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Category: Propaganda

  • Tall Tales and Murderous Restraint: Blinken on Gaza and Israel

    The role of the US State Department regarding Israel’s continued obliteration of Gaza is becoming increasingly clear.  As the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces continue, the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is full of meaningless statements about restraint and control, the protection of civilians, the imperatives of humanitarianism in war.  As the war continues, so do those statements.

    As the new year began, an official from the White House expressed satisfaction at what appeared “to be the start of the gradual shift to lower-intensity operations in the north that we have been encouraging”.  But the revised Israeli approach did not “reflect any changes in the south”.  The monstrous death toll, in short, would continue to rise.

    As Washington feigns a reproachful attitude to the IDF’s grossly lethal tactics, claiming success in restraining them, another, failing front is also being pursued in the Arab world and beyond.  As Israel’s great defender, the US is attempting to hold back fury and consternation as the dirty deeds by their favourite ally in the Middle East are being executed.

    Blinken’s latest round of travelling has the flavour of swinging by tetchy neighbours to see how they are faring in the sea of blood and acrimony.  The itinerary includes Istanbul, Crete, Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Al-’Ula, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, Manama and Cairo.  The State Department’s media release on January 4 outlines the obsolete agenda any sensible diplomat would do best to discard.  “Throughout his trip, the Secretary will underscore the importance of protecting civilian lives in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza; securing the release of all remaining hostages; our shared commitment to facilitating the increased, sustained delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and the resumption of essential services; and ensuring that Palestinians are not forcibly displaced in Gaza.”

    So far, Palestinians are being massacred by the IDF in Gaza, forcibly deprived of life-saving humanitarian assistance and essential services in a sustained act of strangulation while being forcibly displaced.  They are being oppressed, harassed and murdered by vigilante Israeli settlers in the West Bank, even as the army looks the other way.

    It follows that Blinken is telling tall stories and hoping that legs carry them far.  They are also being told as proceedings before the International Court of Justice instituted by South Africa commence to determine whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza satisfies the definition of genocide in international law.

    The strategy becomes clearer in the second part of the disingenuous traveller’s agenda.  Blinken “will also discuss urgent mechanisms to stem violence, calm rhetoric, and reduce regional tensions, including deterring Houthi attacks on commercial shopping in the Red Sea and avoiding escalation in Lebanon.”

    The Houthi attacks and the increasingly violent situation in Lebanon serve as golden distractions for Washington, since they give the Biden administration room to simultaneously claim to be preventing a widening of the conflict while permitting Israel’s butchery to continue.

    Corking the conflict, however, is not proving such a success.  The war is widening, even if reporting on the subject remains sketchy in the negligently lazy news outlets of the Anglosphere.  In addition to the bold moves of the Houthis and escalating violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon come ongoing, harrying efforts from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.  An Al-Mayadeen report on January 7 took note of an announcement from the group, also known as the Iraqi al-Najuba Movement, that it had fired an al-Arqab long-range cruise missile at Haifa “in support of our people in Gaza and in response to the massacres committed by the usurping entity against Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”

    A spokesperson for the Iraqi Resistance, Hussein al-Moussawi, was bullish in claiming that the group had the capacity to strike targets beyond Haifa.  Conditions to develop the group’s weapons had also been “favourable”.

    In a separate statement, the Islamic Resistance also revealed that its fighters had targeted an Israeli base on the occupied Golan Heights, usin drones.  To this can be added drone attacks on the US army base of Qasrok, located in the countryside of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq.  The base continues to host US forces.

    Perhaps the greatest canard of all in this briefest of trips by Blinken is the continued, now absurd claim, that Washington is committed “to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps towards the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”

    In his remarks to President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Blinken showed the hardened ignorance that will ensure the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue in some form.  In his mind, a “reformed” Palestinian Authority will take over the reins of a ruined Gaza (“effective responsibility”) whatever the residents of Gaza think.

    Palestinians will never, given current conditions, be permitted sovereignty and anything remotely resembling a thriving, viable state.  Israel, whose very existence is based on predation, dispossession and war, will never permit a Palestinian entity to be given equal standing at the diplomatic or security table.  The US, in the tatty drag of an independent broker, will go along with the pantomime, promoting, as Blinken is, a sham, counterfeit form of autonomy, one forever subject to conditions, demarcations and restraints.  And one thing is almost certain about any future rump Palestinian entity: it will be deprived of any right to defend itself.

    The post Tall Tales and Murderous Restraint: Blinken on Gaza and Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Social Formation

    1. The overview

    If you often ask yourself “How can people believe those lies and deceptions?” when facts clearly indicate them to be untrue, you are not alone.  If you ask how so-called leaders can get away with a policy that guarantees disastrous, anti-human consequences, you are not alone either.

    In order to examine these questions, let us look at how our minds operate.  We have the conscious part of our minds and the unconscious part of our minds. Both operate together. They can be separated into an instinctual part, a daily operational part, and the part that guides us with set principles. Freud described these as id, ego and superego. As we live in our given social framework, all parts of our minds operate within the imperatives of the social formation. As our minds develop, our instincts are trained to fit what we perceive as reality. Reality, our social interactions, and the ideas and rules generated by society condition and shape our daily thoughts and routines.

    Our idealistic principles are ultimately formed according to the prevalent ideas of good and bad, how things should be and so on. This transfers a collective sense of ideal notions into the guiding principles of individual minds. This basic mechanism allows us to be social beings working together to achieve the goals and objectives of the society. We are individuals with our own ideas and interests, but we are also parts of an entity we perceive as our society. We are individual entities, but we also exist as a collective, as a species in a vast geological time frame.

    But what if our social relations are subservient to the values, norms, and beliefs of the ruling class? What if social institutions are dominated by wealthy and powerful people? What if our society is flooded by their propaganda?

    Our society is highly hierarchical based on financial power. It forms a caste-like system, with social mobility bound by conditions set by ruling class imperatives. No kingdoms in the past achieved the degree of accumulation of wealth we observe today.  Social media platforms are built to facilitate divisions and commodify collective power within the capitalist framework.  Digitalization allows corporate entities to cultivate certain public opinions while excluding others.  AI technology can effortlessly steal collective ideas while reinforcing prevalent ideas firmly within the acceptable range of the authority. The advent of the Internet, AI, and financialization of the economy have strengthened the ways to condition people according to the rules stipulated by the money dominated social institutions. All of these are manifesting in new ways to place our thoughts, our ideas, and our social relations within the acceptable range of the ruling class.

    The capitalist social formation has an inherent contradiction that leads to periodic crises: The capitalists– the ruling class– get too much money and the rest of the people stop having purchasing power, while unsold products pile up. This has been the primary cause of the major predicaments of our times.

    The ruling class shifts its mode of exploitation and subjugation in order to keep the basic structure intact, generating new ways to profit and maintain its dominance. The actual crisis of capitalism is constantly replaced with distorted and narrowly defined prepackaged “crises” which provide pretexts for the economic and social restructuring necessary to float the economy.

    For example:

    The deprived living conditions, poverty, and destruction of inner-city communities—all stemming from the crisis of capitalism—were portrayed as an emergence of inner-city criminal youth, “superpredators.” The demonization, along with the slogan “tough on crime,” exacerbated the momentum for gentrification, militarized police and school-to-prison pipeline, contributing to enriching associated industries.

    Muslim populations have been demonized as “terrorists” as their leaders are called dictators, allowing embargoes, economic blockade, proxy wars, and military assaults against them, ultimately resulting in western corporate powers restructuring their societies to accommodate western corporate interests.

    Legitimate environmental activism has been shaped to narrowly focus on CO2,  which has created a myriad of environmental issues of its own. This has destroyed the momentum for real environmental activism based on actual damages and accountabilities, while creating a momentum for “green capitalism” for profits.  The CO2 focus has also created the carbon trade pyramid scheme for the rich while punishing those developing countries without the capacity to invest in new technologies and infrastructures.

    We are flooded with crisis after crisis—“war on terror,” “global warming,” “pandemic,” “Russian threat,” and etc. And the pace of the cycle accelerates as the crisis of capitalism continues to be insolvable, and the western hegemony faces the economic as well as military powers of countries which have been defying the western colonial trajectory.

    Meanwhile, our minds, facing obvious manipulations and deceptions, struggle to maintain their integrity by keeping certain things conscious and others unconscious in order to exist within the given social formation. This has been facilitated by active propaganda, educational indoctrination, political rituals, and structural violence against the oppressed. We are given false narratives to swallow in exchange for keeping our positions in the social hierarchy while our livelihoods and well-beings are at gunpoint. This conscious/unconscious process of swallowing the status quo by omission of facts ties us to an invisible cage of the ruling class imperatives. Our minds are forced to employ various psychological defense mechanisms to further disassociate ourselves from the root of the problem.

    This has resulted in an enormous decrease of our abilities to perceive ourselves, our relationships to others and the social formation.  It has also been eliminating facts and our history from our minds. Our minds and bodies are conditioned to go along with the social imperatives, and the process diminishes our capacity to grow as human beings.

    This parallels the increased powers of those who profit from our collective labor and our collective knowledge. The acute concentration of wealth allows the rich and powerful to dominate social institutions.  This allows them to impose their agendas and policies through many layers of conditions and extortion regimes against those who are trapped in the social hierarchy.

    One might not keep his job or social position if he holds disagreeable opinions about the authority. Or those with disagreeable ideology could be excluded from various social networks.

    Let’s say that you hold a position in a community organization, and you are an anti-war activist. Your position can be taken away easily by a few wealthy donors with political motives. They effectively blackmail the organization, saying that so and so is on the side of the enemy country, advocating terrorism, and etc. They threaten to boycott the organization unless you are removed. The little organization, which you have been part of, has struggled so hard to serve the community with no resources of its own. The organization has no choice but to ask you to step down. And having struggled together with the organization for years, you can’t risk damaging the organization by making the event public. The anti-war activism suffers, and you are traumatized by the expulsion. In the process, the organization is shaped to stay within the imperial framework.

    Similar dynamics are at work against all individuals who hold views which are unacceptable to the authority. Under the current social formation, our individual productive activities can be exploited by profiteers who set the goals and the objectives, while those who engage in actual activities are deprived of access to the actual collective results. The pattern of domestication of ideas and social relations is not restricted to those who sign contracts with their employers. The fact that social institutions are dominated by the ruling class means that our social relations in general are under the guiding hands of the ruling class.

    For example:

    -Even though they might have good intentions, volunteers for NGOs can be guided to perform activities within the framework of the ruling class, since the NGOs rely on funding from the wealthy. Even if the NGOs survive co-option by the wealthy, their policies and agendas can always be limited by obstacles presented by capitalist dominated social institutions.

    -Grass roots activism can also be at any point co-oped by the interests of the ruling class or neutralized by corporate backed institutions.

    -If you happen to be good at anything and garner popularity among the people, sooner or later, your activities can also be forced to conform to the imperatives of corporate entities.  Or, you could be excluded from one social network or another as your world view collides with money dominated entities along the way, until you find it unsustainable to be in your field.

    This is basically the same mechanism observed by Robert Owen in the 19th century as noted by Frederic Engels in Utopian and Scientific. Owen noted “If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.”

    This fundamental dynamic of exploitation and subjugation and use of the collective power of the people to shift the course of society for the interests of the ruling class has evolved for the past two centuries, fully normalizing the hidden mechanism, while cultivating layers and layers of protective mechanisms to prop up the basic structure. Our social relations are filtered through so many layers, constantly being scrutinized to fit the current social formation. In exchange for contributing to the harvesting of the collective power, we receive money which can only be used within the economic markets which are dominated by the capital. We are deprived of our powers and in exchange we receive smaller powers which can be used to support the economic structure, which is controlled and manipulated by various institutions.  What suffers in the process are things we can’t buy with our tokens: love, friendship, community, culture, nature and etc.

    The strength of colonization through the economic structure can be observed as we see how a regional economy in the global south can lose its tradition, sustainable local economy, and communities with the introduction of Wall Street style economy. As the economy shifts to a winner-takes-all, profit oriented structure, social relations shift to conform to the interests of the rich. This goes along with importation of media, where entertainment commodities are geared toward imperial propaganda. Hollywood movies are filled with western-centric narratives. How many of the movies that we see have Russian villains and Muslim terrorists? Mainstream media outlets, now owned by a mere 6 corporate entities, have been serving the corporate and military interests of the west for generations. Western NGOs can also operate with western funding to spread narratives friendly to the west while demonizing the local authority, which defies the infiltration of western propaganda, cultural imperialism and economic restructuring favorable to western corporate interests.

    2. The Hierarchy 

    Here it should be strongly noted that there is a real sense of community, warmth of togetherness and potentially sustainable social relations among those who are engaging in building community momentum. No one can deny those feelings and the actual benefits. This is obvious when we see people finding the real sense of belongingness, pride, and meaning in the communities they build. This can even be said about institutions more obviously facilitated by the intentions of the ruling class —religious, political, military and so on. However, the point here is that our nature to be social and find collective goals to survive can be systemically and structurally co-opted by the structural arrangement of exploitation and subjugation. This should be noted throughout this text, especially as we discuss the inner workings of individuals. Accountability for inhumanity should be squarely placed against the system and its beneficiaries. The purpose of unfolding the mechanism here is not to blame the people who are victims of the domestication. Doing so would bring us to the cynical conclusion that it is human nature to be exploited and brutally attack each other. We must not equate the nature of humanity, however we term it, with the conditions created by the current social formation that allows the ruling class to domesticate the rest of us while depriving us of our humanity and causing devastating consequences to the environment.

    The difficult part, of course, is that we can say with certainly that slave owning landlords or those who appeared in lynching post cards smiling right next to black men hanging from a tree probably had happy families and friendships amongst themselves. But as soon as you stepped out of the stipulated boundaries of the community, the smiley faces of your fellow humans could turn into the faces of terrifying perpetrators of lynching. The happiness one gained by belonging to the community had dual functions: ensuring your livelihood and well-being while augmenting the then legitimate social institution of slavery. The enormous sacrifices paid by the enslaved people co-existed right next to the happy families of “good old times.”

    When the values, norms and beliefs of the collective are subservient to the ruling class imposed framework of the social hierarchy, it automatically normalizes the most brutal and inhumane discrimination and biases in institutionalized forms throughout the “democratic” sphere.  This is the true nature of the notion of “rule by the majority”– a prominent feature of western democracy today.

    This mechanism is at the core of US imperialism. When western corporate entities restructure a country with their neoliberal economic policies, it expands its “democratic” sphere, normalizing exclusion and discrimination, which, in turn, facilitates the exploitation and subjugation.

    In this regard, the age-old colonial view of “others” still dominates the underlining momentum of western colonialism.  The most important psychological element of colonizing is to define the subject population as inferior to the colonizers.  The sub-humans must be helped so that their lives can rise to the level of the colonizers, or more precisely, modified to serve the colonizers.

    The sense of mission allows the colonizers to do whatever necessary, regardless of the actual well-being of the subject population.  All sacrifices among the population are worth it in the end for their own good.

    A military action against them is always justified but the resistance against it is always denied as “inhumane”, “barbaric” and “brutal” because ultimately the counter action does not serve the subject population according to the colonizers. Countless lives of the subject population simply do not weigh the same as the lives of colonizers in the imperial minds.

    This sense of mission is also very useful in exploiting and subjugating oppressed people within the country engaging in the colonizing. The grievances and dissenting voices against the ruling class are set aside in order to instead fight the “barbaric people.” Those who oppose this would be defined as traitors, terrorist supporters and so on.

    In this broader overview, it is clear that the problem is not the “barbaric people who need help” or “terrorist supporters”.  The problem is clearly with the colonizers.

    The social hierarchy, with its very bottom tier, the very top and everything in between, is the clear manifestation of the social formation of exploitation and subjugation. The political institution of so-called western democracy manifests itself somewhere between social democracy and fascism. In either case, the political parties are backed by capitalists. Their policies and agendas stay within the interests of the owners of the political parties. The constant move between “left” and “right” within acceptable politics creates the sense of political struggle and progress, but in reality, all is restricted within the corporate interests.

    However, capitalist hierarchy as a whole doesn’t only shift itself between its fascist mode and social democracy mode in perpetuating itself. The class analysis of the social formation reveals the elements of fascism and socialism within the existing social formation.

    The effect of the corporate domination and measures implemented against the people can be felt severely among the most oppressed people while the benefits of state protection and favoritism are felt by the rich. The elements of fascism–authoritarianism, social hierarchy, suppression of opposition, censorship, militarism, and so on—are literally the reality among the oppressed without waiting for the fascist dictatorships to come along. For the rich the state functions tremendously to forward their interests. The political notion of fascism to describe political opponents by the “left” only appears when the interests of the privileged class are threatened, while the political notion of socialism to describe political opponents by the “right” only appears, again, when the interests of the privileged class are threatened. The true liberation of the people can only be possible if we grow out of the hierarchical social formation based on money and violence.

    Extreme suffering equivalent to suffering under a fascist dictatorship is inherently present for the oppressed population structurally at all times. The incarceration rate in the US is by far the highest globally. In particular, the rate of incarceration for black people has been higher than apartheid South Africa. Every major city in the US contains tent cities where people are subjected to life without basic human rights. One out of five children is facing hunger in the US. The number goes up twice as much for minority children. Without universal healthcare, the cost of major illnesses would easily bankrupt the average household. Three people are killed by police officers every day on average in the US. Meanwhile, the wealthy people often avoid jail time with their political connections, better lawyers, and ability to pay bail. The richest among the US population pay less tax than the average household. The overwhelming favoritism for the rich in the social layers has been institutionalized in various ways, allowing three people in the US to own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population. “Socialism” only for the wealthy is well functioning for the ruling class at all times.

    In order to fully perceive and appreciate life for the benefits for all,  we must recognize the overwhelming role of ruling class imperatives in the formation of collective values, beliefs and norms among us.  The class hierarchy and the process of “othering” based on the dominant world view play significant roles in determining our perceptions.

    3. The Minds

    Now, getting back to our minds, the fact that we internalize the authority as our guiding principle in order to form society creates an unintuitive phenomenon—our thoughts and behaviors follow the ruling class imperatives automatically. All commonly known psychological defense mechanisms are fully employed by individual minds to cling onto the existing social formation. Instead of recognizing the exploitive nature of the system as a whole, our minds are forced to blame “others” for not following unjust laws and ruling class-centric ideas. For example, economic insecurity and poverty due to austerity measures, job exports to overseas, lower wages and etc. would be blamed on immigrants, who are forced to migrate to the US due to the US imperial policies within their home countries. Inconvenient contradictions and world shattering facts stemming from the systemic exploitation are simply repressed as individuals face cognitive dissonance. Accountability for imperial war crimes, colonial policies, and brutal oppression by the authority are projected onto propagandized characters of “enemies.” Unsolvable contradictions lead to regression, resulting in violent behavior against others.

    The social structure is not forcefully activated by top-down coercion only. Each individual plays a significant role in helping to mobilize the entire structure. This is the secret of “western democracy” managing to reign as an imperial power in the name of “freedom,” “justice” and “humanity” and exploiting and subjugating the global south for so long. The collective power of the imperial mind acts like a power steering wheel, allowing a handful of the ruling class to set their goals and objectives in how to use the stolen collective power of the people.

    This is facilitated by the fact that the social formation, which doesn’t allow social relations based on one’s own interests, deprives one of the ability to perceive their surroundings correctly. Instead, “the reality” is projected onto the people as prepackaged corporate narratives through the media industrial complex, educational industrial complex, political industrial complex and so on. One is either forced to swallow a prepackaged social framework or one develops a personal world view based on one’s own position in the social hierarchy.  For those who embrace the prepackaged world view, dissenting opinions become threats to their very own existence—an attack against the authority literally is an attack against a part of their psyche, the internalized authority. For example, the dissident voices against the US proxy wars and the military actions against other countries would appear unpatriotic, “terrorist supporting” and so on in their minds.

    For those who develop personal world views based on their own position within the hierarchy, it also creates a desperate struggle to embrace that position, instead of offering to understand the view which derives from a different circumstance and work together to eliminate the root cause.  The legitimate grievances of minority groups to access job markets, social safety nets, equal rights and so on are seen as threats among the rest of the already struggling population. This results in divisions amongst the subject population and lack of understanding amongst the people, while augmenting the social hierarchy as a whole.

    Dissident groups often split or disappear as emerging crises reveal their narrow interests within class hierarchy, resulting in infighting. For example, some among those who have vehemently opposed measures forwarded by the medical industrial complex—forced “vaccination,” profit oriented Covid measures, the associated media censorship and etc.—have been quick to side with the establishment in Israel and its allies’ settler colonial violence after the 10/7/23 Palestinian military operation against Israel. Those who oppose losing their human rights within the imperial framework have failed to recognize over 75 years of colonial occupation, apartheid policies and genocide against Palestinian people by the US imperial project in the Middle East. This has resulted in devastating divisions among activists. The power which should be directed against the thieves of the collective power is directed toward one another, within the hierarchy.

    Quite often a social mobilization is expressed as “war”–war on drugs, war on crime, and so on. A state of war does not allow discussion, alternate views, or reconciliation on a personal basis or collective basis without the commander in chief saying so. Instantly, dissenting actions are deemed “treason.” The urgency and seriousness of “war” is orchestrated by media propaganda, educational indoctrination, political measures, legal restrictions, and so on. The internalized authority in people’s minds creates a massive storm of self-censorship, infighting amongst families, friends and communities under the notion of absolute allegiance to the authority.  A McCarthyism-like social atmosphere appears every time we are subjected to this sort of mobilization.

    Without understanding the structural mechanism as well as the psychological mechanism, one can also develop a warped abstract notion of a collective enemy—Jewish bankers, globalists, Illuminati, and so on. These prepackaged enemies can serve the system by preventing people from seeing the actual mechanism of exploitation and subjugation, while depriving them of the actual measures to dismantle the system.

    For many, these processes involving psychological defense mechanisms are unconscious, while the framework of the society where they belong is upheld unconditionally. The cage of capitalism stays invisible to the subject population. Also, the fact that we are deprived of access to facts and history due to the domination of social institutions by capital adds to the confusion while making the authority a single entity to obey.

    For those who manage to be conscious about the contradictions and unjust policies coming out of the authority, the situation is very difficult. Most of us do not wish to fight a systemic mafia enterprise operating in our neighborhood. If they demand a protection fee, many will simply pay instead of having their houses burned down at night.  In this case, we are talking about the entire system colluding with institutions to run its operation. It is unlikely that any legal system, any media outlets, and so on, will take your side. In most cases the idea gradually subsides into unconsciousness, turns into cynicism, or creates various sorts of mental dysfunctions amongst the subject population.

    Yet, conscious efforts to point out the problem of this social formation have been with us for centuries. Unfortunately, history is abundant with violent repression against dissidents with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist views. The degree of the use of violence is unimaginable to ordinary people. The brutality and scope of the violence defines the  determination and criminality of the ruling class to perpetuate its dominance over the subject population. Assassinations, imprisonment, systemic eradication of dissident organizations by state violence, various war crimes committed by its military and so on have created an aspect of the authority as an invincible “mafia enterprise.” This notion lurks on the border between the unconscious and the conscious as we wonder about the legitimacy of the authority and the grave violence committed by it in the name of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “humanity,” as it quietly demands compliance by its threatening presence. This is far from how a “free country” is said to run its business.

    The internalization of the authority is a colonization of the mind in each and every one of us. Trauma creating events due to economic oppression, lack of social safety nets, destruction of communities and so on strengthen the presence of the internal authority, just like victims of domestic abuse cling onto the abusers. Pain and suffering are a firmly integral part of the social formation.

    The collective wounds of a trauma—racism, sexism and so on—can also be utilized to augment capitalist measures and imperial measures. These create opportunities for the same system which institutionalizes trauma-inducing discriminations to effectively enlist people of stigmatized identities who are willing to collaborate in exploitation and subjugation.  The first black President Barak Obama came in with a thundering popularity.  He managed to bomb seven countries, effectively working with corporate entities to install neoliberal restructuring regimes in many areas, while protecting the interests of the criminal banking system.  The legitimate criticisms against him were termed racist, while the actual deep seated racist sentiment amongst the population muddied the aim of the legitimate criticisms as well. A similar mechanism is at work in Israel’s brutal imperial settler colonialism.  The Israeli government, along with the western establishment, has been openly equating opposition to Israel’s apartheid policies and settler colonial violence against Palestinians with anti-semitism. This has created a vicious cycle of anti-imperial momentum advertised as “anti-semitism” through corporate media, adding to the escalating violence against Palestinians with impunity. This has allowed Israel to function as a military base for the US empire in the middle east and beyond for generations. The US financial aid to Israel surpasses the aid to any other country, amounting to over $317 billion since 1946. The vast majority of the aid goes to the military.

    Moreover, social activism for equality and justice has become strategized tokenism within the system instead of a struggle to eliminate class hierarchy and ruling class abuses. This trajectory has been openly supported by the establishment in the name of “diversity.” The corporate backed “diversity” firmly operates within the structural imperatives of the established order. Those with minority backgrounds who embrace corporate policies and imperial agendas are chosen for their diverse backgrounds; however, in reality, their corporate orientations and their subserviency toward imperialism reinforce the actual capitalist hierarchy and contribute in exacerbating actual sufferings of the oppressed.

    As we grow as humans, we grow in this mold, thinking and acting so that you won’t offend the authority and the internalized authority. Dissenting voices are structurally excluded, deprived of facts, of history and resources and constantly forced to make deals with the establishment to keep themselves alive.

    When we shift our attention to the mental states of agents of the ruling class — politicians, bureaucrats, establishment backed “experts,” and super rich individuals — one can’t avoid witnessing psychopathic qualities present in how the interests of the ruling class are blatantly forwarded at the expense of a vast suffering majority. We saw president Obama joking about killing people and joking about drone bombing. We saw Hilary Clinton laughing about assassinating Gaddafi. We heard Madeline Albright stating it’s worth killing half million Iraqi children. Some remarks by president Trump certainly belong to this category as well.

    The wealth driven social structure requires leaders who can ruthlessly forward the interests of the ruling class. Psychopathic characteristics are necessary parts of this social formation.

    In a society which operates based on the interests of the population in harmony with nature and life forms,  psychological repression is a defense mechanism that protects individuals from devastating traumas. Psychopathic behaviors are treated as unsuitable personal traits for responsible positions in society. However, defense mechanisms are an integral part of the dynamics of the collective mobilization and they are crucial in making the capitalist cage invisible in this social formation. The social formation also utilizes psychopathic individuals in forwarding inhumane exploitive measures.

    Suffering and pain create infighting amongst the oppressed, while hopelessness and cynicism turn into self-harm or random violence. The internalized authority in the subject population’s minds directs their attention to their fellow humans, to themselves, or forces them to regress into committing violent actions. These tendencies have been drastically augmented by the prevalent use of mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs in recent decades. Researchers have been noting the devastating consequences brought out by drugs with side effects such as suicidal ideation, psychopathy and so on. (Big pharma makes money, and again, suffering caused by the exploitive environment has created opportunities for industry.)

    Where is a formation like this heading in the geological time frame, let alone the development of a few centuries?

