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Category: George Galloway

  • From the Darkness Must Come out the Light

    Having been awakened in the dead of night to an horrific screaming shriek, a blinding flash of light and cataclysmic explosion, followed by a bloody splattering of the body parts of one’s children, there will be one single motivating factor for the rest of a person’s life. And that motivation is not going to be, “I will now bow down my head in obeisance to the American-armed onslaught of the Genocidal State of Apartheid Israel.”

    Netanyahu and his cruelest cabal of subhuman thugs say that they aim to bomb Hamas into oblivion — millions of innocent, defenceless, impoverished and besieged Palestinian civilians be damned. They will not stop, they say, until “every last member of Hamas has been destroyed.” And just like their Zionist zealot predecessors, who came in the night, and uprooted more than 800,000 Palestinians, destroyed their villages and drove them out of their country in the 1948 Nakba, they will launch thousands upon thousands of sorties of American-supplied earth-shattering one ton bombs every night to amplify the terror, while eager Israeli citizens gather on nearby mountaintops and dance and cheer on the slaughter.

    They will mercilessly carpet bomb their way across Gaza from north to south, driving the utterly terrorized civilians before them. They will bomb the exodus as well for good measure, even as they promised them safe haven to the south. They will maim, amputate, decapitate, crush and burn thousands upon thousands of children and not give a damn. If they think there is a Hamas fighter hiding in a hospital, they will destroy it, doctors, nurses, patients, ambulances and refugees be damned. Every school, university or Masjid is precision bulls-eyed with American-supplied bombs shot from American-supplied jets to murder thousands more who are seeking refuge there. They will kill any journalist and their family, and any United Nations, Red Cross or other humanitarian volunteers. They will flatten Gaza like a tube of toothpaste, squashing all of its millions of people south in the cruelest, most blatant act of ethnic cleansing ever.

    The Zionist tsunami of bloodlust that drives this slaughterfest was brought into being by the British, but is now financed, armed and masterminded by the USA. It has long infected the now totally senile President of the USA himself, as well as virtually the entire grotesque quisling cabal of what passes for American government. Biden, the bomber-in-chief will brook no ceasefire. And the warmongering NATO cabal Goose-steps along with him, slathering for Palestinian blood. Biden’s most grovelling obsequious sycophants — such as Canada’s empathy-bereft Prime Minister, Justin “We Stand with Israel” is right on cue, categorically refusing to demand a ceasefire. Trudeau, ever the hypocrite, brags on ad nauseam about his pathetic “reconciliation” efforts with First Nations, who are themselves the victims of horrific ethnic cleansing and Colonial genocide. Trudeau condemns anyone protesting this most awful Israeli violence, in spite of polling that demonstrates a majority of Canadians want the killing to stop. Canada’s tax-payer-funded CBC has been reduced to a Goebelsian propaganda organ, constantly egging-on the onslaught — last night giving airtime to an Israeli avocado grower near the borders of Gaza, who whined that the massive bombardment next door was disturbing her peace.

    I am not Jewish, and although I have endeavoured to speak out about the plight of the long-suffering people of Palestine, my efforts are obfuscated by the charge that what I say is “anti-semitic.” And of course, for any conscientious Human Rights activist, an anti-semitism charge is an inevitable, predictable rite of passage. There is no such thing as a credible, conscientious Human Rights activist who has not been critical of the Genocidal State of Apartheid Israel. For speaking out, I’ve been harassed by B’Nai Brith, I’ve been blacklisted by the CBC and other “official narrative” and corporate-controlled propaganda organs. I’ve had to quit Facebook, because although 3000 carefully vetted Facebook Friends might “like” a post of my cat, my Facebook readership was constantly throttled back to zero by their censor-bots anytime I mentioned the name of Gaza, or Palestine. Though shalt not mention Gaza or Palestine on Facebook.

    If I were to be suddenly awakened at night by a massive American-supplied 1 ton bomb blast, precision guided by state-of-the-art homing device into my house, and splattered with the body parts of my children, I know what my single-minded obsession for the rest of my life will be. Just by watching Netanyahu’s merciless terror campaign, I know that somewhere beyond the depths of my good conscience, there lurks a vengeful, unforgiving monster, also capable of subhuman Netanyahuesque cruelty. I understand the motivation that leads people to join organizations like Hamas. It is in all of us. If you love your children, you will do the same. Whatever Hamas may be, if the violence-stupified Netanyahu thinks he can destroy Hamas by murdering thousands of innocent children for every single Israeli fighter, Hamas will simply morph and come back with an even more furious vengeance. Having lost all faith in humanity, I feel myself sinking into a dark, dreadful, deep, despair, and find myself yearning towards Armageddon.

