radiofree.asia

Category: Disinformation

  • Oklahoma Supreme Court Repeats Disinformation That Charter Schools Are Public Schools

    In a much-awaited case brought forth by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond (Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board), the Oklahoma State Supreme Court ruled 6-2 on June 25, 2024, that St. Isidore of Seville Catholic K-12 Virtual Charter School is unconstitutional and cannot open and enroll students in Fall 2024.

    The online religious charter school is sectarian and not permitted to receive any public funding, said the court. Writing for the majority, Justice James Winchester said that, “the contract between the state board and St. Isidore violates the Oklahoma Constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act and the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” He added that, “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school. As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.” Winchester also stated that, “What St. Isidore requests from this court is beyond the fair treatment of a private religious institution in receiving a generally available benefit, implicating the free exercise clause. It is about the state’s creation and funding of a new religious institution violating the establishment clause.”

    The Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause make up the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Justice Dustin P. Rowe dissented from much of the majority opinion while Justice Dana Kuehn dissented entirely with the majority.

    Reuters stated that the religious online charter school would have siphoned about $26 million from public coffers in the first five years of operation. The real amount is likely higher. Charter schools across the country siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools, increase segregation, and fail and close regularly.

    This unprecedented ruling blocks what would have been the first publicly funded religious charter school in the U.S. It invalidates the approval in October 2023 of St. Isidore by the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, an entity comprised mostly of unelected private persons. Charter school authorizers around the country typically consist of many unelected individuals from the business sector. Such entities usually embrace capital-centered ideas and policies.

    The sponsors of the deregulated virtual charter school, the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa, have openly stated that the religious virtual charter school would be open to students statewide, rely directly on Catholic teachings, and use public funds to operate. Catholic leaders have never concealed their mission to evangelize students at the online religious charter school. In fact, St. Isidore students would not only “be taught Catholic doctrine,” they would also be “required to attend mass,” reported Oklahoma Voice.

    The Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the termination of St. Isidore’s contract with the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which became the new Statewide Charter School Board on July 1, 2024. “The [nine-person] board will succeed the [five-person] Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which oversaw only online charter schools in Oklahoma,” says The Oklahoman. The new entity will oversee all charter schools in the state and will be comprised mainly of unelected business people with greater responsibilities and powers.

    For their part, the Catholic sponsors of the virtual charter school have pledged to appeal the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they plan to open the online religious charter school in the 2025-2026 school year. On July 5, attorneys for the online religious charter school asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court for a stay of its order to have its contract rescinded by the new Statewide Charter School Board until the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case. The new Statewide Charter School Board, which met for the first time on July 8, held off on terminating the virtual school’s contract. The new unelected board claims that it is waiting to see how legal proceedings play out in the coming weeks and months. On July 17, Drummond scolded the new board for not rescinding the contract for the Catholic virtual charter school. He told the new board, “You must know and accept that no state agency, board, or commission may willfully ignore an order from Oklahoma’s highest court.” Private religious forces are hoping that recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court that further abolish the distinction between public and private will work in their favor.

    Such developments and contradictions arise in the context of neoliberal forces working for the last few decades to restructure the state in ways that change governance and administrative arrangements to expand privatization. Blurring the public-private distinction is central to neoliberal efforts to further privilege private interests while marginalizing the public interest. This is why today there is little distinction between the state and Wall Street. We live in a system of direct rule by the rich. Private monopoly interests, not the public, control the economy and the state. In the years ahead, major owners of capital will strive to further dominate the state so as to privatize more institutions, programs, enterprises, services, and governance itself.

    “Public” and “private,” it should be stressed, are legal, political, philosophical, and sociological categories that mean the exact opposite of each other; they are antonyms. Confounding them is problematic, both conceptually and practically. It is self-serving, not just intellectually lazy, to mix up two sharply distinct categories like “public” and “private.” It is like saying hot and cold mean the same thing. In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion; [1] It is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, or benefitting everyone.

    State constitutions typically prohibit states from using public money to support or benefit religious institutions and entities. As a general rule, states cannot use public money to fund religious schools. Historically, there has been a powerful trend in U.S. society to keep religion and state separate (the so-called “wall of separation between church and state”). Modern conditions and requirements dictate that states must avoid sponsoring, promoting, funding, or privileging any religion. There can be no “religious liberty” when a state sponsors, funds, privileges, or entangles itself with any religion or sect. The state is supposed to represent the interests of all members of the polity, regardless of religion.

    The Oklahoma Supreme Court argued that had St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School opened as a regular nonsectarian “public” charter school instead of a religious charter school, it could have received public funds and operated normally.

    In reasoning in this manner, the court correctly negated publicly-funded sectarian education arrangements but erroneously sanctioned the continued funneling of public funds from public schools to deregulated charter schools that are public only on paper. In other words, the highest court in Oklahoma saw no problem with charter schools siphoning public funds from public schools. The court overlooked the fact that charter schools in Oklahoma, like the rest of the country, are privately-operated and differ legally, philosophically, pedagogically, and organizationally from public schools.

    The court thus blundered when it repeatedly referred to charter schools as public schools in its ruling. It uncritically repeated flawed and banal assertions about the “publicness” of charter schools. It incorrectly characterized charter schools as state actors even though private entities are typically the only entities that hold charter school contracts in the U.S.

    It is generally recognized that how an entity is described on paper can often differ greatly from how it operates in reality. There can be a large chasm between the two. People understand that words and deeds are not always aligned. Indeed, there has always been a big gap between rhetoric and reality in the charter school sector. Charter school owners and promoters have long confused words on paper with empirical realities. They want people to believe that just because something is on paper, it is automatically true, valid, and unassailable. They have taken abstraction of certain ideas to incoherent and detached levels, while also merging legalese and lawfare to advance their agenda. For 32 years charter school owners and promoters have strived to create a legislative veneer of respectability, but lack of legitimacy remains a nagging problem in the charter school sector.

    To be clear, all charter schools in the U.S. are privately-operated and governed by unelected private persons. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not run by publicly elected people. In fact, many charter schools are directly owned-operated by for-profit corporations that openly cash in on kids as their education model. For example, most charter schools in Michigan and a few other states are openly for-profit charter schools. But even so-called “non-profit” charter schools regularly engage in profiteering.

    Legally, private operators of charter schools exist outside the public sphere, which makes them private actors, not state (public) actors. Charter school operators are not government entities or political subdivisions of the state. This is why most constitutional provisions apply to public schools, which are state actors, but do not apply to the operators of charter schools or the students, teachers, and parents involved with them. Charter schools teachers, for example, are legally considered “at-will” employees, the opposite of public school teachers. The rights of teachers, students, and parents in public schools are not the same as the rights of teachers, students, and parents in charter schools.

    For these and other reasons, charter schools are deregulated independent schools. As private actors, they are not subject to the same requirements as traditional public schools. They do not operate in the same way as public schools. They are not “entangled” with the state in the same way that public schools are. Charter schools do not have the same relationship with the state as public schools. The state, put simply, does not coerce, compel, influence, or direct charter schools to act in the same way as public schools. The state does not play a significant role in charter school policies and actions, certainly not in the way that it does with traditional public schools. This means that the state cannot be held responsible for the actions and policies of private actors.

    In the U.S., state laws explicitly permit charter schools to avoid most laws, rules, statutes, regulations, and policies governing public schools. Charter schools can essentially “do as they please” in the name of “autonomy,” “competition,” “accountability,” “choice,” “parental empowerment,” and “results.” It is no accident that charter school advocates boast every day that charter schools are “free market” schools, which means that they are based on the law of the jungle. President Bill Clinton, a long-time supporter of charter schools, once correctly called charter schools “schools with no rules.” Charter schools have long embraced social Darwinism and a fend-for-yourself ethos.

    The “free market” ideologies of competition, individualism, and consumerism are therefore central to the creation, operation, and expansion of charter schools. Fending-for-yourself in the pursuit of education is seen as natural, normal, and healthy by charter school owners and promoters. There can supposedly be no better way to organize education and life according to charter school owners and promoters. Thus, when a charter school fails and closes, one is supposed to quickly and effortlessly find a new school, complain about nothing, move on, and nonchalantly accept that “this is just how life is.” In this outdated, disruptive, and unstable set-up, one is expected to be a “rugged individual” who embraces inequality and competition. Winning and losing is supposedly inevitable. Put simply, neoliberals and privatizers do not view education as a basic human right that must be guaranteed in practice. Commodity logic—the logic of buying and selling—guides their outlook and agenda.

    Further, the notion, promoted by some, that charter schools are “public-private partnerships” is also flawed and dangerous because it implies that there is a public component to charter schools and that a fair, balanced, equal, meaningful, and mutually-beneficial relationship can exist between the public sector and the private sector. This neoliberal notion covers up the fact and principle that public funds belong only to the public and must not be wielded or controlled by the private sector at any time. If the private sector wants income and revenue, then it should generate income and revenue through its own activities and operations, without using the state to seize public funds that do not belong to it. Public funds must serve the public and not be claimed by private interests through new governance arrangements that harm the public. So-called public-private “partnerships” further concentrate accumulated social wealth in private hands and restrict democracy.

    It is disinformation to claim that the public sector needs the private sector for government, society, institutions, infrastructure, and programs to exist and function at a high level. The public sector would be far healthier and more human-centered if a public authority worthy of the name kept all public funds in public hands at all times and used public funds only to advance the general interests of society. It should also be recalled that the private sector has been rife with fraud, failure, scandal, and corruption for generations. We see this in the news every day. Privatization does not guarantee efficiency, success, or excellence. Privatization invariably increases corruption and negates human rights.

    Other differences between charter schools and public schools include the fact that, as privatized education arrangements, charter schools cannot levy taxes like public schools and do not accept or keep all students. Unlike public schools that accept all students at all times, charter schools, which are said to be “welcoming,” “free,” and “open to all,” routinely cherry-pick students. In addition, many charter schools are legally permitted to hire uncertified teachers.

    Charter schools also frequently fail to uphold even the few public standards enshrined in state charter school laws (e.g., open-meeting laws, reporting laws, enrollment requirements, and audit laws). These are laws and requirements they are supposed to embrace but often violate. It has often been said that the charter school sector is not transparent or accountable, even though it seizes billions of dollars every year from the public, leaving the public worse off—and all under the veneer of high ideals. Dozens of other differences between public schools and charter schools can be found here.

    Charter, by definition, means contract. Charter schools are contract schools. Contract law is part of private law in the U.S., not public law. Private law deals with relations between private citizens, whereas public law deals with relations between the state and individuals. Thus, the legal basis and profile of charter schools differs from the legal basis and profile of public schools, which is why, as noted earlier, charter school students, parents, and workers have different rights and protections than public school students, parents, and workers.

    Charter schools in the U.S. are private entities that enter into contract with the state or entities approved by the state. The state does not actually create the charter school, it mainly delegates (not authorizes) a function to the private contractor of the school; it is outsourcing education; it is commodifying a social responsibility. This outsourcing of constitutional obligations to private interests does not automatically make said interests state actors.

    A private actor does not automatically and magically become a public agency with public power just because it is delegated a duty by the state through a contract. Generally speaking, not a single charter school in the U.S. is owned-operated by a public entity or government unit. Unlike public schools, charter schools are usually created by private citizens, often business people, and often with extensive support from philanthrocapitalists. These private forces or entities do not suddenly become public entities just because they contract with the state or an entity approved by the state. Partnering with the government is not the same as being part of the government. And simply receiving public funds to carry out a function does not spontaneously transform a private entity into a public entity. It is well-known that thousands of private entities in the country receive some sort of public funding but they do not suddenly stop being private entities.

    Nor can charter schools be deemed public just because they are called “public” 50 times a day. Repeating something endlessly does not instantly make something true. There would actually be no need to call charter schools “charter” schools if they were public schools proper. The word “charter” before the word “school” instantly sets charter schools apart from public schools. The word “charter” creates a demarcation. Similarly, there would be no need to call charter schools “schools of choice” if they were traditional public schools. “Free market” phrases such as this one also communicate a difference between charter schools and public schools. Today, ninety percent of the nation’s roughly 50 million students attend a public school in their zip code. Neoliberals have successfully starved many of these schools of public funds over the past 45 years.

    It is also worth noting that the academic performance of cyber charter schools in the U.S. is notoriously abysmal (see here, here, and here). Equally ironic in this situation is that Epic Charter Schools in Oklahoma, a massive online charter school, has been charged by various government authorities with different crimes in recent years. The owners-operators of Epic Charter Schools have been charged with embezzlement, money laundering, computer crimes, and conspiracy to defraud the state. Such crimes have been widespread in the entire charter school sector for three decades. Equally noteworthy is the fact that under Oklahoma law charter school teachers do not have be certified to teach.

    Currently, there are more than 60 privately-operated charter schools in Oklahoma. About 3.8 million students (7.4% of U.S. children) are currently enrolled in nearly 8,000 charter schools across the country.

    The inescapable law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism, especially since the mid-1970s, continues to coerce capital-centered forces to privatize as much of the public sector and social programs as they can in order to maximize profits and avoid extinction. Capitalist economies everywhere are in deep trouble and are becoming more reckless in their narrow quest to maximize profits as fast as possible. Greed is at an all-time high.

    Capital-centered forces will continue to restructure the state apparatus to advance their retrogressive agenda under the banner of high ideals. This includes raiding the public education sector and privatizing it in the name of “serving the kids,” “empowering parents,” “promoting competition,” and “increasing choice.” So far, “school-choice” schemes have made some individuals very rich while lowering the level of education and harming the public interest.

    Charter schools represent the commodification of education, the privatization and marketization of a modern human responsibility in order to enrich a handful of private interests. The typical consequences of privatization in every sector include higher costs, less transparency, reduced quality of service, greater instability, more inefficiency, and loss of public voice. Whether it is vouchers, so-called “Education Savings Accounts,” or privately-operated charter schools, education privatization (“school-choice”) has not solved any problems, it has only multiplied them. [2]

    Charter schools are not public schools. If privately-operated charter schools wish to exist and operate they must do so without public money. Public funds belong only to the public and must be used solely for public purposes. This means guaranteeing a range of services, programs, and institutions that continually raise living and working standards. It means serving the common good at the highest level and blocking any schemes that undermine this direction.

    FOOTNOTES

    [1] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.

    [2] See The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (2023).

     

    The post Oklahoma Supreme Court Repeats Disinformation That Charter Schools Are Public Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. SecDef Lloyd Austin’s NATO Speech Lies

    In an enthusiastically received speech on July 10 to the Washington DC 75th Anniversary NATO Summit, U.S. Secretary of Defense and ‘former’ Raytheon Corporation board member Lloyd Austin strung together lies by the U.S. empire in order to reverse the imperialistic guilt of the U.S. Government for starting the Cold War in order to conquer and take over the entire world, and to pretend that instead the Cold War was and remains an ideological communist-versus-capitalist war in which the Soviet Union was the aggressor, but has now become after 2000 a war between nations that Austin calls “democracies” (which today’s America clearly is not), on the one hand, and nations that he simply assumes are not, on the other.

    Appropriately for his lying ‘history’ of this war since 25 July 1945, he twice referred to its creator on 25 July 1945, U.S. President Truman, whose 4 April 1949 “Address on the Occasion of Signing the North Atlantic Treaty” (the NATO Treaty), stated:

    Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression. Our peoples, to whom our governments are responsible, demand that these things shall not happen again.

    We are determined that they shall not happen again.

    In taking steps to prevent aggression against our own peoples, we have no purpose of aggression against other peoples. To suggest the contrary is to slander our institutions and defame our ideals and our aspirations.

    According to the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved), in its article “List of wars involving the Soviet Union”, during the entire time-span between “1944-1960s”, that list includes only these wars:

    Anti-communist insurgencies in Central and Eastern Europe[citation needed]

    Guerrilla war in Ukraine (Part of World War II from 1944 to 1945)

    Guerrilla war in the Baltic states

    Anti-communist resistance in Poland (1944–1953)

    Listed as the aggressors in them were:

    Soviet Union
    East Germany
    Polish People’s Republic
    Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
    Hungarian People’s Republic
    Socialist Republic of Romania
    People’s Republic of Bulgaria
    Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

    Those were the nations that the Soviet Union had liberated from Hitler.

    Listed as the defenders (not the aggressors) in these wars were:

    Ukrainian Insurgents
    Polish Insurgents
    Estonian Insurgents
    Latvian Insurgents
    Lithuanian Insurgents
    Bulgarian Insurgents

    Those ‘insurgents’ (or ‘guerillas’) were predominantly — and in some nations almost entirely — the forces that were fighting on Hitler’s side in his Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union.

    When Truman, in his 4 April 1949 “Address on the Occasion of Signing the North Atlantic Treaty”, asserted that “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression,” he never made clear which of those wars by the Soviet Union defending itself against Hitler’s Operation Barbaross invasion constituted those “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression.” It wasn’t Hitler who had done the “unprovoked aggression.” That was America’s President right after the passionate opponent of Hitler, FDR, died.

    Already at the founding of NATO, this creation by the Nazi Truman was an extension from Operation Barbarossa by Truman’s United States Government, in order to take over the world, starting with taking over the Soviet Union, which had been America’s most important ally during WW2 under President FDR.

