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.
“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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.
Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.
This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.
Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.
Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.
Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.
Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.
The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”
In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.
Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.
First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.
Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.
Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.
Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.
The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.
Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).
Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.
Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America. And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.
Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.
Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.
The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.
Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.
This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.
Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.
Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.
Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.
Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.
The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”
In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.
Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.
First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.
Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.
Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.
Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.
The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.
Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).
Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.
Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America. And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.
Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.
Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.
Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.
In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:
‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’
In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:
‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.
‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’
The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:
‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’
And:
‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’
Morton then repeated both criticisms:
‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’
And:
‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’
Morton piled on the pain:
‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.
‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’
Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.
The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:
‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’
The BBC reported:
‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’
Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?
In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:
‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”
‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’
We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).
‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’
Pilger added:
‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.
‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’
In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:
‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.
‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)
Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.
The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:
‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’
There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:
‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’
Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:
‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’
And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:
‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.
We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.
It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.
A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.
‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’
No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:
‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’
That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.
The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:
‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”
‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”
‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)
Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.
In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.
The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)
With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.
By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.
And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.
None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:
‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’
Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.
Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:
‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’
Jones noted:
‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.
‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’
Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:
‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying
‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader
‘Just criminal’
It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:
‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’
Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.
No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.
Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.
Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.
In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.
1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”
2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.
4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.
5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.
6. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”
8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.
9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.
11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.
12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.
14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.
15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes.
16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state.
18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.
19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.
20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.
No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.
Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”
There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.
Since October, Israeli government officials have spent millions of dollars on a widespread campaign to target people who are opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and advance Zionist policies in the U.S. and Europe, a sprawling new investigation finds. A report by The Guardian released Monday reveals that the same group behind a covert Israeli social media campaign to influence U.S.
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.
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.
Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, Be careful his bowtie is really a camera.
— America by Paul Simon, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel in their Bookends album, 1968
Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any sense of the nightmare that is approaching. Even for them, however, and surely for most others, unreality reigns. Reality has a tough time countering illusions. For we are cataleptically slow-walking to WW III. If it is very hard or impossible to imagine our own deaths, how much harder is it to imagine the deaths of hundreds of millions of others or more.
In 1915, amid the insane slaughter of tens of millions during WW I that was a shocking embarrassment to the meliorist fantasy of the long-standing public consciousness, Freud wrote:
It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are, in fact, still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.
The growing lunacy of the Biden administration’s provocations against Russia via Ukraine seem lost on so many. The long-running and deep-seated demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin by U.S. propagandists has sunk so deep into the Western mind that facts can’t descend that deep to counteract it. It is one of the greatest triumphs of U.S. government propaganda.
A friend, a retired history professor at an elite university, recently told me that he can’t think of such matters as the growing threat of nuclear war if he wants to sleep at night, but anyway, he’s more concerned with the consequences of global warming. Readers at publications where my numerous articles about the nuclear war risk have appeared – the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 – have made many comments such as “nuclear weapons don’t exist,” that it’s all a hoax, that Putin is in cahoots with Biden in a game of fear mongering to promote a secret agenda, etc. How can one respond to such denials of reality?
The other day I met another friend who likes to talk about politics. He is an intelligent and a caring man. He was sporting a tee-shirt with a quote from George Washington and quickly started talking about his obsessive fear of Donald Trump and the possibility that he could be elected again. I told him that I despised Trump but that Biden was a far greater threat right now. He spoke highly of Biden, and when I responded that Biden has been a warmonger throughout his political career and, of course, in Ukraine, was instigating the use of nuclear weapons, and was in full support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, he looked at me as if I were saying something he had never heard before. When I spoke of the 2014 U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine, he, a man in his sixties at least, said he was unaware of it, but in any case Biden supported our military as he did and that was good. When I said Biden is mentally out of it and physically tottering, he emphatically denied it; said Biden was very sharp and fully engaged. He said Trump was fat and a great danger and George Washington would agree. I was at a loss for words. The conversation ended.
A third friend, just back from living overseas for a year, flew back east from California to visit old friends and relatives. He told me this sad tale:
There were experiences that troubled me very deeply during my visit that had nothing to do with all the death and final goodbyes I was immersed in. My family I would say is pretty typical working class Democrat. Liberal/progressive in social outlook. Most are devout Catholics. All are kind, generous very loving people. What was troubling was that it was pretty much impossible to carry on a rational reasonably sane political conversation with all but a couple of them, as the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” symptoms were absolutely off the charts. It was quite stunning actually. It is almost as if Dementia-Joe isn’t even in office as they had no interest in discussing his many failings, because their entire focus was the orange haired clown. If I had ten bucks for every time someone told me any one of the following NPR/PBS talking points I’d buy a nice meal for myself – (Trump will be a dictator if elected – Trump will prosecute his enemies if elected – Trump will destroy our democracy if he gets in – etc.) Any and all attempts to question these narratives and talking points by bringing the behavior of the current administration into the conversation were met with befuddlement – as if people couldn’t believe that “I” wasn’t as terrified as they were by the “Trump-Monster” lurking in the shadows.
So I guess I’m sharing these thoughts with you, Ed, because it feels like I’m dealing with several different kinds of loss right now. The more obvious “loss” associated with the physical death of loved ones – but I’m also mourning the intellectual and psychological death of living loved ones who have somehow become completely untethered from the “material realities” I observe on planet earth. They can repeat “talking points” but can’t explain the evidence or reason that needs to be attached to those talking points for them to be anything but propaganda. Physical death is a natural thing – something we will all face – but this intellectual and spiritual death I am witness to is perhaps even more painful and disconcerting for me. How do we find our way forward when reason, rational debate, evidence, and real-world events are replaced with fear – and rather irrational fears at that?
This intellectual and spiritual death that he describes is a widespread phenomenon. It is not new, but COVID 19 with its lockdowns, lies, and dangerous “vaccines” dramatically intensified it. It created vast gaps in interpersonal communication that were earlier exploited in the lead-up to the 2016 election and Trump’s surprising victory. Families and friends stopped talking to each other. The longstanding official propaganda apparatus went into overdrive. Then in 2020 the normal human fear of death and chaos was fully digitized during the lockdowns. Putin, Trump, the Chinese, sexual predators, viruses, space aliens, your next door neighbor, etc. – you name it – were all tossed into the mix that created fear and panic to replace the growing realization that the war on terror initiated by George W. Bush in 2001 was losing its power. New terrors were created, censorship was reinforced, and here we are in 2024 in a country supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza and with a population blind to the growing threat of WW III and the use of nuclear weapons.
The communication gap – what my friend aptly describes as “this intellectual and spiritual death” – is two-sided. On one hand there is simple ignorance of what is really going on in the world, greatly aided by vast government/media propaganda. On the other, there is chosen ignorance or the wish to be deceived to maintain illusions.
We are thinking reeds as Pascal called us, vulnerable feeling creatures afraid of death; we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by supporting wars that make so much blood that is inside other people get to the outside for the earth to drink since it is not our blood and we survive.
I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true. I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.
For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. Grasping the theatrical nature of social life, the need to pretend, to act, to feel oneself part of a “meaningful” play explains a lot. To stand outside consensus reality, outside the stage door, so to speak, is not very popular. Despite the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media, people want to believe them to feel they belong.
Yet D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world. It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about. Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al. The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media that are propagandists. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy. Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise. Here or there a decent article appears to reinforce the illusion that the corporate media tell the truth. But essentially it is one massive deception that is leading many people to accept a slow walk toward WW III.
