A Brilliant Early Defender of Palestine – Book Review
(Colin Andersen, Balfour in the Dock. J.M.N. Jeffries and the Case for the Prosecution. Bloxham, Oxon: Skyscraper Publications, 2017)
Reviewed by Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle | April 18, 2018
J.M.N (Joseph) Jeffries was an outstanding British journalist whose book Palestine: The Reality (1939) is described by Colin Andersen as ‘a masterwork of history and a scathing indictment of British policy in Palestine from 1914 to 1938.’
George Antonius’ seminal work, The Arab Awakening, had been published only the year before but it is a more general account of British betrayal of the Arabs, whereas the value of the Jeffries book lies in his single-minded focus on Palestine and the force of his arguments. Few copies of the book were printed, and it is now almost impossible to find even in libraries. By Edward Said and many others, however, its value as an early exposure of British perfidy has long since been recognized.
Zionism itself was a wicked idea from the start. Herzl was not ignorant of the realities on the ground in Palestine. In the form of the people, he wanted to remove them and in the form of the land he wanted to turn Palestine into something else. Chaim Weizmann was no better. He lied, deceived and dissimulated as a matter of course. By 1914, with one exception, Zionism had no support anywhere. The Ottoman sultan, the Kaiser, and the Tsar’s government had all turned their backs on it. By Jews around the world, the Zionists were regarded as cranks, fanatics, and heretics but the one exception was critical. In Britain, the seed of imperial support for this mad idea had been sown by Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, when in 1903 he backed Zionist settlement in East Africa.
By 1917 Zionism had been absorbed into British imperialism. The motive was not gratitude for Weizmann’s chemical research in support of the war effort or anything as fanciful as sympathy for a persecuted people bent on returning to their ancient homeland but the recognition that Zionism was a tool Britain could use. The chief villains of the piece, in Jeffries’ reading, were the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and his Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, both of whom, to use a term now current, ‘weaponised’ Zionism, first to bring the US into the war and then to turn Palestine over to their Zionist proxies, much as the US, Britain, France and their ‘allies’ have tried hard over the past seven years to put Syria in the hands of their takfiri proxies.
It was Jeffries, an outstanding correspondent for the London Daily Mail, who in 1923 exposed the deception deliberately built into Sir Henry McMahon’s correspondence with the Sharif Husayn of Mecca in 1915. The Sharif had outlined the area in which the Arabs were to be granted independence in return for supporting the British war effort. McMahon made specific exceptions for Mersin and Alexandretta (Iskanderun) and ‘portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, which cannot be said to be purely Arab.’ The excluded region had a substantial Christian percentage, but in line with its imperial tactics of divide and rule Britain chose to regard only Muslims as ‘Arab’ despite the role Christians played in the formulation of the Arab national idea.
This region ‘west of Damascus’ was the coastal littoral Britain intended to allocate to France in Sykes-Picot the following year but on no map, can Palestine be found west of Damascus. Homs and Hama are mentioned but not Jerusalem, for the obvious reason that the British knew that the Sharif Husayn would never agree to its exclusion from the area set aside for ‘Arab independence.’ Although Antonius is given the credit he deserves for exposing the depth of deceit in the McMahon letters to the Sharif Husayn, it was Jeffries, in articles written for the Daily Mail in 1923, based on a copy of the text he had been given by King Feisal, who first brought this deception to the attention of the British public.
The Husayn-McMahon correspondence was followed in 1916 by the treachery of Sykes-Picot and in 1917 by the further treachery of the Balfour declaration, a pledge not just made to the Zionists but largely written by them. Behind the caviling and declarations of nothing but good intentions, Jeffries knew exactly what they were up to the formula of a ‘national home’ was adopted for the time only because pressing for statehood would be regarded even by the British government as too provocative. The ‘country without a people for a people without a country’ was a brazen lie which the Zionists pretended to believe because they did not want the Palestinians to be there. They were being wished away psychologically long before they could be removed physically. As Jeffries was to write, they were nobodies who would eventually ‘vanish like mist before the sun of Zion.’
Behind his lofty, somewhat detached philosophical exterior, Balfour was as remorseless as the fanatics whose cause he was promoting, not in their interests, as they undoubtedly realized, but Britain’s. Zionism, he wrote in 1919, right or wrong, good or bad, was rooted in traditions, present needs and future hopes of ‘far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’ Crucially, the words ‘now’ and ‘inhabit’ point to what Balfour, the British government, and the Zionists, colluding, had in mind: Palestine did not belong to the Palestinians, they were only ‘inhabiting’ it and only for ‘now.’ In the same statement Balfour, in a rare moment of truth, wrote that insofar as Palestine was concerned ‘the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.’
