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How Online Users responded to YouTube’s termination of Middle East Observer – Facts & Figures

Middle East Observer | March 14, 2019

Hello fellow observers,

Just five days after YouTube’s termination of our channel, here’s some of the major developments that occurred in response to this decision:

a) the number of ‘Patrons’ supporting us financially on our Patreon page grew by an outstanding 70%, opening up much greater opportunities for MEO to not only become more sustainable but to increase its content production too (e.g. one more Patron and we will reach 30 total Patrons – which means we’ll be committing to producing at least 6 video translations/month, in line with our current stated goal on Patreon – a significant milestone indeed!).

b) the number of subscribers on our website mailing list grew by %170

c) the number of our Twitter followers grew by 200%

d) major spikes in the number of ‘likes’ and general engagement on our Facebook page

Many heartfelt thanks once again to everyone who supported us with a word of solidarity, a subscription to our website mailing list or social media, and/or crucially, a financial sponsorship of our project on our Patreon page!

Meanwhile, ALOT is going on behind the scenes, most notably:

1. We are gradually uploading some of the more than 250 videos that were taken down by YouTube on to our Daily Motion channel. We will embed every video that we upload on our Daily Motion channel on to our website aswell as stand alone posts.

2. We are replacing the ‘dead’ embedded video links on our website with the Daily Motion video links (this is a gradual process, but you may have noticed that we have already replaced many dead links with the functional Daily Motion versions).

3. We are working on a more detailed and rigorous long-term strategic plan for MEO which takes into consideration the relatively huge developments (both positive and negative) that MEO experienced over the past one week. We will share some details of this strategic vision with you in due time.

Thanks again to every single person who stood in solidarity with MEO and the freedom to express alternative news and views.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | | 1 Comment

Palestinian Resistance Groups in Gaza All Deny Firing Shells Toward Israel

By Celine Hagbard | IMEMC | March 15, 2019

After two nights of wide-scale bombardment of the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces in which dozens of bombs were dropped on the crowded coastal enclave, someone in Gaza apparently attempted to retaliate Thursday night by firing several shells toward Israel.

But the Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza, usually quick to claim credit for actions they take, all denied involvement in this attack.

Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees all issued separate statements officially denying any involvement in relation to the firing of the missiles.

The Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said in a brief statement that the timing of these missiles being fired is suspicious, as it came while Hamas leaders were meeting with an Egyptian security team, discussing arrangements to maintain calm in the coastal region.

In addition, Daoud Shehab, the spokesperson of the Islamic Jihad, denied Israel’s allegation that the Islamic Jihad movement was the one that fired the missiles toward Tel Aviv.

The Salaheddin Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Committees, also issued a statement denying any connection with the missiles.

It is worth mentioning that, from time to time, some unknown smaller group, tries to fire missiles largely into open areas in Israel, which to many observers looks like an act that is meant to create tension, and drag the region into a new wave of military escalation.

For its part, the Ministry In Interior and National Security In Gaza said that the firing of the missile violated the agreement between the resistance factions in Gaza, and the national consensus regarding avoiding military escalation with Tel Aviv. It added that it will conducted all needed measures to find the individuals who are responsible for firing the missiles.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism | , , , , | 1 Comment

Israel embassy to UK erases West Bank, Gaza in election video

Screenshot of a video released by the Israeli embassy to the UK has erased the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), showing the whole of historic Palestine as Israel [Twitter]

Screenshot of a video released by the Israeli embassy to the UK has erased the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), showing the whole of historic Palestine as Israel [Twitter]
MEMO | March 15, 2019

A video released by the Israeli embassy to the UK has erased the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), showing the whole of historic Palestine as Israel.

The video – created by the Israeli embassy in London and shared on its official Twitter account on Wednesday – sets out to explain the upcoming Israeli general election on 9 April. The video addresses “frequently asked questions” about the Israeli electoral system, such as “what is the Knesset” and “who do people vote for”.