There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind. To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.
Here’s an anecdote about a very strange encounter, one I couldn’t make up. A communication of some sort that also has a make-believe quality to it. I’m not sure what the message is.
I was recently meeting with a writer and researcher who has interviewed scores of people about the famous 1960s assassinations and other sensitive matters. I only knew this person through internet communication, but he was passing my way and suggested that we meet, which we did at a local out-of-the-way cafe. We were the only customers and we took our drinks out the back to a small table and chairs under a tree in the café’s large garden that bordered open land down to a river. About 10 yards away a woman sat at a table, writing in a notebook that I took to be journaling of some sort. The researcher and I talked very openly for more than two hours about our mutual work and what he had learned from many of his interviewees about the assassinations. Neither of us paid any attention to the woman at the table – naively? – and our conversation naturally revolved around the parts played by intelligence agencies, the CIA, etc. in the assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, Jr. The woman sat and wrote. Near the end of our two plus hours, my friend went inside the café, which had closed to new customers, to use the men’s room. The woman called to me and said I hope you don’t mind but I overheard some of your conversation and my father worked for U.S. intelligence. She then told us much more about him, where he went to college, etc. or at least what she said she knew because when growing up he didn’t tell her mother, her, or siblings any details about his decades of spying. But when she attended his memorial service in Washington D.C., the place was filled with intelligence operatives and she learned more about her father’s secretive life. Then, out of the blue, it burst out of her how he was obsessed with the high school he attended, one she assured us we probably never heard of (we were in Massachusetts) – Regis High School, a Jesuit scholarship prep school for boys in NYC. To say I was startled is an understatement, since I went to Regis myself, and the anomalous “coincidence” of this encounter in the back garden of an empty café spooked my friend as well. The woman told us more about her father until we had to leave.
I wondered if he wore a bowtie and if what just happened weren’t really so.
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.
Anyone who denies this is extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch at this point isn't being honest.
And I don't understand how Democrats and their pundits believe they can convince Americans it's not happening.
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.
Antony Blinken: "We can never let the crimes Russia's committing become our new normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal" pic.twitter.com/W2rBYE8CVk
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.
Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide. A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB
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.
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.
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.
According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.
Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel's use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T
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.
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.
We speak with Congressmember Jamaal Bowman of New York, one of the top targets for pro-Israel groups seeking to oust lawmakers who have led calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. Bowman is a former Bronx middle school principal who won his seat in 2020 before becoming a member of the so-called Squad of progressives in Congress. The powerful lobby group AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, could spend as much as $25 million to support George Latimer, Bowman’s rival for the Democratic nomination in New York’s 16th District, which would make it the most expensive primary fight in U.S. history. “It’s unprecedented,” says Bowman, who calls it “despicable” for the group to target him for his antiwar stance. “They don’t want anyone to be critical of the state of Israel, even though an honest critique will lead to the ongoing safety and security of the people of Israel and hopefully get us a free Palestine.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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.
The Israeli government spent millions of dollars to fund a covert, ongoing social media campaign to create an illusion of stronger pro-Israel sentiment in order to push U.S. politicians to send more military funding to bankroll the Gaza genocide and other Israeli atrocities, a new bombshell report finds. Reports published Wednesday by Haaretz and The New York Times detail how, in October…
Ireland’s recognition of the state of Palestine has been enthusiastically welcomed at home and (mostly) abroad as a positive contribution to the future of Palestine. Needless to say, this development did not take place in a vacuum though, for the most part, it is being presented as if it did.
The scale and endurance of the pro-Palestinian campaigns in Ireland both historically, and specifically in response to the Israeli/US barbarism in Gaza, is probably not given the recognition it deserves. However, the result was dramatic: the Irish government was forced to take a position – a position that successive Irish governments had resolutely refused to entertain.
That is one side of the story. The problem for pro-Palestinian campaigners and supporters is that Ireland is a perfect example of a term not often used these days – Ireland is a banana republic. So much so, that the Irish government does not get out of bed in the morning without first checking with its major ‘partner’ – the United States of America.
This is where internal political considerations clashed with Ireland’s unswerving allegiance to the US. There now was a problem and it had to be solved. So, for our brave leaders in the Irish government, it then became a matter of how to manage this particular problem.
Enter the US State Department. From then on, Ireland stayed firmly within the boundaries allowed – as it always does. And that is what it came down to: what would Ireland be allowed to say or do. The statement provided by the Irish government, here if read carefully, clearly shows what those boundaries are.
It did not stop there: on 28 May, the day the Palestinian flag flew outside Leinster House (Irish Parliament) the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris stated “And Europe could be doing a hell of a lot more, Europe needs to do a lot more in relation to this.” Europe but not the United States of America! Know your boundaries and stick to them – or else.
As reported by Politico:
Dublin was determined to take this step without damaging its typically strong relations with U.S. politicians — particularly Biden’s White House.
Consequently, Irish Department of Foreign Affairs diplomats ensured that their U.S. counterparts in the State Department were speedily briefed on every conversation the Irish had with like-minded European governments — Belgium, Malta, Norway, Slovenia and above all Spain — as they pursued a joint plan to recognize Palestinian statehood, the official said.
This included face-to-face discussions with senior National Security Council officials at the White House in March as part of St. Patrick’s Day-related diplomacy; multiple phone calls between Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, who led the Irish initiative, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and final calls to Washington following the Irish Cabinet’s formal signoff on its decision Tuesday night.
“We couldn’t have been clearer in spelling out our intentions weeks, months in advance to make sure there were no surprises or needless suspicions raised in Washington,” said the Irish official, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Apparently, the US side was quite chuffed with the outcome: “They tried to make enough of a group so that it would make a splash, but in our view, it’s more like a ripple.”
In the end, the Irish statement announcing its intentions quite clearly shows that the Irish position soon emerged as an Irish government/US State Department position or, in short, a US State Department position.
Let’s start with the “hostages”:
“It is long past time for a ceasefire, for the unconditional release of hostages and for unhindered access for humanitarian aid.”
and,
“Let me be clear that Ireland condemns the barbaric massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7th last. Civilians attacked and murdered. Hostages taken in the most brutal and terrifying of circumstances, including a young Israeli-Irish child.
We call again for all hostages to be immediately returned to the arms of their loved ones.”
Harris is referring here to more than one hundred Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Nowhere in his statement does he even refer to the 5,200 Palestinians hostages, including at least 170 children held up to October 6, 2023, nor to the 7,350 more hostages taken by Israel since that date.
Move on to “children”:
“Children are innocent. The children of Israel. The children of Palestine. They deserve peace.”
Look at the order. Yet, the killings are in a different order – 10,651 Palestinians were slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to 7 October 2023, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.
The figures since 7 October are so horrific that they cannot even be accurately counted – on the Palestinian side. That is before we even start to think about starvation and denial of medical and other essential requirements, the destruction of medical facilities, injuries and the unrelenting terror.
Now we get to the “two state solution”:
“It is a statement of unequivocal support for a two-State solution – the only credible path to peace and security for Israel, for Palestine and for their peoples.” (note the order again)
“A two-state solution is the only way out of the generational cycles of violence, retaliation and resentment, where so many wrongs can never make a right.”
It is not for me to determine what is best for the Palestinian people but when the chief enablers of the barbarism against the Palestinian people tell you that there is only one solution – a two state solution – it is legitimate to constructively analyse that position. However, when the Irish government – in unison with the chief enablers of the barbarism – insists that this is the only solution, it becomes an imperative.