In Palestine: The Reality Jeffries traced Balfour’s declaration from inception through gestation to birth. As Colin Andersen writes, far from being a pure and lofty initiative of the British government, the declaration was in its drafting ‘very much an Anglo-Zionist-American affair.’ The process began ‘in earnest’ in June 1917, when Weizmann, Lord Rothschild, and Sir Ronald Graham, assistant undersecretary at the Foreign Office, visited Balfour, who had just returned from a five-week visit to the US, where he met the leading US Zionist, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The question of a declaration on Palestine was discussed and after seeing Weizmann and Rothschild back in London, the drafting began, as Jeffries was to write, ‘on both sides of the Atlantic.’
It remains very worthwhile to consider how these drafts changed. As documented by Jeffries, in its first draft, prepared in July 1917, the British government spoke of Palestine being recognized as ‘the National Home of the Jewish people’, with the conditions of their ‘national life’ being determined with representatives of the ‘Zionist Organization.’ There is no mention of the theme dwelt upon by Balfour and others in the government of historical Jewish suffering and the need for a refuge and neither is there any mention of the majority of the population – Arab – actually living in Palestine.
On July 18 the Zionists produced their amended version in which Palestine would be ‘reconstituted’ as the national home of the Jewish people. In August Lord Milner, a senior figure in the government prepared a draft removing ‘reconstituted’ and referring to ‘a’ Jewish national home ‘in’ Palestine. This was approved by Balfour but opposed by Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, both Jewish and anti-zionist, who described Zionism as a ‘mischievous political creed’, who said there was no Jewish nation and even argued that Zionism should be declared as illegal ‘and against the national interest.’ By longing for the day when he could ‘shake British soil from his shoes’ and go to Palestine, the British Jew would have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and admitted that ‘he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain or to be treated as an Englishman.’ At a Cabinet meeting on October 4, Montagu again objected vigorously, with the support of Lord Curzon, who asked ‘How was it proposed to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place?’
In Washington on October 13, President Wilson approved to have the British draft, clearly without spending much time thinking about it. Back in London, a reworded draft referred to the British government viewing with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish ‘race’, a phrase as bereft of any logic, historical or otherwise, as the Jewish ‘people’ or ‘nation.’ This time, however, the draft referred to the civil and religious rights of ‘existing’ non-Jewish communities in Palestine – the Palestinians, 90 percent of the population- as well as the rights of Jews elsewhere who were content with their existing nationality ‘and citizenship’, Balfour added.
This draft was also approved by Wilson. Alterations at the behest of Louis Brandeis led to further rewording, especially ‘people’ instead of ‘race.’ The reference to the rights of the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’ raised objections from the Zionists. How could anyone think that they could be damaged by the establishment of a national Jewish home? After all, did not Jewish religious tradition prescribe that the stranger must be looked after? In their inverted world, it was the stranger, themselves, who owned the land and the true owners, individually and collectively, the people of Palestine, who were the strangers, not that the Zionists had any intention of looking after them or even sharing the land. They wanted to get rid of them.
The final form of the declaration was approved by the War Cabinet on October 31 and issued on November 2. It ends with Balfour’s request to Lord Rothschild to bring the declaration to the notice of the Zionist Federation. Nothing more cynically humorous had ever been penned than these two lines, wrote Jeffries, seeing that the Zionists had collaborated in drafting the declaration: in its final form it would never have been issued without their approval. Jeffries describes the document as the most discreditable produced by a British government in living memory.
He follows a trail spotted with lies and deceit to where it led after the war, to a mandatory administration of Palestine top-heavy with Zionists and Palestine resistance to the Anglo-Zionist occupation of their land. By 1937 the Peel report was recommending partition and transfer of part of the Palestinian population, a solution which the Zionists wanted not in part but full but part would at least be a start. Wrote Jeffries: ‘How can anyone suggest that about a quarter of the Arab population should be removed by force from the land which they and theirs have occupied for centuries?’
Colin Andersen, blending original material from Palestine: The Reality and Jeffries’ other writings with his own analysis and interpretation, has produced a book that no student of Britain’s deceits from Husain-McMahon to the Balfour Declaration should leave unread. There is a broader context, of course. In 1917, as the Balfour Declaration was being prepared and the world was reacting to the Bolshevik revolution, Lloyd George was giving assurances to the British labor movement that territorial annexation was the last thing the government had on its own mind.