    Both FDR and Churchill acknowledged that the coming victory against Hitler was more by the Soviet Union than it was by even the entirety of The West. Near the beginning of FDR’s lengthy fireside chat to the nation on 28 April 1942, he said:

    On the European front the most important development of the past year has been without question the crushing counteroffensive on the part of the great armies of Russia against the powerful German Army. These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies — troops, planes, tanks, and guns — than all the other United Nations [by which he at that time was referring only to the U.S. and the UK’s empire, because he hadn’t yet even met Stalin] put together. (NOTE: He was already using the phrase “United Nations” with the objective in mind for all of the world’s nations to view themselves as having been saved by the U.N. that FDR was intending ultimately to replace all empires and to be the sole source of international laws.)

    Near the War’s end, on 19 September 1944, Churchill telegrammed to Stalin “that it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine and is at the present moment holding by far the larger portion of the enemy on its front.” As the History Channel’s article “Operation Barbarossa” summed-up: “On 22 June 1941, German forces began their invasion of the Soviet Union, … the most powerful invasion force in history, … 80% of the German army … [plus] 30 divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops. … By the time Germany officially surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945, 80% of its casualties during WW2 had come on the Eastern Front [the Soviet Union].” Even Wikipedia’s “Operation Barbarossa” said “The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of the Third Reich.[30]” However, on 8 May 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted “On May 8, 1945, America and Great Britain had victory over the Nazis! America’s spirit will always win. In the end, that’s what happens.” So goes the myth (which is cited by both Democratic and Republican politicians), but certainly not  the history.

    Furthermore: what was Truman referring to by his “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression”? He never said, but why did he call the Soviet Union’s victories against Hitler “unprovoked aggression”? It had been Hitler — and not Stalin — who invaded in Operation Barbarossa, and Stalin — not Hitler — who were defending there. This is how much of an American Nazi Mr. Truman had become so soon after he had made the decision on 25 July 1945 for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world. If anything is “sickening” in that statement by him, it is Truman himself.

    On that date, 25 July 1945, Truman told the Soviet Union’s leader Joseph Stalin that the U.S. Government would not recognize the legitimacy of its control over the countries that it had conquered from Hitler unless the U.S. Government is granted veto-power over the Soviet Union’s decisions regarding those Governments (both their internal and external affairs); and, in Truman’s letter that night to his wife, Bess, he even gloated over this, by saying:

    Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused. We have unalterably opposed the recognition of police governments in the Germany Axis countries. I told Stalin that until we had free access to those countries and our nationals had their property rights restored, so far as we were concerned there’d never be recognition. He seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.

    Suddenly, the amicable relationship between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., which had prevailed throughout FDR’s three terms in office, and which had won WW2 for the Allies, and which FDR had been planning to continue afterward under the U.N. that FDR had been carefully planning during August 1941 till his death on 12 April 1945, ended in a crash of mutual hostility, because Stalin couldn’t accept Truman’s demand, any more than Truman would have accepted a similar demand from Stalin about the nations that America and its colonies such as the UK had conquered in Europe. Stalin (like FDR would have done if he had survived) made no such demand upon Truman or anyone else, and from that date forward Stalin recognized that unless he could change Truman’s mind on this (which never happened), the U.S. Government would be at war against the Soviet Government. It turned out to be (on the American side at least) a war not actually between capitalism versus communism (as Truman propagandized it to be) but instead between the U.S. against the entire world — to take all of it — as was made clear when U.S. President GHW Bush started, on 24 February 1990, secretly instructing his stooge leaders, such as Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, that their war against the soon-no-longer-communist Russia would secretly continue until it too becomes a part of the U.S. empire.

    Furthermore: whereas there was lots of friction between FDR and Churchill because FDR was an impassioned anti-imperialist and Churchill was an equally impassioned imperialist, FDR’s relationship with Stalin was superb, because both of them were equally impassioned anti-imperialists — about which fact Truman and his followers have been lying constantly.

    The current war inside Ukraine — about which Mr. Austin’s speech largely focuses — started with U.S. President Barack Obama’s coup there in 2014, but had been in preparation ever since the Truman Administration. I detailed that fact here.

    Austin’s speech was loaded with lies, but I will stop here, because that’s enough to demonstrate his propagandistic intent.

    The post U.S. SecDef Lloyd Austin’s NATO Speech Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized

    The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

    This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

    This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

    In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

    Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

    For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

    For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

    “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

    This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

    Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

    Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

    Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

    Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

    Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Digital currencies, combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism, will create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society.

    Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

    Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    Weaponizing politics. Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset.

    Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have-nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

    The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the facts speak for themselves.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

    The post Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why the news media’s job is to groom us

    When all we have to rely on in understanding our relationship to the news media is the media’s self-proclaimed assessment of its own role, maybe it is no surprise that most of us assume the West’s “free press” is a force for good: the bedrock of democracy, the touchstone of a superior western civilisation.

    The more idealistic among us think of the news media as something akin to a public service. The more cynical of us think of it as a competitive marketplace in information and commentary, one in which ugly agendas are often in evidence but truth ultimately prevails.

    Both views are fanciful. The reality is far, far darker – and I speak as someone who worked for many years in the Guardian and Observer newsrooms, widely seen as the West’s most progressive newspapers.

    As readers, we don’t, as we imagine, “consume” news. Rather, the news consumes us. Or put another way, the media uses the news to groom us, its audience. Properly understood, the relationship is one of abuser and abused.

    Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory?

    In fact, just such an argument was set out many years ago – in more academic fashion – in Ed Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent.

    If you have never heard of the book, there may be a reason. The media don’t want you reading it.

    When I worked at the Guardian, there was no figure more reviled in the newsroom by senior editors than Noam Chomsky. As young journalists, we were warned off reading him. How might we react were we to start thinking more deeply about the role of the media, or begin testing the limits of what we were allowed to report and say?

    Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model explains in detail how western publics are “brainwashed under freedom” by a media driven by hidden corporate and state interests. Those interests can be concealed only because the media decides what counts as news and frames how we understand events.

    Its chief tools are misdirection and omission – and, in extremis, outright deception.

    Tribal camps

    The Propaganda Model acknowledges that competition is permitted in the news media. But only of a narrow, superficial kind, meant to divide us more usefully into tribal, ideological camps – defined as the left and the right.

    Those camps are there to keep us imagining that we enjoy a plurality of ideas, that we are in charge of our response to events, that we elect governments – just as we enjoy a choice between watching the BBC and Fox News.

    But our herding into oppositional camps isn’t really about choice. The camps are there to keep us divided, so we can be more easily manipulated and ruled. They are there to obscure from us the deeper reality that the state-corporate media is the public relations arm of an establishment that needs us weak.

    To survive, the western power establishment has to engineer two related kinds of popular endorsement:

    First, we must consent to the idea that the West has an inalienable right to control the Earth’s resources, even at the cost of committing terrible crimes both against the rest of humanity, such as the current genocide in Gaza, and against other species, as we wreck the natural world in our pursuit of impossible, endless economic growth on a finite planet.

    And second, we must consent to the idea that the richest and most powerful elites in the West have an inalienable right to cream off most of the profits from this industrialised rape of our only home.

    The media rarely identifies this wasteful, greed system, so normalised has it become. But when given a name, it is called capitalism. It emerges from the shadows only when the media need to confront and ridicule a bogeyman caricature of its main ideological rival, socialism.

    Immersed in propaganda

    The news media have been fantastically successful at making a system of suicidal resource extraction designed to enrich a tiny number of billionaires seem entirely normal to their audiences. Which is why those same billionaires are as keen to own the news media as they are to own politicians. In fact, gain ownership of the media and you own the political class too. It is the ultimate two-for-one offer.

    No politician can afford to take on key state-corporate interests, or the media that veils those interests – as Jeremy Corbyn soon found out in the UK a few years back.

    I have spent the past 15 years or more trying to highlight to readers the true nature of our relationship to the media – the groomer and groomed – using the media’s coverage of major news events as a practical peg on which to hang my analysis. Talking about the abusive relationship purely in the abstract is likely to persuade few, given how deeply we are immersed in propaganda.

    Understanding how the media carries out its day-to-day switch and baits, its omissions, deceptions and misdirections, is the key to beginning the process of freeing our minds. If you look to the state-corporate media for guidance, you are already in its clutches. You are already a victim – a victim of your own suffocating ignorance, of your own self-sabotage, of your own death wish.

    I have expended many hundreds of thousands of words on this topic, as have others such as Media Lens. You can read a few recent examples from me here, here and here. Or you watch this talk I gave on how I freed myself professionally from the clutches of the corporate media and gained my freedom as an independent journalist:

    Different narratives

    But rarely do we have examples of propaganda so flagrant from our “free press” that it is hard for readers not to notice them. This week the state-corporate media made my job a little easier. Over the past few days, it has reported on two closely comparable events that it framed in entirely different ways. Ways that all too clearly serve state-corporate interests.

    The first such event was an Israeli air strike last Saturday on a school in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians, including children, had been sheltering from months of a rampaging Israeli military that has slaughtered many tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure.

    The massive scale of death and destruction in Gaza has forced the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide – not that you would know from the media coverage. The genocide case against Israel has been largely disappeared down the memory hole.

    The second event, on Monday, was a Russian air strike on a hospital in Kyiv. It was part of a wave of attacks on Ukrainian targets that day that killed 36 Ukrainians.

    Let us note that on a typical day in Gaza, at least 150 Palestinians are killed by Israel. That has been happening day after day for nine months. And the death toll is almost certainly a massive under-estimate. In decimated Gaza, unlike Ukraine, officials long ago lost the ability to count their dead.

    Let us note too that, despite huge numbers of Palestinian women and children being killed each day by Israeli missiles, the news media largely stopped covering the carnage in Gaza months ago. The BBC’s main evening news barely reports it.

    The fact alone that the killing of 36 Ukrainian civilians attracted so much attention and concern from the western media, in a war that’s more than two years old, when there is a far larger daily death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which our governments have been directly aiding, and the slaughter is of more recent origin, is telling in and of itself.

    So how did our most trusted and progressive media outlets report these comparable events, in Gaza and Ukraine?

    The headlines tell much of the story.

    In an all-too-familiar pattern, the BBC shouted from the rooftops: “At least 20 dead after ‘massive’ Russian missile attack on Ukraine cities”. It named Russia as responsible for killing Ukrainians, and did so even when there was still some debate about whether Russian missiles or Ukrainian air-defence missiles had caused the destruction.

    Meanwhile, the BBC carefully avoided identifying Israel as the party that killed those in Gaza sheltering from its bombs, even though Israel long ago stopped pretending that feeble Palestinian rockets could cause damage on such a scale. The headline read: “Air strike on Gaza school kills at least 15 people.”

    The Guardian’s headlines were even more revealing.

    The paper did, at least, identify Israel as responsible for the killing: “Israeli strike on Gaza school kills 16, say Palestinian officials.”

    However, the dry, matter-of-fact language about those Palestinian deaths, the suggestion that the deaths were only a claim, and the attribution of that claim to “Palestinian officials” (with the now widely accepted implication that those officials can’t be trusted) was intended to steer the emotional response of readers. They would be left cold and indifferent.

    The framing was clear: this was just another routine day in Gaza. No need to be overly invested in Palestinian suffering.

    Contrast that with the entirely different tone the Guardian struck in its headlines on the cover story (below) of the attack on Ukraine: “‘No words for this’: horror over Russian bombing of Kyiv children’s hospital.” The subhead reads: “Witnesses express shock and revulsion after deadly missile strike on Ukraine’s largest paediatric clinic.”

    The emphasis is on “horror”, “shock”, “revulsion”. “No words”, we are told, can convey the savagery of this atrocity. The headline’s emphasis is on the targeting of “children” with a “deadly missile”.

    All of which, of course, could be equally said about the horror of Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children day-in, day-out. But, of course, isn’t.

    Swaying readers

    If this isn’t convincing enough, take another example of the Guardian’s treatment (below) of comparable events in Gaza and Ukraine. Here is how the paper reported Israel destroying Gaza’s largest hospital back in November, when such actions had not yet become routine, as they are now, and when it had killed far larger numbers of civilians at the hospital in Gaza than Russia did in Ukraine.

    The headline reads clinically: “IDF says it has entered Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital in ‘targeted’ operation against Hamas.”

    The Guardian readily repeats the Israeli military’s terminology, conferring legitimacy on the carnage at al-Shifa hospital as a “targeted operation”. The fact that patients and medical personnel were the main victims is obscured by the Guardian’s repeating of the Israel’s claim that it was simply “targeting Hamas” – just as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza has supposedly been about “eliminating Hamas”, even as Hamas grows stronger.

    Apparently there is no “horror, “shock” or “revulsion” at the Guardian over the destruction and killing spree at Gaza’s largest hospital. Such sentiments are reserved for Ukraine.

    The same differences are illustrated in the US “liberal” media, as Alan MacLeod noted on X.

    A day after Russia’s strike on Ukraine, Israel was attacking another school shelter in Gaza. The New York Times made it clear how differently readers were supposed to feel about these similar events.

    Headline: “At Least 25 Reported Killed in Strike on School Building in Southern Gaza.”

    Note the passive, uncertain treatment – this was, after all, only a report. Note too that the perpetrator, Israel, remains unidentified.

    Headline: “Russia Strikes Children’s Hospital in Deadly Barrage Across Ukraine.”

    In stark contrast, Russia is clearly identified as the perpetrator, the active voice is used to describe its crime, and once again emotional descriptors – “deadly” – can be readily deployed to sway readers into an emotional response.

    Headlines and photos are the part of a story that almost every reader sees. Which is why their role in framing our understanding events is so important. They are the print media’s main means of propagandising us.

    Skewed priorities

    Broadcast media like the BBC work slightly differently in manipulating our responses.

    Running orders – the channel’s way to signal its news priorities – are important, as are the emotional reactions of anchors and reporters. Just think of the way Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, half-stifles a sneer every time he mentions Vladimir Putin by name, or how he struggles to suppress a scoff at any of the Russian president’s statements. Then try to imagine any BBC reporter being allowed to do the same with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, let alone British leader Sir Keir Starmer.

    Another way to make us invested in some events but not others is by concentrating on what are called “human-interest” stories, taking ordinary individuals and making their troubles and suffering the focus of a piece rather than the usual talking heads.

    The BBC evening news, for example, has largely stopped reporting on Gaza’s suffering. When it does, reports occur briefly and late in the running order and they usually cover little more than the dry facts. Human-interest stories have been rare.

    The BBC broke with that trend twice on Tuesday’s News at Ten – in the midst of Israel twice targeting schools that were supposed to be offering shelter to Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli bombs.

    Did the BBC tell the stories of the victims of those air strikes? No, those attacks received the most minimal coverage.

    The first human-interest story concerned a Ukrainian mother, shown desperately searching for her child in the aftermath of the attack on the Kyiv hospital the previous day, as well as their later reunion.

    The second human-interest story, this one from Gaza, didn’t concern any of the many victims of the Israeli attacks on school-shelters. It focused instead – and at great length – on a Palestinian man beaten in Gaza for opposing Hamas rule.

    In other words, not only did the BBC consider the day-old deaths of Ukrainians far more important news than Israel’s killing that day of 29 Palestinian civilians, but it also considered the beating of a man by Hamas as a bigger news priority too.

    When we are encouraged to care about Palestinians, it is only when the odd one is being brutalised by other Palestinians, not when millions of them are being brutalised by their occupier, Israel, in their ghetto-prisons.

    The pattern to this skewing of news priorities, the constant distorted framing of events is the clue to how we should decipher what the media is trying to achieve, what it is there to do.

    BBC news coverage all too often looks like it is exploiting any opportunity to highlight violence by Russia, in strict accordance with British foreign policy objectives. Equally, it all too often looks like the BBC is engineering pretexts to ignore or downplay violence by Israel, again in strict accordance with British foreign policy objectives.

    Ukraine is a key battleground for the West in its battle for global “full-spectrum dominance”, Washington’s central foreign policy strategy in which it positions itself so that no other great power, such as Russia and China, can challenge its control over the planet’s resources. The US and its western allies are ready to risk an entirely unnecessary nuclear war, it seems, to win that battle.

    Israel, meanwhile, a colonial fortress-state implanted by the West into the oil-rich Middle East, is a critically important ally in realising Washington’s dominance in its region. The Palestinians are the fly in the ointment – and like a fly, they can be swatted away with utter indifference and impunity.

    With this as our framework, we can understand why the BBC and other media fail so systematically to fulfill their self-professed remits to reporting objectively and disinterestedly, and fail to scrutinise and hold power to account – unless it is the power of an Official Enemy.

    The truth is the BBC, the Guardian and the rest are nothing more than conduits of state-corporate propaganda, masquerading as news outlets.

    Until we grasp that, they will continue grooming us.

    The post Why the news media’s job is to groom us first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Does Canada Uphold Binding International Law?

    The Canadian government repeatedly tells the world that Canada upholds an international rules-based order that is the basis of democracy.

    What the Canadian government says is not true. The evidence that it is not true is indisputable.

    There is widespread concern that social media is putting out disinformation, that this practice is dangerous and harmful and should be challenged. What about when our government puts out serious disinformation that is dangerous and harmful? Should that not be challenged? What do you think?

    I’m not talking about trivial matters. I’m talking about extremely serious issues where the health and survival of people and the planet are threatened. And I’m not talking about pretty words. The Canadian government excels at that. I’m talking about our actions. When words and actions contradict one another, it is the actions that speak the truth. In fact, it makes Canada’s role more destructive because it is dishonest. What do you think?