The fact is that large numbers of Palestinians have always, and still, oppose the Oslo Accords and the concept of a two state solution. Indeed, a large part of the reason for the successful election of Hamas in Gaza was its opposition to those concepts. Yet, the Irish government and the US government insist this is the ONLY way forward.
However, Ulster says NO! Ooops, I have strayed into that other unresolved statehood issue – the little matter of the British-occupied six counties in the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland.
Sorry, Israel says NO! NEVER! to a two state solution with Netanyahu boasting that “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.”
Despite the clearly stated and unequivocal refusal of Israel to even consider a two state solution, the Irish and US governments insist that it is the ONLY option. So, Ireland has now recognised the state of Palestine but retains the right to tell them what to do in step with the US government telling them what to do: the-two-state-no-other-option option is the only option.
The real irony is that in fighting so hard for Palestinian statehood and sovereignty, the Irish government – as usual – entirely sacrificed its own statehood and sovereignty as it crawled on its belly to the US State Department begging for some understanding for the little pickle it found itself in. The fact is that the Irish government would not dare step one inch outside the well-established boundaries that have been set for it by the US authorities.
Yet, the Irish government is successfully strutting its stuff – virtually unchallenged – about how brave it is, what a wonderful defender of the oppressed it is, what a promoter of peace it is as it crawls back from its ‘consultations’ with the worst offender of all those concepts the world has ever known.
Now that Palestine is sorted, perhaps we could look to seeking statehood and sovereignty for Ireland? The farcical position of the Irish government leading a charge on Palestinian statehood while simultaneously begging forgiveness and understanding from the despots who rule the US (and who think they rule the world) and with an on-going British occupation of part of our country, has not entirely gone unnoticed. One thing is certain, the Irish government will not lead that charge.
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 merging of Zionist propaganda and anti-China hysteria should embarrass its proponents, but apparently there’s a market for this conspiratorial drivel in the “post-truth” era promoted by the far right. They want us to believe the paid foreign agents we should be concerned about are students in $40 tents calling for university divestment, not those working for a foreign-focused lobby with billions of dollars.
Last week National Post columnist John Ivison claimed the Chinese Communist Party was funding the popular uprising against Canada’s role in enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Of course he supplied absolutely no evidence. The front-page article headlined “Chinese links to protests fit pattern” began: “the public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada has already established that China tried to meddle in the last two general election campaigns. But, if a new report into the funding of the anti-Israel movement in North America is to be believed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also linked to the protests that are disrupting cities and campuses across the continent.” Notice the hedging? If it “is to be believed”. In other words, there is absolutely no evidence that he is willing to cite.
On X, I responded, “A well-financed foreign focused lobby has employed every tactic short of assassination to scuttle a popular uprising against genocide in Gaza and Johnny boy claims those who don’t want Canada to enable the slaughter are a Chinese Communist Party front. You are beyond ridiculous.”
Ivison retorted, “What’s wrong, Yves? Are your paymasters unhappy at any scrutiny of their funding of Canada’s legion of useful idiots?” CBC and Globe and Mail commentator Andrew Coyne and former Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein retweeted Ivison’s idiocy to which I responded: “You haven’t a scintilla of evidence I’ve been funded by any foreign, corporate or wealthy interest. You on other hand are paid by a paper set up by Conrad Black and currently owned by a US hedge fund. Are you ashamed of promoting genocide and being such a sycophant of power?”
Since campaigning against Canada’s role in overthrowing Haiti’s elected government 20 years ago, I’ve repeatedly been accused of receiving money from Haitian, Venezuelan, Russian, Iranian and Chinese officials. It’s common to claim that internationalists and anti-imperialists are funded by foreign enemies. In a bid to delegitimize the anti-genocide movement, especially the student divestment encampments, there’s been a burst of these claims recently. In “Hidden hand funds Jew-hating protests, rallies, encampments”, Warren Kinsella makes a mockery of himself. The Toronto Sun commentary concluded, “The rest of us know the truth: the Jew-hating protests, rallies and encampments we are seeing are funded, in whole or in part, by outside interests who do not wish to reveal themselves. They are the hidden hand. But the rest of us will not rest until the hidden hand is exposed.”
The imaginary “hidden hand” versus documented apartheid lobby truth. It’s easy to trace at least part of the mammoth sums the apartheid lobby has used to shape Canadian opinion since all taxpayers subsidize the registered “charities” behind their propaganda. Montreal’s Jewish federation has $2 billion in assets. The other federations have hundreds of millions of dollars more. (The federations receive tens of millions of dollars in government grants and tens of millions more in subsidy through tax receipts they offer to donors).
The federations fund a bevy of genocidal organizations and their official advocacy arm is the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. CIJA has a slew of ties to Israel with its top lobbyist, David Cooper, a long-time press officer at the Israeli Embassy. The Jewish Federations of Canada (JFC) and its United Israel Appeal (UIA) calls “the government of Israel” one of its “key strategic partners … that act as agents in the delivery of programs in Israel.” Between 1991 and 2022 UIA received over $1.5 billion in donations, which largely came from the federations.
At a broader level, Canada’s Jewish Federations have long been formally tied to the Jewish Agency for Israel (Jewish Agency for Palestine until 1948). Its website notes, “Canadian Federations are engaged in unique alliances with the Jewish Agency for Israel” and “founded in 1929, the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) is a primary agent for JFC-UIA in carrying out our mandate.”
The Jewish Agency for Israel effectively became Israel’s government in 1948 with long-time head David Ben-Gurion its first prime minister. Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, Moshe Sharett, subsequently led the Jewish Agency while current Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, stepped down as head of the Jewish Agency to take that position. Today the Jewish Agency for Israel is a parastatal organization that seeks to further Judaize Israel, especially far-flung areas.
No corporate media ever discusses the federations’ formal ties to Israel. Nor do we hear about the huge sums spent on pro-apartheid campaigning in Canada.
But we know one thing for certain: The paid foreign agents for Israel and its genocide aren’t sleeping in $40 tents.
There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:
* Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.
* Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.
* For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel’s favour have been true for decades.
* Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.
* Israel has laid waste to Gaza’s entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.
* Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.
* Israel is actively starving Gaza’s population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.
* Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.
* Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.
* And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.
Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.
It was faint, but there was more than just a flicker of hope. In the tormented (and tormenting) journey the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange, has endured, May 20, 2024 provided another pitstop. As with many such stops over the years, it involved lawyers. Many of them.
The occasion was whether the UK High Court of Justice would grant Assange leave to appeal his extradition to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 hewn from the monstrous quarry that is the Espionage Act of 1917. He is wanted for receiving and publishing classified US government materials comprising diplomatic cables, the files of those detained in Guantanamo Bay, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any computed sentence, glacially calculated at 175 years, would effectively spell his end.
News on the legal front has often been discomforting for Assange and his supporters. The US has been favoured, repeatedly, in various appeals, chalking up the lion’s share of victories since successfully overturning the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser to bar extradition in January 2021 on mental health grounds. But Justice Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp of the High Court of Justice in London promised to keep matters interesting.
A key sticking point in the proceedings has been whether the First Amendment would protect Assange’s publishing activity in the course of any trial in the US. The attitude from the central US prosecutor in the extradition proceedings, Gordon Kromberg, and former Secretary of State and ex-CIA director Mike Pompeo, has been one of hearty disapproval that it should.