    4.  The Social Institutions

    Our social lives revolve around certain networks in our careers, our interests, our backgrounds and so on. This allows us to find livelihoods and meaning in our daily lives away from the structural issues devastating parts of our population. However, the measures and the policies of the ruling class are also imposed through those networks within the social formation as well. Social institutions, under the strict control of capital and backed by the internalized authority of individuals, quietly guide us to the imperial framework. In a functioning society, a social institution allows facts and history to accumulate in a given field, creating collective assets of knowledge and wisdom. This is a column supporting what we perceive as “civilization.” But what is the implication of it functioning as an element to divide people and impose draconian measures under the umbrella of the ruling class authority? What are the consequences of such oppression for those who are eager to protect the integrity of the institution? And how do we understand our surroundings, facts and history when those change according to the agendas? We lose our common ground to stand on. Our communities are destabilized and ultimately forced to stand on official narratives.

    Religious institutions, political institutions, science and etc. often play such a role.  For example, the political institution has been reduced to a machine to form and legitimize ruling class agendas in the name of “democracy” in which money dominated corporate parties meticulously choose and curate problems that will give opportunities for corporate entities. Narratives, slogans and talking points are provided to party members according to their affiliations. The parties, backed by corporate interests, encourage party members to engage in this controlled competition in which rules and objectives are set by corporate interests. This effectively eliminates an actual political process for the interests of the people while giving an illusion of “democracy.” Participation becomes a ritual in which the collective power of the people is stolen in the name of ensuring the betterment of the people.

    Just as the collectivity of indoctrinated individual minds acts as a power steering wheel for capitalist agendas, social institutions have become an integral part of the driving force of ruling class agendas.  In particular, corporate funded NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, research institutions and so on, play a crucial role in formulating effective measures and policies for achieving lucrative goals at the expense of the exploited and subjugated population.

    5. Perpetual Now

    The depth of the colonization of minds is reflected by how we perceive major events of our time. For example, the people who desperately screamed “Stand with Ukraine” are nowhere to be seen as we are forced to swallow the new slogans on the Palestinian conflict. The 500,000 Ukrainian deaths resulting from the US proxy war do not appear anywhere.  We clearly remember the images of 9/11. But there is no accountability for the deaths of millions of innocent people in the Middle East. The non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, “dead incubator babies,” “viagra supplied soldiers,” and other emotionally charged accusations against the “brutal dictators” do not find any reasoned connections to the actual events and their consequences at all. We are forced to consume incoherent segments of the broken dreams of the ruling class, with ample excuses and justifications, as if we are watching a series of rationalization dreams of the ruling class mind with our wide awake minds.  In this collective process, we are totally detached from history and material reality as we are forced to embrace the fictitious notion of “perpetual now.”  This colonization of our perception, with forced consumption of incoherent propaganda narratives, leads us, sleep walking, into colonial projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberal restructuring.

    Our lives count on the healthy functioning of social institutions and social relations based on our interests. We internalize the imperatives of the collective as guiding principles. We naturally build respect and trust for those who protect social institutions with their wisdom and knowledge. We build communities to build social relations based on our interests. Our internal sense of the collective manifests as tradition, myths, culture and so on. We learn to organize ourselves so that we can live harmoniously with ourselves, with each other, with other life forms and with nature. We create art to reflect who we are while also reflecting how things can be, reaching out to the vastness of the universe.

    The capitalist hierarchy and its beneficiaries replace these dynamics with imperatives that keep their order intact. Our psychological traits, our collective social mechanism, how we perceive, and the actual facts themselves and history are being manipulated, altered, and abused. They have been taken apart and put back together to form an invisible cage of caste-like social hierarchy which is constantly being shaped and maintained through the process of trauma and conditioning. Our species is being domesticated by the ruling class, which is harvesting our collective powers to pursue this destructive path.

    6. Growing Out of the Social Formation

    In this writing I have attempted to lay out the psychological aspect, as well as the structural mechanism, of collective mobilization of the people under capitalist domination.

    All these processes clearly indicate structural as well as active efforts by the ruling class to impose policies and agendas against the subject population. This particular social formation is extremely inefficient and unproductive in terms of realizing the potential of the collective power of humanity since the captured power has been largely used to concentrate the power of humanity in the hands of a few without regard to the ultimate trajectory of the species as well as our real potential to actualize our capabilities in harmony with our surroundings. The process diminishes our capability to perceive ourselves, each other, and our environment, while depriving us of our abilities to create and grow as human beings. We have yet to see the real potential of our species at this point. Continuation of this trajectory will deprive us of it.

    To end this writing, I must add one thing. I find many people in the US to be friendly, kind, and extremely sophisticated in their areas of specialization. I have seen so many of them displaying great ingenuity, relentlessness and creativity in what they achieve. As an artist, I do feel waves of corporate pressure against creative freedom and the structural impediments of co-optation. But I also do feel the resilience of artists quietly but surely spreading roots in examining what it is to live and what it is to be humans. The sense of freedom and optimism which has overcome slavery does shine through the spirits of the people. The progress we make for the betterment of all people must stem from the historical reality and the characteristics of the people. Yes, slavery has morphed into current forms of exploitation and subjugation. Yes, the accumulation of wealth and the disparity among haves and have-nots has been exacerbated.  We could see these facts as proving the strength and resilience of the capitalist formation. However, we could also see them as evidence proving the criminality of the social formation as a vast pyramid scheme imposed on the majority. As the list of criminal acts continues to expand, our yearning for life and nature also expands.

    It is very difficult to understand the mechanism of exploitation and subjugation which involves many layers of our social structure as well as that of our minds.  Our examination makes it clear that the social formation consists of many elements working together in highly complex ways. The ultimate solution cannot be narrowly defined by one magic bullet.   Although focused measures are necessary to counter immediate risks and impediments to well-being, a narrowly focused solution will ultimately allow the system to morph and absorb that measure into the existing system. The transformation of society from a ruling class-centric one to a people-centric one requires a fundamental shift of social power to the hands of the people.

    The discussion leads to new questions:

    The system cannot function without the help of the internalized authority in every one of us.  Our understanding of the system and our role in it helps us to do away with the spell put on us by the system, allowing us to have opportunities to refuse to act against our own interests which, in turn, can stop the momentum of the system.  How do we educate ourselves?

    The system attempts to commodify love, friendship, community, culture, nature and so on.  All of those have been shaped and defined by the capitalist society to be sold and bought, only to be seen less and less among us.  If we make right choices for ourselves and for others, not for the interests of the ruling class, we can cultivate truly meaningful social relations by valuing what really matters to us, which could lead us to building social institutions which function for us.  Social institutions which work for the interests of the people are the basis of a well-functioning social structure for the people.  How can we achieve that?

    We are social beings by nature.  We can achieve by working together what we cannot achieve by working alone.  This collective power belongs to us all. How do we ensure that our power serves the livelihoods and well-beings of us in harmony with nature and other life forms?

    Countless people in the US and across the globe have raised their voices against this social formation from various angles. We have much to learn from the successes and failures of people who live under the socialist form of government. We have a vast wealth of knowledge and wisdom going all the way back to the beginning of our species examining how to be as a collective and how to be as individuals. We are one with those people from the past, from now and from the future in our path to outgrow the current social formation.

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  • Facing an Undeniable Fact

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  • The Distortion of Science

    Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests.

    Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact.

    The Unmaking of Science

    The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette smoking and harms. This campaign lasted for almost 50 years, and was extremely successful… until it wasn’t. This tobacco industry’s strategic brilliance lay in the use of a marketing and advertising campaign (otherwise known as propaganda) to create scientific uncertainty and sow doubts in the minds of the general public. This, combined with legislative “lobbying” and strategic campaign “donations” undermined public health efforts and regulatory interventions to inform the public about the harms of smoking and the regulation of tobacco products.

    Disrupting normative science has become a de rigueur component of the pharmaceutical industry business model. A new pharmaceutical product is not based on need, it is based on market size and profitability. When new data threatens the market of a pharmaceutical product, then that pharma company will try to sprout the seeds of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof. For instance, clinical trials can be easily coopted to meet specified end-points positive for the drug products. Other ways to manipulate a clinical trial include manipulating the dosing schedule and amounts. As these practices have been exposed, people no longer trust the science. Fast forward to the present, and the entire industry of evidence-based (and academic) medicine is now suspect due to the malfeasance of certain pharma players. In the case of COVID-19, Pharma propaganda and cooptation practices have now compromised the regulatory bodies controlling the pharma product licensing and deeply damaged global public confidence in those agencies.

    We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change. Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day.

    Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications- and therefore to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe). Those who produce a counter narrative from the government approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.

    And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the “war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction) published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. Remember, the NIH peer review system only triages grants, it does not actually chose who receives grant money. The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied. This little truthbomb was conveyed to me – word of mouth- many years ago by a researcher and Professor who specialized in drug addiction research. Nothing printed, all heresy. Because that is how the system works. A whisper campaign. A whiff of a message on the wind.

    The ends justify the means.

    The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/propaganda/”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with COVID-19.

    Just like with the tobacco industry’s scientific disinformation campaign, they are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside. The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.

    As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set-up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.

    The standard approach for nutritional research is based on a food-frequency and portion questionnaire – usually kept as a diary. The nutrient intake from this observational data set is then associated with disease incidence. Randomized interventional clinical trials are not done due to expense and bioethical considerations.

    The problem is that the confounding variables in such studies are hard to control. Do obese people eat more, so would their intake of meat be more or less in proportion to dietary calories? What do they eat in combination? What about culture norms, combined with genetic drivers of disease? Age? Geo-considerations? The list of confounding variables is almost never ending. Garbage in, garbage out.

    We have all witnessed how these studies get used to promulgate one point of view or another.

    It’s not just within the context of red meat. The same thing happens over and over. We get dietary recommendations put together by expert committees and the data are reviewed. But when subsequent, so-called systematic reviews of specific recommendations take place, the data don’t meet reliability standards…

    Yes, available information is mostly based on studies of association rather than causation, using methods that fall short of proving chronic disease effects, especially in view of the crucial dietary measurement issues. The whole gestalt produces reports that seem very uncertain in terms of the standards that are applied elsewhere in the scientific community for reliable evidence. (Dr. Ross Prentice, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)

    Some recent “peer reviewed” academic publications on climate change and diet:

    Enter climate change regulations, laws and goals – such as those found in UN Agenda 2030. Enter globalists determined to buy up farm-land to control prices, agriculture and eating trends. Enter politics into our food supplies and even the science of nutrition What a mess.

    Below are some of the more outlandish claims being made in the name of climate science and nutrition. The United Nations’s World Food Program writes:

    The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. Hunger will spiral out of control if the world fails to take immediate climate action.

    Note that “Climate shocks” have always existed and will always exist. The existence of readily observed (and easily propagandized) human tragedies associated with hurricanes, fires and droughts are embedded throughout the entire archaeological record of human existence. This is nothing new in either written human history or prehistory. This does not equate to a pressing existential human crisis.

    In fact, reviewing the evidence of calories and protein available reveals a very different trend. Over time, per capita caloric and protein supplies have increased almost across the board.

    The prevalence of undernourishment is the leading indicator of food availability. The chart below shows that the world still has a significant issue with poverty and food stability, but it is not increasing. If anything, people are better nourished in countries with extreme poverty than they were 20 years ago.

    *Note the COVIDcrisis has most likely exacerbated extreme poverty and undernourishment, but those results for the 2021-2023 years are not (yet?) available.

    Despite clear and compelling evidence that climate change is not impacting on food availability or undernutrition, websites, news stories and research literature all make tenuous assertions about how the climate change “crisis” is causing starvation.

    These are from the front search page on google for “climate change starvation”:

    But the actual data documents something different.

    This is not to say that that the poorest nations in the world don’t have issues with famine, they do. It is an issue, but not a climate change issue. It is a gross distortion of available data and any objective scientific analysis of those data to assert otherwise.

    The best way to stop famine is to ensure that countries have adequate energy and resources to grow their own food supply, and have a domestic manufacturing base. That means independent energy sources.

    If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates <and reduce our immigration pressure>, they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.

    Famine is not a climate change issue, it is an energy issue. Apples and oranges. This is not “scientific”. Rather, it is yet more weaponized fearporn being used as a Trojan horse to advance hidden political and economic objectives and agendas of political movements, large corporations and non-governmental organizations.

    Facts matter.

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  • A Patriotic Duty

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  • Troublesome China Bashing

    The front-page headline of the December 11, 2023, Washington Post (WAPO) read, “China’s cyber army is invading critical U.S. services.” The sub-headline, “A utility in Hawaii, a West Coast port and a pipeline are among the victims in the past year, officials say,” impressed upon the reader that the Peoples Republic of China had wriggled its way into causing havoc in America’s industrial system. Carefully read the article and learn that nothing unusual has happened to critical U.S. services and there are no facts to indicate anything unusual will happen. The headlined article is a far-fetched opinion piece masquerading as an explosive investigation that urges critical attention to an exaggerated problem. Addressing this exaggeration may seem trivial but it tells the story of how the government gathers information to make faulty decisions and that is not trivial. Please excuse if the response to the article sounds sarcastic at times, but the article has comedic appearances that invite ridicule.

    How do we know this is an exaggerated problem; a succeeding paragraph tells us nothing happened, and, after casually informing us there have been no disruptions, the authors take a five thousand mile leap to tie together a trivial hacking and the brewwwwwwiiiiing conflict in Taiwan.

    None of the intrusions affected industrial control systems that operate pumps, pistons or any critical function, or caused a disruption, U.S. officials said. But they said the attention to Hawaii, which is home to the Pacific Fleet, and to at least one port as well as logistics centers suggests the Chinese military wants the ability to complicate U.S. efforts to ship troops and equipment to the region if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan.

    Without citing a fact that relates some trivial hacking to a diabolical scheme or showing the hacking was more than a nuisance, the article informs us that the hacking, “suggests the Chinese military wants the ability to complicate U.S. efforts to ship troops and equipment to the region if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan.”

    Did this read correctly: “Chinese military wants the ability to complicate U.S. efforts to ship troops and equipment to the region if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan?” Fellow Americans, do you know that our government intends to send troops to fight for Taiwan? Don’t be concerned, any war in Taiwan will be over before any ship left U.S. waters with battle-ready American soldiers ready to fight the yellow peril.

    Who are these hackers? “Hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have burrowed into the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year, experts said.” ‘Affiliated’ is a vague word and, without having specifics, there is doubt that China’s People’s Liberation Army knew about the hacking.

    The imagination of the government sources that provided the information for the article does not just leap continents, it reaches into the barren outer space with over-dosed suppositions.

    Some of the victims compromised by Volt Typhoon were smaller companies and organizations across a range of sectors and “not necessarily those that would have an immediate relevant connection to a critical function upon which many Americans depend,” said Eric Goldstein, CISA’s executive assistant director. This may have been “opportunistic targeting … based upon where they can gain access” — a way to get a toehold into a supply chain in the hopes of one day moving into larger, more-critical customers, he said.

    The hackers are looking for a way to get in and stay in without being detected, said Joe McReynolds, a China security studies fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank focused on security issues. “You’re trying to build tunnels into your enemies’ infrastructure that you can later use to attack. Until then you lie in wait, carry out reconnaissance, figure out if you can move into industrial control systems or more critical companies or targets upstream. And one day, if you get the order from on high, you switch from reconnaissance to attack.”

    Lots of words that say the cyberattacks have accomplished nothing but could be a training ground for more advanced activities, similar to shooting ducks could be terrorist training for shooting down airplanes.

    Adding zero information to zero information forms a mighty conclusion.

    The disclosures to The Post build on the annual threat assessment in February by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which warned that China “almost certainly is capable of launching cyberattacks that would disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and rail systems.

    The report, which shows some Chinese have basic knowledge of cyberattacks, leads to a conclusion of major capability ─ China “almost certainly is capable of launching cyberattacks that would disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure, including oil and gas.” To my knowledge, no strategic facility is on the Internet; they are all on private networks and cannot be hacked unless the hacker sets up transceivers around the facility that can intercept the communications, decode them, retrieve vital information, such as passwords, and transmit hacking messages into the networks computers. This is a complicated procedure and is difficult to shield from exposure. No revelations that “hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army” have set up shop around the private networks have been mentioned.

    This investigation of the investigation may sound trivial and provoke a big yawn and a “so what.” Don’t be fooled, the WAPO article reveals a major problem confronting Americans ─ U.S. foreign policies are not developed from facts and reality; they are developed from made-up stories that fit agendas. Those who guide the agendas solicit support from the population by providing made-up and exaggerated stories that rile the American public and define its enemies. This diversion from facts and truth is responsible for the counterproductive wars fought by the U.S., for Middle East turmoil, for a world confronted with terrorism, and for the contemporary horrors in Ukraine and Gaza. U.S. foreign policy is not the cause of all the problems, but it intensifies them and rarely solves any of them.

    U.S. administrations have been involved in much of China’s internal affairs — Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, South China Sea, Belt and Road, Uyghurs — without showing how China’s internal affairs affect the U.S. and why the U.S. and not Tanzania should be involved. What has this interference accomplished? Nothing! Absolutely nothing, and, except for the South China Sea disputes, nothing that arouses concerns seems to be occurring. If the U.S. administrations spent time, energy, and tax dollars on affairs more directly connected with U.S. operations, they may learn that their obsession with China’s affairs hindered acceptable resolutions and prevented attention to their own and more meaningful problems. Oh, and it might prevent World War III.

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  • Crowds, Masses and Movements

    Orientation

    Why study crowds, masses and movements?

    It is tempting to imagine that as socialists we must know a great deal about crowds, masses, and in medieval thought individual meant inseparable, that is indivisible. People were defined as individuals by reference to the groups of which they were members. Group membership defined their very identity as individual units. Farr treats individualism as a product of the Renaissance and Reformation, stressing the emerging traditions of religious, political and economic liberalism. However, unlike Farr, Ivana Markova argues that it was monasticism and chivalry that contributed most towards strengthening the development of individualism in feudal society. Nikolai Berdyaev has pointed out that the individualism of the Renaissance and Humanism brought man to the limit of his ability to withstand the uncertainty and loneliness into which the Renaissance and Humanism threw him.

    With the rise of capitalism, the concept of the individual came to be divorced from its original intrinsic connection with the social community. This tendency can be seen in the work of Hobbes, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In psychology, individualism became connected to the Associationist theory of John Locke and the hedonistic psychology and utilitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Individuals came to be treated in isolation and abstraction. Individualism in its most extreme form is present in social Darwinism in the 1870s in the work of Herbert Spencer who was much more influential in the US than he was in Britain. This individualism continued with pragmatism in the late 19th and 20th centuries and with behaviorism beginning just before World War I.

    The majority of the main issues to which psychology is addressing itself has been concern with the isolated individual rather than the individual as a member of a particular social group. With the aggregate of strangers thrown together in lab experiments this became the setting in which social psychologists explored what social life was supposed to be about. What is missing is the social psychology of real groups that an individual was part of, including occupational groups, church groups or extended families. These are called “reference” groups.

    Reference groups

    So far, the social-individual dialectic has been understood as a group mind (crowd psychology) or a social contract (individualism). The third way to put a frame around the social-individual polarity is to think of society not as a group mind but as a reference group. According to JD Greenwood (What Ever Happened to the Social in Social Psychology) the term “reference group” was introduced by Hymen and then developed in 1951 by Newcombe. An individual’s reference groups were ongoing groups with whom the individual has a commitment and history with and whose norms they are loyal to. They had shared norms and differentiated roles and they met in the same time and place. Social psychologists who represent this school included William McDougall, Omar Sheriff, William Thomas and Solomon Asch. These theorists claim that understanding social life should begin with reference groups with whom the individual has a foundation, not strangers with whom one has no commitment or history.

    Reference groups are contrasted to aggregates of strangers who are thrown together for an experiment. Aggregates are statistical groups. Reference group theory also argued against conceiving of the social life as a mystical social mind hovering above individuals. The early psychologist William McDougall embraced this socially embodied individuality of the communitarians. He thought that the social groups were the source of individuality. McDougall rejected both the social mind theories of group super-individuality and also opposed social aggregate theory. This intrinsic form of group identity was followed by Baldwin, Cooley, Mead and Goffman.

    For crowd or social mind theorists individuals think, feel and act differently in the physical presence of other individuals than they do in physical isolation from other individuals. For collective mind theorists like Le Bon, the mechanism of influence is grounded in hypnosis, imitation and contagion. For reference group theorists, social psychological-states are distinct from individual psychological states but not separate from them. Social life in any concrete case is the mind of an individual in a social group. Historically, in the philosophy reference group, the tradition of the individual as being socially embedded is in the philosophy of Vico and in the idealist philosophy of Hegel, Green and Royce.

    Why was reference group theory lost in the shuffle?

    Greenwood asks why the original form of the social in American psychology was abandoned. He gives two reasons:

    • It became associated with crowd theories about the emergent properties of supra-individual group minds. This was against the beliefs of those committed to empiricism, experimentalism and individualist social psychology.
    • It challenged principles of autonomy and rationality – the moral and political individualism most common in American psychology.

    Demonization of Collective Life

    Interestingly, around the same time individualism was understood in its most extreme form, any kind of group life or collective behavior was treated as if:

    • it was completely separate from the individual; and,
    • it contained all the negative tendencies such as irresponsibility, irrationality, violence and pleasure-seeking animality.

    There was the tendency of some American social psychologists to follow Le Bon and Tarde in equating social behavior with the irrational and emotional behavior of crowds. Le Bon and Tarde completely overlooked and suppressed the altruistic picture of the behavior of collectivities perpetuated by crowd theorists.

    Between the first and second World War the empiricist behaviorism of Floyd Allport argued there is nothing in the social world that is not first in the minds and actions of individuals. Allport maintained that social phenomena can be explained only in terms of psychological phenomena of individuals (opposite of Durkheim). Other behaviorists besides Allport denied that when people come together to create a social world, whatever the result, it is no more than the sum of individual wills. Crowds do not have a nervous system or an introspective faculty.

    The following table is a summary which contrasts the three ways social psychologists have contrasted the nature of the relationship between the individual and society.

     Three Ways to Understand the Relationship Between Society and Individual

    Category of comparison Aggregates

    (Yankeedom)

    		 Reference groups

    (Yankeedom)

    		 Social mind

    (Europe—France, Germany, Italy)
    Definition Populations of individuals that merely have some property in common and do not represent themselves as a social group Members are bound by a history of interaction. Shared forms of cognition, emotion and behavior. They represent themselves as a social group Society as a whole is like a social mindwhich is more than the sum of individuals

     
    Examples of types of groups Demographics of class, race, age groups, gender Class, race, age groups, gender

     

    		 Strangers in crowds
      Strangers in labs
    Time, place displacement Dispersed in space—masses

    Or face to face as strangers

    		 Same time and place or over time

    Organic groups

    		 Same place and same time

    Crowds
    Range of social cognition Public opinion or opinion in focus groups Tradition and group beliefs spread historically Hypnosis, group contagion

     
    What is social learning? Interpersonal learning in face-to-face

    Experimental situations

    		 Intrinsic learning

    by passing on traditions

    		 Imitation

    Regression

     
    Historical origins Social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, Hume Goes back to Herder, Goethe, Hegel Late 19th and Early 20th century crowd psychologists
    Theorists Allport

    Behaviorism

    Lazarsfeld -mass communication, Gallup polls

    		 McDougall,

    Cooley, William Thomas Mead, Sheriff, Asch

     

    		 Le Bon, Levi-Bruhl, Tarde, Wallis, Wundt, Durkheim

     
    Research methods Experimental

    groups

     

    Statistical surveys

     

     

    		 Experimental Local groups—Families, religious or occupational groups

    Professional organizations

     

    Experiments in social psychology may require special adaptation of experimental method

    		 Eye witness accounts
    Typical questions How do different social classes feel about the importance of leisure time?

     

    		 How are Catholic, working class families different from Methodists and Baptists families? How do crowds behave in revolutionary situations?

    Right-Wing Crowd Psychology: Crowds as Super-Minds

    How to understand crowds

    Philosophers of conventional sociology at the end of the 19th century thought that crowds were not a separate or new phenomenon. Rather they were seen as fleeting gatherings outside of social institutions which resulted in temporary chaos between social classes. Émile Durkheim and Marx emphasized reason or class interest to explain why people gathered in crowds to begin with. Liberal politics saw the masses as an epiphenomenon which would pass away as education, technology and a more just distribution of wealth would even things out. Crowds were still equated with the general population and not considered “mobs”. Liberals saw gatherings as no more than a collection of individuals.

    Whether conservative or liberal, mainstream philosophers of sociology were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of themselves. “Crowd” psychologists claimed Darwinian evolution showed that progress was a slow process and any sudden changes based on strikes or armed conflict was a throwback to pre-modern times. Crowds were like Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter. Crowd psychologists perceived crowds in a much more sinister light.

    Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theories such like Durkheim and Marx because they felt they left out the emotions and unconscious motivation of people. If you could not depend on what people intended, then was what is really driving them below the level of consciousness? Crowd psychology was interested in the behavior of crowds, the behavior of leaders and the relationships between them. Crowds were here to stay and the sooner we understand them the better. For crowd psychologists individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. Until the 1960s social psychologists accepted right-wing crowd theory even though it was not based on any research. (Social Psychology, Delamater, Myers, Collett; David Miller Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action). Please see my article for more detail about crowd psychologists. Ruling Class Fears of the Day of Reckoning: Historical Causes for the Biases Against Crowds

    Left-Wing Crowd Theory: Crowds as reference groups

    Up until the 1960s social psychologists continued to examine crowds in an unfavorable light following the thinking of Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. To the extent they tolerated collectivities at all they followed research on mass public opinion. But in the early 1960’s Carl Couch began to have his students study the work of George Rudé on the French Revolution which showed crowds in a more favorable light. Crowds were workers, not criminals, and the behavior of workers was somewhere in between derelict and heroic.

    From collective behavior to collective action

    In 1968 Clark McPhail began to take his students into situations where crowds had assembled and got them to engage in participatory research. Later, in 1997 he took a team of over sixty trained observers to a very large “Stand in the Gap” rally of the Promise Keepers on the National Mall in Washington DC. They used paper, pen, film and videotape to record people’s activities at political as well as sports and religious events. This was something that early crowd theorists never had done. The results challenged all seven of the myths I described in my previous article. The myths are:

    • Irrationality
    • Emotionality
    • Suggestibility – mindless behavior
    • Destructiveness
    • Spontaneity
    • Anonymity
    • Unanimity of purpose

    McPhail tried to indicate this difference by distancing himself from the word “crowds”, calling collectivities “gatherings.”

