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Israel offers privileges to settlement companies affected by Boycott

Palestine Information Center – October 2, 2017

NAZARETH – Israeli Economy Minister Eli Cohen decided to offer special privileges to Israeli companies working in settlements in defiance to international boycott resolutions.

Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported that the decision stipulates offering aid in form of tax privileges in the exportation field for the factories affected by the boycott in order to guarantee continuing work in settlements.

The UN Human Rights Council decided to publish a blacklist including the names of factories and companies working in settlements in order to support the boycott and pressure these firms to stop working in the settlements as well as to urge international companies to stop dealing with Israel.

October 2, 2017 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , | 1 Comment

US ‘completely & unlawfully seize’ Russian SF consulate as blacksmith breaks lock

RT | October 2, 2017

A blacksmith has broken a lock as the police guarded Russian consular residence in San Francisco under the cover of a tarp. The Russian Foreign Ministry said Washington has failed to “give up on its unlawful intents” and reserves its right to respond.

A “Pop-A-Lock” van could be seen parked near the entrance to the Russian consular residence in San Francisco Monday, with a blacksmith in casual clothes having dealt with a lock at the residence.

Covered by a large piece of tarp, the blacksmith entered the premises and proceeded to its entrance while the gate was guarded by police officers. In broad daylight, the tarpaulin was then moved to cover the doors of the consular residence, with the blacksmith having apparently worked on the lock under its cover.

Russian diplomats were given an October 1 deadline to vacate the residence, following a directive by the US State Department ordering the closure of the Russian Consulate in San Francisco.

“Despite warnings, US authorities have not listened to the voice of reason and didn’t give up on their unlawful intents. Today they completely seized all premises of Russia’s Consulate General in San Francisco, with the residential section of the administrative building,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Monday, adding that American secret services have been “bossing around” in the building’s restricted areas for a month.

A separate residence of the consul general has also been “seized,” the statement added, saying that US actions are a “new flagrant violation of international law.”

October 2, 2017 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Russophobia | | 1 Comment

Trampling Core American Values US Cracks Down on RT

By Andrei AKULOV | Strategic Culture Foundation | 02.10.2017

RT America, the American arm of the state-owned Russia Today, has been notified by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that it must register as a foreign agent that is disseminating propaganda in the United States under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Otherwise, it might face restrictions that would make it unable to continue work in the country. Passed in 1938, FARA requires those who represent the interest of foreign powers to disclose their relationship along with information about related activities and finances. The DOJ is also investigating Sputnik, another Kremlin-controlled media organization, which could also be compelled to register under FARA.

The law normally applies to political consultants and those working in lobbying or public relations. The enforcement of FARA has been weak historically. There are 401 entities in the active FARA register that include tourist boards and lobbyists. Normally, media organizations have been exempted from the law. After all, RT and Sputnik are legitimate news outlets no different than the BBC or Germany’s Deutsche Welle, neither of which is subject to FARA. The legal pressure upon them has grave implications for freedom of speech.

RT America can continue to operate in the United States but it will have to regularly submit the information about its sources of foreign government-tied revenue and the contacts it made the US. Any news product must be labeled as being influenced or financed by the Russian government. The broadcaster might be asked to provide the list of all the employees, their salaries, home addresses and telephones.

Earlier this year, a Democratic senator and two congressmen from both parties introduced a bill called the Agents Registration Modernization and Enforcement Act, which would broaden the scope of FARA. They specifically named RT as a target of the legislation.

RT and Sputnik were identified in a US intelligence report in January as being arms of Russia’s “state-run propaganda machine” that served as a “platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.” The report states that the outlets played a role in Russia’s “influence campaign” to back Donald Trump and attack Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to it, RT “actively collaborated with WikiLeaks” during the presidential election. The paper asserts that Sputnik and RT “consistently cast President-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment.”