Answering the question “do they [Israelis] vote for representatives of their city or district,” the video explains: “Israel is very small, so the whole country is a single constituency,” while a graphic draws the outline of historic Palestine and shades in the whole space, erasing the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip.

Though the outline of the West Bank can be seen beneath the shading, the video still shows the territory as part of the “single constituency” of Israel. The Gaza Strip, on the other hand, is not demarcated at all.

Though MEMO contacted the Israeli embassy for comment, at the time of publication no answer had been received.

The video will be seen as further evidence of Israel’s attempt to normalise its narrative of “sovereignty”, which ignores Palestinians living under occupation and increasingly seeks to annex the Palestinian territories.

This narrative has taken centre stage in election campaigning in recent weeks, with a number of parties promising to annex all or parts of the West Bank and increase Israel’s illegal settlement there. The New Right (Hayemin Hehadash) party – which was formed by Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked after they broke away from the Jewish Home party – has vowed to annex “Area C”, which makes up 61 per cent of the occupied West Bank.

The New Right explained that, under this plan, it would give Israeli citizenship to the “80,000 Arabs” it estimates live there. However, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHAoPt), some 297,000 Palestinians are known to live in Area C, raising questions as to their fate should the New Right join the ruling coalition after 9 April.

Even centrist political parties have made partial annexation of the West Bank a key campaign promise. The Blue and White alliance – comprised of Benny Gantz’s Israel Resilience (Hosen L’Yisrael) party and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party and now polling as the main challenger to incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party –  has vowed that the Jordan Valley, which lies deep in the West Bank, will be Israel’s border.

Blue and White has also promised to maintain Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, with the alliance’s number three Moshe Ya’alon criticising the “land for peace” model. This model would see Israel dismantle its occupation in return for peace agreements, following the precedent set by the 1979 Camp David Accords under which Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in return for a peace treaty with Egypt.

The Israeli embassy’s video also came on the same day the US State Department dropped its usual description of the Golan Heights as “Israeli-occupied”, changing the designation to “Israeli-controlled”. The State Department’s annual global human rights report also failed to mention the words “occupied” or “occupation” in a separate section about the West Bank and Gaza.

Though a State Department official said “[US] policy on the status of the territories has not changed,” the move has been interpreted as indication of US support for Israel’s efforts to gain international recognition of the territories it controls. Palestinian officials slammed the move, with the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, saying: “These American titles will not change the fact that the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 and the occupied Arab Golan are territories under Israeli occupation in accordance with UN resolutions and international law.”

During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. With the exception of the Sinai, it has thus far refused to hand back these territories and has transferred its civilian population into the areas, in contravention of international law.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , | 2 Comments

Sorry, Ilhan, Jews HAVE Hypnotized the World

By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • March 15, 2019

Rep. Ilhan Omar equivocally-unequivocally apologized for tweeting that Zionist power was “all about the Benjamins.” A few weeks later, she didn’t apologize at all for suggesting that American congressional representatives shouldn’t have to swear loyalty oaths to Israel.

But Rep. Omar did in fact issue one genuinely unequivocal apology. It involved this 2012 tweet:

“It’s now apparent to me that I spent lots of energy putting my 2012 tweet in context and little energy is disavowing the anti-semitic trope I unknowingly used, which is unfortunate and offensive,” Omar tweeted on January 21 in response to an attack from New York Times op-ed writer Bari Weiss.

As I recently wrote, Ilhan Omar’s other two “anti-Semitic tropes”—that the US supports Israel due to Jewish-Zionist money power, and that Congress has a dual-loyalty problem—are all-too-obviously true. But what about Israel hypnotizing the world? Is that a fair statement? An exaggeration? A racist calumny?

Actually, in some ways it is an understatement. Jewish tribal power has been “hypnotizing the world” in various ways since long before the modern nation state (or settler colony of genocidal squatters, if you will) called “Israel” was founded in 1948.

I put the expression “hypnotize the world” in quotes not only because it was Omar who said it, but because it is obviously a figure of speech, not a literal statement. But as figures of speech go, this one is unusually accurate and revealing.