    If the Canadian government told the truth, it would say that Canada does not uphold binding international laws that protect human rights and the environment. What the Canadian government means is that it upholds international trade Agreements that enforce the interests of powerful private corporations, override democracy and harm human rights and the environment.

    Does that make sense to you? Does that reflect your values? Is that the world you want for your and everyone’s kids and grand-kids?

    Or does that trouble you like it troubles me?

    Another question. If we are a democracy as we claim to be, do you think this should be talked about? It isn’t. Why not? I thought democracy meant accountable government. Do you think we should require our political leaders to state where they stand on this issue and hold an open discussion with Canadians as to whether this is what we, who they supposedly represent, want – i.e. a discussion that is not held behind closed doors and under the influence of powerful vested interests and their paid lobbyists, as is the way that Canada’s policy on human rights, the environment and corporate power is typically decided?

    Canada, right now, is blatantly violating binding international human rights law

    Binding international human rights laws require that, no matter how much economic, military, political power you (and your allies) have, you are legally bound to obey that law. There can be no double standards. All lives are valuable, even the most powerless, especially the most powerless. Human rights are for all. Otherwise, it is not human rights law at all. It is a sham.

    The most serious binding international laws address horrific crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The International Court of Justice investigates and makes legally binding rulings against countries that have violated these laws and the International Criminal Court makes rulings against individuals who have violated these laws.

    Canada has ratified these international laws. Canada is legally bound to obey them and obey the rulings of these two top world courts. But Canada does not. Canada has sabotaged and continues to violate these laws.

    For example, Canada lobbied the International Criminal Court to refuse to investigate documented allegations of war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians. This effort by Canada to prevent the rule of law failed and the International Criminal Court (ICC) proceeded with its investigation. On the basis of overwhelming evidence, the Court ruled that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders, had committed war crimes and that the ICC would be seeking arrest warrants for them.

    After failing in its attempt to prevent the rule of law, the Canadian government now refuses to say whether it will, as it is legally required to do, obey the court’s ruling. Its pretended commitment to international law is non-existent.

    Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, including Jewish organizations, have challenged the Canadian government to obey international law. The government has ignored their appeal.

    Former Liberal Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy and former Liberal Attorney General Allan Rock and a group of 375 prominent former politicians and current academics have sent a letter challenging Prime Minister Trudeau to express clear support for the ICC ruling. The government has ignored their appeal.

    Prof. Heidi Matthews of Osgoode Hall Law School notes that along with a panel of experts in international law who independently reviewed the evidence, the ICC Prosecutor concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant are criminally responsible for starvation, murder, intentional attacks against civilians, extermination and persecution, among other crimes.

    As Prof. Matthews points out: “This dramatic development marks the first time leaders of a western allied state have been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the ICC.” Apparently, Canada believes that binding international law does not apply to western allied states.

    The US government, whether under President Biden or President Trump, believes that binding international human rights law does not apply to the US. In the past and currently, Republican and Democrat politicians in the US have threatened to punish and to arrest the ICC prosecutor and ICC officials, if they come to the United States. Human Rights Watch has written to Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly on May 21, 2024, saying, “We urge Canada, as an ICC member committed to a rules-based international order, to protect the court’s independence and publicly condemn efforts to intimidate or interfere with the court’s work, its officials, and those cooperating with the institution. Canada should also robustly support the ICC’s efforts to advance justice for grave international crimes.”

    The Canadian government stays silent and does nothing. Its proclaimed commitment to the rule of international law is nowhere to be seen.

    The International Court of Justice has ruled that the evidence shows that Israel has committed plausible genocide. The Court has ordered a number of provisional measures. Under the Genocide Convention, Canada is legally required to implement these measures and take all action possible to prevent genocide. Instead, Canada is aiding and abetting genocide by not immediately stopping the shipment of any weapons to Israel.

    Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights, along with others, have filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government to stop arms export to Israel.

    War has devastating environmental impacts

    Please note that, in addition to the horrific human costs, war has a devastatingly destructive environmental impact. See, for example: Revealed: repairing Israel’s destruction of Gaza will come at huge climate cost.

    Canada supports international “free” trade rules that enforce the interests of corporations

    When the Canadian government says it supports the rule of international law, it is referring to its support for international “free” trade rules that override democracy, increase corporate power and harm the environment. These “free” trade rules are colonialism in a new disguise, giving “freedom” to exploit and dehumanize indigenous peoples and populations in the Global South.

    The government is providing misleading, deceptive information.

    Please note that binding international laws that protect human rights and the environment have no enforcement mechanisms. International trade agreements have enforcement mechanisms, such as secretive World Trade Organization tribunals and Free Trade panels, which can force governments to pay billions of dollars to corporations and get rid of laws the corporations don’t like, such as laws that protect the environment and the rights of indigenous communities.

    Think about that. Trade Agreements that protect the huge global power and profits of corporations, such as fossil fuel corporations, mining corporations, agro-chemical corporations, are enforceable.

    Legally binding International Conventions that protect the health and survival of people and the planet are not enforceable.

    Does that make sense to you? Do you think that we should, if we are a democracy, at least have an open discussion about this?

    Right now, for example, the Canadian government together with the U.S. government and powerful agro-chemical corporations (Revealed: Monsanto owner and US officials pressured Mexico to drop glyphosate ban) has threatened to take legal action against Mexico under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (formerly the North America Free Trade Agreement), if the Mexican government does not abandon its decision to place restrictions on the import of GMO corn and glyphosate.

    In January 2023, the Council of Canadians and other organizations wrote to the PM Trudeau and government Ministers, stating: “We call on the Canadian Government to back Mexico’s plan to phase out GMO corn and the use of glyphosate by 2024.”

    “We oppose the use of trade agreements to undermine democratic rights and prioritize
    corporate profit-making ahead of the needs of our communities.”

    Farmer associations, environmental and social justice organizations sent a petition to the Canadian government, stating: “We oppose Canada’s role in the trade dispute that challenges Mexico’s restrictions on the use of GM corn. We oppose the use of trade agreements to undermine democratic rights and prioritize corporate profit-ma::king ahead of the needs of our communities.” They asked Canada to withdraw from this dispute. Canada continues to act for the interests of the agro-chemical lobby.

    The powerful pesticide lobby organization CropLife Canada stated: “CropLife is pleased that Canada is defending rules-based trade and holding Mexico accountable to the free trade agreement.”

    Contrary to what the Canadian government states, Canada is serving the vested interests of the chemical lobby, not democracy. Environmental organizations have expressed concern that Health Canada, which is supposed to regulate pesticides to protect human and environmental health, has been captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate and ignores inconvenient scientific evidence. In the same way, Health Canada was captured by the asbestos industry and supported the corrupt information of the asbestos lobby that asbestos can be safely used.

    Another example of how Canada is undermining democracy, the environment and human rights and is instead serving the interests of Canadian mining and resource extraction corporations is Canada’s support for an “investor-State dispute settlement” regime (yes, this is indeed a pretty phrase intended to put you to sleep, but what it means is giving enforceable power for corporations to override democracy) in the free trade Agreement Canada is currently negotiating with Ecuador.

    As University of British Columbia professor of law, policy, and sustainability and former U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David R. Boyd, stated in a Report to the UN General Assembly in October 2023, Investor-State dispute settlements have catastrophic consequences for the environment and human rights.

    Boyd’s report provides:

    compelling evidence that a secretive international arbitration process called investor-State dispute settlement has become a major obstacle to urgent actions needed to address the planetary environmental and human rights crises. Foreign investors use the dispute settlement process to seek exorbitant compensation from States that strengthen environmental protection, with the fossil fuel and mining industries already winning over $100 billion in awards.

    Amnesty International and environmental groups have called on the Canadian government to exclude this investor-State dispute settlement provision, but, as is its practice, the government is serving the financial interests of powerful corporate lobby groups and is violating binding international laws that protect the environment and human rights.

    Do you support this? Do you think we should, at least, talk about whether this is the world we want? Does it bother you that the CBC and the establishment media pretend not to see this issue and choose not to challenge the government on it? Supposedly, their role is to hold power accountable, but they do not.

    It is up to us to challenge the government’s dangerous misinformation and demand that the government support binding international laws that protect the well-being of people and the planet.

    We need to care about one another and the planet. We will be happier and safer if we do so.

    The post Does Canada Uphold Binding International Law? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tibet Disinformation: Will ‘Resolve Tibet Act’ Challenge Radio Free Asia’s Narrative?

    Tibet Disinformation: Will 'Resolve Tibet Act' Challenge Radio Free Asia's Narrative?

    Image: archivenet

    We have a question for the State Department and its various agencies, over which it either has influence or funds; including Radio Free Asia (RFA)!

    Once the recently passed ‘Resolve Tibet Act’ is signed into law by President Biden can Tibetans be confident that U.S. support for Tibet will empower State Department officials to actively and directly counter disinformation about Tibet from the Chinese government, such as actively rejecting false claims that Tibet has been part of China since “ancient times”?

    For decades US policy has been one of not only accepting China’s fact-free claims on Tibet, but affirming and promoting the lie that Tibet is part of China.

    RFA, a supposedly impartial and respected news agency, has an entire department dedicated to reportage on Tibet. However their coverage, although exposing human rights issues and highlighting the oppressive nature of Chinese rule in Tibet, consistently amplifies Chinese propaganda in regard to Tibetan territory. Its maps are those approved and peddled by the Chinese Regime, while its editors ensure reports use phrases that have a worrying similarity to the disinformation issued by China’s Foreign Ministry.

    Tibet Disinformation: Will 'Resolve Tibet Act' Challenge Radio Free Asia's Narrative?

    Image: archivenet

    It is time to end such troubling appeasement! On that call we remind RFA Editors Roseanne Gerin and Malcom Foster that there are no “Tibetan areas” within Sichuan province; a description which they repeatedly approve and feature. In truth those locations are part of occupied Tibet’s eastern region of Kham!

    This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.

  • Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves

    Like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

    This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

    It’s happening already.

    Yet we’re not just being acclimated to the trappings of a police state. We’re also being bullied into silence and subservience in the face of outright injustice and heavy-handed political correctness, while simultaneously being groomed into accepting government tyranny, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude as societal norms.

    What exactly is going on?

    Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.

    Certainly, it’s not leading to more freedom.

    This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.

    It must be said: the various protests from both the Right and the Left in recent years have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.

    We may be worse off now than we were before.

    Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?

    You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

    This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    It works the same way every time.

    Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government headed up by their particular brand of political savior can solve the problems that plague us.

    We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.

    Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.

    The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.

    Nor does it seem to matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.

    Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”)

    Indeed, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

    We are walking a dangerous path right now.

    No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.

    We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when, in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.

    Never forget, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that the lesser of two evils is still evil.

    The post Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States Is the Main Obstacle to Peace in Palestine

    U.S. Marines and IDF soldiers in joint maneuver Intrepid Maven, Feb. 28, 2023. Photo: US Marines

    On June 13, Hamas responded to persistent needling by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S. proposal for a pause in the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The group said it has “dealt positively… with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a cease-fire agreement.” Hamas added, by contrast, that, “while Blinken continues to talk about ‘Israel’s approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any Israeli official voicing approval.”

    The full details of the U.S. proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed.

    As former Israeli Labor Party prime minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?”

    Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza.

    The basic disagreement that President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and U.S. governments do not.

    Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to—Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit.

    The U.S. is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder.

    The United States seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council.

    But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing outrage of people and countries across the world.

    This pattern of U.S. support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed.

    The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they never happened.

    The U.S. was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.

    Unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves.

    Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world.

    But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and civil rights.

    Qatar mediated a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive.

    The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.

    One way that the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member.

    Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the U.S. too.

    A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for.

    It is time for the United Nations and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side, and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.

    The post The United States Is the Main Obstacle to Peace in Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific

    On June 14, Reuters headlined: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic: The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.”

    A June 15 Google-search of the headline “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” produced virtually no publication of that Reuters news-report anywhere within the U.S. empire — U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. The news-report was not published, for example, in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail, nor CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, PBS, Deutsche Welle, etc. That headline did briefly run on the websites of USA Today and Fox News, but never the news-report itself on that given site, and the link to the story no longer works at either USA Today or Fox News. There had been a link to that headlined story, but that news-report had not been published on either site. The only mainstream site in the U.S. empire that posted not only the headline but that also at their site the actual news-report, was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on June 15. A Google-search of that headline four hours later on June 15 showed no better results. So, this extraordinarily important news-report remains as being news even the day after Reuters had published it on their news-feed. Suppression of a major news-story from a U.S. empire news-agency such as Reuters is highly extraordinary.

    That suppressed news-report — which should immediately have been splashed everywhere, because it was among the biggest news-stories anywhere on June 14 — opened:

    At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

    The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

    Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

    This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the account as fake and removed it.

    TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG

    #ChinaIsTheVirus

    Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China

    (Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)

    “COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

    RELATED

    Podcast: Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign

    After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

    The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

    The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

    “I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”

    Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

    The news-report also said:

    Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.

    When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

    COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines

    The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there. …

    To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

    “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” …

    In 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

    Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

    The statement — “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” — means that the U.S. Government was placing a higher priority upon “dragging China through the mud” than on keeping covid-19 deaths down in the Assia-Pacific region. Especially in the Phillipines, which under Duarte’s Presidency was neutralist in the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Chinese Government, adding to the death-rate there was not a practical concern for the U.S. Government. In other words: the U.S. Government treats neutralist nations as-if they’re instead among its enemy-nations, to such an extent that even civilian deaths there that are caused by the U.S. Government, are of no practical (much less of ethical) concern. This operation by the U.S. Government was expected to increase deaths in that region (because the U.S. Government believed that vaccinations would reduce covid-19 deaths in its own and allied territories), but they were not concerned about that. They were interested only in “how we could drag China through the mud.” The possibily that deaths would increase deaths in and around Asia as a result of what they were doing, was of no concern to them. The extent to which the post-1945 U.S. Government is significantly different than was Hitler’s Government in Germany, is therefore an appropriate matter for public debate, though it’s not being debated anywhere in today’s U.S. empire. The major importance of this news-report from Reuters is that it importantly contributes to that debate; and, now, the further fact of its virtually complete black-out within the U.S. empire, displays the extent to which the U.S. empire will not tolerate the existence of any such public debate. Perhaps this fact is even more important than that extraordinary report from Reuters itself was.

    A reasonable conclusion from all of this is that America’s Government treats neutral countries as-if they are enemy countries. An associated aspect of this fact is that starting on June 11th the U.S. Government increased its secondary sanctions against Russia — the sanctions against businesses that trade with Russia — so as to punish them for that and thereby to limit such firms’ choices as to which countries they will be allowed by the U.S. Government to have commerce with. Secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets (neutral countries and firms) with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. This is erecting a new “iron curtain,” of a specifically economic type, between the American empire — “The West” — and “The East.”

    The U.S. Government is, in effect, betting that to force neutrals to choose between “The West” and “the East,” “The West” will expand, instead of reduce, its empire. Whether, or the extent to which, the reverse might happen, was so much as even considered by “The West,” is not, as-of yet, publicly known.

    However, specifically as regards what was the topic in that Reuters news-report: to be concerned not at all about how the death-rates in the east-Asian region would be affected, but ONLY about “how we could drag China through the mud,” was — given the fact that the U.S. Government thought that to increase the vaccination-rates in that region would reduce the death-rates there — for the U.S. Government to intend to increase covid-19 deaths in the East-Asia & Pacific region. It was their intent, regardless of whether, or the extent to which, it was the result of what the U.S. Government did there.

    The post Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible

    We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

    1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

    And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

    2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

    We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

    We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

    And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

    3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

    And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

    We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

    We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

    In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

    4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

    The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

    We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

    We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

    5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

    We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

    We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

    We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

     

    We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

    We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

    6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

    We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

    We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

    We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

    In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

    In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

    All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

    The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

    The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Day the West Defined “Success” as a Massacre of 270 Palestinians

    Israel hasn’t just crossed the Biden administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp at the weekend, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.

    On Saturday, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its 7 October attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of them women and children.

    The true death toll may never be known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from the bombardment, crushed to death, or trapped and suffocating, or expiring slowly from dehydration if they cannot be dug out in time.

    Many hundreds more are suffering agonising injuries – should their wounds not kill them – in a situation where there are almost no medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an aid blockade.

    Israelis and American Jewish organisations – so ready to judge Palestinians for cheering attacks on Israel – celebrated the carnage caused in freeing the Israeli captives, who could have returned home months ago had Israel been ready to agree on a ceasefire.

    Videos even show Israelis dancing in the street.

    According to reports, the bloody Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of them possibly an American citizen.

    In comments to the Haaretz newspaper published on Sunday, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in.”

    He added: “We weren’t worried that they’d [referring to Hamas] do something to us all of a sudden. We didn’t object to anything. So I wasn’t afraid they’d kill me.”

    The Israeli media reported Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant describing Saturday’s operation as “one of the most heroic and extraordinary operations I have witnessed over the course of 47 years serving in Israel’s defence establishment”.

    The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is currently seeking an arrest warrant for Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges include efforts to exterminate the people of Gaza through planned starvation.