    McPhail classifies gathering according to their behavioral composition. The most inclusive category is that of prosaic gatherers, where behavior is simple – shoppers at malls, people waiting in lines for rides, at amusements parks, gatherings at store openings and spectators at fires and arrests. Less common are demonstration gathering – political demonstrations, sports rallies and worship services… Even less common …are state ceremonial gatherings such as inaugurations, royal weddings and state funerals. (Intro to Collective Behavior, 43) 

    Meanwhile theorists who studied social movements pointed out that up until now all theories of collectivities saw crowds either acting as solitary individuals or reacting to circumstances outside themselves. For scholars such as Charles Tilley, William Gamson, McAdam and Lipsky, people who considered themselves part of social movements, come into a crowd with a plan. Any major demonstration against a war requires months of planning on the part of the organizers. Secondly, being in a crowd and acting in a crowd is not an end in itself, but a means to gather more people to swell the movement long after the particular crowd disperses. Because of this, movement scholars began to change the name of their study from “collective behavior’ (which is more passive) to “collective action”.

    Within the field of social movements there were two tendencies. “Political process” theory is interested in how people come to frame their discontent into ideas. What is it in the nature of some negative events which makes people put up with them, and what is it about negative events that make them seem abusive? In other words, what events will make people more likely to throw down the gauntlet?

    “Resource mobilization theory” tries to answer the question of how movements succeed through networks of movement organizations. What kind of material resources are necessary and sufficient in order to succeed?

    Right-Wing vs Left-wing Theories of Crowds

    Spontaneous vs planning

    There are roughly six theories on crowd psychology – two conservative, two liberal and two radical. However, for our purposes we will contrast them between conservative and radical theories. Collective behavior theories are conservative because they focus on a crowd’s reaction to events – which are often spontaneous. Collective action theories emphasize what crowds do to initiate activity and these activities often involve planning.

    The difference between crowds and everyday life

    A second major difference between the theories is that conservative collective behavior theories think there are some major qualitative differences between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. They imagine that crowds bring out a degenerative side of people. They would look approvingly at William Golding’s book Lord of the Fliesand and say that is what happens in crowds. Collective action theorists think that there is no qualitative difference between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. Whatever there is that is sinister in human behavior it is just as likely to happen in everyday life.

    How unified are crowds?

    Conservative theories of crowd behavior imagine that the individuality of people melts down in crowds and the crowd is easily unified because people are easily emotionally involved. This is  because crowds exert a hypnotic effect which then spreads like contagion. Theories of collective action argue that the individuality that people have when they enter a crowd stays with them during the events that happen in crowds.  People disagree about actions to be taken and crowds can remain divided. It takes real work and skill for leaders of collective action to unify a crowd.

    Masses vs movements

    Theories of collective behavior are most at home studying masses. Masses are people who are not necessarily located in the same space, but which are happening at the same time. Examples are fads, rumors, urban legends, fashions, crazes and mass hysteria. The most famous case of mass hysteria was Orson Wells’ radio broadcast of Martians having landed.

    Mass behavior doesn’t bring out the best in people. People are shown to be petty, superficial, acquisitive and easily aroused. However, collective action theorists tend to study crowds in more serious circumstances as part of movements. Movements are actions that might take place in present time and space but also at different times and different places. Movements can be cross-cultural and historical. Protests, strikes, work-stoppages and boycotts are inclusive of crowds and yet go beyond them.

    Sports crowds, natural disasters and riots

    Both collective behavior theorists and collective action theorists study sports crowds, natural disasters and riots but come to very different conclusions about them. Collective behavior theorists might focus on hooligans in sporting events and violence both between fans as well as collective frustration resulting from the outcome of a game. When it comes to natural disasters, conservative collective behaviorists will focus on the looting of stores and sexual violence as well as stealing between the victims of disasters. As for riots, conservatives will usually focus on damage to property, the chaos of revolutionary situations and the lack of order. This way of thinking about things is perpetrated by mass-hysteria theory which is based on class fear of the lower classes rather than objective research that has been done.

    Collective action theories shine a more favorable light on sporting crowds, natural disasters and riots and they have the research that backs it up. Collective action theorists will marvel at the amount of spontaneous order that occurs in baseball games when tens of thousands of people take the train to a game, watch and enjoy the game peacefully and take the train home without any police intervention needed.

    As for natural disasters, research clearly shows that natural disasters tend to  bring out the altruistic, pro-social side of people, far more often than they bring out the selfish side. Lastly, collective action contains two pieces of research that must be deeply disturbing to conservative crowd theorists. The first is that the most common instigator of violence in riots are the police. More times than not the presence of police with the threat of coercion and use of force amplifies a tense situation rather than cools it out. The second piece of research shows that riots get results. Though people are endlessly told to vote or to write to your member of Congress, it is after riots that the authorities somehow find the time and money to right wrongs. The Watts riots of 1967 is an example.

    Who is drawn to crowds?

    Collective behavior theorists with their negative view of crowds naturally think that only unsavory troublemakers are drawn to them. They believe these people are emotionally unstable or even criminals. No self-respecting member of the middle or upper-middle class would tolerate being in a crowd for long. Theorists of collective action point out that there is no particular type of group or individual that is drawn to a crowd. It is true that middle and upper-middle class people would more easily separate from crowds by driving a car. Cars and money can bypass traveling on buses and trains. However, the difference is much less extreme than collective behavior theorists make it seem to be. When it comes to natural disasters while poorer people are likely to be trapped in poorly built homes or buildings, upper middle-class people have also been the victims of floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.

    Collectivities and human nature

    Conservative collective behavior theorists imagine that crowds bring out only the worst in people, a selfish, desperate and violent side. Collective action theorists say that crowds tend to bring out more extremes of behavior both for better and for worse. Groups and individuals bring out what is most moderate in people. In crowd situations people can be more extreme: selfish and violent on one hand or more altruistic and heroic on the other.

    Who determines norms?

    Contrary to conservative collective behavior theorists who might say all norms vanish as a person goes from a group to a crowd, moderate, liberal theories of crowds such as emergent norm theories argue that group norms emerge spontaneously as the situation dictates. Collective action theorists argue that in the case of social movements, the leaders initiate norms which are created and imposed by crowd monitors from within the protest movement itself. There may be an expectation from within the movement not to break bank windows or throw rocks. In fact, people who do these things may be labeled FBI agents.

    Are members of crowds rootless or do they already have communities?

    Collective behavior theorists imagine that the only people who join crowds are rootless individuals drawn to a crowd because they lack community. On the contrary, collective action theories say most people come to crowds with friends, families and sometimes with neighbors. People are not desperately seeking a community. They already have one but just want to expand those communities.

    How much monitoring of crowd behavior goes on?

    Liberal crowd theorist Herbert Blumer argued that crowds do not monitor their behavior. His circular reaction theory claimed that emotions feed on each other rather and get stuck in an amplifying groove, creating a snowballing effect. Social interaction theorist Clark McPhail points out from his research that crowds do monitor and interpret what is happening, talk to each other about what is going on and change the direction or movement of the crowd as they go.

    Are crowds rational?

    “No!” say the collective behavior theorists. The size of crowds, their anonymity and lack of continuity makes a crowd act more irrationally because of the noise and emotional euphoria. Collective action theories disagree. Crowds are just as capable of groups and individuals of behaving rationally. Perhaps the best example of this is how orderly and graceful people are at the 5 PM rush hour as they navigate walking towards train stations on foot, weaving in and around others, barely touching them. Another example is how most of the time people assemble and leave going to concerts in an orderly fashion without police presence. Disorderly crowd behavior is the exception to the rule. Newspapers with their slogan “if it bleeds it leads” only point out extremes of crowd behavior. Who ever heard of a news headline, “42,000 People at Yankee Stadium Arrive Home From the Train Station With no Incidence of Violence”?

    Crowds as super-minds vs crowds as reference groups

    Let us return to the three ways the relationship between society and individual can be understood. The perspective of crowds as collective behavior corresponds to crowds as having a super-mind. This is because crowds are understood as deeply irrational, with emotions easily aroused and easily spread (contagion). Crowds consist of suspicious strangers who easily melt down through hypnosis, imitation and regression.

    Crowds as collective action corresponds to crowds as reference groups. Why? Because people in crowds consist of reference occupational groups, religious groups and neighbors from the same region. These folks carry the same values into crowds they had in reference groups. Thus, they bring with them their shared history and values which is not so easily thrown off kilter when they celebrate as part of a crowd in a victory in a sports game or while attending a music concert. They’re sharing norms and differentiated roles which come to the fore in emergency situations such as natural disasters.

    Theoretical perspectives

    The most conservative collective behavior theories are mass hysteria theories which were supported by Orrin Klapp. Mass hysteria theories also harken back to the right-wing crowd theorists  such as Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. More moderate theories are that of Gabriel Tarde, Herbert Blumer and David Park. Liberal theories include Smelser’s value-added theory and Turner and Killian emergent norm theory. Clark McPhail really blew the roof off of conservative and moderate crowd theory with his social interactionist defense of crowds as purposive, focused, creative and for the most part non-violent. Radical crowd theories include the resource mobilization theory of JD McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald. Political process theory of McAdam, Gamson and Lipsky both have their focus on social movements.

    How good is the research?

    All crowd research is not just about the present. Georg Rule opened the door with archival research on the French revolutionary crowds. Charles Tilly did the same thing for the 500 years of European revolutions. Gamson did some ingenious work on social protests about what works and what doesn’t work. There have also been participant observations of religious cults (John Lofland), UFO cults and the current Tea Party movement.

    Unfortunately, theories of collective behavior do not have comparable research methods. They mostly rely on conservative ruling class fears of crowds which shows up in newspaper anecdotes, reports by the authorities such as police reports and eyewitness accounts which are notoriously unreliable. Please see the table below for more vivid comparisons of the two theories.

    Conclusion

    I began this article by posing the question of how to think of the relationship between individual and society. One is in the image of society as a kind of group mind superimposed over society. The second way is to think of society as an aggregate which is no more than the sum of its parts. The most grounded approach is to understand society as reference groups. In the second part of my article, I do a comparison between crowd theories based on crowds as  a super-mind (collective behavior theories) compared to crowds as reference groups (collective action) theories. Crowds as gatherings are like reference groups applied to macro-social psychology.

    Two Perspectives on Crowd Theory

    Collective Behavior Category of Comparison Collective Action
    What collectivities do in reaction to events (spontaneous) Mode of Conduct What collectivities do when they plan events

     
    Qualitative differences

    Collectivities behave in unusual ways

    		 What is the difference between collective behavior and behavior in everyday life? There is no qualitative difference Crowds act normally most of the time

     
    Crowds are easily unified because people  are aroused and these emotions spread like contagion How unified are crowds? They are pluralistic, not unified People disagree and it takes work to unify them
    Rumor, Urban legends

    Fads, fashions, crazes

    Mass hysteria—radio

    UFO landings (War of Worlds)

    Diseases

    		 Examples: Masses Collective action does not usually study mass behavior

    More interested in crowds and social movement
    Sports’ crowds, UFO reports

    Natural disasters—floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes,

    riots

    Social movements, political or spiritual

    		 Examples: Crowds and movements Sports crowds, UFO reports

    Natural disasters

    Protests

    Riots

    Strikes

    Work stoppages

    Boycotts

    Social movements—political or spiritual
    Crowds draw trouble-makers or people who are emotionally unstable or criminals Who is drawn to crowds? There is no type of social group or individual that is drawn to crowds compared to groups

     
    Crowds bring out the worst characteristics in people,

    characteristics that would not show up in the same individuals or groups

    Selfish, desperate violence side

    		 What is the relationship between collectivities and human nature? Crowds bring out the best and worst in people

    Groups bring out what is moderate in people

     

    Selfish, violent, selfless and heroic
    Norms are created spontaneously as the situation unfolds (Emergent norm theory) What determines norms? Norms can be created before events occur
    Strangers, people who are rootless and have no communities Composition of collectivities Families, friends, neighbors
    Blumer’s circular reaction

    Emotions build in a snowballing effect

    		 How much monitoring of behavior goes on? Crowds monitor and interpret what is happening and can change direction
    Size, anonymity and lack of continuity in time makes crowds act more irrationally The place of rationality Crowds are as rational as other social formations.
    Mass hysteria theory (Le Bon

    Tarde, Blumer, Park,

    Klapp)

    Value Added theory (Smelser)

     

    Emergent norm (Turner, and Killian)

    		 Theories Social interactionist

    (McPhail)

     

    Resource Mobilization theory

    (McCarthy and Zald)

     

    Political process theory

    (McAdam, Gamson

    Lipsky)
    Anecdotes (Mackay)

     

    Reports by authorities.

    Newspapers, eye witnesses

    		 Research Archival (Rude – French Revolution)

    Gamson – (social protest)

    Tilly (revolutions
        Participant observation—

    Religious Cults –Moonies (Lofland)

    UFO Cults

    Tea Party

    Film, video, records

    (McPhail)

    • First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

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  • Panic-stricken Israel Lobby Shifts into Overdrive

    genocide

    At Westminster the other day the UK Secretary of State for Defence (Grant Shapps) made a statement on military deployments to the Middle East which included questions and answers about the situation in Gaza. It was an opportunity for Shapps with help of pro-Zionist MPs to distort the facts to ‘justify’ Israel’s appalling crimes.

    The following exchanges are taken from Hansard which, for those who don’t know, is the official and “substantially verbatim” report of what is said in the UK Parliament.

    Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP) commented: “It is important to repeat the denunciation of the death cult known as Hamas.”

    Shapps replied: “The hon. Gentleman is right to stress the abominable, disgraceful, disgusting behaviour of Hamas.” [Shapps is Jewish]

    Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con): “Those on both Front Benches seem to agree that Hamas must not remain in control in Gaza. Is any thought being given to how, once they have been removed, they can be prevented from coming back?” [Lewis is also Jewish]

    Shapps: The easiest way to bring this to an end, as I hinted earlier, would be for Hamas, a terrorist organisation, to release the hostages that they have, to stop firing rockets into Israel in a completely indiscriminate way, which I think the whole House should condemn.”

    Sir Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con): “The Houthis, who are attacking British and American cargo ships, and Hamas are basically two sides of the same coin. They are Iranian-funded, Iranian-trained and, of course, Iranian-guided terrorist groups that are publicly committed to the destruction of Israel…. I particularly welcome the UK’s deployment of drones to help locate hostages, including British hostages. In the days after 7 October, the Defence Secretary said: ‘No nation should stand alone in the face of such evil.’ Will he repeat that crucial support today and in the difficult days ahead? I thank him for his support. [Ellis is Jewish and also a member of Conservative Friends of Israel].

    Shapps: My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right that no nation should stand alone. It is easy to forget how this all began, when the Hamas terrorist group thought it was a plan to go into Israel to butcher men, women and children, cut off heads and rape people.

    Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con): “I applaud the decisive actions of my right hon. Friend and the Government to defend our strategic ally, Israel, against Hamas, but the grim reality on the ground right now is that Hamas continue to fire dozens of rockets at Israeli towns and cities. The Iran-backed terror group have fired more than 10,000 rockets since 7 October and show no sign of stopping their violent attacks against Israel. Will my right hon. Friend not only commit to continuing his support for Israel in defending itself against Hamas, but reassure the House that every possible step is being taken to counter Iran’s links across the region, which are causing instability?”

    Shapps: “My hon. Friend makes an excellent point that the conflict would be over immediately if hostages were released and Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel—there would not be a cause for conflict. Indeed, that is the policy Israel followed for many years, hoping that, even though rocket attacks continued, Hamas would not take advantage of their own population by using them as human shields and building infrastructure under hospitals, schools and homes…. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to identify Iran as being behind this whole evil business.”

    Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD): “It was reassuring last week, in answer to my question, to hear the Minister for Armed Forces, the right hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey) telling us that UK surveillance flights would not involve the use of intelligence for target acquisition. I also welcome the Secretary of State talking today about how information that would be helpful to hostage recovery will be passed to the so-called appropriate authorities. We have now heard two questions about the International Criminal Court. Will the UK pass any evidence that it gathers of any breaches of international humanitarian law by combatants in Gaza to the ICC?“

    Shapps: “As the hon. Gentleman says, that question has been asked, and I have answered it a couple of times. The intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – ISR – flights are to look for British hostages and indeed other hostages. That is the information that will be gathered from those flights. Of course, if we saw anything else, we would most certainly alert our partners“. [But do they include the ICC? I think not.]

    Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP): “Yesterday I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), whether the UK Government were in a position to contribute to the International Criminal Court’s call for evidence in its investigation of potential breaches of international humanitarian law. He said: ‘Not at this stage, but we will continue to take note.’ Surely, if the UK Government are actively collecting drone and surveillance images of the war zone, the answer to that question should have been yes?”

    Shapps: “I would have thought that the No. 1 concern would be to locate the British hostages, and that is where the surveillance work will focus.”

    Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind): “The Secretary of State needs to be very clear with the House: 15,000 people have already died in Gaza, and 1,200 have died in Israel. Israel is clearly pushing the entire population southwards, if not out of the Gaza strip altogether. Is Britain involved in the military actions that Israel has taken, either physically or by providing information in support of those military activities? I think the House needs to be told. What is the long-term aim of British military involvement in Gaza?”

    Shapps: “The simple answer is no, and I hope that clears it up. I am surprised to hear the right hon. Gentleman talk just about people being killed. They were murdered. They were slaughtered. It was not just some coincidental thing. I understand and share the concerns about the requirement on Israel, on us and on everyone else to follow international humanitarian law. When Israel drops leaflets, when it drops what it calls a “knock” or a “tap” and does not bomb until afterwards, when it calls people to ask them to move, when it issues maps showing where Hamas have their tunnels and asks people to move away from them, that is a far cry from what Hamas did on 7 October, when they went after men, women and children.”

    Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab): “We have seen increased bombardment in southern Gaza after the pause. We are also seeing increased violence in the West Bank, supported by extremist settler Ministers. What talks is the Secretary of State having with Israel to stop the increase in settler violence in the West Bank?“

    Grant Shapps: “I certainly will not be pulling my punches when I speak to my Israeli counterparts. The violence in the West Bank is unacceptable and it must be controlled—stopped, in fact. None of that, in any way, shape or form, separates us from our utter condemnation of how this whole thing was started in the first place with Hamas, but the hon. Lady is right about that settler violence.”

    Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP): “Medical Aid for Palestinians has warned that Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and siege is making it impossible to sustain human life in Gaza. With 1.8 million civilians displaced and a lack of clean water and sanitation, it is just a matter of time before a cholera outbreak kills many thousands more. The Secretary of State has been unequivocal that the main purpose of surveillance is to help find hostages, which is fine, but for the fifth time of asking: if clear evidence is found of breaches of humanitarian law, will the UK Government share that evidence with the International Criminal Court?

    Shapps: “The simple answer is that we will always follow international humanitarian law and its requirements.”

    Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP): “It is absolutely right that those responsible for the crimes of Hamas are held to account in international law. But why is the Secretary of State so reluctant to give a clear, simple “yes” to the question whether the Government will provide any evidence of war crimes to the International Criminal Court? Is it because he has already seen such evidence? Is it because Israel has asked him to promise not to share such evidence? What is the reason?”

    Grant Shapps: “I have already said that the United Kingdom is bound by, and would always observe, international humanitarian law.

    The message we are supposed to swallow from this pantomime is that it’s all the fault of Hamas and Iran who “started the whole thing” on 7 October, and that Israel’s massacres, brutal occupation using military force, cruel blockade and clear intention of establishing Jewish sovereignty “from the river to the sea” over the last 75 years have nothing to do with it. It is clear that the UK will do everything to avoid upsetting Israel’s evil plan and calling the regime’s war criminals to account despite our solemn obligations under international law to do so.

    And it is pointless for the likes of Shapps to keep repeating that Israel “has to follow international humanitarian law” when Israel has been in permanent breach of nearly all aspects of law for decades and treats international norms with utter contempt. Only today the regime announced approval of 1700 more ‘settlement’ homes in East Jerusalem which is Palestinian territory. And it continues to defy international law, escalating its crimes to the most abhorrent of all – genocide – because it is given cover by the US and UK. Perhaps the rest of us should properly label Israel’s genocide in Gaza as ‘US and UK-backed’. And the UK itself ignores international law if it happens to be ‘inconvenient’.

    As for the constantly repeated claim the Israel has a right to defend itself, this is blatant misinformation. Israel is an illegal military occupier and aggressor committing never-ending war crimes on someone else’s sovereign territory. Its right to self-defence is practically zero in these circumstances. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has stated that “Israel cannot claim self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies – from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation”.

    And notice how everything the Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. Shapps is evidently well versed in the 116-page propaganda manual produced by The Israel Project (TIP) and written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West.

    This masterwork on deception attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.

    Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “words that work” – i.e. carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. We are seeing it at work here with great success.

    MPs who are Jewish are identified as such when it seems appropriate. Those, like Sir Michael Lewis mentioned above, who are signed-up Friends of Israel should, in my opinion, declare that interest in any debate on the subject. But I must emphasise that not all Jewish MPs are tools of the apartheid regime. We remember with admiration Sir Gerald Kaufman who was arguing for economic sanctions against Israel back in 2004. And during a debate on the Gaza war of 2008/9, he told the Commons: “The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians… My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza”.

    He described Hamas as a “deeply nasty organisation” but said the UK Government’s boycott of Hamas had “dreadful consequences”, and he reminded the Commons that Israel had been created following acts of terrorism by the Irgun. He considered Iran a loathsome regime but, unlike Israel, “at least it keeps its totalitarian theocracy to within its own borders”.

    As to why there are so many Israel lackeys in Westminster Kaufman said: “It’s Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative Party. There is now a big group of Conservative members of parliament who are pro-Israel…. whatever the Israeli government does.”

    Of course, it’s not just the Conservative Party. The corrupting influence of dodgy funding is also affecting Labour and the LibDems.

    Remembering the victims of genocide

    This week marks the 75th anniversary of the 1948 Genocide Convention. As explained on the United Nations website:

    Every 9 December the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide marks the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – a crucial global commitment that was made at the founding of the United Nations, immediately preceding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By General Assembly Resolution A/RES/69/323 of 29 September 2015, that day also became the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime.

    At its landmark 75th anniversary this year, the Genocide Convention remains highly relevant. The 1948 Genocide Convention codified for the first time the crime of genocide in international law. Its preamble recognizes that “at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity” and that international cooperation is required to “liberate humankind from such an odious scourge”. To date, 153 States have ratified the Convention. Achieving universal ratification of the Convention, as well as ensuring its full implementation, remain essential for effectively advancing genocide prevention. The Genocide Convention includes the obligation not only to punish the crime of genocide but, crucially, to prevent it. In the 75 years since its adoption, the Genocide Convention has played an important role in the development of international criminal law, in holding perpetrators of this crime accountable, galvanizing prevention efforts, and in giving a voice to the victims of genocide.

    How many parliamentarians in Westminster and Washington who blindly support Israel’s attempts to exterminate the Palestinians in Gaza and turn their homeland into rubble will publicly show respect for those victims of the apartheid regime’s genocide?

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  • Gaza: The Masks are off

    As the genocide in Gaza resumes, it becomes ever more clear that the Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”, launched by the Palestinian Resistance on October 7, and the events that followed, have not only destroyed the prestige of the Israeli army: they completely unmasked the hypocrisy of the West, who is not only silent but accomplice of the unprecedented massacres perpetrated against a defenseless and trapped civilian population, as well as the duplicity of most of the so-called Western “friends” of Palestine, be they political forces, media, Unions or associations.

    On the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, all the factions of the Palestinian Resistance launched a spectacular air, land and sea offensive that succeeded in breaking the siege of Gaza, seizing numerous enemy bases and liberating, albeit temporarily, localities occupied in 1948 —a first in the history of the conflict. In just a few hours, hundreds of occupation soldiers were killed, and thousands of panic-stricken settlers fled (many on foot into the desert), shattering forever the myth of the so-called “most powerful army in the Middle East” and its supposedly infallible intelligence services: the Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman had not even imagined, neither in their most improbable scenarios nor in their worst nightmares, that such an operation was possible on the part of Hamas. Israel had only prepared for it in the north against Hezbollah, which certainly passed on its expertise to the Palestinian fighters. To date, Israel admits to having suffered 1,200 dead, thousands of wounded and over 200 prisoners. This is already the worst humiliation in the history of the “Zionist entity”, inflicted not by a coalition of national armies but by a militia besieged and suffocated for 16 years in a tiny piece of land, the most heavily guarded territory in the world.

    But it’s not just Israel’s illusion of invincibility that has been shattered: Israel’s allies, namely the leaders and elites of Western countries, have revealed to the world the full extent of their racism, cruelty and hypocrisy, giving their unconditional support to the occupier and its preposterous claim of self-defense (a right denied to the Palestinians, while, according to international law, this right can only be invoked against a State, in this case Israel, and not against a colonized people) and by blaming Hamas for the escalation and all the casualties, including Palestinian deaths, echoing the rhetoric of the Israeli army. Neither the inflammatory statements by Israeli ministers about Palestinian “human animals” or “There are no innocents in Gaza” (not even the million children, a legitimate target for the occupier), nor the white phosphorus, nor the war crimes of depriving over 2 million Palestinians of water, electricity, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid, nor the deliberate targeting of hospitals, ordering staff and patients to evacuate in record time or be killed, nor the massive and deliberate bombardment of residential buildings, which has razed entire neighborhoods to the ground and caused over 20,000 deaths, almost half of them children, and tens of thousands of injuries, nor, to cap it all, the ultimatum given to over a million inhabitants of North Gaza to take refuge in South Gaza within 24 hours (with, in the background, efforts to deport the entire population of Gaza to the Egyptian Sinai), an injunction that amounts to State terrorism, materially impossible to carry out (especially with fuel shortages and devastated roads) and which constitutes a crime against humanity, none of this has moved the “civilized West”, which refuses to condemn the occupier and continues to give it its full political, media and military support, vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council. Europe has even restricted, repressed and upright banned demonstrations in support of Palestine, with France going so far as to ban them altogether and consider it an anti-Semitic act to raise a Palestinian flag. After the first moral decay revealed by the war in Ukraine, where the West shamelessly explained that, unlike those of NATO’s wars in the Middle East, the Ukrainian victims were worthy and should move us because they were “like us” (blond with blue eyes), the last fig leaf covering the hideous, truly satanic face of the West has fallen, and is revealed to the whole world in all its abjectness, giving its blessing to the daily butchery of Palestinian men, women and children in the macabre tune of “We stand with Israel”. Behind the cloak of freedom, democracy, human rights and international law, behind the fine suits, perfume and pretensions of refinement, behind the calls to protect civilians and respect humanitarian international law, the rulers of Western countries revealed the full extent of their barbarity, indifferent if not hilarious in the face of the bloodbath, the bodies of shredded toddlers and suffocated premature babies in Gaza.

    However, one of the most disgusting aspects of this great unveiling is the reaction of the so-called defenders of the Palestinian cause, who, with very rare exceptions, have allowed themselves to be crushed by pro-Israeli propaganda, whether through weakness, cowardice, fear of political-media vindictiveness or a latent racism that only truly sanctifies Jewish lives, deeming the massive killing of Arabs something normal, if not praiseworthy. Ever since October 7, the media, personalities and organizations considered, or even claiming, to be pro-Palestinian competed with zeal in their communiqués condemning the “terrorist attack” by Hamas and its alleged “atrocities” and “war crimes”, presenting Israel de facto in the position of a victim who would only defend itself (admittedly in a “disproportionate” manner, but fundamentally legitimate), without any shred of evidence (it has been revealed that a great many Israeli civilians were killed by their own troops), and in defiance of the most basic facts of the conflict: Gaza has been the victim for at least 16 years of the supreme crime according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, that is the crime of aggression (blockade is an act of war), not to mention regular assassinations, the colonization of the West Bank, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque, all casus belli against which Hamas, the legitimate representative of the people of Gaza, has the legal and moral right to retaliate. The vast majority of the so-called “friends of Palestine” demonstrated their lack of humanity and regard for international law, which enshrines the right of occupied peoples to liberate themselves by all means, including armed struggle.