    Nevertheless, there is a most powerful, light of courage shining out in this overwhelming darkness that brings tears of gratitude to my eyes. I think it might just be much more powerful than the gargantuan American-supplied weapons of mass destruction now being slung into Gaza by the crazed Netanyahu’s genocidal state. And that light is the most courageous Jewish activists who are leading the worldwide condemnations of this outrageous slaughter. I bow down to the indefatigable and eloquent Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Max Blumenthal, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Gabor Mate, Dan Cohen, to the thousands of Jews who are out there protesting “Not in my name!” and so may others. For anyone wishing to venture an opinion on these horrific event, Dr Pappe’s seminal work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is absolutely essential reading. I am also immensely grateful to George Galloway, Edward Said, Noura Erekat, Ahed Tamimi, Eva Bartlett, Caitlin Johnstone, and everyone who writes for their amazingly courageous, heartfelt, conscientious work on behalf of the people of Palestine. I love them and thank them from the depths of my being.

    Note: “From the darkness must come out the light” -Bob Marley in his song, “Could you be loved?”

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Twitter IS “State-Affiliated Media”

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    British politician and broadcaster George Galloway has made headlines in the UK with his threat to press legal action against Twitter for designating his account “Russia state-affiliated media”, a label which will now show up under his name every time he posts anything on the platform.

    “Dear @TwitterSupport I am not ‘Russian State Affiliated media’,” reads a viral tweet by Galloway. “I work for NO Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.”

    Galloway argues that while his broadcasts have previously been aired by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, because those outlets have been shut down in the UK by Ofcom and by European Union sanctions he can no longer be platformed by them even if he wants to. If you accept this argument, then it looks like Twitter is essentially using the “state-affiliated media” designation as a marker of who Galloway is as a person, rather than as a marker of what he actually does.

    Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway’s argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people “state-affiliated media”. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.

    In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to “secure” the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.

    “ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government,” veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh told Mintpress News earlier this year. “It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”

    Twitter has also coordinated its mass purges of accounts with a cybersecurity firm called FireEye, which this 2019 Sputnik article by journalist Morgan Artyukhina explains was “founded in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.”

    It has been an established pattern for years that whenever Twitter reports that it has purged thousands of accounts which it suspects of inauthentic behavior on behalf of foreign governments, you know it’s never going to be accounts from US-aligned countries like the UK, Israel or Australia, but consistently from US-targeted nations like Russia, China, Venezuela or Iran. You can choose to believe that’s because the US only aligns with saintly governments who would never dream of engaging in unethical online behavior, but that would be an infantile position which defies all known evidence.

    Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Twitter has been aggressively boosting US narratives about the war by frequently showing users a Twitter Topic without their having subscribed to it which is full of imperial spinmeisters, including The Kyiv Independent with all its shady CIA-affiliated origins.

    Twitter also promotes US narratives about the war by keeping a “War in Ukraine” section perpetually on the right-hand side of the screen for desktop users, which runs stories that are wildly biased toward the US/NATO/Ukraine alliance. There was a full day last month where any time I checked Twitter on my laptop I was informed that “Russia continues to strike civilian targets in Kyiv and across Ukraine.” The claim that Russia had been “targeting” civilians during that time was dismissed as nonsense shortly thereafter by US military experts speaking to Newsweek.

    When the invasion began Twitter also started actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. It also began placing warning labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform.

    Twitter also began placing the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of Russian media platforms, baselessly giving the impression that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not simply their own legitimate perspectives. This labeling has led to complaints of online harassment as propaganda-addled dupes seek out targets to act out their media-instilled hatred of all things Russian.

    As more and more people find themselves branded with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label, Twitter has concurrently announced that it will be hiding the visibility of any account that wears it, announcing on Tuesday that the platform “will not amplify or recommend government accounts belonging to states that limit access to free information and are engaged in armed interstate conflict.” Which is a bit rich, considering the fact that the US does both of those things.

    “This means these accounts won’t be amplified or recommended to people on Twitter, including across the Home Timeline, Explore, Search, and other places on the service. We will first apply this policy to government accounts belonging to Russia,” Twitter said.