The British were sick of war and the government was alarmed at the effects of the Bolshevik revolution, at a time it needed to ‘comb out’ more working-class men of fighting age to send to the front. They had to be deceived. In December 1917, addressing trade union leaders, Lloyd George asserted that ‘our one object in the war was to defend the violated public law of Europe, to vindicate Treaty obligations and to secure the restoration of Belgium.’ The release by the Bolsheviks of the contents of Sykes-Picot on November 23 had been an embarrassment but the Labor Party could still issue a statement praising Lloyd George, whose speech had revealed ‘a government and a people seeking no selfish or predatory aims of any kind, pursuing with one unchanging mind, one unchanging purpose: to obtain justice for others so that we thereby secure for ourselves a lasting peace. We desire neither to destroy Germany or diminish her boundaries: we seek neither to exalt ourselves nor to enlarge our empire.’
The immense harm which has been done to the Palestinians also has to be set in a broader regional context. The partition of Arab lands was of a piece with the planned partition of Anatolia, where the powers planned to establish a Christian Armenian ‘protectorate’ in eastern provinces where the population was 80 percent Muslim. In 1919 Lloyd George was the principal architect of the Greek invasion of western Anatolia, which was not to end, after great loss of life and massive destruction, until 1922. In the same year the British government launched the ‘war of intervention’ against the Bolsheviks: in the 1930s it launched the war of non-intervention against the republican government of Spain as well as enabling the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Japanese invasion of China. Class and money interests of the British establishment took precedence over national interests (not that by this same establishment they were seen as being any different).
We can see continuity in the leading role Britain has played in the destruction of Iraq and Libya and the devastation of Syria by armed proxies over the past eight years, up to the missile attack of April 14. The record of lies, deception, intimidation, and aggression all the way since 1915 is practically seamless. We can only imagine what a journalist of the caliber of J.M.N Jeffries would have made of all this.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).
Russia Urges US Military to Scale Back in Korean Peninsula
teleSUR | April 21, 2018
Russia is welcoming North Korea’s decision to suspend nuclear and missile tests, while simultaneously urging the United States and South Korea to scale back on their own military activities in the peninsula.
In a statement released Saturday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said: “We consider this decision to be an important step toward further easing of tensions on the Korean peninsula and the strengthening of positive trends on settlement of the Northeast Asian situation.
“We are urging the United States and the Republic of Korea to take adequate accommodating steps aimed at slowing down military activities in the region and reaching mutually acceptable agreements with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at the upcoming intra-Korean and U.S.-North Korean summits.”
According to Russian state press agency TASS, Moscow is hoping the situation proceeds along the path originally suggested by Russia and China.
North Korea announced early Saturday that it was suspending all nuclear and missile tests, and focusing its development instead on socialist economic development and peace.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country no longer needs to conduct tests because it has completed its goal of developing nuclear weapons.
“The northern nuclear test ground of the DPRK will be dismantled to transparently guarantee the discontinuance of the nuclear test,” North Korean state news agency KCNA said.
Kim is scheduled to hold talks with U.S. President Donald Trump in May, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in next week.
He has recently held meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the CIA’s head and Secretary of State appointee, Mike Pompeo.
Media Support US Violence Against Syria, but Long for More
By Gregory Shupak | FAIR | April 20, 2018
Corporate media outlets were glad that the US, France and Britain bombed Syria in violation of international law (FAIR.org, 4/18/18), but lamented what they see as a dearth of US violence in the country.
In The Atlantic (4/14/18), Thanassis Cambanis described the war crime as “undoubtedly a good thing,” and called for “sustained attention and investment, of diplomatic, economic and military resources”—though the latter rubbed up against his assessment in the same paragraph that “a major regional war will only make things worse.” Moreover, he described “the most realistic possibility” for the US and its partners in Syria as “an incomplete and possibly destabilizing policy of confrontation [and] containment. But a reckoning can’t be deferred forever.”
This “reckoning” was his somewhat oblique way of referring to a war pitting the US and its allies against the Syrian government and its allies, the very “wider regional war” he just warned against. In Cambanis’ view, “confrontations” between nuclear-armed America and nuclear-armed Russia are “inevitable,” which implies that there is no sense in trying to avoid such potentially apocalyptic scenarios.
A Washington Post editorial (4/14/18) said that “Mr. Trump was right to order the strikes.” The paper was glad that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and President Donald Trump “properly left open the possibility of further action.” The Post’s rationale for continuing to attack Syria was that “the challenge to vital US interests in Syria is far from over,” and that Trump was therefore wrong “to call Friday’s operation a ‘Mission Accomplished.’” These “interests” include ensuring that Iran does not “obtain the land corridor it seeks across Syria.” (Cambanis, similarly, described as “justified” US efforts to “contain Syria and its allies.”)
The paper was concerned because Trump says that he’d like to subcontract US activities in Syria to US regional partners like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Egypt. None of these states, the Post fretted, “are capable of working with local forces [in Syria] to stabilize and hold the large stretch of [Syrian] territory now under de facto US control east of the Euphrates River.”