    Here is a small selection of the shameful and ignominious political, media and trade union statements that have provided unforgivable support and even encouragement for the ongoing massacre in Gaza. All the examples below are taken from France, the self-appointed “Cradle of Human Rights” and allegedly less subservient to Israel’s interest than the US or UK, but the same bias (and much worse) can be found everywhere in the “enlightened West”.

    La France Insoumise

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “La France Insoumise”, or LFI, is France’s main left-wing opposition party, presenting itself as a champion of the rights of minorities (especially Muslims) inside, and of the oppressed peoples outside (especially Palestine). LFI’s initial communiqué on October 7, which caused such a stir in France, was extremely timid. It did not take sides and seemed to consider Israel and Gaza equally to blame: “The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes against a backdrop of intensifying Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian deaths. Our thoughts are with all the victims. The current escalation risks leading to a hellish cycle of violence. France, the European Union and the international community must act without delay to prevent this escalation.” LFI merely called for a “ceasefire” and “the protection of the population”, a “return to the negotiating table” and an active implementation of “UN resolutions”. This statement caused an uproar because it did not explicitly condemn Hamas or use the term “terrorist”, but it must be stressed that it did not condemn Israel either. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s reaction on Twitter was in the same vein (“All the violence unleashed against Israel and Gaza proves only one thing: violence only produces and reproduces itself. Horrified, our thoughts and compassion go out to all the distraught victims of all this”), simply repeating outdated truisms about the “two-state solution” (it is dead and buried, and no power in the world could resurrect it).

    But just as Mélenchon wimped out with the war in Ukraine, condemning Russia as solely responsible for unprovoked aggression and aligning himself totally with NATO, which he had claimed France would leave if he was elected President, LFI quickly gave in to the pack, “condemning the Hamas attack on Israel”, as well as the “massacres”, “abominable acts” and acts of “barbarism” allegedly perpetrated by the Palestinian Resistance (with only the Israeli army’s statements as evidence) and denounced “with the utmost force” its “war crimes aimed at terrorizing civilian populations”, boasting to use the very same words as Israel’s ambassador to the UN. “If our support must be total to the Israeli population, it cannot be unconditional to the Israeli government”, assures Manuel Bompard, coordinator of La France Insoumise. But why would anyone support a largely racist and supremacist people, who have always massively supported the massacres in Gaza? Why should anyone support Netanyahu’s far-right and even fascist government, be it conditionally, instead of just condemning it? Manuel Bompard recognizes Israel’s alleged “right to self-defense” but asks it to be “proportionate”: don’t the Palestinians also have the right to defend themselves, and much more so than the occupier? Hasn’t Hamas, which has caused far fewer Israeli casualties in its whole history than the number of Palestinians regularly massacred by Israel in a matter of days, acted in a “proportionate” manner? This can only be denied if we consider that a Palestinian life is worth less (and x times less) than an Israeli life. And are Hamas’s actions “Resistance”, asks a presenter? LFI bursts into indignation: “Nobody used that expression. It’s a flagrant act of outrageous manipulation, part of the polemics fabricated against LFI.” The NUPES parliamentary group, led by LFI, cowardly joined the minute’s silence for Israeli victims at the National Assembly: LFI claims to have asked for the inclusion of international and Palestinian victims, to no avail, but nevertheless took part in this scandalously one-sided tribute to the “worthy victims”.

    Mélenchon crowned this betrayal of Palestine & Palestinians with a statement condemning Hamas not only for its attack (while admitting that there was as yet no evidence of massacres in the kibbutz, and pretending to ignore the fact that Israeli settlers are notoriously over-armed), but also for its very identity as a politico-religious movement, even though Hamas was elected in democratic elections (Jimmy Carter himself was there and testified to it), and its armed resistance against Israel is overwhelmingly supported by Palestinians and Arab-Muslim populations in general. In recalling his hatred of all theocracies, Mélenchon didn’t even notice the contradiction of not including Israel, a State founded on an amalgam between politics and religion, with a ruling coalition comprising fanatical Talmudists. Mélenchon also stressed that his refusal to use the term “terrorism” was purely from a legal perspective, and because “war crime” is worse than “terrorism”, and would allow Palestine to be dragged to the ICC (sic): “Hamas has unleashed a war operation against Israel. If we want war crimes to be tried and prosecuted, we have to call them by their name. This is possible at the International Criminal Court.” This, then, is LFI’s priority: not to erect a Palestinian state, but to drag the Palestinian Resistance (along with Israeli leaders, as if any White was ever condemned at the ICC) before the courts.

    In short, La France Insoumise has abjectly submitted to the dictates of the pro-Israeli doxa, and has even outbid it, while presenting itself as sensitive to the Palestinian cause, in order to eat at all the racks. LFI only claims a position of dissidence to “keep the votes of the bearded” (and veiled) Muslims, as the odious Dupond-Maserati, Macron’s Justice Minister, put it. LFI’s deep-rooted racist and Islamophobic reflexes are further demonstrated by the disgusting fate it bestowed upon Taha Bouhafs, mercilessly defamed and crushed by the Party because he was an Arab true to his roots.

    Mediapart

    “The images are unbearable”. So begins an article on the front page of the October 10 issue of Mediapart, France’s main online “independent” & opposition media who unveiled so many scandals of Macron’s government. This edition was neither devoted to the Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip, the destruction of hospitals and residential buildings, the use of white phosphorus against densely populated civilian areas (a war crime), nor to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis announced by the deprivation of drinking water, electricity, medicine, gas and fuel imposed on over two million Gazans trapped and with nowhere safe to take refuge, in order to force their deportation to Egypt (a crime against humanity). God forbid. Mediapart was talking about these infamous “Hamas war crimes”. And the “unbearable” images in question were not those of decapitated Palestinian babies, the bodies of infants and children pulled from the rubble of Gaza, the heart-rending farewells of a father, mother or child to loved ones killed in the bombardments, of Palestinians burned (dead or alive) in Gaza and the West Bank, of their lifeless bodies desecrated by acts of mutilation or settlers who completely undress the corpses of Palestinians and film themselves urinating on them, but simply of an Israeli woman captured by Hamas. The article, entitled “Civilian hostages at the hands of Hamas: ‘Unheard of in Israel’s history’”, continues: “In a video shared on the social network X and filmed on Saturday October 7 shortly after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, a woman, displayed like a trophy, lies face down, inert and almost naked, in the back of a pick-up truck. A Palestinian militiaman pulls her hair, another spits on her. Her name is Shani Louk. Her family recognized her by her hair and tattoos.”

    Mediapart clearly adopts the Israeli point of view, speaking of an “Israeli 9/11” and a “bloodbath”, based solely on statements by the Israeli army (even though images showed that Israeli policemen were firing from the Nova rave party, which contradicts the idea of a gratuitous massacre in favor of that of civilians “caught in the crossfire”, not mentioning the reports about Israeli civilians butchered by their own troops from Apache helicopters in the implementation of a “mass Hannibal” directive). And Mediapart spoke of “unbearable images” when the only thing truly “unbearable”, for the Israeli society, is the end of the myth of the Israeli army’s ability to protect its settlers. Moreover, Mediapart insidiously peddles the widely-propagated idea that Shani Louk was raped and executed, 3 days after the images went viral. However, she was already scantily clad during the rave party in the Negev desert, and her family had claimed to have received proof that she was still alive. Still, Mediapart made the choice to echo the rhetoric of the Israeli government by speaking of a “terrorist” attack (a term never used for Israeli crimes, of a much bigger magnitude), propagates the trope of Arabs raping white women and grossly lies by saying that a Hamas fighter spat on her (it’s quite clear from the video in question that it’s a child doing it, which is regrettable, but very different from what is said). Significantly, far-right Marine Le Pen made exactly the same statements in the French National Assembly, and this worthy daughter of her father (Jean-Marie Le Pen was notoriously involved in torture in French Algeria) also retains only this striking image of the “colonist” as prisoner of the “natives”: Mediapart, media of Edwy Plenel (whom Mitterrand described as an agent of the United States), thus followed the footsteps of the French and Israeli far right, giving full credit to the occupation army’s version of events despite the absence of proof and huge record of lies broadcasted by the IDF, and highlighting images that are completely insignificant when compared to the daily life of Palestinians under occupation, with its series of executions, torture, well-documented rapes of Palestinian women prisoners, etc., at a time when Israel is committing its greatest massacre of civilians in Gaza ever. Much later in the article, without any strong epithet or condemnation, it will be mentioned coldly that “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” will be allowed in the Gaza enclave, and that the Israeli Defense Minister has stated “We are fighting animals and we act accordingly”. On this subject, Mediapart refrained from emotionally-charged comments such as those used on the Israeli side (“unbearable”, “Plunged into dread since that fateful Shabbat day”, “traumatic as these are”), showing clearly on which side its heart beats (on the side of “humans”, not “animals”) and where its priorities lie.

    Worse still, Mediapart has also published an article entitled “Massacres in two kibbutzes: ‘They murdered children and the elderly in cold blood’”, presenting as if it were a proven fact the worst atrocities attributed to Hamas, once again based solely on statements by the Israeli army. The following IDF figures are quoted without questioning their statements: “an Israeli army official” (“It’s something more like a pogrom from our grandparents’ time”), “Major General Itai Virov” (“It’s not a war or a battlefield, it’s a massacre”), “Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli army spokesman” (“What’s happening now in Israel is the discovery of the atrocity of massacres committed over two days by Hamas Islamist terrorists, including the carnage at Bee’ri kibbutz. Hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered, torn to pieces and decapitated by men mad with hatred. This was repeated in dozens of places in Israel”), “Yossi Landau, Zaka commander” (“It’s incredible the number of victims we saw, what was done to these families, these children. I’ve been doing this job for thirty-three years and I’ve never seen anything like this”), along with “Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant” (“All those who came to behead, to murder women and Holocaust survivors will be annihilated at the height of our strength and without compromise. What we saw in the cities was a massacre”) and the Israeli (I24News) and Western (CNN) journalists selected by the army for its propaganda, who meekly peddled (then retracted) the story of the 40 beheaded babies (“They shot everyone, they murdered children, babies, old people, everyone, in cold blood.”).

    The conclusion of this article is in the same vein. At the end of the last section, entitled “Pure Evil” (sic), we read:

    “From the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the atrocities committed by Hamas in communities around Gaza, speaking of ‘pure evil’. ‘The brutality of bloodthirsty Hamas reminds us of the most horrific acts of ISIS, he said. This is terrorism which, unfortunately, is not new to the Jewish people. This attack evokes painful memories, the scars of a thousand years of anti-Semitism and genocide’.”

    Never mind that there are no images or videos to back up these assertions, reminiscent of the worst Nazi diatribes. And there is absolutely no mention of the crucial fact that in Israel, relentless military censorship filters out the slightest publication in the media, even in times of “peace”. No doubt is expressed either as to the veracity of these claims, even though the first sentence of the article did indeed state that the kibbutz had been liberated after bitter fighting (“It was only on Monday, after two and a half days of fighting, that Israeli troops were able to regain control of the kibbutz in the locality of Kfar Azza”), without ever mentioning the possibility that some Israelis may have been killed in the exchange of fire or in the Israeli strikes. Many Israeli survivors did claim that their own forces were responsible for the deaths of many settlers, and the Hannibal Doctrine, according to which Israel would rather kill its own citizens than let them fall alive into the hands of Hamas, is well known, and was mentioned in the Mediapart article quoted above (it was referring to the potential targeting by the IDF of Israeli hostages kept in Gaza, not to the October 7 massacres). Thus, trampling on journalistic ethics and disregarding the enormous responsibility placed on the media at such a critical time, Mediapart had no qualms about acting as the spokesperson for the Israeli army as it was preparing to commit an unprecedented massacre in Gaza, peddling lies such as the one about the beheaded babies, which can only contribute to public acceptance of Israel’s “reprisals” against the “pure evil” that needs to be rooted out of Gaza. This hoax was endorsed by Biden in the above speech (he claimed to have seen pictures), but has since been retracted by the White House, which has clarified that no proof was provided, and that Biden had simply repeated the Israeli army’s statements (as he did again for the deadly strike against the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians, attributed by the occupier to an Islamic Jihad rocket, as if the Resistance in Gaza had missiles able to cause such a huge level of destruction). Incidentally, the names of Israeli victims published by Haaretz do not include any babies, but the damage was done. And to this day, Mediapart doesn’t consider it necessary to publish a retraction (any more than it ever repented its despicable slander against Julian Assange). Mediapart has even gone so far as to censor comments questioning the reality of the facts alleged in the article and the irresponsibility of a newspaper to publish them without any verification in such a context, deleting them by the dozen without even taking responsibility for this censorship, which is attributed to the authors of the said comments (the only mention is “This comment has been unpublished by its author”).

    The icing on the cake: these two articles were written by a certain… Rachida El Azzouzi. And to think that some people say that France is racist and that Arabs can’t succeed while staying true to themselves…

    CGT

    The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) is a national trade union center. It is the first of the five major French confederations of trade unions, and is deeply rooted in France’s history of social struggles and international solidarity. Here is how the CGT reacted to the events of October 7:

    “On Saturday October 7, Hamas unleashed an offensive of unprecedented violence, attacking a large number of civilian targets. The CGT condemns this escalation, which bereaves and targets millions of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike, and does a disservice to the Palestinian cause.”

    These are the first words of the communiqué issued by the CGT on October 9, entitled “For a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine!” It is a veritable concentrate of cowardice, lies and ignominy.

    “Unprecedented violence”? But everything Hamas has done, even taking into account the crimes attributed to it without any proof, Israel has been doing far worse for decades! Do Israeli lives count for more than Palestinian lives? Why speak of “unprecedented violence” or “a milestone crossed”, when Palestine is, in the worst case scenario, merely reproducing in a homemade way what the occupation has been doing to it on an industrial scale since 1948?

    So it’s “Hamas escalation” that targets “millions of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike”. Israeli civilians come first, of course, given the highly unequal exchange rate between Jewish and Arab lives, but even the Palestinian victims would not be targeted by the occupation’s aviation and artillery, but by Hamas itself?! It is pure Israeli rhetoric to state so bluntly that Hamas is responsible for all the deaths in Gaza, be it via the myth of “self-defense”, “human shields” or other such outrageous lies.

    Finally, from the comfort of its offices in the Paris region, the CGT has the unheard-of arrogance to decree what serves or “does a disservice to the Palestinian cause”, demonstrating a mentality imbued with colonial smugness and haughtiness.

    The final paragraph of the CGT’s confederal communiqué restates a few facts that should have been the starting (and only) point:

    “The Israeli government, dominated by the far right, openly conducts a policy of apartheid and inexorably pursues the colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in defiance of all international decisions, closing the door more and more to any peace process, while Benyamin Netanyahu calls for the razing of the cities of Gaza.

    The CGT recalls that the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, in a report published on Tuesday June 7, clearly condemns Israel’s policy on the situation: ‘The conclusions and recommendations related to the root causes of this conflict point overwhelmingly to Israel, which we analyze as an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying another’.”

    The CGT, which blamed Hamas for this “escalation” and its consequences throughout its communiqué, is therefore in total contradiction. But it’s not the demand for coherence, or morality, that takes precedence, but rather the demand to “howl with the wolves” and condemn Hamas.

    On October 18, the CGT issued a new communiqué entitled “Stop the bloodbath in Gaza immediately”. Despite this encouraging title, its content is just as distressing as that of the previous communiqué, if not more so. It begins as follows:

    “For the past 10 days, the people of Gaza have been subjected to terrible strikes in retaliation [sic] for the acts of terror perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. The CGT has unambiguously condemned this policy of making things worse, which does a disservice to the Palestinian cause. It is not surprising that Hamas should make this type of choice, as it has been violating women’s rights and multiplying arbitrary arrests for almost 20 years in Gaza, imposing a double penalty on the enclave, which has been held under an outrageous blockade by Israel since 2007.”

    While the population of Gaza had been pounded and genocided for over 10 days, with thousands dead, tens of thousands wounded and hundreds of thousands displaced, the CGT devoted its entire opening tirade to condemning Hamas, with only the word “outrageous” condemning Israel for its blockade at the very end of the paragraph. The same accusatory inversion is at work, via a reversal of chronology that places Gaza in the position of aggressor rather than victim (in a way legitimizing reprisals), with “terrible strikes” on one side and “acts of terror” on the other (accusing Israel of terrorism is out of the question, even when they threaten 1 million inhabitants with annihilation if they don’t evacuate northern Gaza at once). The “policy of making things worse” is not that of Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has left the Palestinian population with no other choice but armed struggle, but that of Hamas, which moreover “violates women’s rights”: is this a reference to the wearing of the veil, a notorious sign of backwardness for the CGTists, even when it is freely worn? All that’s missing is a reference to the rights of the non-existent LGBTI+ community in Gaza to complete the picture (on November 8, the CGT did choose a LGBT flag to call for a demonstration for a ceasefire in Gaza…). And we find once again this major concern of the CGT for what serves and disserves the Palestinian cause, which is one of the priorities of their Montreuil offices: as we read at the end of the communiqué, “The CGT is currently working to build the widest possible arc of forces in favor of an immediate ceasefire and a just and lasting peace for this region of the world.” Under such conditions, the people of Gaza are truly ungrateful for having launched the October 7 offensive, which threatens to scupper the plans for a just and lasting peace skilfully matured, between two packs of beer, by the CGT Union’s experts. All the Palestinians had to do was wait a few more decades and the job was done, what the hell…

    But the worst is yet to come. A few paragraphs later, we read:

    “The CGT demands that France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, immediately mobilize the resources of its diplomacy to obtain an immediate ceasefire and prevent the announced annihilation of northern Gaza by a large-scale land, sea and air offensive. The CGT also demands that everything possible be done to help the civilian population. The generosity and exceptional measures (including temporary protection) rightly implemented to help Ukrainians fleeing the war must also be extended to the Palestinians!”

    Not only is there no explicit condemnation of this crime against humanity in the making, namely the deportation of the population of Gaza to the south and then to the Egyptian Sinai desert, but after a timid request that France should “prevent” it, the CGT calls for this deportation to be facilitated by the reception of the expelled Palestinian populations, in the same way that the Ukrainian populations were massively welcomed in Western countries following Russia’s intervention.

    The CGT, which yesterday supported the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) —at a time where the risk was not an indictment for “apology for terrorism”, but indeed “terrorism” and “high treason”, with the death penalty not been abolished yet—, has changed: today, its General Secretary Sophie Binet denounces Hamas as “terrorist” (she had also supported the banning of the abaya dress in schools…). These positions demonstrate once again that, despite cosmetic differences, the CGT is aligned with NATO policy and that of Western capitals, a position that has only been confirmed since it left the World Federation of Trade Unions (composed of Southern countries) in 1995.

    To put the finishing touches to this sad picture of solidarity with Palestine in France, it should be pointed out that French associations, even Muslim and pro-Palestinian ones such as the AFPS (France Palestine Solidarity Association, whose first press release was very respectable), also threw stones at Hamas. The UJFP (French Jewish Union for Peace) at first issued some very good statements, but eventually gave in to the anti-Hamas mob. Many rallies where only calling for a ceasefire, with the majority of speakers competing in their zeal to condemn “Hamas atrocities” as if it all started from there.

    Why did this happen?

    Over and above the overtly Zionist political and media pressure and its unbearable bludgeoning of the Israeli narrative, as well as the very real judicial threats of charges of apology for terrorism (the New Anticapitalist Party has been indicted for “apology of terror” because of its initial exemplary press release, later retracted, along with two CGT members for their local communiqués or tweets), which may explain the blindness and/or cowardice of all these voices, we must remember that the issues at work in occupied Palestine largely overlap with those of the history of colonialism. In particular, we need to remember the ambiguous position of so-called left-wing or progressive Western forces in the face of national liberation struggles against their own countries. An extract from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the earth, dedicated to the Algerian War, expresses all that needs to be said about the “support” of LFI, Mediapart, the CGT and so many others for the Palestinian cause:

    “The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But, all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left scolds them: ‘You’re going too far; we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them, the French Leftists might as well shove it up their a**es. Once their war began, they saw this hard truth: that every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out of them; they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant favoured treatment to no one.

    There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power. The more far-seeing among us will be, in the last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot help seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that these less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of humanity. Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest Western souls are racist. (…)

    This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters; have no fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge.”

    Yes, this half-hearted support for Palestine of the Western Left is all about racism (and even Islamophobia). The martyrdom of the Palestinian population, which has been going on for decades, has never moved “our worthiest Western souls” as much as the Gaza uprising against the soldiers and settlers, even though the violence of Hamas and the number of Israeli victims are far less than what the occupier regularly inflicts on the Arab population. The West shed more tears on the fake story of 40 decapitated Israeli babies than on tens of premature Palestinian infants suffocated to death by Israel in Al-Shifa Hospital: the mere illusion of a Jewish death is worse, so much worse than the real, actual and horrendous death of thousands of Palestinian children, as if they were meant to die before they come of age. As for “taking the plunge” and supporting the Palestinian Resistance, it’s likely that our “worthiest souls” will never do so, given our indifference to the massacre of almost ten thousand children, a single strike against a hospital resulting in over 500 civilian casualties, the assault on hospitals, the imminent risk of death hanging over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trapped and deprived of drinking water, food, electricity, fuel and medicine, and the specter of a mass exodus, which have not shaken our conviction that any declaration of “support” for Palestine must begin with a condemnation of the “war crimes” of Hamas, the “terrorist” organization that is “holding hostage” the people of Gaza (no matter how much this contradicts the facts, it gives a clear conscience).

    Norman Finkelstein, son of Auschwitz and Warsaw Ghetto survivors and a world authority on the Palestinian question, contextualized and commented on these positions, and affirmed genuine support for the Palestinian struggle. Such a courageous stance is so rare that it is worth quoting at length:

    “My parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto up until the uprising in April 1943. The uprising in the ghetto is normally regarded as a heroic chapter, or the only heroic chapter during the Nazi extermination. And when the anniversary came around, probably around 20 or 30 years ago, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, she interviewed my mother about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And my mother was very – let’s just put it this way – she was very skeptical of all the praise that was being heaped on it. She said, number one, we were all destined to die, so there’s no great heroism in trying to resist when there was no other option available, we were going to be deported and exterminated. Number two, she said that the resistance was vastly exaggerated, which in fact was true. It was a very minuscule resistance to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw at the time. And so I saw that Amy Goodman, her face began to drop because my mother was diminishing what was supposed to be a heroic chapter or the only heroic chapter during that horrific sequence of events. So my mother said, excuse me, Amy asked her, “was there anything positive from what happened?” And I remember my mother commenting, first she talked about the ingenuity, the ingenuity of the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. And she described how they had no implements. They developed this very complex catacombs – what were called “bunkers” in the ghetto – using their bare hands. And I remember her use of that word ingenuity. And then when I saw or witnessed or read about the ingenuity of the people of Hamas, the most surveilled place on God’s earth. Every nook and cranny of Gaza is under 10,000 different Israeli surveillance technologies. And yet they managed, amidst all this, to block all of the surveillance and conduct this operation — I pay tribute to that ingenuity! I pay tribute to the resistance of a people with literally, or almost literally, their having figured out a way to resist this concentration camp imposed on them or overcome it…

    And I have the same sense of wonderment – I am still totally baffled – that Hamas figured out a way to tribute the human ingenuity and that spirit of resistance, and all the powers that each individual can summon forth in that struggle for resistance to defeat a very formidable or impose a defeat, even if it turns out not to be longstanding, to impose a momentary defeat on those racist supremacists and Übermenschen who just don’t believe the Arabs are clever enough, smart enough, have enough ingenuity to prevail.

    As to the question of the civilians and the civilian deaths, I don’t know what happened. I’ll patiently listen and I will as fairly as I can parse the evidence as it becomes available. I’m not gonna put a “but,” I’m not gonna put a “however,” I’m just gonna state the facts. Number one, I was rereading the other day Karl Marx’s Civil War in France, and that describes the period when the Parisian workers come to power in Paris, form a commune, and the government, the official government, was assassinating prisoners of war, hostages. and it became so brutal that the Communards, as they were called, they took about 50 or 60 hostages. The government wouldn’t relent, it wouldn’t relent, and the Communards killed the hostages.

    Karl Marx defended it. He defended it. He said “it was a matter of… They were being treated with such contempt, the Communards.” The Communards were begging for a way to peacefully resolve this. They asked for one of their leaders, Blanqui, to be returned to them, and the government wouldn’t. You know, John Brown, he didn’t have a clean record. When he was in a battle in Kansas over a place called Osawatome, he killed hostages. He did. And when he was hung, it was very hard to find a person to defend him. Actually, I recently learned from reading something by Cornel West, one of the few people who spoke on his behalf was Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, which I wasn’t aware of. But he killed hostages, and he was hung and very few rose to his defense, but before you knew it, the Civil War came along. And, one of the marching songs in the Civil War was “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” History’s judgment can be very different than the momentary judgment.

    It is so appalling, it’s not just the despiriting, it’s so appalling, the reaction of all of these cowards and careerists and scum who use their microphones called Twitter to just denounce the Hamas attack. Most of the Hamas militants, probably the ones who broke through the fence, it’s their first time out of Gaza because you assume they’re mostly in their 20s. The blockade has gone on now for 18 years. They grew up in a concentration camp. They want to be free. One of the natures of the current technology is they get to see on the screen all these people walking free. They want to be free. They joined Hamas, they volunteered. Yes, by international law, they constitute combatants. Do I think they’re legitimate targets because they’re combatants? You’ll never convince me. You will never convince me.

    I know what the law says. I know what I’m legally obliged to say. I know what as a scholar or reported scholar I’m supposed to say. But, are you going to convince me a person who grew up in a concentration camp and wants to breathe free air, is – to use the language of international law – a legitimate target, I can’t do it. I cannot. Now, people are going to say, “you’re a hypocrite, you say you uphold international law, you know the fundamental principle of international law is the principle of distinction. Now you’re contradicting yourself.” Yeah, I’ll admit it. I don’t think legal formulas can capture every situation. And I don’t believe a child who was born into a concentration camp is a legitimate target. If he, in this case, it is he, if he wants to be free. I can’t see it.

    Now, how far are they allowed to go in order to break out of that camp? How far are they allowed to go? I think that’s a legitimate question. But here I’ll give you an example. In 1996, the International Court of Justice was asked to deliver what’s called an advisory opinion. The question put to the court was this, is the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal under international law? Is the use or the threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal under international law? Now, as all of you know, the fundamental principle of the laws of war is the distinction between civilians and combatants, between civilian sites, a military base, and so forth. So insofar as nuclear weapons by their inherent nature are unable to distinguish between civilians and combatants, civilian sites and military sites, insofar as they inherently can’t do that, the question obviously arises, are they legal under international law?