Literal hypnosis, of course, involves inducing a trance state during which the hypnotized subject becomes highly suggestible. The hypnotist can not only elicit amazing feats of rote obedience, but can also implant post-hypnotic suggestions in the subject’s mind which can influence, or even completely control, subsequent behavior.

An intergenerational Jewish tribal elite has spent the past 2500 years perfecting ways to bypass the rational faculties of their victims (the first of whom are non-elite Jews) while inculcating irrational beliefs and behaviors that bring wealth and power to that same elite. Many of their control techniques are reminiscent of hypnotism.

Laurent Guyénot’s magisterial From Yahweh to Zion “unveils the process by which Yahweh, through the voices of his priests, prophets, and scribes (the ‘cognitive elite’) shaped the vision and collective psychology of his chosen people” (p.18). That voice of the Jewish cognitive elite, masquerading as the voice of God, wielded the same kind of charismatic, irrational authority over its victims as the voice of the hypnotist wields over his hypnotic subjects.

The original victims of this “hypnosis” were non-elite Jews. Entranced by the masterful storytelling of the cognitive elite, they submitted to the authority of their priests, rabbis, and scribes in the same way a hypnotic subject submits to the hypnotist. And just as the hypnotist verifies and deepens the trance by commanding the subject to do something ridiculous—for example, by handing the subject an onion and saying “bite into this delicious juicy apple”—the Jewish cognitive elite ordered their subjects to obey all sorts of bizarre rules, from the Levitical to the downright Talmudic. And just as cult leaders “hypnotize” their followers into happily drinking the Kool Aid en masse by demonizing outsiders and fostering groupthink, the Jewish tribal elite created “A People That Shall Dwell Alone” by isolating their subjects, encouraging endogamy, and terrorizing the Tribe into separation from the goyim.

As Guyénot shows in From Yahweh to Zion, the Jewish cognitive elite hypnotized much of the world into believing that their tribal god Yahweh—a stand-in for the authority and interests of that same elite—was Lord and Creator of the entire universe. The ancient Jewish elite’s self-interested equivocation between presenting Yahweh as a tribal god on one hand, and the universal God on the other, resembles today’s Jewish elite’s equivocal presentation of Jewishness sometimes as a religion, sometimes as an ethnicity (depending on which version best serves Jewish elite interests). Both goyim and non-elite Jews accept such contradictions as unquestioningly as hypnotic subjects accept the commands of a master hypnotist.

Apocalyptic War: A Post-Hypnotic Suggestion?

The endgame of a certain Jewish elite’s effort to hypnotize the world into submission became apparent by around 1500, when the messianic-yet-worldly Zionism of Isaac Abarbanel drew the blueprint for the creation of the state of Israel more than four centuries later—and the apocalyptic war between Muslims and Christians it would instigate. To understand the significance of Abarbanel, we must remember that Jewish messianic thought has always awaited the coming of the Messiah, viewed as a king and warlord who will lead the Jews to a military triumph over all other tribes (the goyim) and institute 1000 years of pax Judaica. (Obviously this involves a severe rejection of the Christian and Muslim doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah.)

Abarbanel was a key figure in the heretical, Satanic turn in Jewish millenarianism: The transition between traditional orthodoxy, which held that God alone would institute the messianic age without human help, to the Zionist doctrine that Jews should “force God’s hand” by taking over Jerusalem, and the world, themselves—even if the price involved kabbalistic black magic, devious conspiracies, big lies, mass murder, weaponized usury, and other abominations. Today, Naturei Karta and other genuinely orthodox traditional Jews correctly view Zionism as a Satanic heresy. But most of the world’s Jewish communities, and the populations whose media they dominate, have been hypnotized into biting into the reeking rotten onion of Zionism and insisting it is a fresh, delicious apple.