According to RT editor- in-chief Margarita Simonyan, the registration “may entail restrictions that will simply not allow us to work in” the United States. She pointed out that a campaign to “ruin the reputation” of RT was followed by “people being put under critical pressure so that they won’t appear on air and stopped giving us interviews.” On September 29, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a Security Council meeting that Russian media outlets abroad were facing increasing and “unacceptable” pressure. That statement followed an accusation the previous day by the Russian Foreign Ministry that the United States was placing “unwarranted pressure” on Russia’s RT television network by compelling it to register as a foreign agent. The Ministry said that every move in relation to a Russian media will have a relevant response.

The recent attack against RT and Sputnik is part of a broader picture. The US countermeasures aren’t limited to those stemming from Mueller’s probe. The Department of Homeland Security has said all government agencies must stop using Kaspersky Lab products within 90 days, fearing that the Moscow-based cybersecurity company might be susceptible to Kremlin influence.

It makes spring to mind the hysteria over the activities of former Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, who was accused of attempts to influence the presidential election and other wrongdoings just because he met some people, which is part of his job. The NATO-linked Atlantic Council went as far as Poland to include RT into the list of targets for cyberattacks!

35 Russian diplomats were expelled from the US in late 2016. In early September, three Russian diplomatic outposts – the consulate in San Francisco and trade offices in Washington and New York – were seized after it was confirmed that the Russian staff had complied with the administration’s order to get out within two days. It was done in open violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, Article 17 of which states that «the receiving State shall, even in case of armed conflict, respect and protect the consular premises, together with the property of the consular post and the consular archives». The same way the attacks against the media outlets violate the universally accepted norms of freedom of speech.

Actually, the US itself is involved in activities it tries to put the blame on Russia for. The government spends budget money on involvement in other states internal affairs and propaganda efforts. In 2008, the State Department created the Digital Outreach Team to engage on Internet sites, including on blogs, news sites and discussion forums. Formally, its mission is to “explain US foreign policy and to counter misinformation”.

It was the British Guardian, not a Russian newspaper, that published the story about the Pentagon’s Operation Earnest Voice (OEV) program. The aim of the initiative is to develop software that would allow to secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. The publication said the US military was developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets”. Each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries”.

The Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014 envisaged providing funds “to strengthen democratic institutions and political and civil society organizations in the Russian Federation.” As part of anti-Russian sanctions, the US State Department allocated $60 million to ‘Russian democratic and civil organizations for the support of media and free internet in Russia’ from 2016 to 2018. The State Department is to allocate $20 million annually for these purposes, acting both directly and via Soros’s National Endowment for Democracy.

The list can go on. The hunchback does not see his own hump. Looks like the US administration under pressure from Congress is doing its best to thwart any attempts to ease the tensions between the two countries. It does not hesitate to use any methods to achieve the goal, including trampling on the core America value such as freedom of speech.

October 2, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 2 Comments

What Did Washington Achieve in its Six Year War on Syria?

By Ron Paul | October 2, 2017

Now that the defeat of ISIS in Syria appears imminent, with the Syrian army clearing out some of the last ISIS strongholds in the east, Washington’s interventionists are searching for new excuses to maintain the illegal US military presence in the country. Their original rationale for intervention has long been exposed as another lie.

Remember that President Obama initially involved the US military in Iraq and Syria to “prevent genocide” of the Yazidis and promised the operation would not drift into US “boots on the ground.” That was three years ago and the US military became steadily more involved while Congress continued to dodge its Constitutional obligations. The US even built military bases in Syria despite having no permission to do so! Imagine if Syria started building military bases here in the US against our wishes.

After six years of war the Syrian government has nearly defeated ISIS and al-Qaeda and the US-backed “moderates” turned out to be either Islamist extremists or Kurdish soldiers for hire. According to a recent report, the US has shipped two billion dollars worth of weapons to fighters in Syria via eastern Europe. Much of these weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS directly, or indirectly through “moderates” taking their weapons with them while joining ISIS or al-Qaeda.

“Assad must go,” proclaimed President Obama back in 2011, as he claimed that the Syrian leader was committing genocide against his own people and that regime change was the only way to save Syrians. Then earlier this year, when eastern Aleppo was about to be liberated by the Syrian government, the neocons warned that Assad would move in and kill all the inhabitants. They warned that the population of eastern Aleppo would flee from the Syrian army. But something very different happened. According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, 600,000 refugees returned to Syria by August. Half of the returnees went back to Aleppo, where we were told Assad was waiting to kill them.

