to fall;
    Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
    Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
    The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

    — Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

    The poor and forgotten nations of the world can blame their downward spiral on an emerging world order that Samir Amin in this brilliant essay calls the “empire of chaos.” Comprised of the United States, Japan, and Germany, and backed by a weakened USSR and the comprador classes of the third world, this is an empire that will stop at nothing in its campaign to protect and expand its capitalist markets.

    The interview with Professor Samir Amin was conducted on 6 May 2018 in Beijing, by Professor Lau Kin Chi and Professor Sit Tsui Jade. Professor Amin criticized monopoly capitalism and the collective imperialism of the Triad (USA, Europe, and Japan). He analyzed the current major challenges to China. He strongly suggested that China should not join financial globalization, but on the contrary, keep capital account and exchange rate under control, as well as maintain collective ownership of land and the small peasantry. These were great weapons against financial globalization. He also discussed the possibilities of building people’s internationalism.

    *****
    “Israel’s culture of genocide is spreading globally. We must build an alternative” by Abed Abou Shhadeh

    Even as Israeli violence becomes more visible, politicians like Ben Gvir are welcomed as honoured guests in the US

    ‘The crimes [in Gaza] are so egregious that are being carried out… The attempt to cover them up and whitewash them is failing’ Since 7 October, western media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza has come under intense scrutiny, particularly for the language and terminology used by many outlets. As a result, the coverage has been accused of bias against Palestinians effectively providing cover for Israel’s war on Gaza. To delve into this, we’re speaking to Assal Rad, an Iranian-American scholar of the modern Middle East and fellow at DAWN, who’s also made it her mission to call out and ‘fix’ misleading headlines. Her widely shared posts earned her the title of ‘headline fixer’, turning this into a trend of its own online.

    This is just a watered-down version of what I really would love to write every day, and in a sense have the public square to discuss this silence, this mute echo of silence has pushed a collective insanity and amnesia into the populous.

    The Silence is Deafening

    The silence is deafening, here on the coast, and throughout most of the land. Forget about large universities and valiant young people and some faculty protesting the genocide which by many expert accounts — not cited in so-called legacy media – are 100,000 murdered civilians.

    Targeted assassinations of journalists and of medical workers? And the AMA is silent. The American Medical Association represents hundreds of thousands of doctors.

    “We’re seeing hospitals being bombed, ambulances being bombed, doctors and other medical workers being targeted and shot. The AMA is the sixth-largest lobbying organization in the United States, it’s bigger than Boeing. It’s bigger than Lockheed Martin, it’s bigger than the National Rifle Association. They have a tremendous amount of domestic and international influence, and because they carry such weight within the realm of health care, we felt it would be appropriate for them to use their voice in this way.”

    Emily Hacker, a member of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, outlined that an important reason healthcare workers want the “AMA and all other healthcare institutions to be involved in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine”  is that “the US can spend billions and billions of dollars on bombs and bullets, but there are 26 million Americans with no health insurance and 150 million Americans rely on Medicare or Medicaid.”

    “People can’t afford their insulin, but there’s always money for bombs,” Hackerarticulated.

    Cognitive dissonance is more than just interesting as a theory to study. In our daily lives we for the most part are silent. Hands down. No discussion of Israel’s genocide and the United States’ and Britain’s complicity because most Americans are dangerously poorly educated.

    Miseducated. Brainwashed.

    This is what many call “deep” or “master narratives” – that somehow the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel is the most democratic state in the Middle East. I witnessed genocide silence at the Yachats Commons June 1, where we listened to Oregon Black Pioneers presenter Zachary Stocks discuss the origin of black exclusion laws in our state as well as the pro-slavery mentality that dominated many of the state’s politicians and newspaper editors.

    Good stuff he presented to a largely greying and older population. We did get some land acknowledgment from Joanne Kittel, known for her work around the Amanda Trail.

    “For those of you who travel through Yachats, I ask you to pay respect to and honor the Alsea, Siuslaw, Lower Umpqua and Coos people who lost their lives as a result of their forced incarceration and mistreatment in Yachats, Waldport and Florence areas. The Amanda Trail that connects Yachats to Cape Perpetua is a spiritual and solemn path that remembers in perpetuity.” Joanne Kittel wrote this as a blurb for a book, Seeking Recognition: The Termination and Restoration of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, 1855-1984 by David R.M. Beck.

    No moment of silence for Gaza? It would have been appropriate.

    Deep, grand, meta or master narratives are dominant or commonly-shared stories within a society or culture. They are tools for shaping a collective idea or consciousness about who we are as a society, culture or people. Master narratives also limit our understanding of context and historical causes and effects, and they’re deployed to perpetuate stereotypes or dominant ideologies.

    Erasing knowledge and context is the coin of the realm now especially with a shallow and sallow-minded president. This POTUS isn’t the be-all and end-all, but for the past five months people have been scrambling to anticipate his administration’s brand of proto- or neo-fascism. Erasing Black Medal of Honor winners or Jackie Robinson’s portrait from various locations and websites is just the tip of the iceberg of flipping around of history.

    “A good Indian is a Dead Indian.” Or, from the other POTUS, Teddy Roosevelt: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

    And now why is it the genocide of our times is never discussed in public or around dinner tables? Imagine that during World War Two not a word about Nazism or fascism in Italy and Spain. Silence? The price of bacon?

    A Jewish Canadian journalist, many reading this might not know, Aaron Mate, says it bluntly about that Grand Narrative of Israel and Judaism: “Everything I Was Taught… Was a Lie” He says the indoctrination of how Israel is this grand democracy and mothership for all Jews starts early.

    “This Jewish state commits genocide in our name. It’s a moral obligation to resist this,” Mate states.

    It is more than bizarre and Orwellian, this current rampant ideology of “silence is transparency and lies are truth.”

    Doctors, nurses, and medics are murdered and hospitals bombed. And no one in mixed company discusses Gaza, the genocide, the dehumanization of Palestinians, which is a dehumanization for us all.

    Doctors? I have MDs in my family and I was a pre-med student for a while. Here is an anonymous statement I agree with, from a doctor condemning the American Medical Association’s complicity:

    “As a doctor, I am saying loud and clear I am against all war and especially GENOCIDE. AMA and all our medical institutions that have remained silent and practiced unethical silencing, doxxing, firing of peace supporters or those speaking up for Palestine cast a long shadow of shame on our great profession.”

    Silence, and the grand narrative just crumbles.

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