The editorial failed to note that this territory amounts to “about one-third of the country, including most of the oil wealth” (New York Times, 3/8/18) and “much of Syria’s best agricultural land” (Syria Comment, 1/15/18). The legitimacy of “de facto US control” over Syrian territory and some of its most valuable resources is apparently beyond question, as is the US’s alleged right to determine which governments are allowed to be friendly with each other: The Iranian “land corridor” refers to the Iranian government having warm relations with the governments of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, something the Post appears to regard as a grave danger.
The editorial says that the US and its allies sought to “minimize the risk of a direct military confrontation with Russia or Iran” and that this was “prudent,” but that “if Russia takes retaliatory action, including in cyberspace, the United States must be ready to respond.” According to this view, projecting US power in Syria is so essential that no form of opposition to US violence in Syria can be brooked, the concern for prudence having vanished.
The Post contended that the US must demand “an acceptable political settlement brokered by the United Nations”—“acceptable” signifying “the departure” of the Syrian government. Functionally, this means keeping the war going: Saying that negotiations should take place but that the only “acceptable” outcome is the dissolution of the Syrian government amounts to the same thing as saying that no negotiations should take place, particularly now that the Syrian government is working from a position of strength and unlikely to agree to its own surrender as a pre-condition for talks.
Andrew Rawnsley, writing in the Guardian (4/15/18), supported US violence in Syria by attacking its critics. He said that those who oppose the Anglo-American-French airstrikes on Syria out of “indifference” to Syria’s plight have the “sole merit of being candid,” unlike those who are
less honest . . . the self-proclaimed peace-lovers. Mainly to be found on the hand-wringing left, they are too busy looking in the mirror admiring their own halos to face the moral challenges posed by a situation like Syria.
Luckily Rawnsley has the requisite courage to meet “the moral challenges” and advocate more war: He says that the West should have “impos[ed] no-fly zones” early in the war in Syria, a policy that would have entailed attacking Syria’s air forces, an act of war by any definition. No-fly zones over Iraq and Libya ultimately led to regime change in both countries, with hideous results for their people.
Rawnsley’s complaint that the West applied “no meaningful pressure” to “bring [the Syrian government to the negotiating table” is wildly misleading; the Western powers in fact applied “meaningful pressure” to prevent negotiations.
Rawnsley also legitimized US violence against Syria by expunging the damage it has inflicted. He trotted out the well-worn lie that the West “stood by” and “fail[ed] to act” in Syria, a canard that FAIR has repeatedly de-bunked (e.g., 9/20/15, 4/7/17, 3/7/18). He characterized the West’s approach to seven years of war in Syria as “years of unmasterly inactivity,” having their hands “wedged firmly under their bottoms,” an “impotent posture,” “failures to act,” making the “grav[e] decision not to act,” “inaction,” “non-interventionist” and as “inaction” a second time. Yet the CIA’s effort to oust the Syrian government has been one of the costliest covert-action programs in the agency’s history; has built ten military bases in the country, with two more on the way; and has killed thousands of Syrian civilians in a bombing campaign ostensibly aimed at ISIS (Jacobin, 4/18/18).
“Non-interventionists,” Rawnsley concludes his article, “the horrors of Syria are on you.” Yet there is no shortage of horrors that are on the interventionists. Sanctions imposed by the US and its allies have punished the Syrian population (9/28/16). These states are implicated in sectarian violence that anti-government armed groups have carried out against minorities (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17). The US bombed a mosque in Aleppo, Syria, in the name of fighting Al Qaeda, killing almost 40 people (Independent, 4/18/17), and America used toxic depleted uranium against ISIS-held territory in Syria (Foreign Policy, 2/14/17): It would be rather difficult to claim that these horrors were caused by “non-interventionists.”
Cambanis, moreover, exclusively listed Syria, Iran and Russia among those governments who “have serially transgressed the laws of war” and “gotten away with murder” in Syria, but the atrocities attributable to the US and its allies surely constitute “serially transgress[ing] the laws of war” and having “gotten away with murder.”
The Syrian government and its partners are also responsible for a substantial share of carnage in the war, but Rawnsley’s accusation that “non-interventionists” are to blame for Syria’s bloodshed is completely untenable. His argument that Western states have inflicted insufficient harm on Syrians amounts to war propaganda.
And he’s far from the only media figure about whom this can be said.
Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto.
Another Dodgy British Dossier: the Skripal Case
In this second part of a series, Gareth Porter compares the same faulty logic employed in two purposely misleading, so-called British intelligence dossiers.