Pompeo’s remarks in an infamous April 2017 address as CIA director to the Center for Strategic and International Studies openly branded WikiLeaks “a hostile intelligence service” that proselytised in the cause of transparency and aided such powers as Russia. Assange “and his kind” were “not in the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom. They have pretended that America’s First Amendment freedom shield them from justice.” They were “wrong” to have thought so.
On January 17, 2020, Kromberg submitted an affidavit to the UK district court that was eye opening on the subject. The following remains salient: “Concerning any First Amendment challenge, the United States could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information, and even were they so entitled, that Assange’s conduct is unprotected because of his complicity in illegal acts and in publishing the names of innocent sources to their grave and imminent risk of harm.”
In March 2024, the High Court curtly dismissed six of the nine arguments submitted by Assange in part of his effort to seek a review of the entire case. The judges, anchoring themselves in the initial reasoning of the district court judge, refused to accept that he was being charged with a political offence, something barred by the US-UK Extradition Treaty, or that the CIA had breached lawyer-client privilege in having spied on him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, not to mention the serious thought given to abduction and assassination.
The judges gave the prosecution a heavy olive branch, implying that the case for extradition would be stronger if a number of assurances could be made by the US prosecution. These were, in turn, that Assange be offered First Amendment protections, despite him not being deemed a journalist; that he not be prejudiced, both during the trial and in sentence, on account of his nationality, and that he not be subject to the death penalty. The insistence on such undertakings had a slightly unreal, woolly-headed air to them.
On April 16, the US State Department filed the fangless assurances in a diplomatic note to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). “Assange will not be prejudiced by reason of nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing.” If extradited, he could still “raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.”
The US authorities further undertook to avoid seeking or imposing the death sentence. “The United States is able to provide such assurance as Assange is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.” This can only be taken as conjecture, given the latitude the prosecution has in laying further charges that carry the death penalty should Assange find himself in US captivity.
In court, Edward Fitzgerald KC, representing Assange, explained with cold sobriety that such an assurance made no guarantee that Assange could rely on the First Amendment at trial. “It does not commit the prosecution to take the point, which gave rise to this court’s concerns, i.e. the point that as a foreign citizen he is not entitled to rely on the First Amendment, at least in relation to a national security matter.” In any case, US courts were hardly bound by it, a point emphasised in the statement given by defence witness and former US district judge, Professor Paul Grimm. It followed that the assurance was “blatantly inadequate” and “would cause the applicant prejudice on the basis of his nationality.”
Written submissions to the court from Assange’s legal team also argued that discrimination “on grounds that a person is a foreigner, whether on the basis that they are a foreign national or a foreign citizen, is plainly within the scope of the prohibition [against extradition under the UK Extradition Act 2003]. ‘Prejudice at trial’ must include exclusion on grounds of citizenship from fundamental substantive rights that can be asserted at trial. On the US argument, trial procedures could discriminate on grounds of citizenship.”
In response, the US submitted arguments of a headshaking quality. Through James Lewis KC, it was submitted that the High Court had erred in its March judgment in equating “prejudice on grounds of foreign nationality with discrimination on grounds of foreign citizenship”. The UK Extradition Act mentions “nationality” in preference to “citizenship”. These terms were not “synonymous”.
According to Lewis, Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) protecting journalists and whistleblowers was qualified by conduct “within the tenets of reasonable and responsible journalism”. One factor in this context “whether it is reasonable and responsible is where the publication took place – inside a member state’s territory or outside a member state’s territory.”
The prosecution’s written submissions summarise the points. The First Amendment’s applicability to Assange’s case depended on “the components of (1) conduct on foreign (outside the United States of America) soil; (2) non-US citizenship; and (3) national defense information”. Assange, Lewis elaborated, “will be able to rely on it but that does not mean the scope will cover the conduct he is accused of.”
The prosecution suggested that former US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a vital source for WikiLeaks, had been unable to rely on the First Amendment, limiting the possibility that its protections could extend to covering Assange.
Mark Summers KC, also representing Assange, was bemused. “The fact that Chelsea Manning was found in the end to have no substantial First Amendment claims tells you nothing at all. She was a government employee, not a publisher.”
He also made the point that “You can be a national without being a citizen [but] you cannot be a citizen without nationality.” It followed that discrimination arising out of citizenship would result in discrimination based on nationality, and nothing adduced by the prosecution in terms of case law suggested otherwise.
Unconvinced by the prosecution’s contorted reasoning, Dame Victoria Sharp agreed to grant leave to Assange to appeal on the grounds he is at risk of discrimination by virtue of his nationality, in so far as it affects his right to assert protections afforded by Article 10 of the ECHR and the First Amendment.
It remains to be seen whether this legal victory for the ailing Australian will yield a sweet harvest rather than the bitter fruit it has. He remains Britain’s most prominent political prisoner, held in unpardonable conditions, refused bail and subject to jailing conditions vicariously approved by those in Washington. In the meantime, the public campaign to drop the indictment and seek his liberation continues to ripen.
Propaganda by omission is a dominant feature of the ‘mainstream’ news media. Indeed, it is a requirement. Rather than serving the public interest by fully exposing the brutal machinations of power, state-corporate media shield Western governments and their allies from scrutiny and focus the public’s attention on the crimes of Official Enemies.
Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is but the latest example. Consider the dearth of media coverage given to the compelling and shocking testimony provided by leading British surgeon, Professor Nick Maynard, who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital.
Maynard left Gaza just before Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on 7 May. He had been operating on Palestinian patients for two weeks and he gave a very disturbing account of what he had observed.
The first topic he highlighted was ‘the direct targeting of healthcare workers’ by the Israeli military, describing how ‘hundreds have been killed’ and ‘hundreds have been abducted’. Maynard had personally worked with one young doctor and one young nurse who had been abducted and held in captivity for 45 days and 60 days, respectively. They both gave him ‘very graphic and stark descriptions of their daily torture at the hands of the Israeli defence force’. He described the experience of hearing their stories as ‘extremely harrowing’.
Maynard had also been to Gaza over Christmas and New Year where he worked at Al-Aqsa hospital. He “spent the whole two weeks operating all the time on major explosive injuries to the abdomen and to the chest. And it was really nonstop.”
His visit was unexpectedly cut short in early January when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ordered the medical staff, along with the hospital’s 600 patients, to evacuate the hospital. A few British newspaper reports that included accounts by Maynard and colleagues were published at the time on the “nightmare” of working in “one of ‘Gaza’s last functioning hospitals” (Daily Mirror, 18 January, 2024), “The single worst thing I’ve seen” (Daily Telegraph, 12 January, 2024), and “British surgeon haunted by Gaza horrors pledges to go back” (The Times, 4 February, 2024).
In March, the Guardianreported that a delegation of American and British doctors had arrived in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration that the Israeli military was systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes. Maynard was quoted, accusing the IDF of committing “appalling atrocities”, although the article did not address these in depth.
He said:
“The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.”
He continued:
“It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”
According to Maynard, Israel’s strategy of targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities is intended to drive the Palestinians from their homes:
“It persuades the local population to leave. If a hospital has been dismantled, if the locals see there is no medical care available and see the disrupted infrastructure, it’s yet another factor that drives them south.” [At that time, Israel had designated the south of Gaza a “safe zone” for Palestinians to seek refuge.]