Abarbanel’s plan for Jewish-triggered apocalypse, though produced five centuries ago, is as fresh as tomorrow’s headlines. The good rabbi recommended that Jews return en masse to the Holy Land and orchestrate an apocalyptic war between Christians and Muslims. After the Christians and Muslims had finished destroying each other, Abarbanel prophecied, the Jews—under the command of their Messiah—would rule the world from Jerusalem.

It is telling that Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion wrote a book about Abarbanel highlighting the plan to trigger an apocalyptic Christian-vs.-Muslim war to usher in a one-world state ruled by the Jewish Messiah (who would of course be called Antichrist by Christians and Muslims). Indeed, the plan to trick (post)Christian civilization into launching a global war against Muslim civilization, rolled out on 9/11/2001, is something of a Netanyahu family business.

More than a century after Abarbanel laid the groundwork for the Clash of Civilizations, the famous false messiah Sabbatai Zevi—whose career peaked in the numerologically significant year 1666—led the first wave of Zionism by convincing large numbers of Jews to emigrate to the Holy Land. Zevi’s thought was taken up in the next century by Jacob Frank (1726-1791) who codified Zevi’s madness into the doctrine of “purification through transgression”: the notion that individuals and communities should “religiously” commit sex crimes and other abominations. Rumors of kabbalistic black magic, human sacrifice, and bizarre sexual practices have attended the Frankists, who—according to such Jewish scholars as investigative journalist Barry Chamish and Rabbi Marvin Antelman—were behind both the fiat money magic of the Rothschilds and its seeming opposite, Communism. Taken together, Rothschild capitalism and Marxian communism form a sort of Hegelian dialectical one-two punch in service to the larger project of secularized, materialist Jewish millenarianism.

Even as they “hypnotized the world” into dividing into capitalist and communist camps, heretical Jewish elites were setting the stage for Zionism…and Abarbanel’s eventual Christian-vs.-Muslim apocalypse leading to the Messiah/Antichrists’s one-world planetary dictatorship. Though Albert Pike’s alleged late 19th century prophecy of three Zionist-freemasonry-orchestrated World Wars may be apocryphal, the Frankist-Jewish elite’s hand in World War I, World War II, and the current Clash of Civilizations is convincingly documented in the last four chapters of Guyénot’s From Yahweh to Zion.

Techniques of Hypnotism

Getting back to the question of hypnotism, it is obvious that Jewish elites have played an outsize role in the discovery and manipulation the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was weaponized by his nephew Edward Bernays and transformed into what is euphemistically known as “public relations,” many aspects of which involve the direct manipulation of the unconscious in a process reminiscent of mass hypnosis.

In reality, Bernay’s (and Freud’s) contributions were not original. They are best viewed as modern versions of centuries-old mind control techniques based on Kabbalistic “magic” as described in Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. (Couliano’s spilling of cabalistic secrets may have led to the spilling of his blood: he was murdered in a rest room at that neocon Mecca, the University of Chicago.)

Hypnosis is based on repetition: You gaze at the watch swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, or the spoon clinking round and round and round the teacup, and sink into a suggestible trance. The verbal equivalent of this kind of hypnotic repetition was admirably summarized by Lewis Carroll as: “What I tell you three times is true.” That is why the mass television audience on 9/11/2001, blasted into an awestruck trance by traumatic images, was treated to hundreds of replays of planes into buildings, planes into buildings, planes into buildings, then buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, as an endless parade of talking heads chanted “Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor” and “Bin Laden Bin Laden Bin Laden.” One cannot imagine a more shamelessly obvious example of a pre-scripted mass hypnosis operation.

Often the real point of inducing hypnotic trance is not anything that happens during the hypnotism session itself, but behavioral changes induced by post-hypnotic suggestion: The smoker quits smoking, that fat person loses weight, or the MK Ultra subject fires a gun at Robert Kennedy without the slightest inkling of what he is doing or why. The 9/11 mass hypnosis operation, which I have analyzed with the help of the wonderful Douglas Rushkoff (my kind of Jewish utopian) as a classic example of Coercion—was designed to implant Islamophobia as its primary post-hypnotic suggestion, in service to a Clash of Civilizations agenda whose primary beneficiary is Zionism. (I do hope that certain Unz readers will notice that they are still operating under that baleful post-hypnotic influence, and go about the business of deprogramming themselves.)