    State terrorism

    Israel has been wrecking the established laws of war with abandon for more than eight months.

    At least 37,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed so far in Gaza, though Palestinian officials lost the ability to properly count the dead many weeks ago following Israel’s relentless destruction of the enclave’s institutions and infrastructure.

    Israel has additionally engineered a famine that, mostly out of view, is gradually starving Gaza’s population to death.

    The International Court of Justice put Israel on trial for genocide back in January. Last month, it ordered an immediate halt to Israel’s attack on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. Israel has responded to both judgments by intensifying its killing spree.

    In a further indication of Israel’s sense of impunity, the rescue operation on Saturday involved yet another flagrant war crime.

    Israel used a humanitarian aid truck – supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population – as cover for its military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of perfidy.

    For months, Israel has been blocking aid to Gaza – part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October.

    But more specifically, Israel is waging a war on Unrwa, claiming without evidence that the UN’s main aid agency in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the UN, the international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s wanton savagery, permanently gone.

    By hiding its own soldiers in an aid truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing exactly what it accuses Hamas of.

    But Israel’s military action also dragged the aid effort – the only way to end Gaza’s famine – into the centre of the battlefield. Now Hamas has every reason to fear that aid workers are not what they seem; that they are really instruments of Israeli state terrorism.

    Nefarious motive

    In the circumstances, one might have assumed the Biden administration would be quick to condemn Israel’s actions and distance itself from the massacre.

    Instead, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was keen to take credit for the mass carnage – or what he termed a “daring operation”.

    He admitted in an interview on Sunday that the US had offered assistance in the rescue operation, though he refused to clarify how. Other reports noted a supporting British role, too.

    “The United States has been providing support to Israel for several months in its efforts to help identify the locations of hostages in Gaza and to support efforts to try to secure their rescue or recovery,” Sullivan told CNN.

    Sullivan’s comments fuelled existing suspicions that such assistance extends far beyond providing intelligence and a steady supply of the bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny Gaza enclave over the past few months – more than the total that hit London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during the Second World War.

    A Biden official disclosed to the Axios website that US soldiers belonging to a so-called American hostages unit had participated in the rescue operation that massacred Palestinian civilians.

    Additionally, footage shows Washington’s floating pier as the backdrop for helicopters involved in the attack.

    The pier was ostensibly built off Gaza’s coast at huge cost – some $320m – and over two months to bypass Israel’s blocking of aid by land.

    Observers argued at the time that it was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its construction.

    Its location, at the midpoint of Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel can launch raids into central Gaza like Saturday’s.

    Those critics appear to have been proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first deliveries arrived in mid-May.

    The pier soon broke apart, and its repair and return to operation was only announced on Friday.

    Now the fact that it appears to have been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what the World Court has called a “plausible genocide”.

    But like the use of the aid truck, it also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again – after pulling its funding to Unrwa – in directly discrediting the aid operation in Gaza when it is needed most urgently.

    That was the context for understanding the World Food Programme’s announcement on Sunday that it was halting the use of the pier for aid deliveries, citing “safety” concerns.

    ‘Successful’ massacre

    As ever, for western media and politicians – who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago – Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.

    The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270-plus Palestinians in the freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope”, while the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief”. The appalling death toll went unmentioned.

    Imagine describing in similarly positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel in recent months and known to be held in a torture facility.

    The London Times, meanwhile, breezily erased Saturday’s massacre of Palestinians by characterising the operation as a “surgical strike”.

    Media outlets uniformly hailed the operation as a “success” and “daring”, as though the killing and maiming of around 1,000 Palestinians – and the serial war crimes Israel committed in the process – need not be factored in.

    BBC News’ main report on Saturday night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought. The programme stressed that the death toll was “disputed” – though not mentioning that, as ever, it was Israel doing the disputing.

    The reality is that the savage “rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the US so fully indulgent of his procrastination.

    It will also be very difficult to repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted at the weekend. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.

    The remaining captives’ return will “probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant concessions”, he concluded.

    Leveraging murder

    Benny Gantz, the politician-general who helped oversee Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet and is widely described as a “moderate” in the West, resigned from the government on Sunday.

    Although ostensibly the dispute is over how Israel will extricate itself from Gaza over the coming months, the more likely explanation is that Gantz wishes both to distance himself from Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister faces possible arrest for crimes against humanity and to prepare for elections to take his place.

    The Pentagon and the Biden administration see Gantz as their man. Having him out of the government may give them additional leverage over Netanyahu in the run-up to a US presidential election in November in which Donald Trump will be actively trying to cosy up to the Israeli prime minister.

    The focus on Israeli politicking – rather than US complicity in the Nuseirat massacre – will doubtless provide a welcome distraction, too, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tours the region. He will once again wish to be seen rallying support for a ceasefire plan that is supposed to see the Israeli captives released – a plan Netanyahu will be determined, once again, to stymie.

    Blinken’s efforts are likely to be even more hopeless in the immediate wake of the Biden administration’s all-too-visible involvement in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.

    Washington’s claim to be an “honest broker” looks to everyone – apart from the reliably obedient western political and media class – as even more derisory than usual.

    The real question is whether Blinken’s serial diplomatic failures in ending the slaughter in Gaza are a bug or a feature.

    The stark contradiction in Washington’s position towards Gaza was exposed last week during a press conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.

    He suggested that the aim of Israel and the US was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself – presumably by some form of surrender – in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so, said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”

    Even the usually compliant western press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against humanity – the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat camp on Saturday – was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over Hamas.

    But more likely, the seeming contradiction was simply symptomatic of the logical entanglements resulting from Washington’s efforts to deflect from the real goal: buying Israel more time to do what it is so well advanced doing already.

    Israel needs to finish pulverising Gaza, making it permanently uninhabitable, so that the population will be faced with a stark dilemma: remain and die, or leave by any means possible.

    The same US “humanitarian pier” that was pressed into service for Saturday’s massacre may soon be the “humanitarian pier” that serves as the exit through which Gaza’s Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, shipped out of a death zone engineered by Israel.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post The Day the West Defined “Success” as a Massacre of 270 Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3

    This is about the U.S. Government’s lie to the naive Gorbachev, which fooled him to accept the U.S. empire’s proposal that East Germany become a part of West Germany, and that the Soviet Union and its one-Party rule end, and that its Warsaw Pact military alliance end while America’s NATO military alliance wouldn’t. In other words: it’s about how the Cold War on America’s side continued secretly (and now again brings America and Russia to the very brink of WW3), after the Cold War on Russia’s side ended in 1991 — ended on the basis of America’s lie and Russia’s trust in that lie:

    On 10 September 2015, I documented this lie because so many U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ were alleging it not to have happened but to be mere ‘Russian propaganda’ (and, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, some have even alleged that “European security has in fact benefited significantly from NATO’s enlargement” — a lie on top of the basic one). I also quoted there ‘historians’ who denied this basic lie, so that a reader could see not only the truth but the regime’s agents’ lies denying that it (the West’s Big Lie) had actually happened or that it was important. But then, on 12 December 2017, the U.S. National Security Archives at George Washington University released even fuller documentation of the lie that had occurred by the U.S. Government, and here are highlights from their documentation of it, so that this continuing Big Lie will be recognized by every sane person as being what it is, the Big Lie that might end up producing World War Three:

    Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.

    Memcon from 2/9/90 meeting w/USSR Prem. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnaze, Moscow, USSR

    Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: “The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process” of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later in the conversation, Baker poses the same position as a question, “would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?” The declassifiers of this memcon actually redacted Gorbachev’s response that indeed such an expansion would be “unacceptable” – but Baker’s letter to Kohl the next day, published in 1998 by the Germans, gives the quote.

    Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38).

    *****

    Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner

    Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

    The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. …

    The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)

    *****

    In addition, there is this: On 11 August 2014, Mary Elise Sarotte headlined at the U.S. empire’s own Foreign Affairs journal, “A Broken Promise?” as-if there still had been any doubt that it was that, and so an honest title for her article would have been “A Broken Promise” or even “A Broken Promise!” Because there’s no question about it. She reported not only that it definitely was a lie, and one by the U.S. Government itself; and that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush told America’s stooge leaders, starting on 24 February 1990, that it was going to be a broken promise because “‘TO HELL WITH THAT! [promise]’ HE [Bush] SAID. ‘WE PREVAILED, THEY DIDN’T.’” In other words: on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush started secretly ordering his vassals to continue forward with the intention for the U.S. alliance ultimately to swallow-up not only the rest of the USSR but all of the Warsaw Pact and finally Russia itself. And this has been precisely what the U.S. regime and its colonies have been doing, up until 24 February 2022, when Russia finally put its foot down, to stop NATO’s coming within around a mere 300 miles of The Kremlin.

    Consequently, even if NATO served a constructive purpose during 1945-1991, it has afterward only endangered the world — including especially Europe, making Europe be again the main battlefield if another World War occurs — and thus its continuance after 1991 can reasonably be considered a massive international crime by the U.S. Government.

    NATO is an extension of the will of the U.S. Government, and this is so blatant a fact so that Article 13, which is the only portion of NATO’s charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, that says anything about how a member-nation may either quit NATO or be expelled from NATO, places the U.S. Government in charge of processing a “denunciation” (voluntary withdrawal) — the Charter’s term for resigning from NATO. This term “denunciation” (instead of “withdrawal”) clearly means that if any member does quit, then that will be interpreted by NATO as constituting a hostile act, which will have consequences (the resigning member will be placed onto NATO’s unspoken list of enemies). NATO’s charter has no provision by which a member can be expelled. Moreover, it fails to include any provision by which the charter can be amended or changed in any manner. No charter or constitution that fails to include a provision by which it may be amended can reasonably be acceptable to a democracy: it is so rigid as to be 100% brittle, impossible to adapt to changing challenges. The NATO charter itself is a dictatorial never a democratic document. It takes up, for the U.S. regime after 1945, the function that the Nazi Party had held prior to that in and for Germany: after Hitler died, America took up and has held high his torch for global dictatorship. In fact, “the Government of the United States of America” is also stated in Article 10 as the entity to process applications to join NATO, and, in Article 11, as being the processor of “ratifications” of applications to join.

    This Treaty is an imperial document, of the U.S. empire, none other. And, after 1991, its continuation is based only on lies, including the one that now is coming to a head in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, though Biden said it is — he said recently of Ukraine, that “they are part of NATO.” Tyrants imagine that what they want can simply be willed into existence, and they don’t care about the essential needs of others. Such individuals are driven by their own hatreds. That is what stands at the very top of NATO.

    And this is why we are now at the nuclear brink, because of an organization that ought to have ended in 1991.

    The post America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be

    Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.

    Here’s what happened:

    1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.

    3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

    5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”

    7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).

    If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.

    University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.

    The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.

    Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.

    Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.

    In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.

    There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.

    We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.

    The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden’s “Red Line” Continues to Move to Allow More Israeli Atrocities in Gaza

    For some time, President Joe Biden has claimed that there are limits to US support for Israel, that he cares about the loss of Palestinian life and that certain Israeli conduct (e.g., an invasion of Rafah, an Israeli-designated “safe zone”) would result in the loss of US backing.  The events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.

    The atrocities of Israel in Gaza continue to mount and to become more egregious by the day.  A month ago, on May 6, 2024, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden Administration.  Israel responded by rejecting this agreement and then immediately doing what Biden warned against doing – attacking Rafah where around 1.7 million Gazan refugees are now living in makeshift tents.  As part of this offensive, Israel closed off the Rafah crossing, the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza and preventing any people from leaving.  What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians which the Biden Administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.

    One of the worst massacres took place on May 27, 2024, when Israeli forces carried out an air assault upon a neighborhood in Rafah in which, as explained by CNN, “[a]t least 45 people were killed and more than 200 others injured . . . most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Palestinian medics. No hospital in Rafah had the capacity to take the number of casualties, the ministry said.”  Many were horrified by a video which went viral on social media showing a father holding his headless baby who had been decapitated in the assault.

    Not even this abominable act elicited a rebuke from the Biden Administration which said that it would leave Israel to investigate itself in regard to this incident, and that it had no plans of changing policy as a result.

    And now, Israel has just destroyed a school in Rafah which had been run by UNRWA and which had been sheltering 6,000 Gazan refugees at the time of its destruction.  In this assault, at least 40 civilians were killed, including 14 children and 9 women, bringing the total number of civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 36,000, including 15,500 children.  As is usually the case given that the US is by far the largest arms supplier to Israel, it was determined that Israel had used US munitions in this attack on the school.  After this atrocity, the UN added Israel to its “list of shame” — a distinction reserved for countries that bring extraordinary harm to children.  In response to this massacre and this shameful UN designation, the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be “transparent” about the assault.  No change in US policy toward Israel is forthcoming.

    If this were not enough, reports of more grisly crimes are emerging daily.  For example, accounts have emerged of the heinous treatment of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of Israeli correctional officers and investigators.

    As Mondoweiss explains in a June 7 article, “[b]ehind the bars of Israeli prisons, Israel has been waging war against Palestinian prisoners, creating conditions that make the continuation of human life impossible. The effects of this brutal campaign have reverberated among prisoners’ families outside of jail, who are watching their loved ones being systematically starved, beaten, tortured, and degraded.”  Mondoweiss cites a CNN exposé, based upon whistleblower testimony, which detailed “a number of medieval practices to which Palestinian prisoners have been subjected, including being strapped down to beds while blindfolded and made to wear diapers, having unqualified medical trainees conduct procedures on them without anesthesia, having dogs set on them by prison guards, being regularly beaten or put into stress positions for offenses as minor as peeking beneath their blindfolds, having zip-tie wounds fester to the point of requiring amputation, and a host of other horrific measures.”

    Mondoweiss also cites a New York Times article “based on interviews with former detainees and Israeli military officers, doctors, and soldiers who worked at the prison, bringing new horrors to light about the treatment of Gazan prisoners. Detainee testimonies repeated many of these same accounts but also included additional disturbing accounts of sexual violence, including testimonies of rape and forcing detainees to sit on metal sticks that caused anal bleeding and ‘unbearable pain.’”  And, of course, as Mondoweiss notes, the abominable treatment of Palestinian prisoners – which number in the thousands and includes women and children – has been going on long before October 7.

    All of this illustrates how Israel has no limits or restraints upon its treatment of the Palestinian people.  And this is so because its great patron, the United States, imposes no such restraints upon it.  For all of the crocodile tears shed by Biden, his Cabinet officials and his spokespeople, there truly is no “red line” which Israel could cross which would elicit a cessation of US support, including lethal support, for its war upon the Palestinian people.  And for this reason, the war Israel is waging upon Gaza proceeds without pause and continues to descend into greater acts of depravity and horror.  In truth, as protest planners organizing to surround the White House to show opposition to the war in Gaza, it is the American people who must therefore be the “red line” to stop this genocide.

    The post Biden’s “Red Line” Continues to Move to Allow More Israeli Atrocities in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Digital misinformation fueling Australia’s election angst

    Australians are worried about the impact of content that is digitally altered to fuel online misinformation, fearing it will have an impact on upcoming elections, according to a new consumer survey. The concerns come as the head of the electoral commission warned the integrity of upcoming elections is under threat from artificial intelligence generated deepfakes,…

    The post Digital misinformation fueling Australia’s election angst appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • John Minto: The first casualty of war is truth – the rest are mostly civilians

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Good slogans have people nodding their heads in agreement because they recognise an underlying truth in the words.  

    I have a worn-out t-shirt which carries the slogan, “The first casualty of war is truth — the rest are mostly civilians”.

    If you find yourself nodding in agreement it’s possibly because you have found it deeply shocking to find this slogan validated repeatedly in almost eight months of Israel’s war on Gaza.

    The mainstream news sources which bring us the “truth” are strongly Eurocentric. Virtually all the reporting in our mainstream media comes via three American or European news agencies — AP, Reuters and the BBC — or from major US or UK based newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times. 

    This reporting centres on Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications for what they are doing to Palestinians. Israeli spokespeople are front and centre and quoted extensively and directly.

    Palestinian voices, when they are covered, are usually at the margins. On television in particular Palestinians are most often portrayed as the incoherent victims of overwhelming grief.

    In the mainstream media Israel’s perverted lies dominate. 

    Riddled with examples
    The last seven months is riddled with examples. Just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters were accused of chanting “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House.

    The story was carried around the world through mainstream media as a nasty anti-semitic slur on Palestinians and their supporters. Four months later, after an intensive investigation New South Wales police concluded it never happened. The words were never chanted.

    However the Radio New Zealand website today still carries a Reuters report saying “A rally outside the Sydney Opera House two days after the Hamas attack had ignited heated debate after a small group were filmed chanting “Gas the Jews”.

    Even if RNZ did the right thing and removed the report now the old adage is true: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on”. Four months later and the police report is not news but the damage has been done as the pro-Israel lobby intended.

    The same tactic has been used at protests on US university campuses. A couple of weeks ago at Northeastern University a pro-Israel counter protester was caught on video shouting “Kill the Jews” in an apparent attempt to provoke police into breaking up the pro-Palestine protest.

    The university ordered the protest to be closed down saying “the action was taken after some protesters resorted to virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’”. The nastiest of lies told for the nastiest of reasons — protecting a state committing genocide.

    Similarly, unverified claims of “beheaded babies” raced around the world after the October 7 attack on Israel and were even repeated by US President Joe Biden. They were false.