In an interview with Nick Ferrari of London-based LBC radio on 2 April, Maynard made further shocking revelations. The timing of the interview was linked to the IDF having just destroyed another hospital, Al-Shifa, where Maynard had also previously worked. Around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces.
Maynard told Ferrari:
“Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].”
He added:
“And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.”
Ferrari then asked:
“You believe executed by whom, doctor?”
Maynard:
“By the Israeli Defence Force.
Ferrari:
“Why would they seek to execute surgeons and medical professionals?”
Maynard:
“Well, they’ve been doing it since October the 7th. Over 450 healthcare workers have been killed. Friends of mine that I’ve worked with over the years. Many have been abducted as well, and nothing has been heard of them since. So, there is no doubt in my mind that – I can bear witness to this from my time at Al-Aqsa hospital and from talking to people that there has been direct targeting of the healthcare system in Gaza, direct targeting of hospitals and multiple killings of healthcare workers.”
Maynard also made clear that neither he, nor any of his colleagues, ever saw evidence of Hamas using hospitals or healthcare facilities as bases for their operations, despite numerous Israeli claims to the contrary.
BBC Silence
“Mainstream” media showed minimal interest in this highly credible testimony from a British surgeon on Israel’s deliberate targeting of healthcare workers, including actual execution of surgeons. As far as we can see, there is nothing about Maynard’s testimony exposing these executions on the BBC News website.
An article on the Guardian website on 7 April did cover Maynard’s testimony about targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure, but made no mention of his statement that Palestinian surgeons had been executed by Israeli soldiers. Nor was it mentioned anywhere else in the entirety of the British national press.
The Telegraph carried an interview with Maynard on 12 January in which he said:
“here can be certainly no doubt in my mind from what I’ve recently witnessed that [Israel] are directly targeting healthcare structures with a view to completely disabling the healthcare system in Gaza.”
The Telegraph appears not to have reported Maynard’s subsequent claim that he personally knew surgeons who have since been executed by Israeli soldiers.
On 13 May, International Nurses Day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 500 medical personnel had been killed by Israel since 7 October. Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a paediatric neurologist and co-founder of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, said that the only way Israel could ‘justify’ these killings would be if they see these healthcare workers not as humans, but as “human animals”. As readers may recall, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant infamously described his Palestinian enemies as “human animals”.
“the very strong narrative of the patients I was treating over the last two weeks were those with terrible infective complications as a direct result of malnutrition, and this was very stark indeed.”
He gave a graphic insight into the hellish conditions:
“And I operated on many patients in the last two weeks who had awful complications from their abdominal surgery related to inadequate nutrition, and particularly those with [the] abdominal wall breaking down. So, literally their intestines end up hanging outside. And the intestinal repairs that have been carried out to deal with the damage to the bowels leaking, so their bowel contents leaking out from different parts of the abdomen, covering their bodies, covering their beds.”
He drew particular attention to:
“The lack of resources to deal with these inadequate numbers of colostomy bags, wound management devices and nutritional support.”
Maynard explained the consequences for patients:
“They get this vicious cycle of malnutrition, infection, wounds breaking down, more infection, more malnutrition. So, it’s devastating and we will see far more of that over the coming months.”
He gave examples of two young female patients he had treated: Tala who was 16 and Lama who was 18, both of whom had survivable injuries. Tragically, they both died “as a direct result of malnutrition”.
This was yet more shocking and credible testimony from an experienced British consultant surgeon. It should have been headline news across the British press and broadcasting outlets. But searches of the Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, together with Google searches, reveal minimal “mainstream” coverage: one article in the Independent.
If this had been evidence against “Putin’s Russia” or “Assad’s Syria”, it would have generated huge headlines, in-depth reporting and anguished commentary across all major news media. Once again, we see the insidiously corrupt phenomenon of propaganda by omission.
It is noteworthy that, last November, the BBC News website didfeature Maynard, “who’s been travelling to the Gaza Strip and West Bank for more than a decade.” Six months ago, he was once again on “standby to go and work in operating theatres with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians”. With remarkable courage, he told the BBC:
“I think there is fear, apprehension, not knowing what one would find, but I think the other motives for doing so… are so powerful that they outweigh everything else. I consider it a huge privilege to be in a position to help these people who need help more than most of us can possibly understand.”
Now that Maynard has returned from Gaza with horrific accounts, not least of the murder of healthcare workers by the Israeli military, the BBC appears not in the least interested. When we pointed this out via X (formerly Twitter), directly challenging John Neal, editor of BBC News at One, Six and Ten, and Paul Royall, executive editor of the BBC News Channel, the public response was huge. Our social media outreach is routinely suppressed by the deliberately obscure algorithms of Facebook and X. But this particular tweet spread widely by our standards, being shared 740 times at the time of writing. Shamefully, there has been no response from the BBC.
When Genocide Is Merely “War”
In the meantime, BBC News persists in labelling the Gaza genocide as the ‘Israel-Gaza war’. The day after it was reported that almost half a million Palestinians had fled Rafah in the south of Gaza, despite having previously been designated a “safe zone” by Israel, as discussed above, the BBC failed to follow up on the story.
One was presumably supposed to imagine that this huge number of people was no longer in danger: at risk of being bombed or dying under Israeli-imposed hunger, malnutrition and disease.
That same week, the BBC News website had as many as four ‘Live’ feeds running simultaneously. Not one of them focused on the Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza. This is truly remarkable. Has there been a BBC directive from senior management not to give too much attention to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians? Where are the BBC whistleblowers who can let the public know what’s going on inside the corporation?
A vanishingly rare exception appeared on 24 October 2023, when BBC correspondent Rami Ruhayem – a former journalist for the Associated Press, who has worked as a journalist and producer for BBC Arabic and the BBC World Service since 2005 – sent a letter to the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie:
“Dear Tim,
I am writing to raise the gravest possible concerns about the coverage of the BBC, especially on English outlets, of the current fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions.
“It appears to me that information that is highly significant and relevant is either entirely missing or not being given due prominence in coverage.”
The emphasis now is emphatically on “missing”. It seems the global student and other protests have prompted the BBC to attempt to limit public dissent.
By contrast, BBC journalists can be quick to respond when they feel they have been subjected to unjust criticism. On 13 May, we retweeted a clip from Saul Staniforth, a media activist with a large following on X, about Israel banning Al Jazeera. Staniforth had included a quote from Sebastian Usher, a BBC News Middle East analyst:
“Al Jazeera – I think many people, if they DO watch it, WOULD see it as some kind of propaganda.”
We asked:
“And how do you think many people see BBC News?”
Clearly piqued, Usher contacted us the following day to say that his quote had been taken out of context. He said it was a direct response during a live interview to a question on the likely reaction by Israelis to the closing of Al Jazeera. He considered Staniforth’s tweet and our follow-up seriously misleading and the exact opposite of the tenor of his reporting on the issue.
We asked him which words he had used to express solidarity with Al Jazeera, or to speak out for press freedom and free speech. He declined to provide such a statement, saying that as a BBC journalist he was unable to do so in a public forum. Usher added that in his reporting he stressed that Al Jazeera sees its mission as righting what it believes is imbalance on Gaza reporting in international media by giving more space to Palestinian voices and voices on the ground.
We were happy to include the points he had made, which we did via Facebook and X. Usher responded to our very reasonable response with a grudging “Ok”.