What happened? The neocons and “humanitarian interventionists” lied. Just as they lied about Libya, Iraq, and so on.

While it was mostly ignored by the mainstream media, just this week a Christian was elected speaker of the Syrian parliament. The new speaker is a 58-year-old Orthodox Christian law graduate and member of President Assad’s Baath party.

How many Christians does our “ally” Saudi Arabia have in its parliament? Oh I forgot, Saudi Arabia has no elected parliament.

Why does it seem that US policy in the Middle East always hurts Christians the most? In Iraq, Christians suffered disproportionately from the 2003 US invasion. In fact there are hardly any Christians left. Why aren’t more US Christian groups demanding that the US get out of the Middle East?

The US is not about to leave on its own. With ISIS all but defeated in Syria, many in Washington are calling for the US military to continue its illegal occupation of parts of the country to protect against Iranian influence! Of course before the US military actions in Iraq and Syria there was far less Iranian influence in the region! So US foreign interventionism is producing new problems that can only be solved by more US interventionism? The military industrial complex could not have dreamed of a better scheme to rob the American people while enriching themselves!

What have we achieved in Syria? Nothing good.

October 2, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , | 2 Comments

Assange: Forget Russia,The Real Threat to America comes from Israel and the Israel Lobby

AWD News | September 22, 2017

From his refuge in the Ecuador Embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed a press conference of his supporters in Berlin on Tuesday, amid speculation that he planned to reveal potential threats to America.

But early into his speech, Assange said that while more revelations were to come, he would not be making any major announcements, asserting that there would be no point in making such revelations at a time when most Americans would be sleeping.

“Russian actions on its own doorstep in Eastern Europe do not in fact threaten the United States or any actual vital interest. Nor does Moscow threaten the U.S. through its intervention on behalf of the Syrian government in the Middle East. That Russia is described incessantly as a threat in those areas is largely a contrivance arranged by the media, the Democratic and Republican National Committees and by the White House. Candidate Donald Trump appeared to recognize that fact before he began listening to Michael Flynn, who has a rather different view. Hopefully the old Trump will prevail, there is, however, another country that has interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has corrupted America’s legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby that oddly is not subject to the accountability afforded by the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 even though it manifestly works on behalf of a foreign government. That country is, of course, Israel” said Assange.

The assessment of Israel and what damage it does regarding what most Americans would regard as genuine national interests is most definitely not reported, revealing once again that what is not written is every bit as important as what is. I would note how what has recently happened right in front of us relating to Israel is apparently not considered fit to print and will never appear on any disapproving editorial page. Just this week the Senate unanimously passed an Anti-Semitism Awareness bill and also by a 99 to zero vote renewed and strengthened sanctions against Iran, which could wreck the one year old anti-nuclear weapon proliferation agreement with that country.

The Anti-Semitism bill makes Jews and Jewish interests a legally protected class, immune from any criticism. “Free speech” means in practice that you can burn an American flag, sell pornography, attack Christianity in the vilest terms or castigate the government in Washington all you want but criticizing Israel is off limits if you want to avoid falling into the clutches of the legal system. The Act is a major step forward in effectively making any expressed opposition to Israeli actions a hate crime.

And it is similar to punitive legislation that has been enacted in twenty-two states as well as in Canada. It is strongly supported by the Israel Lobby, which quite likely drafted it, and is seeking to use legal challenges to delegitimize and eliminate any opposition to the policies of the state of Israel.

As the Act is clearly intended to restrict First Amendment rights if they are perceived as impacting on broadly defined Jewish sensitivities, it should be opposed on that basis alone, but it is very popular in Congress, which is de facto owned by the Israel Lobby. That the legislation is not being condemned or even discussed in the generally liberal media tells you everything you need to know about the amazing power of one particular unelected and unaccountable lobby in the U.S.

October 2, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , | 5 Comments