    So there was a huge Supreme Court I.C.J. deliberation on this question, and their conclusion was that under almost all circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons was illegal under international law for the reasons just stated. However, the court said there’s one area where we can’t decide. And the area where we can’t decide, the court said, was what if the survival of a state was at stake? Namely, what if a country faced the prospect that an attack would come at the price of the disintegration of the state? And the I.C.J. said, well, maybe if a state, its survival was at stake, maybe the use of nuclear weapons might be justified. Now bear in mind, the I.C.J. did not deliberate on the survival of a people. It deliberated on the survival of a state. And so I say, if the International Court of Justice – the highest judicial body in the world – couldn’t decide whether you have the right to use nuclear weapons to defend the survival of your state, then I would say you clearly have the right to use armed force in order to protect the survival of your people. So, by current international law standards, I find it very hard to condemn the Palestinians, whatever they did. I find it very hard.

    When I see the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Ilhan Omars, the Bernie Sanders, when they “condemn” the revolt of the inmates in the concentration camp. “Israel has the right to defend itself when the inmates breach the walls of the camp.” I spit on them. They nauseate me. But unfortunately, you can count on the fingers of one hand – and even less than the fingers in one hand – the number of people who showed any heart, any soul, any compassion for the God-forsaken people of Gaza.”

    It is interesting to note that all these betrayals of the Palestinian cause are taking place at a time when, in the eyes of Western opinion, steeped in centuries of prejudice about the “superiority of the White man” and decades of Hollywood propaganda about the presumed supremacy of American armies and their allies, Gaza is about to be annihilated, its population about to undergo a mass and definitive deportation, and the Palestinian cause is about to breathe its last. We can only imagine the chorus of howls, cries and vociferations that will emanate from the capitals of the “civilized West” on the day when the forces of the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah…) enter the stage for the Great War of the Liberation of Palestine, which will inevitably end with the exodus of 6 million Zionist settlers to Europe and America, on the model of the end of French Algeria. On that day, which is much closer than most people imagine, the deafening silence in the face of the imminent total ethnic cleansing of the more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and the completion of that of the three million Palestinians in the West Bank, will be replaced by a thunder of enraged and impotent recriminations, threats of war and perhaps Armageddon if Israel is not saved. But at the end, when Palestine and its allies are victorious and settlers are forced to leave, all the hate speech about immigrants and the need to “remigrate” them whence they came from will turn into a bitter rivalry to welcome Jewish “refugees” expelled from the former State of Israel, as we saw during the war in Ukraine.

    In a way, this situation is to be welcomed. It’s just as well that the masks are coming off. The Palestinian cause is too sacred for cowards, opportunists and hypocrites to claim to be among its defenders during the struggle, and to pretend to have worked for it, after the destruction of Israel, with their declarations of “support”. It is necessary that impostors be expunged from the ranks of the true defenders of the Palestinian cause, and that only its sincere supporters remain. This is perhaps the last condition for its Liberation.

    The post Gaza: The Masks are off first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cities Like Portland Are Spending Staggering Amounts on Police PR Budgets

    Over the past few years, Portland, Oregon, like several other United States metro areas, has seen a substantial rise in gun violence. Since 2019, statistics show an increase in the homicide rate, non-fatal gun violence crime and other auxiliary metrics used to measure public safety. But as policy makers and advocates debate solutions to this violence, Portland police have scaled up their efforts…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pallywood Tactics: Al-Shifa Hospital and Israel’s Propaganda Effort

    It resembles a chronology of desperation, shifting narratives, and schoolboy howlers. From the outset, the mass lethality of Israeli strikes against Gaza and the collective punishment of its populace needed some justification, however tenuous. If it could be shown, convincingly, that Hamas and its allies had militarised such civilian infrastructure as hospitals, they would become fair game for vengeful air strikes and military assault. Thus, could Israel’s soldiers demonstrate, not merely the animal savagery of Hamas, one indifferent to humanity and suffering, but the virtue of Israel’s own military objectives. The forces of pallid light would again prevail against swarthy evil.

    Interest quickly shifted to Al-Shifa Hospital, where the carnage has been horrific. This was said to be the wicked heart of operations, one depicted with exaggerated relish in a video titled “Home to Hamas’ Headquarters, This is an IDF 3D Diagram of the Shifa Hospital”. In an explanatory note, the Israeli Defence Forces state in the crude production that the hospital “is not only the largest hospital in Gaza but it also acts as the main headquarters for Hamas’ terrorist activity.” It goes on to note that, “Terrorism does not belong in a hospital and the IDF will operate to uncover any terrorist infrastructure.”

    This bit of amateurish theatrics suitably complemented another effort which made its debut on November 11. In its official Arabic account affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israel posted a selfie video (now deleted) starring a Palestinian nurse indignant at Hamas’ commandeering of the Al-Shifa hospital. A close inspection of the production could only engender doubt: a well laundered lab coat, appropriate positioning of implicating logos, crude simulations of background bombing, the unconvincing accent. “The only thing missing was a degree hanging in the background saying Tel Aviv Upstairs Medical College,” a scornful Marc Owen Jones of The Daily Beast wrote.

    Despite these stumbling efforts, support followed from Israel’s staunch backers, the United States. In a press briefing held on November 14, NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, asserted that “we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages.”

    The language used by Kirby, however, did not exactly suggest a thriving command and control centre at work, though he would go so far as to claim that the hospital served as a “command-and-control node”. “They have stored weapons there, and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli operation against that facility.”

    When the IDF eventually made its way into the hospital, the initial evidence was not promising. In videos and photos posted by the Israeli forces none revealed tunnels and evidence of a vast command centre. As Aric Toler of the New York Times reported, a mere 10 guns were found at the first count. “The IDF has claimed that the ‘beating heart’ of Hamas’ operations is beneath Shifa. Presumably they’ll release more photos/videos?” In another post, Toler identifies various “grab bags” with “guns and the body armor scattered around, and a laptop next to CD-Rs.”

    In another round of public relations tripping, two new videos released by both the IDF and the Shin Bet security agency purported to document, as the Times of Israel describes it, a tunnel shaft with “a winding staircase from around three meters deep, continuing down for another seven meters until it reaches part of the tunnel network. The tunnel continues for five meters, before turning to the right and continuing for another 50 meters.” At the end of the tunnel lies an obstructing blast door, equipped with a hole for shooters. “The findings,” an IDF statement claimed with weak conviction, “prove beyond all doubt that buildings in the hospital complex are used as infrastructure for the Hamas terror organization, for terror activity. This is further proof of the cynical use that the Hamas terror organization makes of the residents of the Gaza Strip as a human shield for its murderous terror activities.”

    Despite some strained satisfaction in the statement, the picture Israel offers is gnarled and tattered. The IDF production teams continue to struggle in reviving a cadaverous narrative, using their own soldiers as props (because that’s convincing) to describe their first impressions on seeing “a terrorist tunnel”. Just as its cream-of-the-crop elite failed to get wind of the October 7 attack, suggesting an expertise drugged by hubris, Israel’s information strategy seems increasingly suspect, slippery and ever subject to qualification. Rifles, a truck, and a hostage or two, do not a central military command centre make.

    It is also worth noting that physicians and doctors working at the hospital – the authentic ones, in any case – have also been perplexed by the allegations that Al-Shifa serves as a throbbing command and control hub for Hamas and its combat operations. Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert, who has worked at the facility for 16 years, told Democracy Now! that there was “no evidence at all” that such claims were true. “If it was a military command centre, I would not work there.” At least we can be sure that Gilbert is not a stage extra.

    In this bleak mess, it is worth stressing that even if the hospital proved to be a military facility, humanitarian protections would not mysteriously cease for those patients and staff within it. “Anything that the attacking force can do to allow the humanitarian functions of that hospital to continue,” reasons Adil Haq of Rutgers Law School, “they’re obligated to do, even if there’s some office somewhere in the building where there is a fighter holed up.” But the strategy against Al-Shifa was never humanitarian to begin with, starting with depriving Gaza access to fuel, food and water. The rest is Pallywood.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Solitary Confinement

    At least as one response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, some of what became the Romantic movements in the 19th century turned away from social interaction, especially collective activity, and toward individual isolation. Such a reaction was not peculiar to this period. In fact, withdrawal from social contact was an established niche strategy throughout Latin Christendom. There were two broad views in the Church as to how sin was to be encountered. One was collective labour. The other was solitary penitence.

    Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a process of disengagement. By withdrawing from the noise of society artistic (creative) potential could be enhanced. Contemplation was often focused on nature or introspection. The work produced in the process, whether in literature or visual arts, created an iconography for human isolation and alienation. At the same time, nature served as a source of potential redemption from all those sources of alienation found in society. Nature in various forms also became a repository of the divine. The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich are well-known examples for this process in the visual arts. The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, is certainly exemplary in the literary arts.

    Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1799 and finished it in 1805, although he made several revisions in the course of his life. The poem can be understood as a literary investigation into the forces and events that shaped the personality of the author and his poetical labour. In Book Four he wrote:

    When from our better selves we have too long
    Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
    Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
    How gracious, how benign, is Solitude-
    How potent a mere image of her sway!
    Most potent when impressed upon the mind
    With an appropriate human centre: hermit,
    Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
    Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
    Is treading, where no other face is seen)
    Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
    Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
    Or as the soul of that great Power is met
    Sometimes embodied on a public road,
    When, for the night deserted, it assumes
    A character of quiet more profound
    Than pathless wastes.    [1]

    Wordsworth began as a great supporter of the French Revolution and ended greatly disappointed by it. The poem examines the path that transformed him into a revolutionary and led him away from revolution in the end. The revolution had promised to reorganise society along principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wordsworth and others felt it had failed. The dictatorship and imperial ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte were proof that it was impossible to create a society based on New Testament equality by removing the divinely ordained monarchy.

    It is important to add here that these judgements were based on reports scarcely more circumspect than found in today’s mass media. Wordsworth would not have been able to see the results of the Jacobin societies in the provinces or to measure the violence with which the changes introduced were opposed by the counter-revolution with its foreign supporters. The rejection of the French Revolution by much of the English intellectual caste and England’s emergent cultural power in the 19th century constitute a bias which still overshadows the appreciation of the 1789 revolution beyond the English-speaking world. Even today very little attention is given to the counter-revolution and foreign intervention. Almost all school and university texts focus on the Jacobins and the so-called Terror, although the “White Terror” killed substantially more people.

    At the same time the foundation of what we once recognized as modern science, evolving as it did from the same cultural context, emerged as the product of solitary investigation. In fact by the end of the 19th century the image of the scientist and the artist merged as solitary investigators, discoverers and innovators were ranked among the upper strata of Western society and the artistic creator/ scientific genius became clichés.

    The solitude, whether in science or the arts, was in many ways a recovery of the penitentiary tradition in the Latin Church. In order to discover god and attain grace it was necessary to exercise as close to purity as possible. If artistic or scientific truth approached that of the divine or substituted for it, then it was also to be obtained by the investigator isolated from sources of corruption thus able to perceive pure data. The scientist sought this isolation in research performed in private laboratories that were sometimes associated with university faculties. The concept of academic freedom—a secularization of monastic privileges—was interpreted to assure the necessary solitude for unbiased research and pursuit of truth. Thus although scientific research is inevitably a collective activity, the fiction of solitary research was created by formally isolating the university from daily political and commercial interests.

    The artist sought places in the countryside or abandoned his native land for a self-imposed exile or quest. George Gordon Byron’s death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 is only the most notorious.

    By the end of the 19th century the literary-artistic and scientific-scholarly caste was endowed with its own ethic and processes for transforming the pure into the true. This ideal was based on a critique of society’s corruption and the striving to transcend it. The bearer of this ideal was to become the autonomous self, solitude incarnate.

    Following the defeat of Napoleon the Congress of Vienna not only restored the monarchical system, if somewhat “embourgeoised”, it reinstalled the deification of truth and knowledge as something otherworldly in origin. As Nietzsche observed at the end of the century, god was restored in all but name, while the name of “god” became an empty category, a mere symbol for the will to power.

    The emergence of the autonomous Self, whose access to identity and truth derived from exercises in solitude, derived from two traditions. One, already mentioned, was the penitentiary. The individual withdraws from society as a source of sin and by contemplation, absorption and submission to God attains a higher degree of grace and eventually redemption from the sins with which society has soiled him.

    The other tradition is that of natural divinity. The individual withdraws in order to contemplate and then engage the creative forces of nature. By comprehending them the artist becomes an agent of creation. Like nature he becomes capable of producing exemplifications of truth. The truth-value of these exemplifications is claimed by virtue of the method applied to create them. This is sometimes called “scientific method” or “artistic creativity”. Until recently it has been assumed that integrity of the respective methods was essential to the value of the product.

    The Romantics found that solitude created the conditions by which they could contemplate the problems with which they had been confronted in society. The psychic isolation of the countryside or a foreign environment permitted them to focus on what remained in them when they were no longer influenced by daily social interaction. The longer the isolation continued the more they were exposed to themselves. In some cases this resulted in a “stripping” of their personalities down to the basics, e.g. the interaction of the human with nature unmitigated by social instructions. At some point the artist or scholar would arrive at an essence from which his personality could be redesigned, primarily through the creative or investigative work. The principle can be illustrated simply enough. If anyone has been left alone with a problem long enough, especially one which is highly conventionalized but for which there is no external solution available, there is at least a tendency for the person to use whatever means are at his disposal to solve the problem—even if they are unconventional. If a person is left in a group with the same problem and attempts to use that unconventional method, he will likely feel enormous pressure to abandon it in favour of the approach used by everyone else in the group.

    One of the additional products of this solitude, voluntary psychic isolation, is to develop the strength of persona necessary to reproduce the solution created even under social pressure. Thus solitude is not only a strategy for stripping but for clothing the Self. There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to justify statements like “he is too headstrong because he has been working alone too long.” One of the Romantic contributions to cultural transformation has been the adaptation of solitude to the modern scientific construction of the Self.

    The Self as envisioned by the Romantics was a liberated personality, freed from the oppressive social structures and thus able to act as an agent of social transformation. However another Self was developed in response to the revolutionary impulses.

    In 2002, British filmmaker Adam Curtis produced a television documentary, roughly based on a book by Stuart Ewen, called The Century of the Self. [2] Curtis’ central thesis is that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, initiated and for a while led a movement that would turn the concept of the Self into the central instrument of social control in the West. In his study of public relations, the euphemism for propaganda Bernays introduced after World War I, Ewen explains how the culture of the Self was appropriated and exploited by corporate and political communications actors (Business and Government) to produce a society of individuals who believe themselves to be autonomous but are in fact manipulated in their every thought and move. Bernays drew on his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to show that control could be exercised over people by speaking to what they “really” thought and felt as opposed to what they actually said.

    Instead of individuals—as the Romantics imagined—creating an authentic Self and entering society to act on the basis of this authenticity, Bernays and his successors devised methods they believed would suggest to the masses of isolated individuals ways they could reconstruct themselves in the interests of those who rule society. This presumed that one could create individuals in isolation that could be sufficiently alienated to engage in searching strategies. The aim was to exploit industrial and especially post-war psychic distress among masses of people whose lives had been irreversibly affected by the world war. These people would be encouraged in their sense of alienation. That alienation would be labelled individualism. The emotional duress would be sustained by graduated fear. This fear was sublimated in the reconstitution of groups of alienated individuals.

    Curtis’s 4-episode film continues with a focus on commercial activity. Edward Bernays argued if he was able to produce advertising that would persuade people to go to war and fight he ought to be able to do this to sell products. After World War I ended the US was faced with massive overproduction. There were just too many goods that had been produced just to be wasted in war and now the plant lay idle and the goods collected dust in warehouses. Modern advertising was initiated to move those goods and restore the enormous profitability of wartime industrial manufacturing. He shows that creating desires and fears were complementary aims. On one hand the individual has to be freed from inhibitions like thrift, morality, social responsibility, or just a realistic assessment of his financial condition. The objective impositions of society are to be stripped from him so that he can feel his true nature as a desiring subject. Then he is intensively exposed to the prefabricated objects he ought to desire. This process is stimulated by fear, either the inability to satisfy those desires or the injection of ever more desires for which he has not yet the means of satisfaction. Dissatisfaction and fear are the constant state in which the individual is to be confined. Society does not offer him comfort, whether as routine or sustenance. Instead it exposes him to continuous competition for the satisfaction of the desires cultivated in him during his enforced isolation. Society becomes a machine for enforcing the private desires and the cycles of satisfaction – dissatisfaction, safety – fear that are translated into spending and consumption.

    This process of alienation could not have become industrialized without political force. At the same time as individualism was being encouraged, Business and the State were waging vicious war against any genuinely autonomous collectivities like labour unions and popular movements, especially communism in the industrialized world and anti-colonialism/ nationalism among the peoples subjugated by colonial and imperial rule. Although Business was certainly enamoured with Bernays’ approach to mass marketing of products and services, there was also great demand for technologies of the “Self” by state actors.

    The State’s interest in the Self, as opposed to the citizen, has not ceased. Curtis shows how the CIA and other covert agencies of the State promoted large-scale experimentation with the technology for creating or modifying the “Self”. One of the most notorious was the work of Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. There experiments were performed on people who were subjected to pharmaceutical treatment in combination with electro-shocks and various degrees of sensory deprivation. The principle driving this work was that humans could have their consciousness erased and be “reprogrammed” on demand.

    Although the Allan Memorial was eventually closed and Dr Cameron’s work denounced, there is no evidence that this kind of involuntary psychic isolation for political and social engineering goals has discontinued. The rudimentary descriptions available of programs run by the CIA and US military at the Guantanamo Detention Center, US Naval Base Guantanamo Cuba since the beginning of the century bear similarities to those run by Dr Cameron so great that they ought to be equally disturbing. Yet despite numerous pledges this center remains in operation with some 700 persons incarcerated at last count.[3]

    The mass incarceration, appropriately denoted with prison jargon as “lockdowns”, organized and enforced to varying degrees from March 2020 to the end of 2021 has been excused by medical grounds discredited almost as soon as the public health authorities proposed them. Studies are only beginning to emerge that raise the question: what were the real reasons for these forced isolations, in innumerable cases, solitude and involuntary psychic isolation.

    One of Dr Cameron’s experiments was to use covert media, e.g. hidden audio recordings, to introduce thoughts and verbalization to the brain of his presumably erased subject. The recordings would be played during the sleep sessions.

    When the first reports and complaints about torture in Guantanamo Detention Center became public there was frequent mention of forced exposure to loud music and audio-visual material the prisoner would presumably find offensive. Sensory deprivation was combined with saturation exposure to foreign stimuli.

    During the so-called “lockdowns” I was particularly struck by the closures and domestic incarceration in Portugal. In 2005, I was in Fatima for the first time. My friend and I were amazed at the people assembling there. Cripples of all sorts, people visibly disfigured or disabled by every conceivable illness made their way to the sanctuary. They were on their way to ask for the blessing and healing power of the Holy Virgin, Mother of God. Who knows if any of them had infectious illnesses? The power of the Almighty was present and able to heal. Yet during the mass incarceration the Shrine of Fatima was closed. Had I still been a practicing member of the Latin Church I would have been in uproar. How could the State presume to be more powerful than Our Lord and the Mother of God? How could anyone presume to keep me from the omnipotent divine?

    To end, again with Wordsworth:

    Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
    And all will be complete, thy race be run,
    Thy monument of glory will be raised!
    Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
    This age fall back to old idolatry,
    Though men return to servitude as fast
    As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
    By nations sink together, we shall still
    Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know,
    Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
    Faithful alike in forwarding a day

    Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
    (Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
    Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
    Prophets of Nature, we to them speak
    A lasting inspiration, sanctified
    By reason, blessed by faith: what we have loved,
    Others will love, and we will teach them how;
    Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
    A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
    On which he dwells, above this frame of things
    (Which, mid all revolution in the hopes
    And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
    In beauty exalted, as it is itself
    Of quality and fabric more divine.
    (“The Prelude,” Book fourteen, 430-454)

    ENDNOTES

    [1] William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” cited from The Prelude and other Poems, Alma Classics (2019)

    [2] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York, 1996; Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, originally released on BBC Two in 2002. Available on YouTube.

    [3] From the time the US Government announced its program of “extraordinary renditions” and incarceration of “terrorists” at its illegally occupied south-eastern Cuba naval station, Guantanamo Bay aka as GITMO, there have been estimates and official claims ranging between 1,500 and 20 over the past two decades. Thus far there is no way to be certain exactly how many prisoners were or are held at this high security naval base. Therefore 700 is considered a conservative number, even if it may exceed current official claims.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israeli War Crimes and Propaganda Follow US Blueprint


    Girl holds improvised white flag, to tell Israel to respect Geneva Conventions and spare her fleeing family.
    Photo credit: Yasser Qudih

    We have both been reporting on and protesting against U.S. war crimes for many years, and against identical crimes committed by U.S. allies and proxies like Israel and Saudi Arabia: illegal uses of military force to try to remove enemy governments or “regimes”; hostile military occupations; disproportionate military violence justified by claims of “terrorism”; the bombing and killing of civilians; and the mass destruction of whole cities.

    Most Americans share a general aversion to war, but tend to accept this militarized foreign policy because we are tragically susceptible to propaganda, the machinery of public manipulation that works hand in hand with the machinery of killing to justify otherwise unthinkable horrors.

    This process of “manufacturing consent” works in a number of ways. One of the most effective forms of propaganda is silence, simply not telling us, and certainly not showing us, what war is really doing to the people whose homes and communities have been turned into America’s latest battlefield.

    The most devastating campaign the U.S. military has waged in recent years dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, and other areas occupied by ISIS or Da’esh. An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul, while Raqqa was even more totally destroyed.

    The shelling of Raqqa was the heaviest U.S. artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War, yet it was barely reported in the U.S. corporate media. A recent New York Times article about the traumatic brain injuries and PTSD suffered by U.S. artillerymen operating 155 mm howitzers, which each fired up to 10,000 shells into Raqqa, was appropriately titled A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence from the Pentagon.

    Shrouding such mass death and destruction in secrecy is a remarkable achievement. When British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, in the midst of the Iraq War, he titled his Nobel speech “Art, Truth and Politics,” and used it to shine a light on this diabolical aspect of U.S. war-making.

    After talking about the hundreds of thousands of killings in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua, Pinter asked:  “Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy,”
    “But you wouldn’t know it,” he went on.”It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
    But the wars and the killing go on, day after day, year after year, out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. Did you know that the United States and its allies have dropped more than 350,000 bombs and missiles on 9 countries since 2001 (including 14,000 in the current war on Gaza)? That’s an average of 44 airstrikes per day, day in, day out, for 22 years.

    Israel, in its present war on Gaza, with children making up more than 40% of the more than 11,000 people killed to date, would surely like to mimic the extraordinary U.S. ability to hide its brutality. But despite Israel’s efforts to impose a media blackout, the massacre is taking place in a small, enclosed, densely-populated urban area, often called an open-air prison, where the world can see a great deal more than usual of how it impacts real people.

    Israel has killed a record number of journalists in Gaza, and this appears to be a deliberate strategy, as when U.S. forces targeted journalists in Iraq. But we are still seeing horrifying video and photos of daily new atrocities: dead and wounded children; hospitals struggling to treat the injured; and desperate people fleeing from one place to another through the rubble of their destroyed homes.

    Another reason this war is not so well hidden is because Israel is waging it, not the United States. The U.S. is supplying most of the weapons, has sent aircraft carriers to the region, and dispatched U.S. Marine General James Glynn to provide tactical advice based on his experience conducting similar massacres in Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq. But Israeli leaders seem to have overestimated the extent to which the U.S. information warfare machine would shield them from public scrutiny and political accountability.

    Unlike in Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa, people all over the world are seeing video of the unfolding catastrophe on their computers, phones and TVs. Netanyahu, Biden and the corrupt “defense analysts” on cable TV are no longer the ones creating the narrative, as they try to tack self-serving narratives onto the horrifying reality we can all see for ourselves.

    With the reality of war and genocide staring the world in the face, people everywhere are challenging the impunity with which Israel is systematically violating international humanitarian law.

    Michael Crowley and Edward Wong have reported in the New York Times that Israeli officials are defending their actions in Gaza by pointing to U.S. war crimes, insisting that they are simply interpreting the laws of war the same way that the United States has interpreted them in Iraq and other U.S. war zones. They compare Gaza to Fallujah, Mosul and even Hiroshima.

    But copying U.S. war crimes is precisely what makes Israel’s actions illegal. And it is the world’s failure to hold the United States accountable that has emboldened Israel to believe it too can kill with impunity.

    The United States systematically violates the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force, manufacturing political justifications to suit each case and using its Security Council veto to evade international accountability. Its military lawyers employ unique, exceptional interpretations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, under which the universal protections the Convention guarantees to civilians are treated as secondary to U.S. military objectives.

    The United States fiercely resists the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), to ensure that its exceptional interpretations of international law are never subjected to impartial judicial scrutiny.

    When the United States did allow the ICJ to rule on its war against Nicaragua in 1986, the ICJ ruled that its deployment of the “Contras” to invade and attack Nicaragua and its mining of Nicaragua’s ports were acts of aggression in violation of international law, and ordered the United States to pay war reparations to Nicaragua. When the United States declared that it would no longer recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ and failed to pay up, Nicaragua asked the UN Security Council to enforce the reparations, but the U.S. vetoed the resolution.

    Atrocities like Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the bombing of German and Japanese cities to “unhouse” the civilian population, as Winston Churchill called it, together with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi holocaust, led to the adoption of the new Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, to protect civilians in war zones and under military occupation.

    On the 50th anniversary of the Convention in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is responsible for monitoring international compliance with the Geneva Conventions, conducted a survey to see how well people in different countries understood the protections the Convention provides.

    They surveyed people in twelve countries that had been victims of war, in four countries (France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.) that are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and in Switzerland where the ICRC is based. The ICRC published the results of the survey in 2000, in a report titled, People on War – Civilians in the Line of Fire.

    The survey asked people to choose between a correct understanding of the Convention’s civilian protections and a watered-down interpretation of them that closely resembles that of U.S. and Israeli military lawyers.

    The correct understanding was defined by a statement that combatants “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone.” The weaker, incorrect statement was that “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible” as they conduct military operations.

    Between 72% and 77% of the people in the other UNSC countries and Switzerland agreed with the correct statement, but the United States was an outlier, with only 52% agreeing. In fact 42% of Americans agreed with the weaker statement, twice as many as in the other countries. There were similar disparities between the United States and the others on questions about torture and the treatment of prisoners of war.

    In U.S.-occupied Iraq, the United States’ exceptionally weak interpretations of the Geneva Conventions led to endless disputes with the ICRC and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), which issued damning quarterly human rights reports. UNAMI consistently maintained that U.S. airstrikes in densely populated civilian areas were violations of international law.

    For instance, its human rights report for the 2nd quarter of 2007 documented UNAMI’s investigations of 15 incidents in which U.S. occupation forces killed 103 Iraqi civilians, including 27 killed in airstrikes in Khalidiya, near Ramadi, on April 3rd, and 7 children killed in a helicopter attack on an elementary school in Diyala province on May 8.