    No baby beheaded
    Even the Israeli military confirmed no baby was beheaded and yet despite this bare-faced disinformation the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand was able to repeat the lie, along with several others, in a recent TVNZ interview on Q&A without being challenged.

    War propaganda such as this is deliberate and designed to ramp up anger and soften us up to accept war and the most savage brutality and blatant war crimes against the Palestinian people.

    Recall for a moment the lurid claims from 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floor. It was false but helped the US convince the public that war against Iraq was justified.

    Twelve years later the US and UK were peddling false claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” to successfully pressure other countries to join their war on Iraq.

    Perhaps the most cynical misinformation to come out of the war on Gaza so far appeared in the hours following the finding of the International Court of Justice that South Africa had presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide.

    Israel smartly released a short report claiming 12 employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had taken part in the October 7 attack on Gaza. The distraction was spectacularly successful.

    Western media fell over themselves to highlight the report and bury the ICJ findings with most Western countries, New Zealand included, stopping or suspending funding for the UN agency.

    Independent probe
    eedless to say an independent investigation out a couple of weeks ago shows Israel has failed to support its claims about UNRWA staff involved in the October 7 attacks. It doesn’t need forensic analysis to tell us Israel released this fact-free report to divert attention from their war crimes which have now killed over 36,000 Palestinians — the majority being women and children.

    The problem goes deeper than manufactured stories. For many Western journalists the problem starts not with what they see and hear but with what their news editors allow them to say.

    A leaked memo to New York Times journalists covering the war tells them they are to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.

    They have even been instructed not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” or the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza settled by Palestinian refugees driven off their land by Israeli armed militias in the Nakba of 1947–49.

    These reporting restrictions are a blatant denial of Palestinian history and cut across accurate descriptions under international law which recognises Palestinians as refugees and the occupied Palestinian territories as precisely what they are — under military occupation by Israel.

    People reading articles on Gaza from The New York Times have no idea the story has been “shaped” for us with a pro-Israel bias.

    These restrictions on journalists also typically cover how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media. Every Palestinian teenager who throws a stone at Israeli soldiers is called a “militant” or worse and Palestinians who take up arms to fight the Israeli occupation of their land, as is their right under international law, are described as “terrorists” when they should be described as resistance fighters.

    The heavy pro-Israel bias in Western media reporting is an important reason Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing violence which results from it, has continued for so long.

    The answer to all of this is people power — join the weekly global protests in your centre against Israel’s settler colonial project with its apartheid policies against Palestinians.

    And give the mainstream media a wide berth on this issue.

    John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law

    The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law.  Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.

    In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest.  Those regarding the Hamas trio of its leader Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and the organisation’s political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, would have left most Western governments untroubled.

    From Khan’s perspective, the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will focus on policies of starvation, the intentional causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, intentional attacks on the Palestinian population, including extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.

    The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is not what it claims to be.  Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering.  The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”

    The reaction from the Israeli side was always expected.  Netanyahu accused the prosecutor of “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”.  He rejected “with disgust the comparison of the prosecutor in The Hague between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas”.

    Israeli President Isaac Herzog also found “any attempt to draw parallels between these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel – working to fulfil its duty to defend and protect its citizens in adherence to the principles of international law […] outrageous and cannot be accepted by anyone.”

    Israel’s staunchest ally, sponsor and likewise self-declared democracy (it is, in fact, a republic created by those suspicious of that system of government), was also there to hold the fort against such legal efforts.  US President Joe Biden’s statement on the matter was short and brusque: “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.  And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”

    The democracy-as-purity theme, one used as a seeming exculpation of all conduct in war, surfaced in the May 21 exchange between Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.  Was the secretary, inquired Risch, amenable to supporting legislation to combat the ICC “sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent, legitimate, democratic judicial system”?  (No consideration was given to the sustained efforts by the Netanyahu government to erode judicial independence in passing legislation to curb the discretion of courts to strike down government decisions.)

    The response from Blinken was agreeable to such an aim.  There was “no question we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrong-headed decision.”  As things stand, a bill is already warming the lawmaking benches with a clear target.  Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act would obligate the President to block the entry of ICC officials to the US, revoke any current US visas such officials hold, and prohibit any property transactions taking place in the US.  To avoid such measures, the court must cease all cases against “protected persons of the United States and its allies”.

    The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer similarly saw the prosecutor’s efforts as a pairing of incongruous parties. “The fact however that the leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas whose declared goal is the extinction of the State of Israel is being mentioned at the same time as the democratically elected representatives of that very State is non-comprehensible.”

    From the outset, such statements do two things.  The first is to conjure up a false distinction – that of equivalence – something absent in the prosecutor’s application.  The acts alleged are relevant to each specified party and are specific to them.  The second is a corollary: that democracies do not break international law and certainly not when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, most notably when committed against a certain type of foe.  The more savage the enemy, the greater the latitude in excusing vengeful violence.  That remains, essentially, the cornerstone of Israel’s defence argument at the International Court of Justice.

    Such arguments echo an old trope.  The two administrations of George W. Bush spilled much ink in justifying the torture, enforced disappearance and renditions of terror suspects to third countries during its declared Global War on Terror.  Lawyers in both the White House and Justice Department gave their professional blessing, adopting an expansive definition of executive power in defiance of international laws and protections.  Such sacred documents as the Geneva Conventions could be defied when facing Islamist terrorism.

    Lurking beneath such justifications is the snobbery of exceptionalism, the conceit of power.  Civilised liberal democracies, when battling the forces of a named barbarism, are to be treated as special cases in the world of international humanitarian law.  The ICC prosecutor begs to differ.

    The post A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech

    The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.

    Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.

    This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to campus protests.

    Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies; policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

    And now, when they should be empowered to take their rightful place in society as citizens who fully understand and exercise their right to speak truth to power, they are being censored, silenced and shut down.

    Consider what happened recently in Charlottesville, Va., when riot police were called in to shut down campus protests at the University of Virginia staged by students and members of the community to express their opposition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

    As the local newspaper reported, “State police sporting tactical gear and riot shields moved in on the demonstrators, using pepper spray and sheer force to disperse the group and arrest the roughly 15 or so at the camp, where for days students, faculty and community members had sang songs, read poetry and painted signs in protest of Israel’s ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.”

    What a sad turn-about for an institution which was founded as an experiment in cultivating an informed citizenry by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president.

    Unfortunately, the University of Virginia is not unique in its heavy-handed response to what have been largely peaceful anti-war protests. According to the Washington Post, more than 2300 people have been arrested for taking part in similar campus protests across the country.

    These lessons in compliance, while expected, are what comes of challenging the police state.

    Free speech can certainly not be considered “free” when expressive activities across the nation are being increasingly limited, restricted to so-called free speech zones, or altogether blocked.

    Remember, the First Amendment gives every American the right to “petition his government for a redress of grievances.”

    Along with the constitutional right to peacefully (and that means non-violently) assemble, the right to free speech allows us to challenge the government through protests and demonstrations and to attempt to change the world around us—for the better or the worse—through protests and counterprotests.

    If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment with all its robust protections for free speech, assembly and the right to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances is little more than window-dressing on a store window—pretty to look at but serving little real purpose.

    After all, living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign.

    That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about: it assures the citizenry of the right to express their concerns about their government to their government, in a time, place and manner best suited to ensuring that those concerns are heard.

    Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

    In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

    Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

    Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

    Yet if Americans are not able to peacefully assemble for expressive activity outside of the halls of government or on public roads on which government officials must pass, or on college campuses, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

    If we cannot stand peacefully outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties that we cherish as Americans.

    And if we cannot proclaim our feelings about the government, no matter how controversial, on our clothing, or to passersby, or to the users of the world wide web, then the First Amendment really has become an exercise in futility.

    The source of the protest shouldn’t matter. The politics of the protesters are immaterial.

    To play politics with the First Amendment encourages a double standard that will see us all muzzled in the end.

    The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the final link in the police state chain.

    If ever there were a time for us to stand up for the right to speak freely, even if it’s freedom for speech we hate, the time is now.

     

    The post From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia not equipped to handle deepfake electoral threat

    Deepfakes present a growing threat to the integrity of Australia’s electoral system, according to the head of the Australian Electoral Commission, who has warned that the agency is not equipped to tackle AI-generated misinformation. Appearing before a Senate inquiry into AI on Monday, electoral commissioner Tom Rogers said “significant and widespread examples of deceptive AI…

    The post Australia not equipped to handle deepfake electoral threat appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • BJP’s 2024 poll campaign is riding on disinformation and Muslim vilification

    How big a part will disinformation play in the 2024 election campaign? The question has been asked by so many people on so many platforms. As the big fat Indian election season reaches its peak, the answer is quite clear. At the moment, the BJP’s Lok Sabha 2024 election campaign stands firmly on falsehoods, disinformation and communal hate. These are tools with which the party has always sought to create propaganda in its favour — it is the raison d’etre of the IT cell and Amit Malviya — but with the election season at its peak, the BJP has decided to use them in a no-holds-barred manner.

    Modi Leading the Way

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Banswara speech on April 21 — in which he served his audience a cocktail of disinformation and communal hate — was just one example. His denigrating reference to Muslims as ‘infiltrators’ and ‘those who produce more children’ out to take away the wealth of the Hindus drew sharp reactions from the Opposition and the international media while Right Wing trolls like OpIndia editor Nupur J Sharma celebrated it. And then he claimed that the Congress manifesto had said the gold owned by women, particularly their mangalsutra, would be taken away and given to Muslims. Alt News has already shown that the manifesto does not say anything remotely similar to this, by any stretch of the imagination.

    Other than deepening communal polarisation, what Modi’s speech was also able to achieve was to steer the entire political discourse, bang in the middle of the elections, to what he saw as a Congress-Muslim nexus to harm Hindus. Every top BJP leader has repeated the trope since. And this villainisation of Muslims, their projection as a devil out to devour the jobs and wealth of Hindus, fits well within the RSS-BJP’s larger communal agenda of ‘Hindu khatre mein hai’ (Hindus are in danger in this country).

    On April 23 in Rajasthan’s Tonk-Sawai Madhopur constituency, Modi repeated the falsehoods. He said, referring to his speech two days earlier, “When I came to Rajasthan the day before, for 90 seconds in my speech I presented some truths before the country. It created so much panic in the entire Congress and INDI alliance… I presented the truth before the nation that the Congress has hatched a deep conspiracy to snatch your property and distribute it among their special favourites. I exposed this a couple of days back.”

    For over 15 minutes in the 35-minute speech, Modi dwelt on the theory of a Congress-Muslim nexus. Pertinently, just after the publication of the Congress manifesto, Modi had called it the manifesto of the Muslim League. In Tonk, he urged his audience to vote for the BJP to make sure that Ram Navami could be celebrated and Hanuman Chalisa could be sung in the state. He also stated, “You know that they have written in the manifesto that there will be a survey of ‘stree-dhan‘ and ‘mangalsutra’ owned by our mothers and sisters… and then all your wealth which is in excess of your need will be confiscated and distributed. If you have two homes, one will be taken away.”

    Fact remains that there is no mention of wealth survey and distribution in the Congress manifesto. Several media outlets, including Alt News, have debunked the false claim by the Prime Minister, including Firstpost, BoomLive, ABP Live, NDTV.

    The Prime Minister repeated his claims on Congress’s ‘sinister’ plans to distribute the wealth of the majority among Muslims, in an interview to the Times of India published on April 29 and called it a ‘Maoist thinking and ideology’. Responding to a question on wealth distribution, he stated the following:

    Amit Shah

    Union home minister Amit Shah addressed a rally in Chhattisgarh’s Kanker the very next day. Shah asked why Congress wanted to do a survey of wealth. He challenged Rahul Gandhi to come clean to the people of India on whether the Congress manifesto talked about a survey. As already mentioned, the Congress manifesto does not talk about a wealth survey. Nor does it talk about redistribution of wealth, let alone among any particular community.

    Shah spoke at Guna in Madhya Pradesh on April 26 and in Chhattisgarh’s Bemetera district on April 28. At both the places, he claimed the Congress manifesto had made it clear that the party wanted to introduce Sharia Law and reintroduce triple talaq.

    “Read the Congress manifesto carefully. They have said they will re-implement the Muslim personal law and triple talaq. You tell me, can this country be run by Sharia?” he said in his speech in Madhya Pradesh.

    In Chhattisgarh, he said, “They have said they will make a separate law for minorities. Tell me, should this country function as per Sharia? Should triple talaq be reintroduced?”

    There is no mention of triple talaq or Sharia in the Congress manifesto. About personal laws, the manifesto says in the section titled, ‘Religious and Linguistic Minorities’:

    • Congress will ensure that, like every citizen, minorities have the freedom of choice of dress, food,
      language and personal laws.
    • We will encourage reform of personal laws. Such reform must be undertaken with the participation and
      consent of the communities concerned.

    Rajnath Singh

    Union defence minister Rajnath Singh, No. 3 in the Modi Cabinet, addressed a meeting in Vishakhapatnam on April 24, dubbed as ‘intellectual meet’. Singh started his speech by pointing out that India’s stature on the global stage has improved significantly in the Modi regime. And then he told the audience the ‘war rukwa di’ story that is so incredulous that it has now turned into a meme. “Our Prime Minister quickly spoke to Russian president Mr Putin and Ukraine president Mr Zelenskyy and the war stopped for four and a half hours and more than 22000 students returned to India. This is India’s stature.”  The ‘intellectuals’ clapped gleefully. The relevant part of his speech can be heard below:

    It is now known by many that Union external affairs ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi had refuted the claim in a press conference on March 3, 2022, adding, “to say that somebody is holding up bombing or this is something we are coordinating, (that) I think that’s absolutely inaccurate.”

    The Muslim question soon entered into his speech. Singh stated that Muslim appeasement and vote-bank politics were in the DNA of Congress which divided the country on the basis of religion together with the Muslim league. “BJP”, he asserted, “never politicized caste, creed and religion.”

    Singh lingered on the Muslim question and said that Andhra Pradesh was the first laboratory of Congress’s communal agenda and called it a ‘dirty game’. “Between 2004 and 2010, Congress tried four times to introduce Muslim reservation in Andhra Pradesh but they failed in their mission because of legal provisions and the alertness of the Supreme Court.”

    He further said, “The 2024 Congress manifesto cleverly and indirectly talks about introducing Muslim reservation.  Our PM Modiji has exposed this and Congress is now attacking him by claiming he is telling a lie. Truth is that Congress is fooling Indians… If one reads section 3 and section 6 of the chapter on minority in the Congress manifesto, their intentions become clear.” He then reads the two sections, which are as follows:

    • We will encourage and assist students and youth belonging to the minorities to take full advantage of the
      growing opportunities in education, employment, business, services, sports, arts and other fields.
    • We will ensure that the minorities receive their fair share of opportunities in education, healthcare, public
      employment, public works contracts, skill development, sports and cultural activities without discrimination.

    This promise of ensuring fairness, Singh said, was “a preparation for bringing religious-based reservation through the back door.” He then extrapolated this to say that all these provisions were based on Sachar Committee report, which sought to divide Indian Army on the basis of religion. “This year’s manifesto hints at reservation based on religion in government jobs. If this is implemented, armed forces may also come under its ambit. This will affect India’s unity and integrity.”

    Fact remains that there is no mention of religion-based reservation in the Congress manifesto. The third point in the ‘Equity’ section of the manifesto promises to implement the 10% reservation in jobs and educational institutions for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), for all castes and communities without discrimination. There is no mention of the Sachar Committee report in the document, either.

    The defence minister must be particularly fascinated with the ‘war rukwa di’ claim, because a day before the Vizag meet, he visited Uttar Pradesh’s Bisahda village in Greater Noida on the 23rd where he held a rally in support of BJP’s Gautam Buddha Nagar candidate Mahesh Sharma, and he repeated it there as well.

    He has actually made this false claim innumerable times in the past. (April 15, 2024; Jan 10, 2024; May 14, 2023) A lie, repeated again and again, assumes the shape of truth — is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi ideologue Joseph Goebbles.

    Yogi Adityanath

    Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath addressed a public meeting at Amroha on April 23. He repeated the claim that Congress in its election manifesto had expressed intention to implement Sharia law in the country. “Will this country be governed by the Constitution formulated by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar or by some Shariat”? asked BJP’s poster boy of bulldozer justice. He dwelt on the issue for some time, explaining that the promise of introduction of personal laws, i.e., Sharia was made in the Congress manifesto because “PM Modi had stopped triple talaq…”

    In another speech in UP’s Sambhal constituency, he claimed that the Congress manifesto had promised a free-hand to Muslims in slaughtering cows.

    Anurag Thakur

    Addressing a rally in Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh from where he is seeking reelection, Union minister Anurag Thakur claimed that the imprint of foreign hands were clear in the Congress manifesto, which wanted to “give property of your children to the Muslims.”