It is worth noting that Usher strongly objected to being “quoted out of context” while working for a media organisation clearly trying to suppress public outrage at an ongoing genocide by reducing coverage.
Moreover, the essential observation we made stands: many people at home and abroad regard BBC News as an outlet of western propaganda. Its abject performance during the Gaza genocide – “the Israel-Gaza war”, as the state-mandated broadcaster puts it – is ample proof.
These Tibetan children are from Sangri in Lhoka region of occupied Tibet. Here they are displaying paintings upon the theme of; ‘forging a strong sense of Chinese national community’, little wonder they produced such propaganda imagery. But that is function of ‘schools’ established across Tibet’s lands, they are not seeking to educate, but indoctrinate. A calculated program of brainwashing to eliminate any trace of Tibetan cultural and national identity, it is the genocide of a people and their culture.
[This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.]
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things.
First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a horrifying price for making the Palestinian experience of genocide visible to western audiences over the past seven months.
Israel has killed a tenth of their number – some 100 journalists – as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel’s has been most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.
Second, we must shame the western media – not least the BBC – who have so utterly betrayed their Palestinian colleagues by failing to properly report the destruction of Gaza, or name it as a genocide.
The BBC aired only the briefest coverage of South Africa’s devastating case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January – a case so powerful the court has put Israel on trial for genocide. A fact you would barely know from the BBC’s reporting.
By contrast, the corporation cleared the schedules to present in full Israel’s hollow legal response.
The BBC’s double standards are all the more glaring if we recall how it reported Ukraine, also invaded by a hostile army – Russia’s.
Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv’s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.
BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post – apparently approvingly – a diagram showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.
Two years later, in its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.
It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks – even though those soldiers, unlike Russia’s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.
Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.
But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren’t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.
The same media that celebrated families taking in Ukrainian refugees has willingly conspired in the smearing of those whose only crime is that they wish to stop the slaughter of 15,000-plus Palestinian children in Gaza.
There is apparently nothing heroic about opposing Israel’s genocide, even if opposing Russia’s invasion is still treated as a badge of honour.
The media give politicians a free pass to vilify as an antisemite anyone outraged that UK weapons are being used to help kill, maim and orphan many, many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. That accusation assumes that every Jew supports this slaughter, and erases all those Jews standing alongside us today at this protest.
In the US, police forces are beating and arresting students who have peacefully called on their universities to stop investing in the arming of Israel’s genocide. When the police pulled back at UCLA, it was only to allow pro-Israel thugs to assault the students – again many of them Jews.
A clear war is being waged against the right to protest against a genocide. And in tandem, the media has declared a war on the English language.
The roles of aggressor and victim have been reversed. The BBC accused the students, encamped on university grounds, of “clashing” with pro-Israel groups that invaded the campus to violently attack them.
What explains these glaring inconsistencies, this gigantic failure by a media that’s supposed to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power.
Part of the answer is old-school racism. Ukrainains look like us, as some reporters let slip, and therefore deserve our solidarity. Palestinians, it seems, do not.
But there is another, more important answer. The establishment media isn’t really a watchdog on the abuse of power. It never was. It is a narrative factory, there to create stories that make those abuses of power possible.
State and billionaire-owned media achieve this goal through various sleights of hand.
First, they omit stories that might disrupt the core narrative.
The media’s script is a simple one:
What the West and its allies do is always well-meant, however horrific the outcomes.
And what the West does, however provocative or foolhardy, can never be cited as an explanation for what our “enemies” do.
No cause and no effect. They, whoever we select, are simply savage. They are evil. Theyare out to destroy civilisation. They must be stopped.
Nightly for weeks, I have watched the BBC news. If it were all I relied on, I would barely know that Israel is daily bombing the refugee camps of Rafah that are supposedly a “safe zone”.
Or that Israel continues to engineer a famine by blocking aid, and that Palestinians continue to die of hunger.
Or that the UK has actively assisted the creation of that famine by denying UNRWA funding.
Or that the protests to end the Gaza genocide – painted as terror-supporting and antisemitic – are backed by many, many Jews, some of them here today.
And of course, I would have little idea that Israel’s imprisonment and slaughter of Palestinians did not begin on October 7 with Hamas’ attack.
That’s because the BBC continues to ignore the siege of Gaza as the context for October 7 – just as it and the rest of the media largely ignored the 17-year siege throughout the years Israel was enforcing it.
If I relied on the BBC, I would not understand that what Israel is doing can be neither “retaliation”, nor a “war”. You can’t go to war, or retaliate, against a people whose territory you have been belligerently occupying and stealing for decades.
And when the media can no longer omit, it distracts – through strategies of deflection, misdirection and minimisation.
So when Gaza makes the news, as it rarely does now, it is invariably filtered through other lenses.
The focus is on interminable negotiations, on Israel’s plans for the “day after”, on the agonies of the hostages’ families, on the fears evoked by protest chants, on where to draw the line on free speech.
Anything to avoid addressing a genocide that’s been carried out in broad daylight for seven months.
In their defence, establishment journalists tell us that they have a duty to be impartial. Their critics, they say, do not understand how news operations work.
As a journalist who spent years working in major newsrooms, I can assure you this is a self-serving lie.
Just this week, an interview went viral of the Norway Broadcasting Corporation interviewing Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. Unlike on the BBC, Mencer’s lies did not pass unchallenged.
The Norwegian journalist spent 25 minutes unpicking his falsehoods and deceptions, one by one. It was revelatory to see an Israeli spokesperson’s claims stripped away, layer by layer, until he stood there naked, his lies exposed.
It can be done – if there is a will to do it.
Journalists at the BBC and the rest of the establishment media understand, however implicitly, that their job is to fail. It is to fail to investigate the genocide in Gaza. It is to fail to give voice to the powerless. It is to fail to provide context and aid understanding. It is to fail to show solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza being killed for their journalism.
Rather, the BBC’s role is to protect the political establishment from ever being held to account for their complicity in genocide.
The establishment media’s job is to create the impression of uncertainty, of doubt, of confusion – even when what is happening is crystal clear.
When one day, the World Court finally gets round to issuing a ruling on Israel’s genocide, our politicians and media will claim they could not have known, that they were misled, that they could not see clearly because events were shrouded by the “fog of war”.
Our job is to explode that lie, to deny them an alibi. It is to keep pointing out that the information was there from the start. They knew, if only because we told them.
And one day, if there is any justice, they will stand in the dock – at the Hague – their excuses stripped away.
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 26, 2024. Photo: Xinhua
A foreboding article was published on April 24. It was pointed out that China had provided a berth to a Russian ship Angara that is purportedly “tied to North Korea-Russia arms transfers.”
Reuters cited Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) – that boasts of itself to be “the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank” – which claims Angara, since August 2023, has transported “thousands of containers believed to contain North Korean munitions,” [italics added] to Russian ports.
Container ships transport containers, and along the way they dock in certain harbors. Until satellite photos have X-ray capability any speculation about what is inside a container will be just that: speculation. Discerning readers will readily pick up on this.
Despite China repeatedly coming out in favor of peace, Reuters, nonetheless, plays up US concerns over perceived support by Beijing for “Moscow’s war” (what Moscow calls a “special military operation”) in Ukraine.
And right on cue, US secretary-of-state Antony Blinken shows up in Beijing echoing a list of US concerns vis-à-vis China.