    This diminished visibility has been verified by people who’ve been slapped with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label. So you can understand why imperial narrative managers whose job is to quash dissent want that designation applied to as many critics of the US empire as possible.

    If you are curious why the “state-affiliated media” label has not been applied to Twitter accounts associated with government-funded outlets of the US and its allies like NPR and the BBC, it’s because Twitter has explicitly created a loophole to exclude those outlets from such a designation.

    “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” Twitter’s rules say.

    Which is of course an absurd and arbitrary distinction. Whether you like George Galloway or not, I think anyone who’s familiar with his personality would agree that if anyone ever tried to take away his editorial independence and tell him what he is or isn’t permitted to say, it would take an entire team of surgeons to remove Galloway’s footwear from their personal anatomy. Many people who’ve worked with Russian media have said they’ve never been told what to say, and Galloway is surely one of them.

    The audacity of a social media company which works hand-in-glove with the most powerful government on earth to go around branding people “state-affiliated media” is appalling. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It is an instrument of imperial narrative control, just like all the other billionaire Silicon Valley megacorporations of immense influence. Putin could only dream of having state media that effective.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Bizarre RT Framing

    … you have to include the important information first.

    — News Writing for Television and Radio, University of Florida

    RT America begins a newscast with anchor Rick Sanchez standing by a map of Iraq, informing viewers: “Seven rockets hit a US military base just north of Baghdad. It houses US troops.”1

    Sanchez continues, “But here is what I want you to understand about this story. This is not just a story about Iraq and the United States. This is a story about Iraq and Iran and the United States and China.”

    Sanchez says we should ask: why China? Sanchez answers, “Because this week we learned that China has increased its purchases of Iranian oil by 129%!”

    “Now does this mean that China is partnering with Iran?” Sanchez answers his own question: “Yes, and no.”

    When the buyer has the chance to snap up a regularly purchased commodity at a discount price, usually the buyer will make a large purchase. That is a normal behavior in business transactions. Sanchez recognizes that China may just be agreeing to a good deal.

    But, says Sanchez, “China is ignoring US sanctions, getting tons of oil at a discount and supplying Iran with a much needed revenue source which Iran is in turn using against US troops.”

    Here, his tenuous logic that China is indirectly, and presumably knowingly, funding attacks against the US is so off-putting. And why should China which also finds itself under US sanctions (including new sanctions over alleging Chinese “interfering in Hong Kong’s freedoms.”2 ) want to abide by US sanctions?

    To state the connections proffered is bizarre is putting it mildly. “Question more,” RT advises. Is Sanchez suggesting that when one country conducts trade with another country — for instance, an exchange of cash for goods — that the buyer is responsible for what the buyer does with the cash it receives? Is an employer responsible should an employee use his pay check to drink himself silly and go home and abuse his family? Such is the logical connection that Sanchez proposes.

    Sanchez continues, “So Iran, fueled by its oil revenues, is trying to force the US out of Iraq. And you know what?” Sanchez leans forward and hold his arm out, as if pointing to the viewer: “Seems to be working.”

    Why would Iran want the US — which declared Iran to be part of an “axis of evil” along with Iraq (then under the rule of Saddam Hussein) — next door in Iraq? Who would want a neighbor like that?

    Sanchez got the year wrong,3 in subsequently stating that the Iraqi parliament is “essentially asking the United States troops to leave, to get out of their country.” [emphasis added]

    Most news organizations referred to Iraq expelling US troops; for example, the first page of an internet search on the terms “iraq parliament us troops 2020” listed NPR, Al Jazeera, France24, DW, Rand, Boston Herald, and VOX using some form of the word expel.

    To be fair, the parliament’s resolution did not target only the US: “The Iraqi government must work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason.” [emphasis added]

    Sanchez carries on:

    … we have China, Iran, two of the countries most targeted by the United Sates when it comes to sanctions and trade wars in recent years, right?, partnering in a deal that is ostensibly funding attacks against the United States, so what does the United States do at this point? Does it leave Iraq once and for all? Or does it attack China with more sanctions?

    Sanchez is proposing the questions. “Question more” is the RT slogan — a slogan that RT selectively adheres to. There are several more questions that should spring to mind: What are sanctions; i.e, what purpose do they serve? Are sanctions legal? Why is the US military still in Iraq and how did it get to be stationed there in the first place? Why are the purportedly “Iran-backed” militias attacking US bases in Iraq?