By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | April 21, 2018
The British government shared what was supposedly a dossier containing sensitive intelligence to convince allies and EU member states to support its accusation of Russian culpability in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England on March 4.
But like the infamous 2003 “dodgy dossier” prepared at the direction of Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify British involvement in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the intelligence dossier on the Salisbury poisoning turns out to have been based on politically-motivated speculation rather than actual intelligence
British officials used the hastily assembled “intelligence” briefing to brief the North Atlantic Council on March 15, the European Foreign Affairs Council on March 19 and the European summit meeting in Brussels on March 23.
The Need for Dramatic Claims
When Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ordered the production of an intelligence dossier to be used to convince allies and EU member states to join Britain in expelling Russian diplomats, they had a problem: they were unable to declare that nerve agent from a Russian military laboratory had been verified as the poison administered to the Skripals. As the well-informed former Ambassador Craig Murray learned from a Foreign and Commonwealth Office source, the British government military laboratory at Porton Down had been put under strong pressure by Johnson to agree that they had confirmed that the poison found in Salisbury had come from a specific Russian laboratory. Instead Porton Down would only agree to the much more ambiguous formula that it was nerve agent “of a type developed in Russia.”
May and Johnson: Needed dramatic claims
So May and Johnson needed some dramatic claims to buttress their argument to allies and EU member states that the Salisbury poisoning must have been a Russian government assassination attempt.
A letter from British national security adviser Mark Sedwill to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg released publicly on April 13, refers to two key claims in the dossier of a Russian program to research ways of delivering nerve agent, including smearing it on door handles, and of Russian production and stockpiling of nerve agent during the past decade.
But closer analysis of these claims, based in part on information provided by official British sources to the press, makes it clear that the government did not have any concrete “intelligence” to support those Government claims in the intelligence brief.
The Door Knob Claim
The Sedwill letter referred to a Russian “investigation of ways of delivering nerve agent, including by application to door handles” as being part of a broader alleged Russian government program of chemical weapons research and military training.” The letter was obviously implying that it had some secret intelligence on which to base the charge, and some in the British press pitched in to support the claim.
The first paragraph of a Guardian story on the intelligence dossier said, “Russia had tested whether door handles could be used to deliver nerve agent,” attributing the information to “previously classified intelligence over the Salisbury attack made public Friday.”
In another story about the evidence on the Salisbury poisoning, however, The Guardian, apparently reflecting its understanding of what government officials had conveyed, wrote, “Such an audacious attack could have been carried out only by trained professionals familiar with chemical weapons.” That statement hinted that the alleged Russian “investigation of ways of delivering nerve agents, including by application to door handles” was actually a speculative inference rather than a fact established by hard evidence.
A report in the Daily Mirror, evidently intended to support the government line, actually showed quite clearly that what was being presented as intelligence on alleged Russian research on delivering nerve agent via a door handle was in fact nothing of the sort. It quoted a “security source” as explaining how that claim in the intelligence paper was linked to the belief of counter-terrorism investigators that the Skripals first came in contact with nerve agent on the handle of Skripals’ front door.
“The door handle thing is big,” the unnamed source told the Mirror. “It amounts to Russia’s tradecraft manual on applying poisons to door handles. It’s the smoking gun.” The source was not saying that British intelligence had firsthand information about a Russian tradecraft manual; it was suggesting that one could somehow deduce from the assumed application of nerve agent to the door handle of the Skripal house that this was a sign of Russian intelligence tradecraft.
The source then appeared to confirm explicitly that this inference was the basis of the specific claim in the intelligence brief that, “It is strong proof Russia has in the last 10 years researched methods to administer poisons, including by using door handles.”
The Murder that Contradicts the Dossier
The idea that only intelligence operatives with formal training could have applied nerve agent to a door handle was not based on objective analysis. MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, knows very well that a 1995 murder committed in Moscow with a nerve agent developed by Soviet-era scientists was carried out by a private individual, not a government intelligence unit.
Court documents in the 1995 murder of banker Ivan Kivelidi, reported by the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, show that in 1994 a Russian criminal syndicate had acquired Novichok nerve agent, which had been synthesized by Soviet scientists, and that it was used the following year to kill Kivelidi and his secretary by applying some of the nerve agent on his telephone receiver.
Boris Kuznetsov, a dissident Russian lawyer involved in the Kivelidi murder case, who fled Russia in 2007 with copies of all the relevant documents, turned them over to the British government after the Skripal poisoning. The knowledge of that episode would account for Prime Minister May’s otherwise surprising acknowledgement on March 12 of the possibility that the poisoning might not have been a Russian government action but the consequence of the Russian government allowing nerve agent to “get into the hands of others”.
An Ongoing Russian Novichok Program?