    “In its manifesto, along with the hand of the Congress, hands of foreign forces are also visible who want to give your children’s property to Muslims, finish the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and divide the country in the name of caste and region,” Thakur said, adding, “It is for you to decide whether your property should go to your children or to the Muslims…”

    In all the above speeches, if any one thing was conspicuously clear, it was the attempt to communally polarize the electorate. The BJP, as this Al Jazeera piece notes, is leaving no stone unturned in its effort to turn the 2024 elections into a Hindu Vs Muslim fight. In an article titled “Why Did Modi Call India’s Muslims ‘Infiltrators’? Because He Could.”, the New York Times has traced Modi’s heightened anti-Muslim pitch back to his RSS pracharak days. Deliberating on the need for such a divisive strategy, the NYT writes, “It could be a sign of anxiety that his standing with voters is not as firm as believed, analysts said. Or it could be just a reflexive expression of the kind of divisive religious ideology that has fueled his politics from the start.”

    Social Media Foot Soldiers

    On expected lines, the trope has been picked up by the BJP’s social media warriors, which include the IT cell and influencers on X and other platforms. A video of Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah pledging equitable distribution of wealth irrespective of caste and religion was shared by Amit Malviya as ‘dangerous and divisive’.  Siddaramaiah had said last year addressing Muslims, “You too should get a share in the wealth of this country. You are also Indian right… This country should belong to you and us. The wealth of this country belongs to you and belongs to us, so I will work to distribute the wealth of this country to you too. In this case, I will say one thing you will not be treated unfairly for any reason. I work to protect you. Similarly, I work to protect people belonging to all religions and castes”. The video was falsely shared by Right Wing influencers like Rishi Bagree and Shashank Shekhar Jha as proof of Congress’s plan to take away the wealth of Hindus and distribute it to Muslims. Bagree and other users also shared a meme which showed Muslims taking over the house of a Hindu family. The caption says: “They’re coming for your family home, your memories, your sweat, your hardwork, your life savings.”

    On April 30, the BJP released an animated campaign video on its verified Instagram handle (bjp4india) which is solely about the villainization of Muslims. In it, Rahul Gandhi is portrayed as holding the party’s manifesto, which then turns into the Pakistan flag (Photo below, this is used as the thumbnail of the video as well). The voice-over says, “If Congress comes to power, it will snatch all the money and wealth from non-Muslims and distribute them among Muslims, their favourite community.”

    It further states that this has been happening in India since ancient times. “Ancient India was really beautiful. We were so rich and prosperous that each and every average citizen had plenty of gold, plenty of wealth, plenty of riches. And it was this prosperity that made infiltrators and robbers repeatedly invade India. They looted all our wealth and distribute it among themselves. Besides, they destroyed our temples. Congress has been empowering people of this community. Congress party’s manifesto is nothing but Muslim League’s ideology in disguise. If you are a non-Muslim, Congress will snatch your wealth and distribute it to Muslims. Narendra Modi knows of this evil plan. Only he has the strength to prevent it.”

    At the peak of the election season in India, the political discourse has thus been captured by false, hateful and, at times, bizarre narratives repeated by every major BJP leader led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These have been amplified by the party’s social media ecosystem. In all the above speeches that Alt News followed, there was no mention of the much publicized schemes brought in by the Modi government — Startup India, Make in India, Ayushman Bharat et cetera, and steps like demonitzation and the Modi government’s handling of Covid pandemic, which have always been portrayed by the BJP as its achievements. At the moment, the BJP’s 2024 campaign is riding on disinformation and anti-Muslim hate.

    The post BJP’s 2024 poll campaign is riding on disinformation and Muslim vilification appeared first on Alt News.


    This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Indradeep Bhattacharyya.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Chamber of Propaganda Horrors

    Tourists visiting Spanish cities like Córdoba, Toledo and Sevilla have the option of whiling away an hour or so at a ‘Museum of the Inquisition’, sometimes known as a ‘Gallery of Torture’. For around three euros, visitors can view an exotic range of devices used to impale, immolate, strangle and dismember human beings in the name of God.

    It’s tempting to reassure ourselves that these are relics of a far-distant past, horrors that could never happen now. But did the Dark Ages ever really end? Noam Chomsky commented:

    ‘Part of the tragedy of the Palestinians is that they have essentially no international support. For a good reason – they don’t have wealth, they don’t have power. So they don’t have rights. It’s the way the world works – your rights correspond to your power and your wealth.’

    It is indeed the way the world works. It is also the way the medieval world worked. UK Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron (Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton), recently passed judgment on the war in Ukraine at a Washington press conference:

    ‘It is extremely good value for money… Almost half of Russia’s pre-war military equipment has been destroyed without the loss of a single American life. This is an investment in the United States’ security.’

    According even to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, 31,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the conflict. US officials estimate 70,000 dead, while Russia claims to have killed 444,000. Are these deaths ‘good value for money’?

    And what about the 50,000 Russians estimated by the BBC to have died? Do they matter? After all, European civilisation is supposed to be founded on Christ’s teaching that we should love, not just our ‘neighbour’ but our ‘enemy’. On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine offered a different view to Bill, a caller from Manchester:

    ‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’

    Elsewhere, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, commented after Iran retaliated to Israel’s bombing of an Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing 16 people, including two senior Iranian generals:

    ‘The attacks on Israel by Iran this weekend were wrong. They risked civilian lives and they escalated the already dangerous tensions in the region. I pray for the peace and security of Israel’s people at this time and I appeal to all parties both for restraint and to act for peace and mutual security.’ (Our emphasis)

    If Christ had done political commentary, he would have declared both the Iranian and Israeli attacks wrong, and he would have prayed ‘for the peace and security’ of the peoples of Israel and Iran, and also Palestine.

    Cameron responded on the same issue:

    ‘[It was] a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done, and I think the whole world can see. All these countries that have somehow wondered, well, you know, what is the true nature of Iran? It’s there in black and white.”

    He was immediately asked: ‘What would Britain do if a hostile nation flattened one of our consulates?’

    Cameron’s tragicomic response:

    ‘Well, we would take, you know, we would take very strong action.’

    Naturally, ‘we’ would do the same or worse, but it’s a grim sign of Iran’s ‘true nature’ when ‘they’ do it. The ‘Evil’ have no right even to defend themselves when attacked by the ‘Good’. Standard medieval thinking.

    ‘Murderous’ And ‘Brutal’ – Tilting The Language

    In idle moments, we sometimes fantasise about opening our own Media Lens Chamber of Propaganda Horrors, a Hall of Media Infamy. It would be a cavernous space packed with examples of devices used to strangle and dismember Truth.

    A special section would be reserved for the sage effusions of BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner, who wrote recently of Israel:

    ‘It responded to the murderous Hamas-led attacks of 7 October… and then spent the next six months battering the Gaza Strip.’

    The Hamas attack was ‘murderous’, then, with Israel administering a mere ‘battering’ with its attack that has caused at least 30 times the loss of life. A ‘battering’ is generally bruising but not necessarily fatal. The term is certainly not synonymous with genocide. Is this biased use of language accidental, or systemic?

    Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) commented on their careful study of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal:

    ‘Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions. This was 73% of the time at the Times, 78% at the Post and 87% at the Journal. Only 23% of the time was “brutal” used to describe Israel’s actions…’

    The Intercept reported on a leaked memo which revealed that the New York Times had ‘instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land’. The Intercept added:

    ‘The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.’

    The memo was written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies. A Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity ‘for fear of reprisal’, said:

    ‘I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.’

    Our Chamber of Propaganda Horrors might feature this barely believable sentence from a BBC report by Lucy Williamson, which reads like something from the film ‘Dr. Strangelove’:

    ‘If you wanted to map the path to a healthy, functioning Palestinian government, you probably wouldn’t start from here.’

    Probably wouldn’t start from where? From the middle of a six-months genocide, with two million civilians starving, with children literally starving to death, with tens of thousands of children murdered, with Gaza in ruins? It is hard to imagine a more ethically or intellectually tone-deaf observation. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen added to the sense of surreality:

    ‘The decision not to veto the Ramadan ceasefire resolution is also an attempt by the Americans to push back at accusations that they have enabled Israel’s actions.’

    Is it an ‘accusation’ that the US has supplied billions of dollars of missiles and bombs without which Israel could not conduct its genocide? Is there any conceivable way the US could ever ‘push back at’ that unarguable fact? The Guardian described how the US has worked hard to avoid Congressional oversight:

    ‘The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval.

    ‘The Biden administration… has kept up a quiet but substantial flow of munitions to help replace the tens of thousands of bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny coastal strip, making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in military history.’

    These hidden sales are in addition to the $320m in precision bomb kits sold in November and 14,000 tank shells costing $106m and $147.5m of fuses and other components needed to make 155mm artillery shells in December.

    In response to the latest news of a massive additional supply of arms to Israel, Edward Snowden posted on X:

    ‘ok but you’re definitely gonna hold off on sending like fifteen billion dollars’ worth of weapons to the guys that keep getting caught filling mass graves with kids until an independent international investigation is completed, right?

    ‘…right?’

    Because we no longer live in the Dark Ages, right?

    Waiting For The Hiroshima Bombing Scene

    People are generally not tortured on the rack in Western societies, but are we really any less callous?

    Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Oppenheimer’ has been lauded to the skies. It earned 13 nominations at the Academy Awards, winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. It also won five Golden Globe Awards.

    And yet the film is a moral disgrace. It focuses on the life of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, and particularly, of course, on his key role in developing the first atomic weapons. The direct results of his efforts were the dropping of nuclear fireballs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan that killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people.

    These were the first acts of nuclear terrorism, by far the greatest single acts of terrorism the world has ever seen. Although the moral doubts haunting the ‘Manhattan Project’ then and since feature strongly in the film, a portrayal of the hideous impact of Oppenheimer’s invention on civilians is almost completely absent. This single, dignified comment from an elderly Japanese viewer reported by the Guardian says it all:

    ‘“I was waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to appear, but it never did,” said Mimaki, 82.’

    Although the BBC sought out the opinion of cinemagoers in Hiroshima, ‘only meters away’ from where the bomb exploded, the film’s shocking moral failure was not mentioned.

    On reflection, our museum might be better called, The Museum Of Media Madness. Thus, the BBC reported on the refusal of event organisers, The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), to ban Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest. The EBU opined:

    ‘We firmly believe that the Eurovision Song Contest is a platform that should always transcend politics, promote togetherness and bring audiences together across the world.’

    The BBC claims to be obsessed with reporting ‘both sides of the story’, but it conveniently forgot to mention that Russia has been banned from the song contest since 2022 for a reason that did not ‘transcend politics’ – its invasion of Ukraine.

    Martin Österdahl, EBU’s executive supervisor for Eurovision, was asked to explain the contradiction. He responded that the two situations were ‘completely different’. True enough – Israel’s crimes in Gaza are much worse even than Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Österdahl’s casual brush off:

    ‘We are not the arena to solve a Middle East conflict.’

    Media and political voices seeking to challenge the reigning brutality are not burned alive, but they are buried alive in high security prisons like Julian Assange, beaten up on the street like George Galloway, and forced into exile like Edward Snowden. Dissidents may not be pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables in the stocks, but they are pelted with relentless media attacks intended to discredit them.

    In the Guardian, John Crace greeted the news that Galloway had returned to parliament, with a piece titled:

    ‘The Ego has landed: George Galloway basks in his swearing in as MP’

    Crace wrote:

    ‘Wherever he goes, his giant ego is there before him. Like most narcissists, the only fool for whom he makes allowances – for whom he has a total blindspot – is himself.’

    He added:

    ‘… there is a lot about Galloway to dislike. His self-importance is breathtaking. Most MPs suffer from an excess of self-regard, but George is off the scale. It has never crossed his mind that he is not right about everything.’

    Before Galloway’s victory, a Guardian news piece commented:

    ‘“A total, total disaster”: Galloway and Danczuk line up for Rochdale push – Two former Labour MPs are back to haunt the party in what has been called “the most radioactive byelection in living memory”’

    As we have discussed many times, this is the required view, not just of Galloway, but of all dissidents challenging the status quo – they (and we) are all toxic ‘narcissists’. Thus, the BBC observed of Galloway, a ‘political maverick’:

    ‘To his critics and opponents, he is a dangerous egotist, someone who arouses division.’

    What percentage of Tory and Labour MPs under (and including) Sunak and Starmer are not dangerous egotists? Are the thousands of MPs who, decade after decade, line up to vote for US-UK resource wars of aggression of first resort, for action to exacerbate climate collapse, not dangerous egotists?  Of course they are, but they are not labelled that way. The only egotism perceived as ‘dangerous’ by our state-corporate media system is one that threatens biocidal, genocidal and suicidal state-corporate narcissism.

    We have to travel far from the ‘mainstream’ to read a more balanced view of Galloway. Former British ambassador Craig Murray commented:

    ‘I have known George Galloway my entire adult life, although we largely lost touch in the middle bit while I was off diplomating. I know George too well to mistake him for Jesus Christ, but he has been on the right side against appalling wars which the entire political class has cheer-led. His natural gifts of mellifluence and loquacity are unsurpassed, with an added talent for punchy phrase making.

    ‘… But outwith the public gaze George is humorous, kind and self-aware. He has been deeply involved in politics his entire life, and is a great believer in the democratic process as the ultimate way by which the working classes will ultimately take control of the means of production. He is a very old-fashioned and courteous form of socialist.’

    We strongly disagree with Galloway’s views on fossil fuel production and climate change – in fact, he blocked us on X for robustly but politely challenging him on these issues. Nevertheless, it is clear to us that Murray’s view of Galloway is far more reasonable.

    Neon-Lit Dark Age

    In ‘Brave New World Revisited’, Aldous Huxley wrote:

    ‘The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.’ (Huxley, ‘Brave New World Revisited’, archive.org, 1958, p.109)

    This is certainly true of corporate journalists. Borrowing illiberally from authentically dissident media, a recurring Guardian appeal asks readers to support its heroic defence of Truth. The declared enemy:

    ‘Teams of lawyers from the rich and powerful trying to stop us publishing stories they don’t want you to see.

    ‘Lobby groups with opaque funding who are determined to undermine facts about the climate emergency and other established science.

    ‘Authoritarian states with no regard for the freedom of the press.

    ‘Bad actors spreading disinformation online to undermine democracy.

    ‘But we have something powerful on our side.

    ‘We’ve got you.

    ‘The Guardian is funded by its readers and the only person who decides what we publish is our editor.’

    They have indeed ‘got you’, many of you, and not in a good way. The real threat to truth in our time, quite obviously, is the fact that profit-maximising, ad-dependent corporate media like the Guardian cannot and will not report the truth of a world dominated by giant corporations. The declared aspiration is a sham, a form of niche marketing exploiting the gullible.

    The truth is that ‘mainstream’ media and politics are now captured in a way that is beyond anything we have previously seen. All around the world, political choices have been carefully fixed and filtered to ensure ordinary people are unable to challenge the endless wars, the determination to prioritise profits over climate action at any cost. The job of the corporate media system is to pretend the choices are real, to ensure the walls of the prison remain invisible.

    The only hope in this neon-lit Dark Age is genuinely independent media – the blogs and websites that are now being filtered, shadow-banned, buried and marginalised like never before.

    The post Chamber of Propaganda Horrors first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Amnesty’s annual State of the World’s Human Rights report 2023 is out

    • Powerful governments cast humanity into an era devoid of effective international rule of law, with civilians in conflicts paying the highest price
    • Rapidly changing artificial intelligence is left to create fertile ground for racism, discrimination and division in landmark year for public elections
    • Standing against these abuses, people the world over mobilized in unprecedented numbers, demanding human rights protection and respect for our common humanity

    The world is reaping a harvest of terrifying consequences from escalating conflict and the near breakdown of international law, said Amnesty International as it launched its annual The State of the World’s Human Rights report, delivering an assessment of human rights in 155 countries.

    Amnesty International also warned that the breakdown of the rule of law is likely to accelerate with rapid advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) which, coupled with the dominance of Big Tech, risks a “supercharging” of human rights violations if regulation continues to lag behind advances.

    “Amnesty International’s report paints a dismal picture of alarming human rights repression and prolific international rule-breaking, all in the midst of deepening global inequality, superpowers vying for supremacy and an escalating climate crisis,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard. 

    “Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law is compounded by the failures of its allies to stop the indescribable civilian bloodshed meted out in Gaza. Many of those allies were the very architects of that post-World War Two system of law. Alongside Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, the growing number of armed conflicts, and massive human rights violations witnessed, for example, in Sudan, Ethiopia and Myanmar – the global rule-based order is at risk of decimation.”

    Lawlessness, discrimination and impunity in conflicts and elsewhere have been enabled by unchecked use of new and familiar technologies which are now routinely weaponized by military, political and corporate actors. Big Tech’s platforms have stoked conflict. Spyware and mass surveillance tools are used to encroach on fundamental rights and freedoms, while governments are deploying automated tools targeting the most marginalized groups in society.

    “In an increasingly precarious world, unregulated proliferation and deployment of technologies such as generative AI, facial recognition and spyware are poised to be a pernicious foe – scaling up and supercharging violations of international law and human rights to exceptional levels,” said Agnès Callamard.

    “During a landmark year of elections and in the face of the increasingly powerful anti-regulation lobby driven and financed by Big Tech actors, these rogue and unregulated technological advances pose an enormous threat to us all. They can be weaponized to discriminate, disinform and divide.”

    Read more about Amnesty researchers’ biggest human rights concerns for 2023/24.

    Amnesty International’s report paints a dismal picture of alarming human rights repression and prolific international rule-breaking, all in the midst of deepening global inequality, superpowers vying for supremacy and an escalating climate crisis. Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard

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

  • Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

    “Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

    Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

    Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

    This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

    Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

    As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

    Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

    “We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

    On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

    This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

    Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

    We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

    This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

    Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

    Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

    You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

    However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

    This has been in the works for a long time.

    Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

    In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

    If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

    In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

    This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

    The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

    The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

    It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

    A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

    This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

    To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

    If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

    The post Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Says He Has Enough Votes to “Cancel” 2024 Presidential Election

    During a recent speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, billed as a “Border 9/11 Gala,” former President Donald Trump pushed a number of outright lies regarding the 2024 presidential election, claiming, without evidence, that fraud would affect its outcome. Trump’s comments echoed assertions he made in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, which laid the groundwork for him…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Civil society view of the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council

    At the 55th Human Rights Council session, 22 civil society organisations share reflections on key outcomes and highlight gaps in addressing crucial issues and situations [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/02/26/human-rights-defenders-issues-at-the-55th-session-of-the-human-rights-council/]:

    The failure of States to pay their membership dues to the United Nations in full and in time, and the practice of conditioning funding on unilateral political goals is causing a financial liquidity crisis for the organisation, the impacts of which are felt by victims and survivors of human rights violations and abuses. … Without the resources needed, the outcomes of this session can’t be implemented. The credibility of HRC is at stake. 

    We welcome the adoption of three resolutions calling for the implementation of effective accountability measures to ensure justice for atrocity crimes committed in the context of Israel‘s decades long colonial apartheid imposed over the Palestinian people, and for the realisation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. Special Procedures expressed their profound concern about “the support of certain governments for Israel’s strategy of warfare against the besieged population of Gaza, and the failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide” and called on States to implement an “arms embargo on Israel, heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling […] that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza […].”   This session, the Special Rapporteur on the OPT concluded that the actions of Israel in Gaza meet the legal qualifications of genocide. 

    We deplore the double standards in applying international law and the failure of certain States to vote in favor of ending impunity. This undermines the integrity of the UN human rights framework, the legitimacy of this institution, and the credibility of those States. From Palestine, to Ukraine, to Myanmar, to Sudan, to Sri Lanka, resolving grave human rights violations requires States to address root causes, applying human rights norms in a principled and consistent way. The Council has a prevention mandate and UN Member States have a legal and moral duty to prevent and ensure accountability and non-recurrence for atrocity crimes, wherever they occur.

    We want to highlight and specifically welcome the adoption of the first ever resolution on combating discrimination, violence and harmful practices intersex persons. The resolution builds on growing support in the Council on this topic and responds to several calls by the global coalition of intersex-led organisations. The resolution takes important steps in recognising that discrimination, violence and harmful practices based on innate variations of sex characteristics, such as medically unnecessary interventions, takes place in all regions of the world. We welcome that the resolution calls for States to take measures to protect the human rights of this population and calls for an OHCHR report and a panel discussion to address challenges and discuss good practices in protecting the human rights of intersex persons.

    We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism. As attested by human rights defenders with albinism, the mandate played an invaluable role by shedding light on human rights violations against persons with albinism through ground breaking research, country visits, and human rights training, and ensuring that defenders with albinism are consulted and take part in the decision-making. The organisations also welcomed the inclusion of language reflecting the important role played by “organizations of persons with albinism and their families”, and the reference to the role of States in collaboration with the World Health Organization, “to take effective measures to address the health-related effects of climate change on persons with albinism with a view to realizing their right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, particularly regarding the alarming incidence of skin cancer in this population, and to implement the recommendations of the report of the Independent Expert in this regard”.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. We also welcome the update of the title of the mandate acknowledging the recognition of this right by the Human Rights Council in its resolution 48/13 on 8 October 2021 and the General Assembly resolution 76/300 on 28 July 2022. We also welcome the inclusion of gender-specific language in the text, and we call on the Special Rapporteur to devote a careful attention to the protection of environmental human rights defenders for their strong contribution to the realisation of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, as called for by several States. We also welcome that the Council appointed for the first time a woman from the global south to fulfill this mandate, and we welcome the nomination of another woman as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change. 

    We welcome the resolution on countering disinformation, which addresses new issues whilst once again rejecting censorship and reaffirming the ‘essential role’ that the right to freedom of expression plays in countering disinformation. We welcome the specific focus on girls – besides women – as well as risks associated with artificial intelligence, gender-based violence, and electoral processes. We urge States to follow the approach of the resolution and to combat disinformation through holistic, positive measures, including by ensuring a diverse, free and independent media environment, protecting journalists and media workers, and implementing comprehensive right to information laws. Importantly, we also urge States to ensure that they do not conduct their own disinformation campaigns. At the same time, social media companies have an essential role to play and should take heed of the resolution by reforming their business models which allow disinformation to flourish on their platforms. The resolution also mandates the Advisory Committee to produce a new report on disinformation, and it is absolutely essential that this report mirrors and reinforces existing standards on this topic, especially the various reports of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression.

    Whilst we welcome the technical renewal of the resolution on freedom of religion or belief, we regret that the parallel resolution on combating intolerance (widely known by its original name Resolution 16/18) was not tabled at the session. Since 2011, these duel resolutions have been renewed each year, representing a consensual and universal framework to address the root causes of hate based on religion or belief in law, policy, and practice. We call on the OIC to once again renew Resolution 16/18 in a future session, while ensuring no substantive changes are made to this consensual framework. We also urge all States to reaffirm their commitment to Resolution 16/18 and the Rabat Plan of Action and adopt comprehensive and evidence-based national implementation plans, with the full and effective participation of diverse stakeholders.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on prevention of genocide and its focus on impunity, risks and early warnings, as well as the paragraph reaffirming that starvation of civilians as a method to combat is prohibited under international humanitarian law; however, we regret that the resolution fails to adequately reflect and address serious concerns relating to current political contexts and related risks of genocide. 

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the rights of the child: realising the rights of the child and inclusive social protection, strengthening the implementation of child rights-compliant inclusive social protection systems that benefit all children. We also welcome the addition of a new section on child rights mainstreaming, enhancing the capacity of OHCHR to advance child rights mainstreaming, particularly in areas such as meaningful and ethical child participation and child safeguarding.  We remain concerned by persisted attempts to weaken the text, especially to shift the focus away from children as individual right-holders, to curtail child participation and remove the inclusion of a gender perspective.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which addresses effective national legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture. We welcome the new paragraph urging States concerned to comply with binding orders of the International Court of Justice related to their obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

    We welcome the adoption of a new resolution on the human rights situation in Belarus. The Belarusian authorities continue their widespread and systematic politically-motivated repression, targeting not only dissent inside the country, but also Belarusians outside the country who were forced to flee for fear of persecution. Today, almost 1,500 prisoners jailed following politically-motivated charges in Belarus face discriminatory treatment, severe restriction of their rights, and ill-treatment including torture. The resolution rightly creates a new standalone independent investigative mechanism, that will inherit the work of the OHCHR Examination, to collect and preserve evidence of potential international crimes beyond the 2020 elections period, with a view to advancing accountability. It also ensures the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur who remains an essential ‘lifeline’ to Belarusian civil society.

    We welcome the resolution on technical assistance and capacity building in regard to the human rights situation in Haiti and emphasis on the role civil society plays in the promotion and protection of human rights and the importance of creating and maintaining an enabling environment in which civil society can operate independently and free from insecurity. We similarly welcome the call on the Haitian authorities to step up their efforts to support national human rights institutions and to pursue an inclusive dialogue between all Haitian actors concerned in order to find a lasting solution to the multidimensional crisis, which severely impacts civil society. We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the designated expert and reference to women and children in regard to the monitoring of human rights situation and abuses developments, as well as encouragement of progress on the question of the establishment of an office of the Office of the High Commissioner in Haiti. We nonetheless regret that the resolution does not address the multifaceted challenges civil society faces amidst escalating violence, fails to further address the link between the circulation of firearms and the human rights violations and abuses, and does not identify concrete avenues for the protection of civilians and solidarity action to ensure the safety, dignity and rights of civilians are upheld.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on Iran, renewing the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran and extending for another year the mandate of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran. The continuation of these two distinct and complementary mandates is essential for the Council to fulfill its mandate of promotion and protection of human rights in Iran. However, given the severity of the human rights crisis in the country, we regret that this important resolution remains purely procedural and fails to reflect the dire situation of human rights in Iran, including the sharp spike in executions, often following grossly unfair trials. It also fails to address the increased levels of police and judicial harassment against women and girls appearing in public without compulsory headscarves, human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists and families of victims seeking truth and justice, and the continued pervasive discrimination and violence faced by women and girls, LGBTI+ persons and persons belonging to ethnic and religious minorities in the country.  

    We welcome the adoption by consensus of the resolution on Myanmar, which is a clear indication of the global concern for the deepening human rights and humanitarian crisis in the country as a result of the military’s over three-year long brutal war against the people resisting its attempted coup. We further welcome the Council’s unreserved support for Myanmar peoples’ aspirations for human rights, democracy, and justice as well as the recognition of serious human rights implications of the continuing sale of arms and jet fuel to Myanmar.

    We welcome the resolution on the situation of human rights in Ukraine stemming from the Russian aggression. The latest report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) reveals disturbing evidence of war crimes, including civilian targeting, torture, sexual violence, and the unlawful transfer of children. These findings underscore the conflict’s brutality, particularly highlighted by the siege of Mariupol, where indiscriminate attacks led to massive civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction. The report also details the widespread and systematic torture and sexual violence against both civilians and prisoners of war. Moreover, the illegal deportation of children emerges as a significant issue, as part of a broader strategy of terror and cultural erasure. The COI’s mandate extension is crucial for ongoing investigations and ensuring justice for victims. 

    By adopting a resolution entitled ‘advancing human rights in South Sudan,’ the Council ensured that international scrutiny of South Sudan’s human rights situation will cover the country’s first-ever national elections, which are set to take place in De­cember 2024. With this resolution, the UN’s top human rights body extended the mandate of its Com­mis­sion on Human Rights in South Sudan.

    We welcome the resolution on the human rights situation in Syria and the extension of the mandate of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which will continue to report on violations from all sides of the conflict in an impartial and victim-centered manner. Syria continues to commit systematic and widespread attacks against civilians, in detention centers through torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance and through indiscriminate attacks against the population in Idlib. We welcome that the resolution supports the mandate of the Independent Institution of the Missing People and calls for compliance with the recent order on Provisional Measures by the ICJ – both initiatives can play a significant role in fulfilling victims’ rights to truth and justice and should receive support by all UN Member States. In a context of ongoing normalisation, the CoI’s mandate to investigate and report on human rights abuses occurring in Syria is of paramount importance.

    We continue to deplore this Council’s exceptionalism towards serious human rights violations committed by the Chinese government. At a time when double-standards are enabling ongoing atrocity crimes to be committed in Palestine, sustained failure by Council Members, in particular OIC countries, to promote accountability for crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and Muslim peoples in China severely undermines the Council’s integrity, and its ability to prevent and put an end to atrocity crimes globally. Findings by the OHCHR, the UN Treaty Bodies, the ILO and over 100 letters by UN Special Procedures since 2018 have provided overwhelming evidence pointing to systematic and widespread human rights violations across the People’s Republic of China. We reiterate our pressing call for all Council Members to support the adoption of a resolution establishing a UN mandate to monitor and report on the human rights situation in China, as repeatedly urged by UN Special Procedures. We further echo Special Procedures’ call for prompt and impartial investigations into the unlawful death of Cao Shunli, and all cases of reprisals for cooperation with the UN.

    We regret the Council’s silence on the situation in India despite the clear and compounding early warning signs of further deterioration that necessitate preventive action by the Council based on the objective criteria. The latest of these early warning signals include the recent notification of rules to implement the highly discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government just weeks before the election, along with recent intercommunal violence in Manipur and ongoing violence against Muslims in various parts of India amid increasing restrictions on civic space, criminalisation of dissent and erosion of the rule of law with political interference.

    We further regret that this Council is increasingly failing to protect victims of human rights violations throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The people of Yemen and Libya continue to endure massive ‘man-made’ humanitarian catastrophes caused in large part by ongoing impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other grave violations of international law. In Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and in other MENA countries, citizens are routinely subjected to brutal, wide-spread human rights violations intended to silence dissent, eradicate independent civil society and quash democratic social movements. Countless citizens from the MENA region continue to hope and strive for a more dignified life – often at the cost of their own lives and freedom. We call on this Council and UN member States to rise above narrow political agendas and begin to take steps to address the increasing selectivity that frequently characterises this Council’s approach to human rights protection and promotion. 

    We regret that once more, civil society representatives faced numerous obstacles to accessing the Palais and engaging in discussions, both in person and remotely, during this session. The UN human rights system in Geneva has always and continues to rely on the smooth and unhindered access of civil society to carry out its mandate. We remind UN Member States, as well as UNOG, that the Council’s mandate, as set out in HRC Res 5/1, requires that arrangements be made, and practices observed to ensure ‘the most effective contribution’ of NGOs. Undermining civil society access and engagement not only undermines the capacities and effectiveness of civil society but also of the UN itself.

    Signatories:

    1. All Human Rights for All in Iran
    2. Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)
    3. Association Arc pour la defense des droits de l’homme et des revendication democratique/culturelles du peuple Azerbaidjanais Iran -”ArcDH”
    4. Balochistan Human Rights Group
    5. Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies
    6. Child Rights Connect (CRCnt)
    7. CIVICUS
    8. Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)
    9. Egyptian initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)
    10. Ensemble contre la Peine de Mort
    11. Franciscans International
    12. Gulf Center for Human Rights
    13. Impact Iran
    14. International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI)
    15. International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
    16. International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA)
    17. International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
    18. Kurdistan Human Rights Network
    19. Kurdpa Human Rights Organization
    20. PEN America
    21. The Syrian Legal Development Programme (SLDP)
    22. United 4 Iran

    see also: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-geneva/eu-human-rights-council_en

    https://www.fidh.org/en/international-advocacy/united-nations/human-rights-council/55th-human-rights-council-session-israel-palestine-belarus-iran

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

  • Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza

    After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

    Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.

    Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.

    With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.

    But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.

    Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.

    In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.

    Not this time.

    “This has to stop”

    Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”

    Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.

    When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were“indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?

    Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”

    The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.

    A salutary equation indeed.

    British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.

    But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.

    Israel’s playbook

    British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.

    But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

    Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.

    Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.

    They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.

    Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.

    Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.

    Gaza isolated

    But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

    Israel needed to take firmer action.

    The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.

    This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the region to protect its volunteers, while Israel formally banned the group from accessing the occupied territories.

    Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.

    Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.

    The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.

    With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.

    The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.

    The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.

    Western complicity

    That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.

    Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.

    The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.

    The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.

    Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.

    And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.

    This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.

    Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.

    Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.

    The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.

    WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.

    Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.

    Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.

    Life and death lottery

    Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.

    The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.

    Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.

    Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.

    According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.

    Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.

    Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.

    An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

    As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.

    Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”

    That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.

    Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.

    Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”

    This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.

    Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.

    If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.

    Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.

    Reporting stifled

    Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.

    Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.

    That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.

    Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.

    Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.

    What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.

    But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.

    The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.

    The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.

    His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.

    Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.

    Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.

    Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.

    Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.

    Rulebook torn up

    And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.

    Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.

    Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.

    Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.

    Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.

    Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.

    Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.

    Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.

    The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.

    The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.

    Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.

    Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.

    The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UN Human Rights Council again supports US regime change plans for Nicaragua

    When the United Nations sets up a “commission of inquiry,” it can result in a powerful analysis of violations of human rights law, such as the one appointed in 2021 to examine Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and its Apartheid practices. But other commissions can become political platforms aimed at demonizing a particular government by crafting narratives that give the semblance of objectivity, while suppressing all evidence that contradicts the prevailing geopolitical consensus. The ultimate aim of such commissions is not to investigate or to provide advice or technical assistance, but to support a campaign of destabilization. They make it plausible to the world at large that the human rights of the population of the targeted country are being grossly violated and that the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (known as R2P) should be activated.  In other words, regime change, even by force, would be preferable to inaction. This vulgar weaponization of human rights is a favorite device in the tool kit of some hegemonial states.  It is aided and abetted by non-governmental organizations financed by the hegemons and disseminated by the echo chambers of the mainstream media.

    A case in point is the work of the UN’s “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (GHREN), appointed to investigate alleged violations in the country in the period since April 2018. The date is chosen because it marked the start of violent protests, which quickly turned into an attempted coup d’état. The violence lasted for three months and left over 250 people dead, including opponents of the government, government officials and sympathizers, and 22 police officers.

    The group’s first report, in February of 2024, ran to 300 pages. It appeared to be very detailed: for example, it included a 9-page case study of events in one Nicaraguan city, Masaya, during the period April-July 2018. Yet despite this detail, the GHREN ignored the assignment which had been set for its work, which explicitly required it to investigate “all” relevant events. The report either omitted completely, or mentioned only very briefly, the many extreme acts of violence by those involved in the coup attempt. Instead, it focused only on alleged human rights violations by government officials and, in collecting evidence, the group gave preferential access to a number of NGOs which are highly critical of the Nicaraguan government.

    The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, a group made up of organizations and individuals in the United States and Canada, Europe and Latin America, including Nicaragua itself, responded in detail to the GHREN’s work. Its letter calling for the report to be withdrawn was signed by prominent human rights experts, 85 different organizations and over 450 individuals. Despite the number of people who were in support, the letter and detailed evidence submitted received no response whatever.