    Economic sanctions outside the parameters of a United Nations Security Council resolution or national self-defense are held to constitute an illicit intervention into the sovereign affairs of other nations. More egregiously, sanctions are widely regarded as a declaration of war. And why not? Sanctions kill! Professors John Mueller and Karl Mueller in their article, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” made clear the devastating lethality of sanctions:

    economic sanctions … may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.

    Speaking of killing, Sanchez does not mention the extremely pertinent assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani by a US drone strike on 3 January 2020 at Baghdad International Airport. Five Iraqi nationals and four other Iranian nationals were killed alongside Soleimani, including the deputy chairman of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. This led to the Iraqi resolution to remove foreign troops for its territory.

    When someone commits an unprovoked attack against you, you have a choice to respond or not. What message is sent to the aggressor when you do not respond? Might not the aggressor think she can now attack freely knowing that retaliation is unlikely? For instance, consider how the lack of response to Israeli bombing in Syria has resulted in repeated bombing by Israel of targets in Syria and compare it to Israel’s reluctance to bomb the Hizbollah resistance knowing that there will likely be retaliation.

    There is much dark history regarding the US vis-à-vis Iraq (that includes the western backers of the US, such as the UK, Australia, Canada, etc). There are the deaths of half-a-million children resulting from US-backed UN sanctions on Iraq — a price worth the US sanctions policy, according to Madeleine Albright, then US secretary-of-state. The devastation of a war launched by US president George Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair in which “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of removing Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein. Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani noted the UN complicity, and wrote a book titled Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States (Clarity Press)4 .

    Sanchez asks if China even cares about sanctions. “These are serious questions that too few of us are even asking in the media these days.”

    Question more Mr Sanchez: The US is sanctioning Iran. Why? Even though Iran was abiding by the terms of the JCPOA (the Iran nuclear deal), president Donald Trump (most certainly at the behest of Israel) wanted further capitulations by Iran, all this while the US was not in compliance with the deal. Then the US withdrew (so much for fidelity to a signed agreement by the US, but there are scads of such examples), and kept insisting that Iran comply, all while the Europeans partners were also in non-compliance.

    Sanchez presents as the top news question of the day: “Is there an alliance building between China [and Iran] and how will it affect the US?”

    Does Sanchez imply that trade between two countries constitutes “an alliance”? Sanchez’s intonation makes it seem as if the word alliance has some sinister connotations. The US trades with China, so do they have an alliance? Do two countries trading with each other constitute a provocative act against a third country? What does Sanchez wish to denote positing that “an alliance” between China and Iran? Wouldn’t it be nice it all countries were in alliance with each other — like a meaningful United Nations where each member country steadfastly abides by the UN Charter?

    Why not question US alliances, such as with Israel? Israel is a country in violation of dozens of UN resolutions, in violation of several Geneva Conventions, and is engaged in a slow-motion genocide against Palestinians. Indeed, Israeli media pointed out yesterday (16 March) that “Israel’s Theft Business Against the Palestinians Is as Thriving as Ever.”

    How does the US even get portrayed as the aggrieved party in this news reportage? It was the US which did not abide by the JCPOA. It is the US sanctioning Iran, inflicting damage to its economy, and killing Iranian people. It is the US which assassinated a high-ranking Iranian general. It is the US (plus Israel) behind the sabotage caused by the Stuxnet virus and the assassinations of Iranian scientists.

    All Rick Sanchez needs do, to get a good overview of the geo-strategic situation, is eyeball a map bigger than the one he used on air. Then question more: Are Iranian military situated near American shores? Are Iranians in the Florida Strait? Yet, US US warships commonly ply the waters of the Persian Gulf. Should US warships be sailing near Iranian shores? Moreover, when the US sanctions another country, assassinates that country’s citizens, and surrounds it with military hardware, then who is the threat? Also noteworthy is that US warships provocatively sail in the South China Sea, allegedly protecting freedom of navigation there, although never has the US provided any evidence that freedom of navigation has been blocked or threatened by China.

    So why then frame the opening segment by casting aspersions against Iran and China?

    The RT segment improved drastically when Sanchez interviewed former British MP George Galloway, but sadly, the opening segment set a terrible tone. That tone needs to be questioned more because RT is so much better than western mass media, and it needs to keep to that standard.

    1. The opening segment report ends at 16:47.
    2. Imagine if China were to sanction the US for interfering in BLM protestors’ or Capitol Hill protestors’ freedoms?
    3. He stated “Earlier this year,” but it was early 2020 — in January.
    4. Review.
    The post Bizarre RT Framing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.