The Sedwill letter made another sweeping claim of covert Russian production of the line of nerve agent that had been dubbed Novichok. “Within the last decade,” it said, “Russia has produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichok under the same programme.” If true, that would have been major evidence bearing on the Skripal poisoning, since such a program would be both covert and illegal under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Sedwill: No evidence
But neither the Sedwill letter nor any other statement from the British government has referred to the possession of any evidence for that claim, even in the most generic way. In fact, Prime Minister May said merely that Russia “had previously produced Novichoks and would still be able to do so”.
In contrast to its silence about any kind of information supporting its claim of Russian production and stockpiling of Novichok program in the past decade, the Sedwill letter cited “a combination of credible open-source reporting and intelligence” on the existence of the Russian program that developed the Novichok line of nerve agents in the 1970s and 1980s.
If the UK possessed actual evidence of such a Russian nerve agent program at Shikhany, the former military chemical weapons facility, it presumably would have informed the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of the fact and presented its evidence to the 41-member Executive Council, the governing body of the organization. It clearly has not done so, and it has not suggested that it was prevented from doing so by the fear of compromising an intelligence source within the Russian government.
The British government could also demand a “challenge inspection” at the facility. Any member of the Chemical Weapons Convention can call for an immediate inspection, and Russia would have had no option but to permit it. But it has not done so, signifying that it does not have the information necessary to identify the location of the alleged production and stockpiling of such a weapon, nor does it have the name of anyone who has worked on such a project.
Suspect Intercepted Russian Communications
Another claim in the British “intelligence” dossier is an intercepted Russian communication that allegedly supports the Russian nerve gas operation accusation.
The tabloid Express reported its sources saying such an intercept had been “a key part of Britain’s intelligence evidence.” The sources revealed that on March 4, a message from Damascus to Moscow intercepted by a listening post in Southern Cyprus contained the words, “The package has been delivered.” And the same message was said to have reported that two named individuals had “made a successful egress” – meaning that they had left.
But without knowing the context in which either statement was made, such quotes are meaningless. And one must ask how often something like those exact words would be communicated to Moscow from a diplomatic or military outpost somewhere in the world every single day. Furthermore, the second message to which the dossier is said to have referred actually revealed the names of the two men who had departed, so it clearly had nothing to do with a covert operation.
The May government was able to convince 29 other states, including the United States, to take action against Russia by expelling its diplomats, representing a deliberate step toward higher tensions with Moscow. But the intelligence dossier it deployed in that effort, as reflected in the Sedwill letter and media reporting, was far from being the kind of information one might expect to provoke such a major diplomatic move. It was instead, like the original 2003 “dodgy dossier” on WMD in Saddam’s Iraq, essentially a collection of misleading claims based on politically-skewed logic.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy and the recipient of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published in 2014.
“Spring Arriving 26 Days Early”–BBC
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 21, 2018
The BBC has been up to its tricks again!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09yddxd
The latest edition of Radio 4’s environmental programme, “Costing the Earth”, looks at how our springs are supposedly getting earlier. (Yes, I know spring starts in March!)
The programme’s opening introduction by presenter Lindsey Chapman gives us a clue that it won’t be an objective assessment:
We’re looking for signs of how a volatile climate is shifting our seasons, and affecting both our native wildlife and migrant visitors to these shores.
Chapman, also presenter of the Springwatch TV series, then adds:
I’ve been noticing changes on my own patch, from the arrival of the first swallows to the flowering times of spring flowers over the last ten years.
At about seven minutes in though, she makes this extraordinary statement:
Spring now arrives an average of 26 days earlier each year than it did 10 years ago. We know this because of the extraordinary records kept by the public, stretching back centuries.
As Paul Matthews points out:
This statement that Spring is almost a month earlier than it was just 10 years ago is complete nonsense and fails the most elementary sanity check. It appears, yet again, that where global warming is concerned, elementary common sense and fact-checking are thrown out by the BBC, and replaced with absurd exaggeration and alarmism.
So where did Chapman get this crazy claim from?
As she goes on to explain, it is supposedly from the Woodland Trust, who run a scheme called Nature’s Calendar.
This allows members of the public to record when they first see certain events each spring, such as birds, first flowerings, butterflies and so on. In other words, phenology. During warm springs, naturally enough, these events tend to arrive earlier.
According to Woodland Trust, these first sightings have been between around one and two weeks earlier in the last three years, though some butterfly and bird arrivals were as much as three weeks early in 2017:
https://naturescalendar.woodlandtrust.org.uk/analysis/seasonal-reports/
You will notice that Woodland Trust use 2001 as a baseline, and nowhere do they claim that spring is now 26 days earlier than ten years ago.