    Indeed, the GHREN continued its work, and in February of 2024 published a further report, this time without even passing mention of opposition violence. It made no reference to the Coalition’s submissions: it was as if the criticisms of the first report and the evidence substantiating them never existed.

    As one of the human rights experts who was critical of the first report by the GHREN, and as one of the organizers of the Coalition response, we have worked together to produce a second letter, which has been sent to the GHREN and to the President and senior officials of the UN Human Rights Council. This new letter says that the latest report is “methodologically flawed, biased and should never have been published.”  It contends that “excluding pertinent information submitted to the study group is a breach of responsible methodology, a violation of the ethos of every judicial or quasi-judicial investigation.” The letter is signed by ten prominent human rights experts and activists, 47 organizations and over 250 individuals in Nicaragua, USA and Europe, many with long experience in Nicaragua.  (The Coalition is continuing to collect signatures, which will be sent in follow-up at a later date.)

    What is wrong with the GHREN’s latest report? Many examples of bias and omissions can be found within its 19 pages. One is its reference to the amnesty announced by the Nicaraguan government in 2019 for those detained and found guilty of crimes, including even homicide, during the coup attempt. The amnesty was an outcome of negotiations with the Catholic Church and others, aimed at achieving reconciliation in the aftermath of the coup attempt. However, the GHREN portrays the amnesty as benefiting only the state itself, when, in fact, its main beneficiaries were more than 400 opposition figures, including coup organizers, who had been convicted of violent offences. One of the most prominent beneficiaries, Medardo Mairena, had organized several murderous attacks on police stations: the worst, in the small town of Morrito, led to five deaths and nine police officers being kidnapped and beaten. Despite his crimes, Mairena was portrayed as a victim by the GHREN: he was even one of the opposition figures invited to address the UN Human Rights Council in July of 2023.

    A second example is the report’s treatment of migration. Initially, the report claimed that 935,065 people had left Nicaragua; i.e., that one in eight of the population had “fled the country since 2018.” This was the figure that received publicity, even though it was absurdly high. Within a few days the GHREN realized their mistake and revised their report, so that the version currently on the website says instead that 271,740 Nicaraguans have become asylum seekers and 18,545 Nicaraguans are recognized as refugees worldwide (fewer than 1 in 20 of the population). But the report still gives no attention to the evidence that most migration from Nicaragua in the past five years has been economic in motivation, given the effects of US coercive measures on the country, and the economic downturns which resulted from the coup attempt itself and from the subsequent Covid-19 pandemic. It also takes no account of the fact that many migrants return to Nicaragua after periods of working abroad. In other words, even the lower figure likely exaggerates the numbers of Nicaraguans who (in the report’s original words) “fled the country.”

    The most egregious bias in the report is its treatment of opposition figures as victims. Yes, it is true that there have been arrests, imprisonments and the expulsion from the country (with US agreement and facilitation) of many of those arrested. But the GHREN’s report assumes that those affected are innocent of any crime and are merely being persecuted as opponents of the government. It feeds the narrative of Washington, its allies and corporate media that what happened in 2018 was peaceful protest, when in practice the violent coup attempt affected millions of Nicaraguans, with lives lost, public buildings destroyed, homes set on fire and scores of government officials and sympathizers kidnapped, tortured, wounded or killed. The GHREN ignored the plentiful, detailed evidence from the Coalition which presented a more accurate narrative of what happened.

    It is vital that the UN Human Rights Council pay attention to these criticisms and thoroughly review its dealings with Nicaragua. It is clear that the current expert group has totally failed in its assignment to consider “all” relevant events since April 2018 and is behaving in a completely unprofessional manner. Its work should be stopped, and a genuine attempt should be made to work with the Nicaraguan government based on a proper understanding of the needs of its people and of their experience of the 2018 coup attempt. Above all, it should urge the removal of the unilateral coercive measures (wrongly referred to as “sanctions”, implying that they are legitiamte), which are worsening conditions for Nicaraguans, not improving them.

    Coda by Alfred de Zayas

    The dysfunctional situation described above is not without precedent.  During my six years as Independent Expert on International Order (2012-18), I myself observed manipulations and double standards, and duly informed the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) that in my considered opinion some of my colleague rapporteurs were not rigorously observing their independent status and our code of conduct, particularly Article 6, which requires all rapporteurs to give due weight to all available information and to pro-actively seek explanations from all stakeholders, including the government of the state in questions, respecting the over-arching rule of audiatur et altera pars (“let the other side be heard as well”).

    When in the summer of 2017 I sought an invitation to visit Venezuela on official mission, I encountered opposition within OHCHR, which attempted to dissuade me.  When I did receive an invitation, thus breaking a 21-year absence of UN rapporteurs from Venezuela, I was surprised to receive letters from three major NGOs who actually asked me not to go, because I was not the “pertinent” rapporteur.  Evidently these NGOs and some officials at OHCHR were “concerned” with my independence, as already demonstrated in 12 reports to the General Assembly and Human Rights Council,  and feared accordingly, that I would write my own report on Venezuela, which  would not necessarily support the ubiquitous US narrative.

    It became clear to me that some officials at OHCHR were nervous that I would actually conduct a fair investigation, speak to all stakeholders on the ground and then make my own judgment.  Indeed, I read and digested all the relevant reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. When I was on the ground in Venezuela I fact-checked these and other reports, which I found to be seriously deficient.  I also consulted the reports of local non-governmental organizations in Venezuela, including those of Fundalatin, Grupo Sures and Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, and read the economic analysis by the Venezuelan Professor Pasqualina Curcio.

    When in November/December 2017 I became the first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21 years, I was subjected to pre-mission, during-mission, and post-mission mobbing.  I endured a barrage of insults and even death threats.  Notwithstanding an atmosphere of intimidation, my mission resulted in positive results, including the immediate release of opposition politician Roberto Picon (his wife and son appealed to me, I then submitted the case to the then Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza), the release of 80 other detainees, enhanced cooperation between UN agencies and the government, and new memoranda of understanding. The mission opened the door to the visits of several other rapporteurs including Professors Alena Douhan and Michael Fakhri, as well as by High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet.  My report to the Human Rights Council in September 2018 addressed the root causes of problems, formulated proposals for solutions, incorporating the information received from all stakeholders, including the opposition parliamentarians, Chamber of Commerce, the press, diplomatic corps, church leaders, university professors, students and more than 40 NGOs of all colors.  The report was criticized by mainstream NGOs in the US and Europe, for whom only those rapporteurs are praiseworthy who engage in “naming and shaming” and promote regime change.

    Chapters 2 and 3 of my book The Human Rights Industry document the endemic problems in the functioning of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council that continue to cater to the priorities of the major donors.  However, the general perception of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council promoted by the mainstream media gratuitously grants both institutions authority and credibility, without addressing the problems already exposed by a number of rapporteurss, including myself.

    This dependence of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council on Washington and Brussels explains some of the abstruse decisions and resolutions adopted by the Council.  Part of the problem lies in the ways in which staff members are recruited and in the procedures by which experts, including rapporteurs, independent experts and commission members, are appointed.

    For example, it does not advance “geographical representation” simply by hiring someone from Mauritius or Indonesia, if that person has been trained and indoctrinated in US and UK universities.  “Geographical diversity” does not necessarily ensure the representation of a spectrum of opinions and approaches to problems.  It does not mean much when there are so and so many persons who are ticked off against a particular nationality; e.g., US, French, Russian, Chinese, South African.  What is crucial is to ensure that all schools of legal thinking and philosophy are represented.  What is important is that when a candidate from State X is recruited or appointed, that he/she have first and foremost the interests of the United Nations at heart, and that he/she is not a priori committed to support the interests of the US or one of the European powers. I do not challenge the competence or expertise of staff members and rapporteurs – I challenge their ethos and independence — their commitment to the values of the UN Charter and their commitment to impartiality.

    There are other obstacles to impartiality. Indeed, some OHCHR staff members are penalized if they do their work properly and do NOT follow the orders coming from above, which are mostly US-Brussels friendly.  It is a regrettable reality that the donors weigh heavily in setting the agenda. There is no mechanism to ensure that the code of conduct of rapporteurs is respected, in particular Article 6.  The impunity for openly siding with the US and Brussels and ignoring the rest of the world is notorious.  In other words, OHCHR and the Human Rights Council have been largely “hijacked” – as indeed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, European Court of Human Rights have been.  This raises the issue that Juvenalis formulated in his sixth Satire (verses 346-7): Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – “who will guard over the guardians?”

    Experience shows that being a solid professional does NOT facilitate getting a promotion.  One is likely to be penalized.  Abiding by the “unwritten law” of “groupthink” and supporting the Western narratives does contribute to career development. And, alas, most staffers are first and foremost interested in their careers, and not necessarily in promoting human rights.  As elsewhere, it is a job.

    Some outside observers have understood what game is being played and what the rules are.  Reality at OHCHR and the Human Rights Council is closer to Machiavellianism and Orwellianism than to the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, Charles Malik, P.C. Chang and others.  Notwithstanding these problems, we are optimistic that the system can be reformed, and we encourage all non-governmental people of good will and good faith to insist on reforming these institutions so that they serve all of humanity and not only the interests of a handful of powerful states.  Among the NGOs that are making concrete proposals for reform are the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities and the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, both in consultative status with the United Nations.

    The post UN Human Rights Council again supports US regime change plans for Nicaragua first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Answer to False Claims

    The post The Answer to False Claims first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how

    For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.

    Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.

    Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.

    Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.

    These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.

    The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.

    The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.

    What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.

    Whitewashing genocide

    Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.

    Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.

    Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.

    Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.

    Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.

    The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.

    But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

    Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.

    It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.

    First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October – and those it did not – have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.

    The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.

    More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.

    A colonial arrogance

    Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.

    True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.

    Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.

    And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.

    No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves – were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.

    The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.

    Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.

    The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.

    The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza.

    Suicide mission

    The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.

    The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout – and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.

    Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.

    The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.

    They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.

    As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned.

    Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”

    For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.

    The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position.

    It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world.

    Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.

    Loss of focus

    But for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected.

    Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.

    With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.

    That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.

    And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza.

    It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media.

    Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.

    Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders.

    One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior US officials too.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims.

    Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.

    Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.

    Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.

    When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.

    Fabricating atrocities 

    Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.

    Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.

    Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.”

    In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.

    The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”.

    The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?

    The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary.

    Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”

    The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity.

    ‘Hannibal directive’

    Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas – particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.

    Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.

    In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.

    The commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those who did die in the house were killed by Israel.

    The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”.

    These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.

    In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.

    Woeful imbalance

    The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts.

    The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?

    In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

    But the problem runs deeper.

    This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years.

    Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target.

    That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism.

    A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.

    Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files, showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people.

    Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation.

    There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.

    Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps.

    And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide.

    Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm.

    Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.

    The post We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Government-Made Comic Books Try to Fight Election Disinformation

    With the 2024 elections looming, the Department of Homeland Security has a little-noticed weapon in its war on disinformation: comic books. Few have read them, but the series is attracting criticism from members of Congress. Calling the comics “creepy,” Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., complained earlier this month that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency-produced series was just another way for the federal government to “trample on the First Amendment” in its zeal to fight so-called disinformation.

    “DC Comics won’t be adding these taxpayer-funded comic books … to their repertoire anytime soon,” cracked Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s annual report on government waste released in December. 

    The comics read like well-meaning (if corny) attempts to grapple with efforts by foreign governments to influence American public opinion, as articulated in intelligence community assessments. But there is a risk that the federal government’s fight against foreign disinformation positions it as an arbiter of the truth, which raises civil liberties concerns. The efficacy of the DHS “Resilience Series” of comic books is also far from obvious. 

    The members of Congress might be comforted to know that few people ever noticed the comics. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urges users to “share” their “Resilience Series” comics, but a search of the webpage’s address on X shows that it is linked to fewer than a dozen times. CISA also produced glossy-looking YouTube trailers for its two graphic novels that garnered just 4,000 and 6,000 views respectively — a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of views trailers for other graphic novels attract. 

    For CISA, disinformation is no laughing matter. “Disinformation is an existential threat to the United States,” declares CISA’s webpage detailing its “Resilience Series” of comic books.

    Third in sales by genre, only behind general fiction and romance novels, graphic novels are particularly popular among the youngest readers. One industry observer notes that in Japan, more paper is used for manga books than for toilet paper. School Library Journal concluded in their graphic novels survey last year that popularity increased over 90 percent year over year in school libraries. The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of school librarians reported opposition to graphic novels from teachers, parents, and others who didn’t consider them “real books.”

    Though first released in 2020 in anticipation of the Trump–Biden presidential election, the comics were intended to be an evergreen resource in the war on disinformation. “Learn the dangers & risks associated with dis- & misinformation through fictional stories that are inspired by real-world events in @CISAgov’s Resilience Series,” the U.S. Attorney for Nevada posted on X last April. 

    CISA produced two graphic novels, “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes.” “Real Fake” tells the story of Rachel O’Sullivan, a “gamer” and a “patriot” who infiltrates a troll farm circulating false narratives about elections to American voters. “Bug Bytes” addresses disinformation around Covid-19, following Ava Williams, a journalism student who realizes that a malicious cyber campaign spreading conspiracy theories about 5G technology is inspiring attacks on 5G towers.

    “Fellow comic geeks, assemble!” CISA said when the comic books were initially released. “Let’s band together to take on disinformation and misinformation.” The CISA post quotes another X post by the FBI’s Washington field office recommending the graphic novels and exhorting the importance of “finding trusted information.”

    “The resilience series products were released in 2020 and 2021 to raise awareness on tactics of foreign influence and disinformation,” a spokesperson for CISA told The Intercept, noting that despite continued reference by members of Congress and critics, that this series of comic books has now been discontinued.

    “The problem is not that panels about African troll farms (Real Fake) or homegrown antivaxxers (Bug Bytes) might make readers feel insecure—it’s that they don’t make readers feel insecure enough,” writes Russ Castronovo, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for the Humanities and professor of American studies and English, in Public Books magazine. “Or, more precisely, these comics might be judged aesthetic failures because—due to their proximity to propaganda—they leave little space for the vulnerabilities inherent in the act of reading. So, while readers learn that meddling by foreign powers ‘is scary, especially in an election year,’ the graphic fictions commissioned by US cybersecurity assume reading itself to be a process whereby information (as opposed to disinformation) is obtained, questions are answered, and doubts are resolved.”

    Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Thomas Gaulkin said that “the Resilience Series … conjures a certain jingoism peculiar to government publications that can mimic the very threat being addressed.” 

    All of which raises the question as to what role the Department of Homeland Security should play in adjudicating “media literacy,” as the series webpage says. 

    Both “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes” were written by Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who works as a contributor to MSNBC and is affiliated with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, and Farid Haque, an education technology entrepreneur who is CEO of London-based Erly Stage Studios and was previously CEO of StartUp Britain, a campaign launched by then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. 

    Watts, who writes and speaks about Russian influence campaigns, has testified to Congress on the matter and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Clearly knowledgeable, his own writings can sometimes veer into hyperbole — a potent reminder that even experts on disinformation are not infallible.

    “Over the past three years, Russia has implemented and run the most effective and efficient influence campaign in world history,” Watts said in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017. While Russia’s propaganda regarding its first invasion of Ukraine and Crimea was no doubt effective, that employed in 2016 against the U.S. presidential election was “neither well organized nor especially well resourced” according to a detailed study by the Pentagon-backed Rand Corporation. The think tank later concluded that “the impact of Russian efforts in the West has been uncertain.”

    Co-author Haque, according to an interview in Forbes, became involved in the Resilience Series after a chance meeting at a bookstore with actor Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks, who would later join Erly Stage’s advisory board and introduce Haque to his Americans contacts, which included Watts.

    “There is now a real need for schools and public authorities to educate young people on how much fake news there is across all forms of media,” Haque told Forbes.

    Related

    The Government Created a New Disinformation Office to Oversee All the Other Ones

    Counter-disinformation has become a cottage industry in the federal government, with offices and programs now dedicated to exposing foreign influence, as The Intercept has previously reported. CISA’s Resilience Series webpage directs questions to an email for the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (not to be confused with the FBI’s own effort, the Foreign Influence Task Force, or the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center). In 2021, the CISA Task Force was replaced by a Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation team according to a government audit, which CISA tells The Intercept has now been rolled into something called “the Election Security and Resilience subdivision.” (Malinformation refers to information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate, according to CISA.)

    The proliferation of various counter-disinformation entities has been disjointed, prompting the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general to conclude that “DHS does not have a unified, department-wide strategy to set overarching goals and objectives for addressing and mitigating threats from disinformation campaigns that appear in social media.”

    CISA’s mission, originally focused on traditional cyber and critical infrastructure security, evolved in the wake of the 2016 election. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson officially designated the election systems as a part of critical infrastructure. Since then, CISA has expanded its focus to include fighting disinformation, arguing that human thought can be said to constitute infrastructure.

    “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in 2021. 

    In pursuit of that cognitive infrastructure, CISA launched the Resilience Series, with an eye to mediums that would appeal to popular audiences.

    “We have to find new ways to engage with people through mediums that use soft power and creative messaging, rather than being seen to preach,” Haque said in the Forbes interview.

    The post Government-Made Comic Books Try to Fight Election Disinformation appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.