    UNAMI demanded that “all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF (Multi-National Force) forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”

    A footnote explained, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”

    UNAMI also rejected U.S. claims that its widespread killing of civilians was the result of the Iraqi Resistance using civilians as “human shields,” another U.S. propaganda trope that Israel is mimicking today. Israeli accusations of human shielding are even more absurd in the densely populated, confined space of Gaza, where the whole world can see that it is Israel that is placing civilians in the line of fire as they desperately seek safety from Israeli bombardment.

    Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are echoing around the world: through the halls of the United Nations; from the governments of traditional U.S. allies like France, Spain and Norway; from a newly united front of previously divided Middle Eastern leaders; and in the streets of London and Washington. The world is withdrawing its consent for a genocidal “two-state solution” in which Israel and the United States are the only two states that can settle the fate of Palestine.

    If U.S. and Israeli leaders are hoping that they can squeak through this crisis, and that the public’s habitually short attention span will wash away the world’s horror at the crimes we are all witnessing, that may be yet another serious misjudgment. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1950 in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism.

    We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Foreign Policy Establishment Is Instrumentalizing Islamophobia, Report Shows

    An incisive new report released by researchers affiliated with Rutgers University lays out in detail the many ways in which the U.S. political establishment has instrumentalized anti-Muslim bigotry and disingenuously redefined the idea of “antisemitism” in order to defuse criticisms of the Israeli government and justify dehumanizing policies toward Palestinians. Titled “Presumptively Antisemitic…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Genocide is Israel’s Strategy

    Israel is losing the battle. They cannot afford to remain fully mobilized this long, even with unlimited US financial support. It is estimated that despite limited commercial flights, more than a quarter million Israelis have left the country. This is also the number that have evacuated settlements in both the south, in a large radius around Gaza, and in a wide ribbon along the northern border with Lebanon.

    Israel is not used to this, and despite its sophisticated military equipment, it depends upon concluding its combat quickly and overwhelmingly. The problem is that it can’t. Hamas is too well dug in, and Hezbollah is too strong. Both have their own sophisticated equipment, despite an absence of navy and air force. Their strategy has been to make air and naval forces largely useless against them by means of a vast and well equipped underground network of reinforced, sealed and well defended tunnels. Their strategy is attrition: to draw out the conflict longer than Israelis are willing or able to endure.

    It appears to be effective. Israelis are taking casualties at a rate to which they are not accustomed. This is making them slower and more cautious, except in the air, and it is disrupting civilian life to an unprecedented extent. The resistance forces of the Palestinians and their allies have planned for a confrontation of unlimited duration, while Israel plans only short, massive attacks designed for a quick, decisive victory, which in this case is illusive.

    This is the main reason they have chosen genocide as a tactic. They reason that massive, horrible deaths of vulnerable civil Palestinians, mainly women and children, will force Hamas, Hezbollah and their allies to take risks and expose themselves. But genocide is not working. And when it doesn’t, Israel’s answer is to use more genocide.

    Gaza is largely without food, medicine, electricity, fuel or potable water. Israel is trying to force a panicking population to leave or die. If they leave, it is to the Sinai, never to return to their own country. That suits Israel, but not Egypt, which has arrayed a solid row of tanks and other equipment along the border to prevent being forced to admit the Palestinian population.

    This is why Israel is resorting to bombing hospitals, schools, mosques and even the few churches of the tiny Christian community that opened their doors to their Muslim brothers and sisters seeking refuge. The Israeli strategy seems to be that when pictures of gaunt living skeletons of children and mounds of corpses begin to be estimated in the hundreds of thousands, or more, the fighters will become desperate and/or the international community will compel Egypt to open its doors.

    The strategy could backfire. The international community could become so horrified that no amount of hasbara [friendly media] will cover such epic crimes. Instead, their staunchest allies may be forced to abandon them, and other powers may enter the fray on the side of the Palestinians. At that point, the consequences become unpredictable. Demonstrations by the millions are already beginning to occur around the globe. At least one prominent voice in Israel has suggested the nuclear option.

    The call for a ceasefire is becoming louder, but Israel sees that as a Palestinian win, and the Palestinian factions have little stomach for returning to the status quo ante, which means little more than confinement to destitute concentration camps or “reservations”. Caring people from around the globe are beginning to mobilize near the conflict zone, to try to, at minimum, allow the resumption of humanitarian aid, fuel, electricity and water to the besieged, starving, sick, parched and dying people of Gaza.

    This is just the beginning. Things could change very quickly, for good or bad.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel’s Lies and Deception

    We are won over by “words that work” from an Israeli training manual.

    Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirt practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.

    It’s Hebrew for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a “brand image” completely at odds with the ugly truth.

    Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools used for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective, up to a point. The reason why it will ultimately fail is that it has very poor material to work with. You cannot behave like psychopaths and disguise it forever. You cannot trample other peoples’ rights and freedoms, and destroy their property, and expect to be loved. You cannot keep your jackboot on your neighbour’s neck for 75 years and expect to call yourself civilised and in tune with Western values. You cannot steal his lands, water and livelihood at gunpoint and claim the moral high ground.

    And you certainly cannot create a wholesome brand image from bullshit.

    I wrote this 10 years ago, and nothing has changed, only got worse.

    Israel’s book of lies

    The great mystery is why Western politicians and media outlets, after 75 years of Israel’s existence, are still so ignorant about what’s been happening and the countless crimes committed in pursuit of Zionist ambitions.

    Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of hasbara – the sugarcoating techniques and downright lying to persuade the gullible to swallow their poison.

    Notice how everything Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labelled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.

    The 116-page instruction manual, called the 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which says it is “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It was written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.

    TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West. And because God gave them the keys to the Holy Land, their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.

    I suspect Messrs Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, Keir Starmer and the rest of Israel’s stooges in Westminster carry this training manual in their pocket, which accounts for the claptrap they constantly spout and their inexplicable infatuation with the rogue state.

    The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivelers use to try to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and its contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.

    They tell us, for example, how many rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel but never how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited kind) Israel’s US-taxpayer-funded F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats pour into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza.

    And they are careful not to mention, for example, that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British Mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In July 1948 Israeli terrorists seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

    Out of a population of 19,000, only 1,052 were allowed to stay. Others who survived the killing spree were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way. Israel has no right to Lydda at all – they stole it in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages.

    “Captain of Spin” returns

    I’m horrified to see Mark Regev making a comeback to our screens and being interviewed by British media. Regev (real name Freiberg) is an ace propagandist, master of disinformation, whitewasher extraordinaire and personal adviser and spokesman for the apartheid regime’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

    While he was ambassador to the UK one of his senior political officers, Shai Masot, plotted with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures, including Sir Alan Duncan at the Foreign Office. Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, regrettably, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government afterwards.

    It should have resulted in Regev being kicked out, but he wasn’t.

    Regev is quoted several times in the Global Language Dictionary in its attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and to make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink all us simple-minded Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.

    Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “Words that work” – that is to say, carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. A statement at the very beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

    Here’s an example:

    Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process.

    Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.

    Actually, Israel made no sacrifices at all – Gaza wasn’t theirs to keep and staying was unsustainable. Although they removed their settlers and troops, they continued to occupy Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters and control all entrances and exits, thus keeping the population bottled up and provoking acts of resistance that give Israel a bogus excuse to turn Gaza into a prison.

    International law regards Israel as still the occupier.

    The manual also serves as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks recruited to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet. It uses some of Regev’s words to provide disinformation essential to the hasbara programme. We’re told, for example, that the most effective way to build support for Israel is to talk about “working toward a lasting peace” that “respects the rights of everyone in the region”.

    Here are a few more:

    We welcome and we support international efforts to help the Palestinians. So, once again, the Palestinian people are not our enemy. On the contrary, we want peace with the Palestinians.

    We’re interested in a historical reconciliation. Enough violence. Enough war. And we support international efforts to help the Palestinians both on the humanitarian level and to build a more successful democratic society. That’s in everyone’s interest.

    The central lie, of course, is that Israel wants peace. It doesn’t. It never has. Peace simply does not suit Israel’s purpose, which is endless expansion and control. That is why Israel has never declared its borders, maintains its brutal military occupation and continues its programme of illegal squats, or so-called “settlements”, deep inside Palestinian territory, intending to create sufficient “facts on the ground” to ensure permanent occupation and annexation.

    Q: Why did Israel use disproportionate force in Gaza?

    A: The devastation in Gaza is heartbreaking. So much suffering that was so unnecessary. And none of it had to happen.

    Israel left Gaza – uprooting 9,000 Israeli families, and turned it over, peacefully, to the Palestinians. They had every opportunity to succeed: support from the international community, financial aid from across the globe, and the aspirations of the people.

    Israel gave up Gaza with every hope that this was the first step towards peace with the Palestinians, and all they got was rockets in return. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands of rockets. Not monthly. Not weekly. Literally daily. Even since the fighting in Gaza stopped, more than 160 rockets been fired from Gaza towards Israel since Israel stopped fighting.

    What would you have done – or wanted your government to do – if you and your family were under rocket attack every day? When will the terrorists in Gaza stop shooting rockets at Israeli civilians?

    You and I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to live on land we’d stolen from the Palestinians at gunpoint.

    It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community that

    If Hamas reforms itself…

    If Hamas recognises my country’s right to live in freedom…

    If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…

    If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.

    Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

    Iran must be demonised too, so Regev’s twisted wisdom is used again:

    Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason.

    Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles…. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.

    But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? And why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

    As for “wiping Israel off the map”, accurate translations of that remark by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (The Guardian), or “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history” (Middle East Media Research Institute). Ahmadinejad was actually repeating a statement once made by Ayatollah Khomeini.

    And one more:

    When asked a direct question, you don’t have to answer it directly. You are in control of what you say and how you say it. Remember, your goal in doing interviews is not only to answer questions—it is to bring persuadable members of the audience to Israel’s side in the conflict. Start by acknowledging their question and agreeing that both sides – Israelis and Palestinians – deserve a better future. Remind your audience that Israel wants peace. Then focus on shared values. Once you have done this you will have built enough support for you to say what Israel really wants: for the Palestinians to end the violence and the culture of hate so that fences and checkpoints are no longer needed and both sides can live in peace. And for Iran for Iran-backed terrorists in Gaza to stop shooting rockets into Israel so that both sides can have a better future.

    A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say “Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!

    Why is all this elaborate lying and misquoting necessary? It’s the good old Mossad motto “By deception we shall do war”, ingrained in the Israeli mindset.

    And I’m even more horrified to have just seen Trevor Phillips giving Tzipi Livni a platform. This vile woman, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought death and destruction to Gaza’s civilians during the blitzkrieg known as Operation Cast Lead. Showing no remorse, and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of it. Speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv’s Institute for Security Studies, she said: “I would today take the same decisions.”

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel’s Lies and Deception

    We are won over by “words that work” from an Israeli training manual.

    Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirt practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.

    It’s Hebrew for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a “brand image” completely at odds with the ugly truth.

    Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools used for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective, up to a point. The reason why it will ultimately fail is that it has very poor material to work with. You cannot behave like psychopaths and disguise it forever. You cannot trample other peoples’ rights and freedoms, and destroy their property, and expect to be loved. You cannot keep your jackboot on your neighbour’s neck for 75 years and expect to call yourself civilised and in tune with Western values. You cannot steal his lands, water and livelihood at gunpoint and claim the moral high ground.

    And you certainly cannot create a wholesome brand image from bullshit.

    I wrote this 10 years ago, and nothing has changed, only got worse.

    Israel’s book of lies

    The great mystery is why Western politicians and media outlets, after 75 years of Israel’s existence, are still so ignorant about what’s been happening and the countless crimes committed in pursuit of Zionist ambitions.

    Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of hasbara – the sugarcoating techniques and downright lying to persuade the gullible to swallow their poison.

    Notice how everything Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labelled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.

    The 116-page instruction manual, called the 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which says it is “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It was written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.

    TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West. And because God gave them the keys to the Holy Land, their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.

    I suspect Messrs Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, Keir Starmer and the rest of Israel’s stooges in Westminster carry this training manual in their pocket, which accounts for the claptrap they constantly spout and their inexplicable infatuation with the rogue state.

    The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivelers use to try to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and its contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.

    They tell us, for example, how many rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel but never how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited kind) Israel’s US-taxpayer-funded F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats pour into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza.

    And they are careful not to mention, for example, that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British Mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In July 1948 Israeli terrorists seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

    Out of a population of 19,000, only 1,052 were allowed to stay. Others who survived the killing spree were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way. Israel has no right to Lydda at all – they stole it in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages.

    “Captain of Spin” returns

    I’m horrified to see Mark Regev making a comeback to our screens and being interviewed by British media. Regev (real name Freiberg) is an ace propagandist, master of disinformation, whitewasher extraordinaire and personal adviser and spokesman for the apartheid regime’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

    While he was ambassador to the UK one of his senior political officers, Shai Masot, plotted with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures, including Sir Alan Duncan at the Foreign Office. Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, regrettably, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government afterwards.

    It should have resulted in Regev being kicked out, but he wasn’t.

    Regev is quoted several times in the Global Language Dictionary in its attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and to make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink all us simple-minded Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.

    Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “Words that work” – that is to say, carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. A statement at the very beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

    Here’s an example:

    Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process.

    Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.

    Actually, Israel made no sacrifices at all – Gaza wasn’t theirs to keep and staying was unsustainable. Although they removed their settlers and troops, they continued to occupy Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters and control all entrances and exits, thus keeping the population bottled up and provoking acts of resistance that give Israel a bogus excuse to turn Gaza into a prison.

    International law regards Israel as still the occupier.

    The manual also serves as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks recruited to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet. It uses some of Regev’s words to provide disinformation essential to the hasbara programme. We’re told, for example, that the most effective way to build support for Israel is to talk about “working toward a lasting peace” that “respects the rights of everyone in the region”.

    Here are a few more:

    We welcome and we support international efforts to help the Palestinians. So, once again, the Palestinian people are not our enemy. On the contrary, we want peace with the Palestinians.

    We’re interested in a historical reconciliation. Enough violence. Enough war. And we support international efforts to help the Palestinians both on the humanitarian level and to build a more successful democratic society. That’s in everyone’s interest.

    The central lie, of course, is that Israel wants peace. It doesn’t. It never has. Peace simply does not suit Israel’s purpose, which is endless expansion and control. That is why Israel has never declared its borders, maintains its brutal military occupation and continues its programme of illegal squats, or so-called “settlements”, deep inside Palestinian territory, intending to create sufficient “facts on the ground” to ensure permanent occupation and annexation.

    Q: Why did Israel use disproportionate force in Gaza?

    A: The devastation in Gaza is heartbreaking. So much suffering that was so unnecessary. And none of it had to happen.

    Israel left Gaza – uprooting 9,000 Israeli families, and turned it over, peacefully, to the Palestinians. They had every opportunity to succeed: support from the international community, financial aid from across the globe, and the aspirations of the people.

    Israel gave up Gaza with every hope that this was the first step towards peace with the Palestinians, and all they got was rockets in return. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands of rockets. Not monthly. Not weekly. Literally daily. Even since the fighting in Gaza stopped, more than 160 rockets been fired from Gaza towards Israel since Israel stopped fighting.

    What would you have done – or wanted your government to do – if you and your family were under rocket attack every day? When will the terrorists in Gaza stop shooting rockets at Israeli civilians?

    You and I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to live on land we’d stolen from the Palestinians at gunpoint.

    It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community that

    If Hamas reforms itself…

    If Hamas recognises my country’s right to live in freedom…

    If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…

    If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.

    Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

    Iran must be demonised too, so Regev’s twisted wisdom is used again:

    Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason.

    Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles…. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.

    But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? And why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

    As for “wiping Israel off the map”, accurate translations of that remark by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (The Guardian), or “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history” (Middle East Media Research Institute). Ahmadinejad was actually repeating a statement once made by Ayatollah Khomeini.

    And one more:

    When asked a direct question, you don’t have to answer it directly. You are in control of what you say and how you say it. Remember, your goal in doing interviews is not only to answer questions—it is to bring persuadable members of the audience to Israel’s side in the conflict. Start by acknowledging their question and agreeing that both sides – Israelis and Palestinians – deserve a better future. Remind your audience that Israel wants peace. Then focus on shared values. Once you have done this you will have built enough support for you to say what Israel really wants: for the Palestinians to end the violence and the culture of hate so that fences and checkpoints are no longer needed and both sides can live in peace. And for Iran for Iran-backed terrorists in Gaza to stop shooting rockets into Israel so that both sides can have a better future.

    A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say “Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!

    Why is all this elaborate lying and misquoting necessary? It’s the good old Mossad motto “By deception we shall do war”, ingrained in the Israeli mindset.

    And I’m even more horrified to have just seen Trevor Phillips giving Tzipi Livni a platform. This vile woman, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought death and destruction to Gaza’s civilians during the blitzkrieg known as Operation Cast Lead. Showing no remorse, and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of it. Speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv’s Institute for Security Studies, she said: “I would today take the same decisions.”

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Oh, Wow, It’s Raining JDAMs and White Phosphorus Again

    I’ve been thinking for quite awhile how the most depraved position of the Israeli government becomes the baseline view here in the United States, particularly in politics and media. It makes sense that the genocidal, racist, colonial project of Israel would find admiration in the ruling class of a nation founded on indigenous genocide and built by black slavery.

    Here in the United States of Israel media, Hamas commits “massacres” but the Israeli government never “massacres” anyone – they do “ground operations.” (The latter typically kills 50-100-1,000 times more civilians than do the Hamas “massacres.” See Wikipedia for “Operation Cast Lead” and “Operation Protective Edge.”) Israeli Jews are “killed” (mostly occupation soldiers) but Palestinians “die” from unknown causes and are kept from food, water, medical supplies, building materials, electricity and the internet by mysterious forces of nature – genocide as a weather event. Oh, wow, it’s raining JDAMs and white phosphorus again.

    Strangely, even though Israel has killed over 10,000 Palestinians in three weeks in real life, it never actually killed any Palestinians in mainstream media headlines. Nicholas Maduro and Daniel Ortega are often referred to as “Hitlers” but the Israeli government just murdered over 4,000 Palestinian children in three weeks but this was neither a massacre nor Hitler-like to the US Congress or the New York Times. There are worthy and unworthy victims as Chomsky said.

    The US is a stinking trash heap of lies. Its media act as lawyers to frantically justify every Israeli atrocity while its politicians compete to see who is the most bloodthirsty toward Arabs and Persians. When the US empire finally implodes there will be Nuremberg-like trials for many commentators and “reporters” who are nothing but pint-sized Julius Streichers and Eichmanns promoting endless wars, justifying atrocities and vilifying innocents to be exterminated. Every article and news report takes for granted that no number of Palestinian lives have as much value as one Jewish Israeli life.

    The racist war criminal Joe Biden says the Gaza Health Authority is lying about how many people Israel is killing even though the world sees on Twitter entire city blocks being flattened, mosques, churches, hospitals, bakeries and UN facilities obliterated, individual homes in northern Gaza already being bulldozed by Zionist soldiers for the upcoming land theft and ethnic cleansing, the second Nakba, 35 Palestinian journalists killed and – not the bare-faced lies of Zionists about beheaded Jewish babies – but real video of Palestinian children with their heads blown off from US-supplied bombs dropped by Israelis. Biden kills innocents then he slanders them. Psychopathic empire filth like Biden, Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan won’t be traveling to many countries because there will be arrest warrants for crimes against humanity.

    One of these days millions of Americans are going to get tired of living in Israel’s world, the world of censorship where we can’t criticize a foreign country or are penalized for supporting a peaceful, 1st Amendment-covered boycott movement (BDS), where US police forces are trained by Israelis in the latest fascistic techniques, where college professors are drummed out of teaching or denied tenure because they dared to note Israel’s inhumanity and crimes.

    Americans are going to get tired of all the Orwellian efforts to protect and promote a goddamned racist genocidal enterprise – charitably called the last apartheid state in the world – normalizing something that’s always been completely abnormal, a state that can’t exist without constant infusions of blood, money, munitions, lies, violence and repression, a tumor implanted in the Levant over 100 years ago by some British imperialists who were themselves antisemites. Americans are going to get tired of politicians who are supposed to be working for us but are much more responsive and animated by slavishly serving a foreign government.

    My fellow US serfs, wake the fuck up. What do you think is going to happen in the coming months and years? Do you imagine that the joint US/Israeli genocide of Gaza will result in less “terrorism” and a more peaceful world?

    Or you can close your eyes. Go to sleep. Dream on. And when you awake on a bloody street or in a bombed out cafe or a shot up concert, you can say stupid clueless infantile shit like “Why do they hate us?”

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Is Using Disinformation and Deflection as a Foreign Policy Stratagem

    Finding articles and accounts sensitive to the asymmetries between Israel and Palestine amid the unfolding war is no simple matter. This interview with international relations scholar Richard Falk, however, hopes to show the ways in which Israel has created asymmetric conditions that have situated the attainment of Palestinian rights and aspirations beyond horizons of realistic hope.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mass Media Needs to Probe Deeper into Israel’s Invasion of Gaza

    In the midst of extensive coverage of the war in Gaza, there are questions that the U.S. mass media should address:

    1. How did Hamas, with tiny Gaza surrounded by a 17-year Israeli blockade, subjected to unparalleled electronic surveillance, with spies and informants, and augmented by an overwhelming air, sea and land military presence, manage to get these weapons and associated technology for their October 7 surprise raid?

    2. What is the connection between the stunning failure of the Israeli government to protect its people on the border and the policy of P.M. Netanyahu? Recall the New York Times (October 22, 2023) article by prominent journalist, Roger Cohen, to wit: “All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: ‘Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.’” (Note: Israel and the U.S. fostered the rise of Islamic Hamas in 1987 to counter the secular Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]).

    3. Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. This, in the midst of a childcare crisis. Should U.S. taxpayers be expected to pay for Netanyahu’s colossal intelligence/military collapse?

    4. Why hasn’t the media reported on President Biden’s statement that the Gaza Health Ministry’s body count (now over 7000 fatalities) is exaggerated? All indications, however, are that it is a large undercount by Hamas to minimize its inability to protect its people. Israel has fired over 8,000 powerful precision munitions and bombs so far. These have struck many thousands of inhabited buildings – homes, apartments buildings, over 120 health facilities, ambulances, crowded markets, fleeing refugees, schools, water and sewage systems, and electric networks – implementing Israeli military orders to cut off all food, water, fuel, medicine and electricity to this already impoverished densely packed area the size of Philadelphia. For those not directly slain, the deadly harm caused by no food, water, medicine, medical facilities and fuel will lead to even more deaths and serious injuries.

    Note that over three-quarters of Gaza’s population consists of children and women. Soon there will be thousands of babies born to die in the rubble. Other Palestinians will perish from untreated diseases, injuries, dehydration, and from drinking contaminated water. With crumbled sanitation facilities, physicians are fearing a deadly cholera epidemic.

    Israel bombed the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border. Only a tiny trickle of trucks are now allowed there by Israel to carry food and water. Fuel for hospital generators still remains blocked.

    5. Why can’t Biden even persuade Israel to let 600 desperate Americans out of the Gaza firestorm?

    6. Why isn’t the mass media making a bigger issue out of Israel’s long-time practices of blocking journalists from entering Gaza, including European, American and Israeli journalists? The only television crews left are Gazan-residing Al Jazeera reporters. Israeli bombs have already killed 26 journalists in the Gaza Strip since October 7. Is Israel targeting journalists’ families? The Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera, Wael Al-Dahdouh’s family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.

    7. Why isn’t the mainstream U.S. media giving adequate space and voice to groups advocating a ceasefire and humanitarian aid? The message of Israeli peace groups’ peaceful solutions are drowned out by the media’s addiction to interviews with military tacticians. Much time and space are being given to hawks pushing for a war that could flash outside of Gaza big time. Shouldn’t groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab-American Institute, Veterans for Peace and associations of clergy have their views and activities reported?

    8. Why is the coverage of the war overlooking the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter and the many provisions of international law that all the parties, including the U.S., have been violating? (See the October 24, 2023 letter to President Biden). Under international law, Biden has made the U.S. an active “co-belligerent,” of the Israeli government’s vocal demolition of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Gaza, who are mostly descendants of Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in 1948. (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

    9. What about the human-interest stories that would be revealing? For example: How do Israeli F-16 pilots feel about their daily bombing of the completely defenseless Gazan civilian population and its life-sustaining infrastructures? What are the courageous Israeli human rights and refuseniks thinking and doing in a climate of serious repression of their views as a result of Netanyahu’s defense collapse on October 7?

    10. Where is the media attention on the statements from Israeli military commentators, who, for years have declared high-tech US-backed, nuclear-armed Israel to be more secure than at any time in its history? Israel is reasserting its overwhelming military domination of the entire region, fully backed by U.S. militarism.

    Historians remind us that in a grid-locked conflict over time, it is the most powerful party’s responsibility to lead the way to peace.

    Establishing a two-state solution has been supported by Palestinians. All the Arab nations, starting with the Arab League peace proposal in 2002, support this solution as well. It is up to Israel and the U.S., assuming annexation of what is left of Palestine is not Israel’s objective. (See, the March 29, 2002 New York Times article: Mideast Turmoil; Text of the Peace Proposals Backed by the Arab League).

    More media attention on this subject matter is much needed.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Background Facts about Gaza

    Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” The Israeli Ambassador responded that Guterres’ comments were “shocking”, “unfathomable” and  “disconnected from reality”.  He called for the Secretary General’s resignation. Below are some facts about Gaza to evaluate whether Guterres was accurate or not.

    Gaza is a tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean coast with the 5,000 year old Gaza City in the north. The entire strip is only 5 miles wide by 25 miles in length with 2.3 million Palestinians locked in this territory by Israel.  It is the size of a small US city.

    In 1996 Israeli journalist Amira Haas published the book Drinking the Sea at Gaza. After living and researching in Gaza, she described the history, conditions, religion and politics. The subtitle was “Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege”. Gaza has been under siege for decades.

    About 80% of the people in Gaza are descendants of refugees who were expelled from their villages in what is now southern Israel in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe).  Most Gazans have never been able to set foot outside the territory. They are born, live their lives and die in this concentration camp.

    At least 50% of Gaza’s work force is unemployed. Israel restricts nearly all aspects of their economy. For example, Gaza’s fishermen are prevented from going into deeper waters to fish. If they try, they are fired on by Israeli naval boats. Farmers and shepherds are also fired on as they try to eke out a living.

    From December 1998 to February 2001, there was an airport in Gaza until Israel bombed the control tower and destroyed the runways to make it unusable.

    Gaza has a port but foreign boats are prevented from landing. In 2010, six civilian ships including the Turkish Mavi Marmara tried to bring humanitarian relief to Gaza. Israeli paratroopers attacked  the ships,  killing 9 passengers including one American.

    Israel routinely demolishes the homes of Palestinians. In 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the destruction of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Gaza.

    Israel routinely denies exit permits to outstanding youth who have received scholarships to study abroad.