Blinken had public words for China: “In my meetings with NATO Allies earlier this month and with our G7 partners just last week, I heard that same message: fueling Russia’s defense industrial base not only threatens Ukrainian security; it threatens European security. Beijing cannot achieve better relations with Europe while supporting the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War. As we’ve told China for some time, ensuring transatlantic security is a core US interest. In our discussions today, I made clear that if China does not address this problem, we will.”
It would seem clear that the Taiwan Straits is a core China interest, no? Or is it only US core interests that matter?
Blinken: “I also expressed our concern about the PRC’s unfair trade practices and the potential consequences of industrial overcapacity to global and US markets, especially in a number of key industries that will drive the 21st century economy, like solar panels, electric vehicles, and the batteries that power them. China alone is producing more than 100 percent of global demand for these products, flooding markets, undermining competition, putting at risk livelihoods and businesses around the world.”
It sounds like sour grapes from the US that China’s R&D and manufacturing is out-competing the US. Take, for example, that the US sanctions Huawei while China allows Apple to sell its products unhindered in China. China has hit back at the rhetoric of “overcapacity.”
Blinken complained of “PRC’s dangerous actions in the South China Sea, including against routine Philippine maintenance operations and maritime operations near the Second Thomas Shoal. Freedom of navigation and commerce in these waterways is not only critical to the Philippines, but to the US and to every other nation in the Indo-Pacific and indeed around the world.”
Mentioning freedom of navigation implies that China is preventing such. Why is freedom of navigation in the South China Sea critical to the US? Second Thomas Shoal is a colonial designation otherwise known as Renai Jiao in China. The “routine Philippine maintenance operations and maritime operations” that Blinken speaks of are for a navy landing craft that was intentionally grounded by the Philippines in 1999. Since then, the Philippines has been intermittently resupplying its soldiers stationed there.
Blinken: “I reaffirmed the US’s ‘one China’ policy and stressed the critical importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
How does the US stationing US soldiers on the Chinese territory of Taiwan without approval from Beijing reaffirm the US’s commitment to a one-China policy? The Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 states “the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position.”
Blinken: “I also raised concerns about the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and democratic institutions as well as transnational repression, ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, and a number of individual human rights cases.”
Evidence of human rights abuses in Xinjiang? This is a definitive downplay from the previous allegations of a genocide against Uyghurs. It would be embarrassing to continue to accuse China of a genocide in Xinjiang due to a paucity of bodies which is a sine qua non for such a serious allegation as a genocide; meanwhile the US-armed Israel is blowing up hospitals and schools with ten-of-thousands of confirmed Palestinian civilian bodies. Even if there are human rights abuses in Xinjiang (which should be deplored were there condemnatory evidence), the US would still be morally assailable for its selective outrage.
Blinken: “I encouraged China to use its influence to discourage Iran and its proxies from expanding the conflict in the Middle East, and to press Pyongyang to end its dangerous behavior and engage in dialogue.”
Is the US militarily backing a genocide of Palestinians a “conflict.” Are US military maneuvers in the waters near North Korea “safe behavior”?
Blinken responded to a question: “But now it is absolutely critical that the support that [China’s] providing – not in terms of weapons but components for the defense industrial base – again, things like machine tools, microelectronics, where it is overwhelmingly the number-one supplier to Russia. That’s having a material effect in Ukraine and against Ukraine, but it’s also having a material effect in creating a growing [sic] that Russia poses to countries in Europe and something that has captured their attention in a very intense way.”
Are the ATACMS, Javelins, HIMARS, Leopard tanks, drones, artillery, Patriot missile defense, etc supposed to be absolutely uncritical and have no material effect on the fighting in Ukraine? And who is posing a threat to who? European countries are funding and arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia not vice versa? It sounds perversely Orwellian.
*****
From Biden to Harris to Yellen to Raimondo to Sullivan to Blinken, US officials again and again try to browbeat and put down their Chinese colleagues.
At the opening meeting on 18 March 2021 of the US-China talks in Anchorage, Alaska, the arrogance of Blinken and the US was put on notice by the rebuke of Chinese foreign affairs official Yang Jiechi: “[T]he US does not have the qualification to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” It doesn’t seem to have sunk in for the American side.
The Russia-China relationship is solid. China’s economy is growing strongly. Scores of countries are clamoring to join BRICS+ and dedollarization is well underway. Yet, the US continues to try to bully the world’s largest – and still rapidly growing – economy. This strategy appears to affirm the commonly referred to aphorism about the definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Japan’s “Ginza Daily,” Italy’s “Milano Moda Weekly,” South Korea’s “Incheon Focus,” France’s “Friendly Paris” and Ecuador’s “Iguazu.”
All these innocent-sounding websites from around the world provide local news, crime reports, entertainment and dining guides – but they have one thing in common: their narratives align with that of Chinese propaganda. For example, they all offered similar criticism of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and accused a public health researcher in Hong Kong of being a “traitor” and a “fraud.”
Some of these sites have caught the attention of authorities in various countries. In December, AFCL reported that South Korea’s national intelligence agency warned that 18 such sites were connected to a Chinese company, while Italian media also investigated a group of fake news websites that had origins in China.
Researchers at The Citizen Lab, a research institute that’s part of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, have examined these sites and found that they were part of a network of over 100 websites in 30 countries that originated from one company: Shenzhen, China-based Haimai, an abbreviation of Haimaiyunxiang Media Corp.
They dubbed the operation “PaperWall.”
Despite having little to no traffic, these sites disseminated Chinese propaganda and attempted to influence search engine recommendations, according to a February report by The Citizen Lab titled, “PaperWall: Chinese Websites Posing as Local News Outlets Target Global Audiences with Pro-Beijing Content.” Some of these sites have since gone blank.
Asia Fact Check Lab, a unit of Radio Free Asia, talked to Alberto Fittarelli, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, about “PaperWall.”
AFCL: As a senior expert in the field of information security, how did you pivot from consulting tech companies to studying misinformation and disinformation in the media? And how did you become aware of the “PaperWall” campaign?
Alberto Fittarelli: I am a threat intelligence and cyber security researcher with about 15 years of experience, mostly in the private sector and mostly focused on threats to online communities. But over the past decade, I’ve prioritized investigating information operations, the act of potentially manipulating information in order to deceive or deceptively influence.
I want to be upfront and say I am not necessarily an expert of China or any other region. Although I’ve been working more on specific regions, my focus is on looking and finding similarities among information operations from around the globe.
After joining the Citizen Lab, I started researching the“Hong Kong Leaks” [a website targeting democratic activists, human rights defenders, and journalists in Hong Kong, disclosing the personal information of nearly 3,000 people], which our team issueda report on in July 2023 explaining what they were and revealing who was behind it. That campaign lasted for a couple of years and is still technically visible, though perhaps not very active.
PaperWall gave me an opportunity to use my experience in dealing with the specific tactics utilized by information operations in order to understand how such operations cross reference and intersect with each other, and how they can form an ecosystem.
Last year, I found an article in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio claiming some websites were managed from China, and were part of an information operation. That got me wondering: is it even true? Could there be more? Could it be more than a few Italian websites? I wanted to verify the claims, and started investigating with my colleagues at the Lab.
AFCL: How do Chinese information operations work in practice? What’s new about “PaperWall”?
Fittarelli: Online Chinese information operations have been around for quite some time. The most well known is Spamouflage, also known as Dragonbridge, a large network of collaborating entities, potentially including corporations. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of coordinated accounts aggressively spreading targeted pieces of disinformation. While the content spread on Dragonbridge potentially intersects with what we found on PaperWall, the two networks’ preferred tactics differ.