When someone like Ilhan Omar—who suffered horrific trauma as a result of the 9/11-triggered Zionist plan to destroy “seven countries in five years” one of which was Somalia—looks at the United States, a nation of 300 million people, obediently laboring for tiny Israel like some sort of zombie golem, it is understandable why the word hypnosis would enter her mind and her Twitter stream. As I have shown, and could show in a book-length or even encyclopedic treatise given world enough and time, her hypnosis metaphor is illuminating and apropos.

In conclusion, I offer an obligatory disclaimer that should go without saying: Obviously Jewish elites are not the only people in the mass hypnosis business. All governments and corporations hypnotize their subjects and personnel into loyal obedience. All religion involves a degree of mass hypnosis; and mysticism, the heart of religion, involves a degree of self-hypnosis. And even parents routinely hypnotize their children to sleep with repetitious storytelling. Some of this, perhaps much of this, is normal and healthy. My point is that Jewish elites have been unusually successful in employing hypnotic mass manipulation for self-aggrandizing purposes, and that today’s Zionist elites are doing so in strikingly immoral and destructive ways.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | 1 Comment

US Threatens Anyone Behind ICC Probe Into Its Staff With Visa Restrictions

Sputnik – 15.03.2019

The US is determined not to issue visas to individuals who are behind any the International Criminal Court investigation of US personnel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday.

The new visa restrictions will not terminate Washington’s previous measures, and new economic sanctions may follow if the International Criminal Court (ICC) fails to change its course, Pompeo said during the briefing.

“I’m announcing a policy of US visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of US personnel,” Pompeo said. “This includes persons who take or have taken action to request or further such an investigation. These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis.”

The remark comes after Pompeo issued the warning after announcing that the US would impose visa restrictions on individuals linked to the ICC’s prospective investigation into alleged war crimes committed by US personnel in Afghanistan.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

Spectre of Afghan quagmire haunts US

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | March 15, 2019

The Afghan national security advisor Hamdullah Mohib, while on a visit to Washington, tore into the US’ peace talks with Taliban in remarks to the American media on Thursday. Mohib alleged that US special representative Zalmay Khalilzad is keeping the Afghan govt in Kabul in the dark about the negotiations with the Taliban and that he’s plotting to replace President Ashraf Ghani.

Mohib alleged that Pakistan is dictating the trajectory of the US-Taliban negotiations and warned that there can be no peace until Islamabad ended its support for ‘non-state actors’.

The charges are indeed very serious and it is unlikely that Mohib spoke without Ghani’s approval. Mohib is Ghani’s hand-picked security aide, the fountainhead of Afghan intelligence and is wired into the Washington Beltway, where he previously served as ambassador. The US state department called in Mohib and apparently gave him a dressing down.

That there is friction between Khalilzad and Ghani has been known for sometime. Basically, there is much resistance among the Afghan elite to the US strategy to take Pakistan’s help to engage Taliban in direct negotiations and chalk out a settlement that mainstreams the insurgents.

Things have lately reached a point of no return, now that the crucial next phase of negotiations at Doha is due where the agenda includes intra-Afghan dialogue and ceasefire leading to an interim power-sharing arrangement in Kabul replacing the Ghani government.

Meanwhile, there are interest groups within the Afghan elite who either fear retrenchment or simply do not accept reconciliation with the Taliban. There is indeed widespread resentment among Afghans toward Pakistan’s blatant projection of power into their country through decades. In sum, a coalescing of anti-Taliban, anti-Pakistan sentiments is taking place.