    In 2014 Israel bombed Gaza’s water reservoir and sanitation treatment facilities, escalating the shortage of drinking water while sewage ran in the streets. Since then, as documented by Oxfam, Israel has prevented the importation of equipment necessary to rebuild sanitation and water treatment.

    In spring 2018 Gazans demonstrated against their imprisonment. They called it the Great March of Return.  The two year report documents that 217 Palestinians were killed and over 19,000 injured  by Israeli soldiers.

    In 2020 the UN issued a report saying that Gaza is not liveable. “The primary cause of this ‘unliveable environment is a highly restrictive Israeli blockade … which has reduced Gaza to the point of ‘systematic collapse.’”

    Conclusion

    Clearly, the Secretary General was accurate in his statement that Palestinians have endured decades of “suffocating occupation”. It is a measure of the Israeli Ambassador’s sense of impunity that he attacks the top UN official who dares to mention this.

    The diplomatic conflict will increase in the coming days and weeks as Israel’s genocidal campaign continues.

    The facts about Gaza and Palestine are clear: Israel is violating international law and Western states that support this are complicit. It is up to the people all over the world to speak out.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Viewers ridicule propaganda film ‘When Marx met Confucius’

    Viewers in China are ridiculing a propaganda film showcasing attempts by President Xi Jinping to merge the thought of Karl Marx with that of Confucius, slamming the show on social media as “boring,” too “far out” and counter to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy that the People’s Republic of China was founded on.

    According to officials, the Hunan Satellite TV show, which comes as Xi steps up a campaign to promote his personal brand of ideology, has been viewed more than 1 billion times.

    Based on a short story by late communist author Guo Moruo titled “Marx Enters the Temple of Confucius,” it depicts the founding father of communism in conversation with China’s most famous sage, taking theoretical questions from students, all interspersed with performances of traditional music, cartoons and rap.

    It clearly has the seal of presidential approval, having been screened during a recent propaganda conference in Beijing that was chaired by Xi and marked his attempt to stamp his political ideas on the cultural life of the nation.

    But its attempt to meld the two vastly different philosophies – dubbed the “second combination” by Xi – met with very mixed reactions on social media.

    “If I remember correctly, those who believed in Marx during those ten years should have smashed everything related to Confucius [Second Combination] #WhenMarxMetConfucius,” @Phuket New Forest said in a reference to the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

    “They didn’t smash it hard enough,” commented @Agony丶Cloud.

    ENG_CHN_MarxConfucius_10232023.2.jpg
    Computer-generated mythical figures appear to endorse the story as the true representative of traditional Chinese culture in “When Marx Met Confucius.” Credit: Screenshot from movie

    Others griped about the dialogue, in which Marx says: “I have been in China for more than 100 years. In fact, I have been Chinese for a long time,” and says both philosophies “share a commitment to stability.”

    Confucius agrees, saying that both “hoped to achieve the highest happiness for mankind.”

    “Who came up with these lines?” one comment wanted to know.

    Common enemies

    Marx and Confucius also agree that they fought common enemies, including non-approved takes on history and Western attempts to impose “universal values” on China, something Xi has explicitly banned since taking power in 2012.

    Computer-generated mythical figures appear to endorse the saga as the true representative of traditional Chinese culture, while Lenin makes an appearance to call for an end to the “feudal” elements of that culture.

    They then hail Xi’s “second combination” of their philosophies.

    “When history happens the first time round, it’s often a tragedy, and when it happens again, it’s often a comedy,” wrote @absolute_zero_9, adding in apparent reference to life under Xi Jinping: “I sincerely hope that this decade-long farce will be over soon!”

    @Choice_is_very_important wanted to know if the fictional meeting meant that retail stock market investors will now have to pay for officials to “go to clubs, eat high-end Western food [and] have their feet washed,” citing the Confucian respect for authority figures.

    Others had a more succinct reaction.

    “I feel sick,” @Your_Ah_Q_Spiritual_Victory_Method wrote, while @clown_actor_1920 commented: “All I see is oppression.”

    User @qkeaa described Confucius as “a wandering soul, something only fit for a museum,” while @10_hours_of_charging wrote: “#WhenMarxMeetConfucius# made me see how ridiculous contemporary literary and artistic work is.”

    In a reference to the leader of the doomed Taiping Rebellion, who said he was Jesus’ brother and tried to topple the Qing Dynasty, they added: “But I’d still watch ‘When Jesus met Hong Xiuquan’.”

    “I’d rather watch ‘In the Night Garden’,” @Captive_snail_003 said, of the British TV show for small children. “At least it’s not intellectually challenged.”

    “There will be more and more jokes like this in the future,” commented @A Zhuma with a cry-laughing emoji.

    Shoddy production

    Others took issue with the show from a Marxist point of view, saying that Confucius was in favor of slavery and other hierarchies of power, and wouldn’t have wanted to eat at the same table as Marx’s wife and children.

    “I am speechless over this disgusting show,” @Drink_coco wrote, while commentator An Haoxin said it would appeal to older, middle-class people.

    “What they want is not Confucianism, nor is it a study of its historical value, but a re-reinforcement of the hierarchical order,” they wrote.

    ENG_CHN_MarxConfucius_10232023.3.jpg
    Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin makes an appearance in “When Marx Met Confucius” to call for an end to the “feudal” elements of the culture. Credit: Screenshot from movie

    Others took aim at the production values.

    “The technology is shoddy, the scenery is poor, the filters are saturated to death, the special effects are abrupt, and the shots are inexplicable,” one user wrote. “It’s like a rough product rushed out of a small workshop, like a group assignment made up after staying up late the night before.”

    The Hunan provincial radio and television bureau, which administers Hunan Satellite TV, had other ideas, however, lauding the show for using technology to “create visual wonders.”

    “The real-life stage design is supplemented by virtual reality technology to create a fantasy scene where reality and reality coexist,” it said in a statement on the show.

    Attempts to marry Marxism with Confucianism have been made since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in the early 20th century, commentator Zhou Kexin said in a recent commentary for Bitter Winter magazine.

    “Readers of Bitter Winter are familiar with the debates about the nature of Confucianism, and the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to empty it of all spiritual elements, presenting Confucius’ teachings as an early form of atheism,” Zhou wrote.

    “It is not surprising that this counterfeit Confucius would agree with Marx. And that both Confucius and Marx would agree with Xi Jinping,” he said.

    Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Wing Tim for RFA Cantonese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • War on Gaza, 2023

    “Hamas terrorists”, “hostages”, “anti-Semitism”, Israeli “right of self-defense”, standing with Israel, upholding the “laws of war”, peace thru “negotiations”, “2-state solution”, end game?  What are the relevant facts?  How should recent events be evaluated?

    Double standard

    Western imperial states (US, Britain, France, Germany, et cetera) and their mainstream media report the conflict with a pro-Israel anti-Arab bias.

    + Palestinian violence is categorized as “terrorism”, while Israeli violence never is.  Statistics: Israeli violence (2008-2023 June) killed 6,407 Palestinians, while Palestinian violence killed 307 Israelis.[1]

    + Israelis taken captive by Palestinian fighters are categorized as “kidnapped” and “hostages”, while the 4,500 Palestinians (including 147 minors as young as 12) in Israeli detention are not so categorized despite the facts that: more than 1,100 are held under administrative detention without charge or access to any court, and many of the remainder were detained on purported “security grounds” (sometimes for nothing other than: denunciation of harsh Israeli policies, relationship with actual militants, expressions of sympathy with the resistance, and/or mere suspicion of support for militant resistance) by military courts (used only against Palestinians) with outcome almost always predetermined with a 99% conviction rate).[2]

    + Ethnic cleansing is recognized in international law as a crime against humanity, but the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing to create a Lebensraum for their so-called “Jewish state” is simply accepted.

    + Apartheid in South Africa (though the US and its Western allies did not always oppose it) is now considered an injustice, but Israeli apartheid-like persecutions of Palestinians go mostly unmentioned and without condemnation.[3]

    + The territory between the river and the sea is often called “Israel”, never “Palestine”.

    + When Israeli forces kill Palestinians one or a few at a time; it is barely, if at all, mentioned. It is only when Israeli bombings kill Palestinian civilians by the hundreds and thousands that the West sees fit to report on it. Killings of Israelis by Palestinians are reported empathetically as tragic, while Palestinians killed in far greater numbers by Israeli forces are merely unfortunate. With Israel now beginning to mass-murder Palestinians of all ages with indiscriminate bombing and thru starvation (preventing access to food, safe drinking water, and necessary medical supplies with which to treat mass casualties from Israeli bombing); Western state leaders excuse Israeli genocidal war crimes in Gaza, with banal assertions that Israel is only exercising its “right of self-defense” against “terrorists”, assertions which go unchallenged in the mainstream media.

    + Palestinian grievances (home demolitions, road blockages and checkpoints applied only to Palestinians, land and water resources taken from Palestinians and given to neighboring illegal Israeli settlements, grossly inequitable social services, travel restrictions applicable only to Palestinians, the economic siege of Gaza which impoverishes its population, the closing of Gaza’s borders so as to turn it into an “open-air prison”, and so forth) almost invariably go unmentioned.[4]

    + Ever increasing attacks (including murders) upon West Bank Palestinians by neighboring Israeli settlers, sometimes accompanied by participating Israeli soldiers, are perpetrated with impunity and rarely reported in the Western mainstream media.[5]

    The most overtly fascist coalition now governing the Zionist state has intensified its oppression of the Palestinians, especially in the occupied West Bank. That has naturally provoked an increase in militant resistance. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, notwithstanding their faults, currently constitute the most organized force in said resistance. The current armed conflict (begun October 07) between Gaza and the Zionist state is the natural outcome of Israeli/Zionist persecution and violence against the Palestinians.

    Hamas

    There are valid criticisms of Hamas as a governing entity. For example, it has permitted its most Islamist faction to impose a religiously intolerant, theocratic, and patriarchal regime in Gaza (acts which oppress fellow Palestinians); but that is not why Israel and the US condemn it.

    Hamas evolved from a Palestinian affiliate of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.  Israel originally promoted Hamas as an alternative to the PLO which then represented the Palestinian resistance to Zionist oppression.  Indiscriminate Israeli violence against Palestinians during the first intifada (1987—93) affected all Palestinians including Hamas supporters. At that point, Hamas embraced the resistance against the Zionist state. Following the Oslo Accords (1993), Fatah and Israel established the Palestinian Authority which then devolved into a corrupt and subservient client regime for the Zionist state.  Hamas has filled much of the vacuum for the militant resistance.

    Israel, the US, and their apologists accuse Hamas of being ISIS.  That is not a valid comparison; in fact, Hamas denounced ISIS and its crimes.  Hamas fighters may have committed some “atrocities” (killing unarmed Israelis of all ages) in the current conflict; but the sensational allegations (beheading babies, immolating captives, raping women) voiced by Netanyahu and Biden are evidently false. Moreover, the charge that Hamas targeted “innocent” civilians ignores context (which is never considered by apologists for Israel, even though it mitigates Palestinian violence). For example, the Kibbutz residents attacked by Hamas are largely armed settlers in possession of land stolen from Palestinians.  Furthermore, most non-Arab Israeli adults (women as well as men) serve, or have served, in the Israeli army, which has perpetrated decades of often-murderous persecutions of the Palestinians (including ethnic cleansings); and those Israelis are military reservists until they reach the age of exemption (which varies from 40 to 49 depending upon rank and specialty).  Reasoned analysis of Hamas’ actions indicates that they intended to take as many captives (bargaining chips) as possible rather than simply kill Israelis. It appears that it was primarily those Israelis who resisted capture, including by fleeing, who were the ones killed.

    Should actual Hamas atrocities be disapproved? Yes. Should every violent Palestinian response to Israeli violence be denounced? No. Should Hamas excesses be equated to, and condemned equally with, those of the Zionist state? To do so (as have, all too eagerly, many left liberal peace advocates posturing as sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians) is to equate the violence of the resistance to that of the oppressor. In effect, it legitimizes the existence of a racist state built upon mass murder, often brutal persecutions, and the violent ethnic cleansing of a country stolen from its indigenous population. Is it appropriate to express uncritical praise for Hamas (October 07) action (as have some radical pro-Palestinian activists)? No. Such response dehumanizes and fails to recognize that the dead and wounded (sometimes avoidably, sometimes unavoidably) included, not only actual enemies, but also innocent children and likely some Israeli Jews of the minority which are actual opponents of the Zionist oppressions of Palestinians. Israeli assertions to the contrary, Hamas does not hate Jews in general; but it is not wrong in recognizing that Israeli “civilians” are not all “innocents”.

    Israelis

    Many Jews in Israel (and elsewhere: Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now) have sought an end to the Zionist state’s apartheid-like oppressions of the Palestinians[6]; but, in Israel, they are a minority.  A much smaller minority of Israeli Jews (along with many Jews in other countries) actually renounce the Zionist project and demand a single state between the river and the sea with equal rights for all, and the right of return and compensation for exiled Palestinians. Certainly, justice-seeking Israelis (some affiliated with organizations such as B’Tselem) do not deserve to suffer and die because of the crimes perpetrated by their government, crimes which provoke the inevitable counter-violent resistance by its victims.

    Fantasy: a permanent peace based upon the 2-state solution!

    Many liberals (including many of those denouncing Hamas while posturing as sympathetic to the suffering Palestinians) insist that the “Palestinian problem” be resolved thru negotiations toward the vaunted “2-state solution”. They evade the facts. The Zionist state (regardless of ruling party) has never been willing to share Palestine with any actual Palestinian Arab state.

    1. After 30 years of British Mandatory rule with democratic governance denied to the Palestinian populace (in violation of Mandate precepts); the UN (then with white-ruled countries constituting nearly ¾ of its 56 member states), indifferent to the rights of the indigenous Palestinians, divided Palestine so as to give 55% of the territory to the Zionist settlers who then constituted 32% of the total population.
    2. The Zionists, after having “agreed” to the UN plan, then invaded, conquered, and annexed half of the 42% of territory designated by the UN for the Palestinian state (which was never established). The Zionists also permanently expelled a majority of the Palestinians from the 77% of Palestine which then came under their rule.
    3. The Zionist state, in secret alliance with Britain and France, launched a war of conquest to seize the remainder of Palestine plus the Egyptian Sinai. The US, then led by President Eisenhower, issued a firm “no”, and compelled the aggressor: to abort before it had seized the West Bank, and to withdraw from seized territory in Gaza and Egypt.
    4. Israel launched another war of conquest, this time enabled by the US and its allies, and seized all remaining Palestinian territory plus parts of Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It then began its ongoing practice of planting illegal Zionist settlements in the newly conquered territories.

    1993-95. Israel signed onto the Oslo Accords, which did not include any actual provision for the creation of a real “state” in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians are wrongfully blamed for the failure to achieve a 2-state peace agreement. In fact, no Israeli government, then or at any other time, has ever been willing to remove the illegal settlements or to accept a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state. Moreover, repeated Palestinian attempts to achieve justice by peaceful methods have always been thwarted by the Zionist state and its imperial allies.

    For a more detailed history, see Charles Pierce: “The essential facts concerning Zionism and Palestine,” (Dissident Voice, 2023 Oct 10).

    End game?

    Israel, asserting “right of self-defense” as pretext, states its intention to wipe out Hamas and its operatives. Toward that end, Israel, in addition to bombing the territory into rubble, plans a ground invasion of Gaza. If that occurs, it appears reasonable to expect: much more mass killings of Gaza Palestinians (whom the Israeli Defense Minister describes as “human animals”, followed by a very brutal Israeli military rule, and eventual establishment of a quisling regime to rule the populace, plus Israeli detentions of any Palestinians who openly decline to be subservient to that regime, and inevitably a renewed violent Palestinian resistance to the ongoing persecution. Either that or Israel will complete its ethnic cleansing (as advocated by some parties in the ruling coalition) by expelling most remaining Palestinians from all Israeli-ruled territory.

    Biden, most members of Congress, and the US foreign policy establishment

    Israeli and US leaders responded to outrage over the aerial bombing of the Baptist hospital in Gaza (on Oct 17), with death toll in the hundreds, by blaming it on a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. Except by their apologists, that assertion is reasonably disbelieved. Militants in Gaza simply do not have rockets with bombs large enough to kill hundreds; whereas Israeli bombs have actually and deliberately destroyed multi-story buildings in Gaza, killing hundreds of their residents. Lies and cover-ups such as this are nothing new for the US; remember previous lies: babies taken from incubators in Kuwait, WMD in Iraq, unprovoked Vietnamese attack in Gulf of Tonkin, no US commanders’ orders to massacre civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere during the War in Korea, et cetera.

    Biden, who rushed to assert that the US “stands with Israel”, pretends to be pressing Israel to abide by the “laws of war” which prohibit making war on civilians; but he certainly knows that Israel will not comply as long as he refuses to use US leverage to compel compliance; and he clearly will not do so. Likewise pro-Israel politicians in the US Congress will not stop, or even put conditions upon, the $3.8 billion/year of US taxpayer funding (to which Biden intends to add an extra $14 billion) for the Israeli war machine; because (beyond their commitment to Western imperial world domination) they only care that the election-campaign funding, provided by the rich and powerful Zionist lobby and US Zionist billionaires, shall go to themselves rather than to their challengers.

    The anti-racist “left” needs to recognize that Biden along with most members of the US Congress and their counterparts in the Western allies, all now rushing to assist Israel, are ultimately no less racist than are Trump’s MAGA Republicans and other right-wing populists.

    ENDNOTES

    [1] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: “Data on casualties,” 2023.

    [2] Addameer: “The Israeli military court system,” 2017 July.  B’Tselem: “Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli custody,” 2023 Sep 07.

    [3] B’Tselem: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” 2021 Jan 12.

    [4] Amnesty International: “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, a look into decades of oppression and domination,” 2022 Feb.

    [5] Leila Fadel: “Palestinians appear to have been killed in reprisal attacks in the West Bank,” NPR, 2023 Oct 18.  Amira Hass: “Israeli Settlers Aren’t Pausing the Expulsion and Dispossession in the West Bank,” Ha’aretz, 2023 Oct 12.

    [6] Ellen Brotsky & Ariel Koren: “We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza,” Guardian, 2023 Oct 18.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Scam of Pragmatism: An Origin Story of ‘Just the Way It Is’

    The past never truly stays where it belongs. Even when the truth is carefully scrubbed from our understanding of history, its spores disperse through time to seep into the firmament like a persistent black mold poisoning the air we breathe.

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • Do We Know What We Mean When We Say “Terrorist”?

    What is a terrorist? Seriously. I’m asking.

    Per the Oxford Dictionary, terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

    So it makes sense that we would regard the murder of at least 260 attendees of the Supernova music festival in southern Israel as terrorism. It makes sense that we would see the indiscriminate killing of Israeli civilians as terrorism.

    I fully understand the demands–coursing across social media–to condemn Hamas’s recent atrocities as terrorism. From my apartment in Brooklyn, I can only imagine what Israelis are experiencing at this moment, but I imagine that it is something that can be justifiably described as terror.

    What I don’t understand is that if this is terrorism, what is the Israeli airstrike, on Monday, that reduced a marketplace in the Jabalia refugee camp to rubble and killed dozens of civilians?

    What are the airstrikes that destroyed four mosques in the Shati refugee camp, killing people worshiping inside?

    What is the word that we should use to describe an air force that levels entire school buildings, hospitals, apartment complexes, and neighborhoods?

    I am asking what these things are, because when they’ve happened, there has been no overwhelming demand from the American public to label these atrocities as terrorsim. There have been no calls by politicians to label Israel as an entity that yearns for the extermination of all Palestinians. There have been no coordinated attempts to label Israel’s actions as terrorism.

    But then what is an appropriate descriptor for the siege that will cut off Gaza from food, water, aid, and electricity and that is being enacted in contradiction of international law?

    What shall we call the killing, last year, of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank? Or the killing of at least six more journalists in Gaza in recent days?

    What about the murder, carried out this past September by the Israeli special forces, of a 15-year-old boy as he was leaving his grandfather’s house?

    How should we think about the acts that killed 91 children in the Gaza Strip over the course of 48 hours this past weekend? Should we understand them as acts of self-defense? Because if we should, then I am unclear as to how this notion of self-defense differs from what I am being told to understand as terrorism.

    I visited Israel once, in 2016, on a Birthright trip alongside thirty other young American Jews. I remember that over the course of those weeks, we threw around the word terrorist with abandon. In fact–and this is true–one of the icebreakers that we engaged in after touching down at Ben Gurian airport was called “Escape the Terrorist.” The game involved seeking out a partner to help navigate an area of sidewalk littered with make-pretend bombs.

    The only history lesson we received on that trip was a brief lecture given to us by Gil Hoffman, the chief political correspondent at the time for the Jerusalem Post. What left the biggest imprint was Hoffman’s closing remark.

    I remember him, in a dramatic pause, holding his chin in his palm, and then looking into our eyes and saying, “When the Palestinians care about their own children, then there will be peace.”

    Later that day, I was reminded of Hoffman’s words as I stared into the grainy footage of a Nazi propaganda film on display at Yad Vashem. The film, ostensibly, showed the routine goings on within a Jewish ghetto. In the center of the frame, a group of emaciated children huddled together for warmth, as passersby didn’t so much as stop to take notice.

    A placard near the screen described the propaganda as an attempt to depict the Jewish people as callous–as a people incapable even of caring for their own children.

    Nearby, a mic’d-up guide addressed a group of elderly tourists, saying, “They tried to strip us of our humanity, but in doing so only revealed the absence of their own.”

    What does it mean to believe that an entire people would not care for their children? What does it mean to believe that an entire people would be more celebratory of death than they would be of their own emancipation?

    What does it mean that terrorism is defined not by the act but by the actors?

    What does it mean to be a terrorist? I’m not sure that we know.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Massacre at a Hospital in Palestine 

    I want to know their names.  I want to know the names of every child, every woman, every man. I want to know exactly what they were doing the moment the bombs hit.

    Was a nurse staunching a bloody wound?  Was a mother leaning over her daughter stroking her forehead? Was a doctor preparing a syringe?

    I want to know the stories – the loves, the fears, the memories of each and every one who was struck down so bitterly, so casually, so easily.

    Is the Israeli who pushed the button burning with regret? Will he have nightmares for the rest of his life? Will he fall into the darkness of alcohol and hopelessness? Or is he standing on a corner joking about his murderous act? I want to know.

    I want to know who manufactured the bomb.  Is the nuclear physicist who sat at his desk parsing the complicated formulas that produced the bomb drinking coffee and playing with his dog? Or is he wracked by regret?

    I want to know.  I want to know the names of each and every child buried under the rubble of Al Ahli Hospital.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Hamas Resistance to Israel and Iran’s Involvement

    I was “interviewed” by an Iranian journalist online (15 October) about the Hamas-Israel conflict and Iran’s involvement. My answers are below.

    1. During the war between Hamas and Israel, some sources in America and their affiliated media reported that Iranian money was blocked in Qatar again, which was later denied. Do you think there was a message hidden in this news?

    I have written about this accusation in the United States. For your readers, I want to lay out the reasoning behind the accusations in the United States. The reasons for these accusations are complex, and they have more to do with partisan politics in the United States than about Iran.

    First, the accusations of the tie between the Iranian settlement and the  Hamas attack was launched exclusively by Republicans, and it was a ploy to try and blame President Biden for the Hamas attack. There were many misstatements made, but “truth” is irrelevant when it comes to partisan politics. The main goal is to “score” points rhetorically.

    The most ignorant comments claim that Iran received the money and immediately used the funds to support the Hamas attack. This is of course a total lie, but for people who are ill-disposed toward Iran and toward President Biden, this was an easy lie to sell, and looking at the commentary from right-wing media and comments on new stories shows that many people heard this and immediately believed it.

    A slightly more sophisticated version of this same lie is that Iran received the funds, and couldn’t use them to support Hamas because they were earmarked for humanitarian purposes, but because they received the funds, they were able to “offset” other government funds which were sent to support Hamas.

    When the Biden administration decisively pointed out that first, the funds did belong to Iran, and that none of them had been disbursed from Qatar, a third version of this story started circulating, and that is that Iran anticipated  these funds after the settlement, and so disbursed other existing funds to support Hamas.

    Of course all of these were complete lies. Hamas had planned this attack for months. The Iranian settlement took place long after the planning and preparation for the Hamas attack was underway. Iran could not have anticipated that the $6 billion of its own money would  be released as a condition of the prisoner exchange, because negotiations were not finalized before the planning for the Hamas attack. So these accusations are false and illogical.

    However, that still did not stop Republicans from continuing the narrative that President Biden was “soft on Iran” and that concessions made to Iran “somehow” led to the Hamas attack, and so ultimately President Biden was responsible.  The Republican narrative that the attack was engineered, directed and supported by Iran continues and now has been cemented in the Republican political narrative, and the Biden administration has been unable to counteract it.

    Another narrative that has emerged claims that Iran will instigate Hezbollah to attack Israel from Lebanon, thus proving that Iran was behind the Hamas attack. This is illogical, of course, but the demonization of Iran has become such a complete fixture in American politics, this kind of narrative has been extremely easy to promulgate.

    So, in response to these falsehoods, the Biden administration froze the Iranian assets in Qatar. It was a violation of the agreement between Iran and the United States. But it was necessary to try and stop the Republican lies. It highlighted the fact that the funds were never disbursed, and that Iran could not now anticipate receiving them.

    And the other move by the Biden administration to counter this rhetoric was to engage in a full-throated, loud and very public support for Israel. Sending Secretary of State Blinken to Israel for a highly emotional presentation citing his own Jewish roots, and President Biden making many public statements in support of Israel blunted some of the Republican criticism. I am not suggesting that these sentiments were insincere, but they were a very deliberate, highly public and emotional display of support for Israel. And it appears to have worked.

    1. How likely is it that America will use these funds as leverage against Iran in the future? If so, what will be the harm to America?

    No one should expect these funds to be released very soon. There is a possibility that they could be quietly released after the 2024 elections when President Biden’s fate concerning his presidency is settled. If Trump were to win re-election in 2024 the funds would never be released while Trump was in office. One again, I emphasize that this is not about Iran. This is about electoral politics in the United States, where sadly,, any politician who does anything to support or provide any benefit to Iran will be attacked.

    1. What is the impact of this war on the future of Iran’s nuclear negotiations?

    The Israeli-Hamas conflict will result in a halt to any progress in the Iranian nuclear negotiations until after the 2024 presidential elections. Senator Lindsay Graham (Republican from South Carolina) said today that Iran was totally to blame for the Hamas attack. Other Republicans have said the same. Some have called for bombing of Iran’s oil facilities to destroy Iran’s economic base. Sadly, anything the United States would now do that would result in any improvement in Iran’s economic condition is on hold for now. It is too politically dangerous for the Biden administration to do this. At best the talks will “tread water” until after January 2025 when the new presidential administration is in office.

    Let me also point out that if Hezbollah attacks Israel from the North, any talks between Iran and the United States over the nuclear negotiations will be immediately abandoned.