Spamouflage utilizes a large number of spam accounts on social media to harass its targets. The content of this spam is primarily commercial, but occasionally turns into political attacks. That’s been known for years, and Meta and Twitter (now X) actually disrupted a number of such operations.
“HK leaks” was different, using doxxing [maliciously searching and spreading private and identifying information about the targeted individual] to target specific almost 3,000 individuals associated or involved with the Hong Kong protests. While distinct from Spamouflage, some of the former’s tactics were employed to amplify the effect of the harassment.
What we believe to have found with “PaperWall” was something quite different: A private company creating a number of websites pretending to be local media organizations in targeted countries where they clearly don’t have any physical presence. While we haven’t seen any in the U.S. and Canada (with the exception of a single website aimed at U.S. audiences), there’s a lot from Mexico, as well as in Europe, Japan, South Korea and a number of other Asian countries.
So again, different tactics, different audiences, same goal. We assume the goals are the same because the political content they use to attack is similar to that of “Dragon Bridge.”
AFCL: You mentioned the collaboration between the Chinese government and private PR companies. How does this type of collaboration play into the current information operations?
Fittarelli: To be honest, we can’t confirm that relationship. However, while there’s no direct evidence to prove that these networks or this PR company were directed by the Chinese government, the political content that’s published by them is so aggressive, so explicit and so obviously aligned with Beijing’s interests that it’s difficult to believe it’s just a coincidence.
For example, all PaperWall websites have attacked Yan Limeng [a Hong Kong University researcher who accused the Chinese government of manufacturing the COVID-19 virus]. Regardless of who exactly the attacks are targeting, the clear coordinated operations against individuals known to be on the Chinese government’s bad side. We found a similar alignment with Beijing’s interests in content on Spamouflage.
It’s a very complex network. Perhaps “PaperWall” is primarily motivated by money, and perhaps the Chinese government is one of their clients. But that doesn’t rule out secondary political motivations as potentially influencing the network’s choice of client.
AFCL: Do these websites have much traffic? What has been the impact?
Fittarelli: We used open source tools to measure these sites’ traffic and found that most of them did not even appear in their database. That typically means they’re getting almost no traffic, with a few of them, particularly English language ones, having only about 50 individual visits per day. There’s also no social media accounts working to promote their visibility.
So it’s a trade-off. We, the researchers, are providing visibility to unknown websites, but at the same time saying, hey, they’re fake, you might want to be careful.
AFCL: Asia Fact Check Lab had a story during the Taiwan election that a Taiwanese journalist was paid by the Chinese government to set up a group of local news websites in Taiwan to spread false information. It sounds very similar to “PaperWall.” However, in this case the mainstream media eventually picked up content from these websites. Could this be the potential outcome of PaperWall?
Fittarelli: That was probably their goal too. While there was some traffic for “PaperWall,” we didn’t find it getting picked up by news aggregators like Google News, Yahoo News.
However, if these operations do manage to produce a high enough volume of political content that it eventually starts being picked up by such services, you have a successful operation.
AFCL: We tried to check some of the websites’ pages and found that most of them are blank now. Is it because of the report?
Fittarelli: I see that most of the non-English local websites appear to be gone, which is a bit surprising given that they’re technically hosted in China and could stay online. It seems like they’re winding down the operation after the report was published. A couple of the English speaking websites are still online and actively publishing content, such as one called “euleader,” which I believe was targeting the U.K., and another called “world development press-WDPP.”
AFCL: So they are scaling down the campaign because of the report? Has Haimai, the Chinese PR company ever responded to the report?
Fittarelli: It’s possible. Exposing it probably defused the operation.
While our team didn’t request a response from Haimai, I’ve noticed that Japan’s NHK did their own investigation on “PaperWall” and requested one response from Haimai. And according to my poor Japanese skills and automatic translation, it seems like Haimai replied with something along the lines of, “We didn’t read the report” and “It’s not us,” which is not surprising.
AFCL: What do you find most surprising about “PaperWall”? What is the danger of such operations?
Fittarelli: The most peculiar feature of “PaperWall” was its rapid replication. If you look at the timeline, while they initially created only a couple of websites in 2019, starting in mid 2020 they created about 120 websites in a few years.
This is an operating model that can be replicated quickly and could eventually become extremely dangerous if it started to be legitimized. If given a wider audience by a politician’s reference or by mainstream media coverage, the amount of people confused by or sold on its contents would exponentially increase. At that point, the damage is done and it would be difficult to go back and tell people, “Just forget what you saw. ”
I really want to emphasize that while the impact of PaperWall so far has been negligible, that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
I personally have seen a decade of information operations, most of which were completely innocuous up until the point they were impactful. People need to know that such operations are not necessarily dormant; they are a potential time bomb that may very well explode someday.
AFCL: What does PaperWall forebode for information operations? Is China changing its tactics?
Fittarelli: That’s my speculation. As social media companies have heavily fought information operations over the past few years, especially in 2016 and 2017, they’ve gotten wise to how fake accounts are most commonly created or used to spread specific pieces of content on their platforms.
Malicious actors using outdated tactics will get shut down very quickly on these sites and so they’ve had to find novel means to achieve the same ends.
For example, after Twitter shut down an operation targeting the Hong Kong protests, the first of the “HKLeaks” websites came out. Again, this is an assumption, but this turn of events was probably due to these malign actors wanting to continue impacting the protests without being shut down by social media companies they had no control over.
“PaperWall” might be another piece of this same puzzle. As a website hosted in China by the local conglomerate Tencent, nobody can shut down their servers or restrict the website domains they can reach globally. And that’s probably why they didn’t use social media in the first place – they didn’t need to in order to have an influence, and they knew that if they tried, they were likely going to get caught.
AFCL: How about the future? The current hot topic is generative AI, how do you see it assisting with information operations from China or other places?
Fittarelli: I’ll decouple this topic from China, because it’s applicable to any area in the future.
Take “PaperWall” for example, these people stole content from real news organizations. But they did so in a very conspicuous manner. Italian websites publish local news in Italian, but this political content is in English and possibly not even understood by all people who came across it.
In the future, AI could allow such malicious actors to generate independent content instead of directly stealing it. Every article will be unique and look like a real news organization, and be unable to be traced back to its sources.
This applies just as much to audio and video content too. Deep fake videos of politicians or influential figures could be made saying something that the person never uttered. Such videos will be difficult to trace or even prove false, particularly if they were supported by a network of social media accounts simultaneously pushing a matching narrative.
We already saw a couple of information operations using such videos, with AI generated news anchors in Venezuela looking so real that they were difficult to be recognized as fake . This could be done by any government or any private actor for that matter.
AFCL: That sounds so pessimistic for the future.
Fittarelli: I don’t want to sound pessimistic. I think we also have opportunities.
While we are perhaps not yet ahead of these malign actors or the national security concerns they raise, we can quickly identify their tactics, and anticipate future scenarios. We need to be aware of these actors’ potential in order to be able to combat them as quickly and effectively as possible.
On a positive note, the fact that “PaperWall” is being wiped out after getting exposed is good news. It means that exposure can have a serious impact on such operations, and that it will likely help counter similar future operations as well, regardless of whether or not they employ AI.
Edited by Shen Ke and Malcolm Foster.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Li Sai for Asia Fact Check Lab.