But why 2001? In fact they have only been collecting this data since 2000, and decided to use 2001 as the base year because, they claim, weather conditions that year “closely reflected the 30-year average”.
However, on closer examination we see that it is not the current 30-year average they are talking about (ie 1981-2010), but 1961-90.
This is highly significant, because the 1961-90 period was considerably colder than both the decades that preceded and followed it.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
HH Lamb pointed out that the onset of spring in Oxford was 16 days later between 1963-80, compared to 1920-50:
HH Lamb – “Climate History and the Modern World” (p 274):
To a large extent therefore, the onset of spring in recent years has merely returned to earlier patterns, with the end of the colder interlude.
We can see the effect of using the two different baselines below:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
The 1961-90 period was 0.7C colder than 1981-2010. We can also see that, while there have been ups and downs, there is little evidence of overall change in spring temperatures since around 1990.
This is definitely not the message portrayed by the BBC programme.
We should also note that the spring of 2001 was much colder than prior years, which makes it strange that it should be used as a base year at all. The Woodland Trust recognised this same point in their Spring 2005 report:
https://naturescalendar.woodlandtrust.org.uk/analysis/seasonal-reports/?p=3
Of course, when we are talking about “early springs”, temperatures in January and February may be just as important as those in April and May.
But when we look at Jan-March, and Feb–April, we find a very similar pattern – very little change in trend since 1990:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
This should be little surprise, when we see that, contrary to popular myth, temperatures in January and February have changed little since a century ago.
And, as with spring temperatures, there is a noticeable dip between 1961-90:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
Summary
There appears to be no evidence to back up Chapman’s claim that spring now arrives an average of 26 days earlier each year than it did 10 years ago, either in the temperature record or in the Woodland Trust surveys.
The latter are in any event misleading, and certainly not in a shape or from “scientific”. Their conclusions are obtained only by using an unusually cold year, 2001, as their base point.
There is actually nothing in the temperature record to suggest that springs are beginning any earlier than they were thirty years ago.
To be fair, one of the interviewees, Matthew Oates of the National Trust, did mention that the transition to warmer/earlier springs began several decades ago.
Nevertheless, the central theme of the programme was that the UK climate is changing rapidly, something not borne out by the data.
I have no doubt that the BBC will fall back on their regular defence of “scientists say”. However, following OFCOM’s recent ruling that the BBC should have challenged Lord Lawson on comments he made, it should surely not be acceptable for them to simply accept unscientific research from bodies like the Woodland Trust without challenging that as well.
Of course, in this instance the BBC has gone one step further. Not only have they broadcast the Woodland Trust’s findings, Lindsey Chapman has actually then presented them as an indisputable fact.
British govt must explain its behavior in Skripal case, Syria strikes – UKIP MEP
RT | April 21, 2018
Although the UK has deemed Russia responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the public needs proof, a UKIP MEP told RT, adding that London should also justify its role in the Syria airstrikes.
Speaking to RT at the Yalta International Economic Forum in Crimea, West Midlands Member of European Parliament (MEP) Bill Etheridge said there is a lot of “murky water” in the Skripal case. “A lot of things that are unexplained, a lot of behavior that does not ring true.”
He went on to explain that “the British course of public opinion doesn’t believe it, so the behavior of our government and security services, they need to explain to us why they are so convinced that the great nation of Russia would wish to attack anyone in our country.”
Etheridge added that no one has provided any “solid proof” that Russia was behind the poisoning. “The current British government position is one where they are taking too strong a position with Russia. They should be having dialogue, they should be having conversation.”
Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the UK town of Salisbury on March 4. Russia has offered its full cooperation and urged London to provide evidence, including nerve agent samples. However, it has not received any.
The Russian Foreign Ministry says the incident is “highly likely” to have been staged by British intelligence, while Russia’s envoy to the UK has expressed concern that the investigation by the Office for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) lacked transparency.
Etheridge also addressed the topic of Western intervention in Syria, one week after the UK, US, and France launched airstrikes over an alleged chemical attack that the three allies have blamed on the government of Bashar Assad.
“My belief is… the Syrian civil war is one where Western intervention is not helpful… my position is that there should be no intervention and frankly by intervening in that part of the world in the past, the UK and US have made things worse. As far as I’m concerned, we should stand back from this and allow the Syrian people self-determination.”
“I expect that London will get pressure from the British people to justify themselves and if they cannot justify themselves, there will be protests from British people saying, ‘no war in our name, no conflict in our name.'”
The UK, US, and France refused to wait for the results of an official OPCW investigation into the alleged chemical attack before deciding on military action. This also came despite the Russian military traveling to the scene of the alleged attack and finding no evidence of a toxic agent.