    1. What effects will this war have on the future of Iran and Saudi Arabia relations?

    One of the narratives that is being widely spread in the United States by Republicans is that: Iran engineered the Hamas attack on Israel in order to prevent the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iran has recently improved relations with Saudi Arabia. So the question of whether Iran sees establishment of Saudi Arabian-Israeli relations as a danger, or something to be prevented is a very potent issue that Iran will have to deal with diplomatically. If American conservative politicians have their way (including Trump), the Saudi Arabia-Israel accords will go forward, not only because that is seen as positive for Israeli security, but also because it will “deal a blow” to Iran–a double benefit for these politicians. But the Iranian government should take this accusation of Iranian support for the attack as a way to prevent this new alliance very seriously, because it is a major narrative in the United States.

    1. What is the effect of the war between Hamas and Israel on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel?

    See my answer above. This has emerged in some political circles as the root cause for the Hamas attack, and the supposed motivation for Iranian support of the Hamas attack–to prevent this normalization of Saudi Arabian-Israeli relations. It is assumed that Iran wants to prevent this, and it is also assumed that Hamas sees this as a blow to their cause.

    Because this has been put forward so strongly as a motivation for the attack, every effort will now be made on the part of the United States to see that the normalization takes place.

    Ass a final observation, however, many supporters of the Palestinians point out that normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states will have no effect on the Palestinian cause, because in fact, Arab States have not been supporting Palestinians at all historically. There are individuals and groups within Arab states that have supported the Palestinian cause, but the Arab states themselves have never been supportive. This underscores Iran’s support for Palestinians–and the fact that Iran, as a non-Arab state has been the chief reliable support for the Palestinian cause.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Republican Moves to Censure Rashida Tlaib for Call to Stop Israeli Apartheid

    A Republican House member has filed a resolution to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian in Congress, who is facing a deluge of fierce criticism from both sides of the aisle after she called for an end to Israel’s apartheid in a statement this weekend. The resolution was filed on Wednesday by Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Michigan), who parroted unverified information from Israeli…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Achilles’ Heel Of Propaganda: Julian Assange, Nick Cohen And Russell Brand

    In the second decade of the 21st century, after much empty talk of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’, it was discovered that people weren’t even capable of governing their own media consumption. Huge, artificially intelligent computers revealed that while 49.5% of the population was drowning in a ‘post-truth’ sea of ‘disinformation’, another 49.5% was away with the fairies in ‘filter bubbles’ borne aloft by nothing but hot air.

    This left the 1% to cope with the crisis. Giant media corporations recruited ‘disinformation experts’ – savant guardians uniquely qualified to distinguish between rational and propaganda journalism. Their mystical powers are such that, working within profit-maximising, billionaire-owned, advertiser-dependent, government-subsidised media, they are nevertheless exposing ‘disinformation’ without the slightest trace of bias. If CEOs, ad department managers and others privately despise these truth-tellers fearlessly biting the many hands that feed, they are holding their tongues, presumably out of deep respect for their noble cause.

    In all the endless blather about ‘misinformation’, you will see precious little recognition of the great Achilles’ heel of propaganda journalism, the characteristic by which it is instantly exposed, rooted in the fact that it has fundamentally different goals from rational journalism.

    The goals of rational journalism are honesty, accuracy, completeness and clarity. Rational journalism will, of course, present the US-UK governments’ explanation for why they invaded Iraq, and it will present honest, credible, authoritative sources challenging that explanation.

    Notice this claim to rational, honest journalism is not a claim to objective journalism. Judgment about which individuals and organisations are honest, credible and authoritative is a subjective one. We might insist that we are choosing credible sources based on rational, testable evidence, but rational thought is a subjective phenomenon that occurs inside a human head – it is not objective. Our reasoning might be faulty – we might simply be mad.

    Rational, subjective journalism requires that you and I play our parts as honest, rational readers and viewers checking the claims and forming our own subjective opinions. We cannot take the arguments of purportedly honest, subjective journalists on trust – we have to do the work ourselves.

    The goals of propaganda journalism are different: it aims to lead readers and viewers to a particular conclusion. In this case, honesty, accuracy and clarity are subordinated to the needs of persuasion. As for completeness, because it works against the goals of propaganda, it is not merely omitted; it is a threat to be attacked.

    This, then, is how we can distinguish rational journalism from mere propaganda. The great Achilles heel of propaganda journalism is that:

    • It necessarily combines meticulous, detailed, forensic analysis of the facts with vast, ‘inexplicable’, counter-intuitive gaps. The propagandist will collect every tiny detail in favour of the required conclusion but – as though mentally impaired – will ‘fail’ to notice any number of lounge-based elephants leading away from the desired conclusions. The aim is to present a clear-cut, black and white view of the world with no room for doubt.
    • It will find reasons to attack anyone suggesting that this filtered, black and white version is incomplete. Any rational journalist interested in completeness, in doubt, will be attacked as an ‘apologist’, a ‘traitor’, a ‘Lord Haw-Haw’-type character undermining the nation’s moral and intellectual health with ‘disinformation’. Any other rational journalists who then seek completeness in responding to these first claims of ‘treachery’ will be accused of ‘treachery’ in the same way. It is a logical closed-circle – vital because, for a propagandist, victory is all that matters. The flourishing of rational debate is both a threat and a defeat.

    Nils Melzer – ‘I Had Been Blinded By Propaganda’

    In 2019, while working as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer – a highly experienced practitioner in the field of international law who was the Swiss Chair of International Humanitarian Law at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, and who is now Director of Law, Policy and Diplomacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross – commented on Julian Assange:

    Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the United States had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, Swedish prosecution informed the tabloid press that he was suspected of having raped two women. Strangely, however, the women themselves never claimed to have been raped, nor did they intend to report a criminal offence. Go figure. Moreover, the forensic examination of a condom submitted as evidence, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure again. One woman even texted that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test, but that the police were “keen on getting their hands on him”. Go figure, once more.

    Melzer added:

    In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide. And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

    Melzer, clearly an impeccable source on these issues, offered this opinion piece to The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Canberra Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek. The result:

    None responded positively.

    Why not? Because Melzer was dealing with The Medium, a state-corporate propaganda system that needed the Assange case to be presented in black and white terms to neutralise public support so the state could ‘deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide’.

    This propaganda requirement is so important, so relentlessly pursued, that many state-corporate propagandists – people who genuinely imagine they are rational journalists – felt authentic revulsion for anyone interested in challenging the official narrative. As we found out, although no charges had been brought against Assange, and although he had not been convicted of any crime, to promote completeness by challenging the various claims was to be branded ‘a rape apologist’.

    Regardless of the truth of the claims made against Assange, the very fact that expert, rational journalism seeking completeness was not only ignored, but was barred, was the great Achilles’ heel indicating that Assange was indeed the target of a state-corporate propaganda blitz. This automatically meant that, whatever the claims against Assange, The Medium was already guilty of a profound subversion of democracy, civilised debate and freedom, because it was acting as an agent of state, not as an impartial source of information. It was treating the domestic population as an enemy to be controlled and manipulated.

    To summarise, then: when meticulous detail is widely combined with elephant-sized gaps, and when interest in completeness is widely denounced as ‘treachery’, or ‘immorality’ of some kind, this is the Achilles’ heel exposing a propaganda blitz.

    ‘La, La, La!’ The Medium Puts Its Fingers In Its Ears

    In June we were one of a tiny number of outlets who supported women exposing the sexual abuses of high-profile former Observer columnist Nick Cohen in a front-page article published by the New York Times. Seven women told the NYT that Cohen ‘had groped them or made other unwanted sexual advances over nearly two decades. Four insisted on anonymity, fearing professional repercussions. In each case, The Times reviewed documents or otherwise corroborated their accounts’. This was not trial by media – the NYT report followed an internal investigation by Guardian News & Media, after which Cohen had left the Observer.

    The contrast with the media reaction to the Assange allegations could hardly be more disturbing. The NYT’s report on Cohen was published on May 30. Our ProQuest media database search on June 15 of UK newspaper mentions after May 29 gave the following results:

    Nick Cohen’ = 9 mentions

    This was the sum total of interest in the entire UK press. The story was simply buried and was not covered by the Guardian or the BBC.

    We were one of very few outlets to quote sexual abuse survivor Lucy Siegle:

    In 2018, Freelance journalist and BBC One Show reporter Lucy Siegle – who wrote an Observer column on ethical living and launched the newspaper’s Ethical Awards – reported Cohen to the Guardian for groping her in the newsroom, but “nothing had happened”. Siegle described her 1 February 2018 meeting with senior Guardian management as “aggressive”, an “absolute car crash”, in which she felt “gaslit” and that they “basically spent half the time trying to diminish what I was saying and then the other half of the time sort of putting their fingers in their ears and almost going “la la la”.

    ‘La, la la’, pretty much sums up the reaction of the entire state-corporate Medium to the scandal.

    Compare, again, the response to claims against comedian and dissident political commentator Russell Brand, accused of rape by one woman, and of sexual abuse by three other women. The Metropolitan Police subsequently reported that it had also received a ‘number of allegations of sexual offences’. The World Socialist Network (WSWS) commented:

    The hysterical response to the Brand story in the media, with the Guardian and other nominally “liberal” newspapers far in the lead, undermines basic legal and democratic principles. It has pre-emptively judged Brand guilty, rendering him a pariah and jeopardising any chance of a fair trial if that were ever on the cards in the future…

    Legal and democratic rights must be defended to put an end to the situation where public figures and artists can be torn down purely through maliciously intended allegations and gossip. It should not need explaining what enormous power this gives those with the most influence on the media and politics, and the injustice which can be wrought.

    And indeed, anyone who has followed the Assange case will have been alarmed when Foreign Secretary James Cleverly commented publicly on the claims against Brand:

    ‘We have to be particularly careful when we listen to the voices of the people who are relatively powerless. Because we, I think, collectively have missed opportunities to do the right thing and intervene much, much earlier.

    This, of course, strongly implied Brand’s guilt, helping to set the tone for the subsequent trial by media. One might, of course, wonder why such a senior Foreign Office politician responsible for British relations with foreign countries and governments was speaking out on claims targeting a British comedian and actor. After all, Britain’s Foreign Secretary did not comment on the Cohen sex scandal.

    Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons media committee, wrote to the media platform, Rumble:

    We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand’s ability to earn money on the platform.

    To their credit, Rumble replied:

    Today, we received a deeply disturbing letter from a committee chair in the UK parliament…

    We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so.

    Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content on Rumble. We don’t agree with the behavior of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalize them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.

    Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company’s values and mission. We emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.

    Dinenage has also written to TikTok, and also to GB News, commenting:

    … it is concerning that Beverley Turner, who described Mr Brand as “a hero” and invited him to appear on her show, subsequently fronted GB News’s coverage of the allegations regarding Mr Brand on the morning of 18 September.

    Tweeting over a letter he sent to Dinenage, US journalist Glenn Greenwald asked:

    Since when do Western political officials have the power to impose extra-legal punishment on people for alleged crimes they’ve never been charged with? What gives US and UK officials the right to demand that tech companies remove or demonetize speakers?

    No government ministers wrote to the Guardian Media Group demanding the demonetisation of Cohen’s articles. The BBC and Guardian, which failed even to report the Cohen scandal, have lavished coverage in dozens of news and comment pieces on the claims against Brand.

    Once again, the Achilles’ heel of propaganda is clearly visible: meticulous claims with astonishing gaps – for example, the fact that the government is applying enormous pressure to silence Brand, though he has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime – while rational journalists seeking completeness are widely shouted down as ‘rape apologists’, exactly as they were in the Assange case.

    Critics have argued that to suggest Brand is being targeted with a propaganda blitz is to dismiss the women’s claims as propaganda fabrications. This does not follow at all. It is quite possible, for example, that the claims are both true and being used by unscrupulous forces to silence Brand.

    Critics have also asked why we haven’t commented on the plausibility of the women’s allegations – how can we doubt the claims of four women speaking independently? The Assange case, and especially Nils Melzer’s expert analysis of that case, convinced us that it is frankly absurd for people like us – and people like the many people passing instant judgment on social media – to affect to offer an informed opinion on these complex legal issues based on media reports and commentary.

    Is Brand A Leftist?

    As ever, nothing is allowed to interfere with the required, black and white version of events. Cover for the propaganda blitz has even been provided by the assertion that Brand cannot be the subject of an Assange or Corbyn-style blitz because he is not a left dissident at all.

    Whether we call Brand a ‘leftist’ or not, the fact is that over the last decade he has done much to challenge and offend state-corporate power. This year, he has interviewed radical leftists like Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Aaron Maté. He has long and vocally supported Corbyn and Assange, and in the last couple of years he has interviewed Max Blumenthal, Edward Snowden, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, Joel Bakan, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva and many others. This is important work giving a voice to leftists and environmentalists who are completely ignored by ‘mainstream’ media, when they aren’t being slandered and abused.

    Brand has consistently challenged the official narrative on the Ukraine war. On YouTube last February, he conducted the first interview given by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh after Hersh had published his damning claim that the US was behind the Nord Stream 2 terror attacks in Europe.

    As we documented, Hersh’s claims were either ignored, or at best ridiculed, by the likes of the Guardian, BBC and The Times as part of another suppression of dissent. Apply whatever label you like, the fact that Brand conducted this first interview with Hersh on YouTube, that he has 6.6 million YouTube subscribers, and that the video has been viewed 855,000 times, was a serious contribution to anti-war dissent.

    The Hersh interview alone and the fact that Brand is consistently reaching a large audience with his dissent – former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook argues ‘He is possibly the most influential critic of capitalism in the English language’ – means Brand is certainly going to be targeted by the state-corporate propaganda system that successfully destroyed Corbyn’s political project, and Assange’s reputation, for fundamentally the same reasons.

    Indeed, as we discussed at the time, Brand had already been subjected to a Corbyn-style, media trashing a decade earlier, involving pro-war big hitters like David Aaronovitch, then of The Times, and Nick Cohen. Brand’s high-profile, 2014 book, Revolution, described as ‘anti-capitalist’, sold 22,000 copies in the first 11 days and cited the likes of Noam Chomsky and David Graeber. It was targeted because of comments of this kind:

    Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

    The reason the occupants of the [elite] fun bus are so draconian in their defence of the economy is that they have decided to ditch the planet.’ (Brand, Revolution, Century, 2014, ebook, p. 345)

    The reality is that ‘we live under a tyranny’. (p. 550) The US, in particular, ‘acts like an army that enforces the business interests of the corporations it is allied to’. (p. 493) Brand noted that 70 per cent of the UK press is controlled by three companies, 90 per cent of the US press by six, and ‘the richest 1 per cent of British people have as much as the poorest 55 per cent’. (p. 34)

    On possibilities for radical change, Brand wrote:

    Remember, the people who tell you this can’t work, in government, on Fox News or MSNBC, or in op-eds in the Guardian or the Spectator, or wherever, are people with a vested interest in things staying the same.’ (p. 514)

    Anyone who has read Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, will know that dissidents reaching a massive audience with messages of this kind will certainly be subject to intense, escalating attacks from establishment media. Brand doesn’t need to be as radical as Assange, or as politically influential as Corbyn, to qualify. Even comparatively low-profile, UK academic dissidents like Piers Robinson, Tim Hayward and David Miller have been targeted with propaganda smears intended to silence them. The fact that Brand has recently interviewed the likes of right-wing Ben Shapiro doesn’t nullify his record on left dissent. Incidentally, the title of the video of that interview is: ‘Russell Brand & Ben Shapiro “Respectfully Disagreeing”.’

    Conclusion

    The discrediting and silencing of influential, anti-war dissidents is an extremely serious matter. In May, the Costs of War project, based at Brown University in the United States, estimated that the total death toll in post-9/11 wars – including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – could be at least 4.5-4.7 million. The authors of the report commented:

    A 2018 survey of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees showed that more than 60% were traumatized by war experiences, including attacks by military forces, coping with the murder or disappearance of relatives, living through torture and solitary confinement, and witnessing murders, abuse, and sexual violence. More than 6% had been raped.

    There is good reason to believe that the intensity of the 2002-2003 anti-war protests – not least the impact on Tony Blair’s political career – made it much harder for UK opposition parties and the UK government to support Obama’s planned war on Syria in 2013. Consequently, without British support, that formal, full-on US declaration of war did not happen.

    This absolutely does not mean that anti-war voices should be afforded lenient treatment; it means the claims against them, and any counterclaims, must be subjected to careful scrutiny in a way that is fundamentally rational and fair.

    If trial by media in a court of public opinion distorted by overwhelming propaganda is all it takes to silence leading anti-war voices seeking to restrain the rampant US-UK war machine, then that is simply not good enough.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Message to Donald Rumsfeld’s Ghost About My Known Knowns

    On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists.  Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:

    Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

    When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”

    He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.

    Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state.  This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.

    A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point.  He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”  He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.”  Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.

    Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector,  made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is.  See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:

    Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification.  It was a war of aggression.  Millions died as a result.  And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes.  The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see.  Very, very easy to see.

    On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:

    The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one.  No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem.  If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one.  Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media.  The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future.  The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.

    Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.

    I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth.  It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework.  Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all.  I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional.  Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues.  Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?

    Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons.  It causes me to shake my head in amazement.  When will people learn?  How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex.  There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.

    If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns.  So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order.  Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework.  All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.

    My Known Knowns:

    • The U.S. national security state led by the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This is The foundational event for everything that has followed.  It set the tone and sent the message that deep state forces will do anything to wage their wars at home and abroad.  They killed JFK because he was ending the war against Vietnam, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race.
    • Those same forces assassinated Malcolm X fourteen months later on February 21, 1965 because he too had become a champion of peace, human rights, and racial justice with his budding alliance with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an alliance of these two black leaders posed too great a threat to the racist warfare state.  This conspiracy was carried out by the Nation of Islam, the New York Police Department, and U.S. intelligence agencies.
    • The Indonesian government’s slaughter of more than one million mainly poor rice farmers in 1965-6 was the result of a scheme planned by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired. It was connected to Dulles’s role in the assassination of JFK, the CIA-engineered coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, his replacement by the dictator Suharto, and his mass slaughter ten years later, starting in December 1975.  The American-installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965.
    • In June of 1967, Israel, a purported ally of the U.S., attacked and destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian armies, claiming falsely that Egypt was about to attack Israel. This was a lie that was later admitted by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech he gave in 1982 in Washington, D.C.  Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza and still occupies the Golan Heights as well.  In June 1967, Israel also attacked and tried to sink the U.S. intelligence gathering ship the U.S. Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 170 others.  Washington covered up these intentional murders to protect Israel.
    • On April 4, 1968, these same intelligence forces led by the FBI, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not shot by James Earl Ray, the officially alleged assassin, but by a hit man who was part of another intricate government conspiracy.  King was killed because of his work for racial and human rights and justice, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his push for economic justice with the Poor People’s Campaign.
    • Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on his way to the presidency, was also assassinated by deep state intelligence forces in another vastly intricate conspiracy. He was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan, who was a hypnotized patsy standing in front of RFK. He was assassinated by a CIA hit man who was standing behind him and shot him from close range.  RFK, also, was assassinated because he was intent on ending the war against Vietnam, bringing racial and economic justice to the country, and pursuing the assassins of his brother John.
    • The escalation of the war against Vietnam by Pres. Lyndon Johnson was based on the Tonkin Gulf lies. Its savage waging by Richard Nixon for eight years was based on endless lies.  These men were war criminals of the highest order.  Nixon’s 1968 election was facilitated by the “October Surprise” when South Vietnam withdrew from peace negotiations to end the war.  This was secretly arranged by Nixon and his intermediaries.
    • The well-known Watergate scandal story, as told by Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post, that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is an entertaining fiction concealing intelligence operations.
    • Another October Surprise was arranged for the 1980 presidential election. It was linked to the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, led by future CIA Director under Reagan, William Casey, and former CIA Director and Vice-President under Reagan, George H. W. Bush.  As in 1968, a secret deal was made to secure the Republican’s election by making a deal with Iran to withhold releasing the American hostages they held until after the election.  They were released minutes after Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981.  American presidential elections have been fraught with scandals, as in 2000 when George W. Bush and team stole the election from Democrat Al Gore, and Russia-gate was conjured up by the Democrats in 2016 to try to prevent Trump’s election.
    • The Reagan administration, together with the CIA, armed the so-called “Contras” to wage war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua that had overthrown the vicious U.S. supported dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Contras were Somoza supporters and part of a long line of terrorists that the U.S. had used throughout Latin America where they supported dictators and death squads to squelch democratic movements. Such state terrorism was of a piece with the September 11, 1973 U.S. engineered coup against the democratic government of President Salvatore Allende in Chile and his replacement with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
    • The Persian Gulf War waged by George H.W. Bush in 1991 – the first made for TV war – was based on lie upon lie promoted by the administration and their public relations firm. It was a war of aggression celebrated by CNN and other media as a joyous July 4th fireworks display.
    • Then the neoliberal phony William Clinton spent eight years bombing Iraq, dismantling the social safety net, deregulating the banks, attacking and dismantling Yugoslavia, savagely bombing Serbia, etc. In a span of four months in 1999 he bombed four countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.  He maintained the U.S. sanctions placed on Iraq following the Gulf War that resulted in the death of 500,00 Iraqi children.  When his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes if the price was worth it, Albright said, “We think the price is worth it.”
    • The attacks of September 11, 2001, referred to as 9/11 in an act of linguistic mind control in order to create an ongoing sense of national emergency, and the anthrax attacks that followed, were a joint inside operation – a false flag – carried out by elements within the U.S. deep state.  Together with the CIA assassination of JFK, these acts of state terrorism mark a second fundamental turning point in efforts to extinguish any sense of democratic control in the United States.  Thus The Patriot Act, government spying, censorship, and ongoing attacks on individual rights.
    • The George W. Bush-led U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. and its “war on terror” were efforts to terrorize and control the Middle East, Southwest Asia, as well as the people of the U.S. The aforementioned Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his partner in crime Dick Cheney, carried out Bush’s known known war crimes justified by the crimes of Sept 11 as they simultaneously created a vast Homeland Security spying network while eliminating Americans basic freedoms.
    • Barack Obama was one of the most effective imperialist presidents in U.S. history. Although this is factually true, he was able to provide a smiling veneer to his work at institutionalizing the permanent warfare state.  When first entering office, he finished George W. Bush’s unfinished task of bailing out the finance capitalist class of Wall St.  Having hoodwinked liberals of his bona fides, he then spent eight years presiding over extrajudicial murders, drone attacks, the destruction of Libya, a coup in Ukraine bringing neo-Nazis to power, etc.  In 2016 alone he bombed seven countries Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq.  He expanded U.S. military bases throughout the world and sent special forces throughout Africa and Latin America.  He supported the new Cold War with sanctions on Russia.  He was a fitting successor to Bush junior.
    • Donald Trump, a New York City reality TV star and real estate tycoon, the surprise winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite the Democratic Party’s false Russia-gate propaganda, attacked Syria from sea and air in the first two years of his presidency, claiming falsely that these strikes were for Syria’s use of chemical weapons at Douma and for producing chemical weapons. In doing so, he warned Russia not to be associated with Syrian President Assad, a “mass murderer of men, women, and children.”  He did not criticize Israel that to the present day continues to bomb Syria, but he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He ordered the assassination by drone of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport while on a visit to meet with Iraq’s prime minister.  As an insider contrary to all portrayals, he presided over Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccination development and deployment, which was a military-pharmaceutical-CIA program, whose key player was Robert Kadlec (former colleague of Donal Rumsfeld with deep ties to spy agencies), Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response and an ally of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.  On December 8, 2020 Trump joyously declared: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical time-frame for development and approval [for vaccines], as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.”  And he announced they he will quickly distribute such a “verifiably safe and effective vaccine” as soon as the FDA approved it because “We are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Today, we’re on the verge of another American medical miracle.”  The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approves three days later. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine received FDA emergency use authorization a week later.
    • This Covid-19 medical miracle was a con-job from the start. The official Covid operation launched in March 11, 2020 with worldwide lockdowns that destroyed economies while enriching the super-rich and devastating regular people, was a propaganda achievement carried out by intelligence and military apparatuses in conjunction with Big Pharma, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, etc. and promulgated by a vast around-the-clock corporate media disinformation campaign.  It was the third fundamental turning point – following the JFK assassination and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and anthrax – in destabilizing the economic, social and political life of all nations while undermining their sovereignty.  It was based on false science in the interests of further establishing a biosecurity state.  The intelligence agency planners who had conducted many germ war game simulations leading up to Covid -19 referred to a future arising out of such “attacks,” as the “New Normal.”  A close study of these  precedents, game-planning, and players makes this evident.  The aim was to militarize medicine and produce a centralized authoritarian state.  Its use of the PCR “test” to detect the virus was a lie from the start.  The Nobel Award winning scientist who developed the test, Kary Mullis, made it clear that “the PCR is a process. It does not tell you that you are sick.”  It is a process “to make a whole lot of something out of nothing,” but it can not detect a specific virus.  That it was used to detect all these Covid “cases” is all one needs to know about the fraud.
    • Joseph Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Ukraine while vice-president and the U.S. engineered the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, came into office intent on promoting the New Cold War with Russia and refused all Russian efforts to peacefully settle the Ukrainian crisis. He pushed NATO to further provoke Russia by moving farther to the east, surrounding Russia’s borders.  He supported the neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements and its government’s continuous attacks on the Russian speaking Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.  In doing so, he clearly provoked Russian into sending troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022.  He has fueled this war relentlessly and has pushed the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  He supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.  He currently presides over an aggressive provocation of China.  And like his predecessor Trump, he promotes the Covid disinformation campaign and the use of “vaccines,” urging people to get their jabs.
    • Throughout all these decades and the matters touched upon here – some of my known knowns – there is another dominant theme that recurs again and again.  It is the support for Israel and its evil apartheid regime’s repeated slaughters and persecution of the Palestinian people after having dispossessed them of their ancestral land. This has been a constant fact throughout all U.S. administrations since the JFK assassination and Israel’s subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons that Kennedy opposed.  It is been aided and abetted by the rise of the neocon elements within the U.S. government and the 1997 formation of The Project for the New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Donald Kagan, whose signees included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., and their claim for the need “for a new Pearl Harbor.”  Many of these people, who held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, became members of the Bush administration.  Once the attacks of September 11th occurred and a summer of moviegoers watching the new film Pearl Harbor had passed, George W. Bush and the corporate media immediately and repeatedly proclaimed the attacks a new Pearl Harbor.  Once again, the Palestinian’s and Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that is widely and falsely reported as unprovoked, as is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been referred to as “a Pearl Harbor Moment.”  By today, Monday 9 Oct. 2023, President Biden has already given full U.S. support to Israel as it savagely attacks Gaza and has said that additional assistance for the Israeli Defense Forces is now on its way to Israel with more to follow over the coming days. Rather than acting as an instrument for peace, the U.S. government continues its  support for Israel’s crimes as if it were the same country. The Israel Lobby and the government of Israel has for decades exerted a powerful control over U.S. Middle East policies and much more as well.  The Mossad has often worked closely under the aegis of the CIA together with Britain’s M16 to assassinate opponents and provoke war after war.

    Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns.  He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.

    One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things.  It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.

    When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course.  Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.

    “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”  – Norman O. Brown

    Note:  If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.