Russia has also stated that it has indisputable evidence that the attack did not take place, with Russia’s Ambassador to the OPCW, Aleksandr Shulgin, stating that it was a “pre-planned false-flag attack by the British security services, which could have also been aided by their allies in Washington.”
Palestinian lecturer shot dead in Malaysia
MEMO | April 21, 2018
A Palestinian family on Saturday accused Israel’s spy agency Mossad of killing a Palestinian lecturer in Malaysia.
Fadi Mohammed al-Batsh, 35, was shot dead by two gunmen on a high-powered motorcade near his home in the capital Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, Malaysian police said.
“The suspect fired 10 shots, four of which hit the lecturer in the head and body. He died on the spot,” the official Bernama news agency quoted Kuala Lumpur police chief Mazlan Lazim as saying.
Mazlan said a recording of a closed-circuit television camera near the scene showed the two assailants waited for about 20 minutes for the Palestinian lecturer.
“We believe the lecturer was their target because two other individuals walked by the place earlier unharmed,” he said.
The lecturer’s family, meanwhile, said Mossad was behind his assassination.
“We accuse Mossad of standing behind the energy researcher’s assassination,” the al-Batsh family in the Gaza Strip said in a statement.
The family called on the Malaysian police to launch an investigation into the killing.
There has been no comment from Israeli authorities on the accusations.
Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, confirmed that the lecturer was a group member.
“The martyr was distinguished by his excellence and scientific creativity,” Hamas said in a statement.
It, however, did not accuse any side of killing al-Batsh.
In late 2016, Palestinian drone expert Mohamed al-Zawari, was shot dead in Tunisia, with Hamas accusing Israel of killing him.
Israel is widely believed to have killed numerous Palestinian resistance activists in the past, many of them overseas.
In 1997, Mossad agents tried — and failed — to kill Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal in Jordan by spraying poison into his ear.
Mossad is also believed to have been behind the assassination in 2010 of top Hamas commander Mahmud al-Mabhuh in a Dubai hotel.
Israel has never confirmed or denied its involvement in Mabhuh’s murder.
Just When You Thought “Russiagate” Couldn’t Get Any Sillier …
By Thomas L. Knapp | Garrison Center | April 21, 2018
April 20 is cannabis culture’s high holiday, and the Democratic National Committee celebrated it with fervor this year: Blaze up, get silly, file a bizarre lawsuit accusing the Russian government, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and transparency activist group WikiLeaks of conspiring to steal an election.
The suit confirms that after more than a year, special counsel Robert Mueller still hasn’t amassed the evidence required for a successful criminal prosecution, requiring proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” A civil suit lowers that bar to “a preponderance of the evidence.”
But even that’s a long shot. The only credible evidence produced so far implicates only the Trump campaign, not the other two defendants, and only to the same extent that it likewise implicates the Clinton campaign.
That is, both campaigns admittedly tried to tap “Kremlin-connected” sources (defined as “anyone who’s ever been in Moscow”) for dirt on their opponents. Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer in hopes of getting the goods on Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign commissioned a British former spy to work his Russian regime sources for salacious tidbits on Trump the Elder.
Central to the suit’s claims is alleged “Russian hacking” of the DNC’s servers, followed by an embarrassing release of emails showing, among other things, attempts by DNC to rig the 2016 primaries in favor of Clinton and against her main opponent, Bernie Sanders. Problems with the case:
First, the DNC refused to turn those servers over to the FBI for forensic analysis, instead hiring a friendly cybersecurity firm to announce the results it wanted announced.
Secondly, metadata in the “hacked” files released by “Guccifer 2.0” indicates transfer speeds consistent with an internal source at DNC copying the files directly to a USB drive rather than an external hacker accessing the servers.
Thirdly, while the subsequent announcement by the US intelligence community of its conclusions claims methods and IP addresses “consistent with” Russian state hackers, those methods and IP addresses are also “consistent with” every other type of hacker on Earth.
Fourthly and probably decisively, the DNC makes the mistake of dragging WikiLeaks into the matter. The next time WikiLeaks gets caught making a false statement will be the first time. On the other hand, the leaked emails themselves demonstrate that the DNC lies constantly and without hesitation. When it comes to credibility, WikiLeaks is the gold standard and the DNC is something one tries to wipe off the bottom of one’s shoe before entering a respectable household. WikiLeaks says no, its source was neither the Russian government nor any other state party.
This lawsuit is simply the latest version of what the DNC has been doing since 2016: Trying to fob blame for its loss of an election it should have won in a walk off onto someone, anyone, but itself and its insanely poor choice of presidential nominee.
It’s very a risky move. In civil suits “discovery” runs in both directions. We’re about to learn a lot more about how the Democratic Party really works behind the scenes.
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Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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