Ghani himself has never hidden his antipathy toward Islamabad for its interference in Afghan affairs and of late has been reaching out to these anti-Taliban, anti-Pakistan groups within the Afghan elite. He feels annoyed that Washington is not insisting on the Taliban holding talks with the Afghan govt, but has instead harmonised with the Pakistani-Russian idea of an ‘intra-Afghan dialogue’ where the Afghan govt can only be a participant like myriad other Afghan groups — and not as the Taliban’s principal interlocutor.

Having said that, Ghani would also know that Khalilzad who enjoys the backing of the US foreign and security establishment, is by no means a pushover. In principle, the US can withdraw support from Ghani and make a horrible example of him but in the current fluidity, that will open a Pandora’s box and may trigger events over which Washington will have no control. With such a big US and NATO military deployment in Afghanistan, it is out of the question that the Trump administration would make any precipitate moves which might create a power vacuum in Kabul.

On the other hand, President Trump wants the troop withdrawal to begin, which was also his campaign pledge in the 2016 election. Fundamentally, the Americans may have underestimated the strong undercurrents of Afghan nationalism. Ghani suspects that the Pakistani game plan is to ultimately create conditions for an outright Taliban takeover in Kabul. There have been ample signals that he is digging in.

Suffice to say, the spectre of an Afghan quagmire is haunting the Americans. An orderly American / NATO withdrawal is possible only on the basis of a settlement with the Taliban. But Ghani and his camp insist on an ‘Afghan-led’ , ‘Afghan-controlled’ peace process — that is, direct talks between the government and the Taliban. The US’ capacity to leverage Ghani is steadily diminishing.

There are hardline militia factions who stoutly oppose any power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban and are horrified at the prospect of Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan. They may opt for a trial of strength through force. In the circumstances, there is always the danger of a coup and usurpation of power, which of course no one wants to talk about.

The role of regional powers will be crucial in the coming period. Pakistan and Russia have a special role to play here. Both countries harbour an adversarial mindset vis-a-vis Ghani. Clearly, Pakistan and Russia are increasingly moving in tandem to create conditions for a transition in Kabul that maximises their influence. Russia has pockets of influence among the anti-Pakistani Afghan factions — for instance, former president Hamid Karzai or former NSC Hanif Atmar and erstwhile Northern Alliance leaders and so on — which can work favourably for the advancement of Pakistani interests.

Equally, Russia hopes to gain out of its links to the Taliban, which Pakistan has helped to promote, in a future regime in Kabul. Of course, both Russia and Pakistan have troubled relations with the US and will be beneficiaries of any diminution of American prestige and influence in the region. It will be an understatement to say that in the New Cold War conditions, Moscow wouldn’t mind if the US and NATO are forced to exit from the Hindu Kush in disgrace and defeat.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

US War Crimes in Syria Whitewashed in Real Time

Strategic Culture Foundation | 15.03.2019

It was quite amazing to watch reports from Syria this week by US news channel CNN. American bombing of a remaining redoubt of the ISIS terror group near Baghouz on the border with Iraq was presented as some kind of heroic final onslaught against the terror group.

The inversion of reality is a staggering case study in propaganda and “perception management” under the guise of “free media”.

CNN broadcast on-the-ground reports from its correspondent Ben Wedeman in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor province. In the background were evident signs, according to the channel’s video footage, that the US air force was dropping white phosphorus incendiary munitions in support of the offensive against militants.

Indiscriminate use of white phosphorus bombs is arguably a war crime. Yet the US media openly reported this as if it was a legitimate war operation in order to “defeat terrorism”.

Nothing in the CNN reportage suggested anything illegal about the US military campaign. On the contrary, the events were presented as a valorous attempt to “defeat ISIS”.

There are several reasons why this latest US military operation in eastern Syria is disturbing, not least because of mounting civilian deaths as a result of American air strikes.

For a start, American military presence in Syria is a gross violation of international law. The US has no legal mandate to be in that country, operating their since 2015, either as ground forces or warplanes.

Secondly, it is well-documented that Washington has been covertly funneling military aid to various anti-government militia, including terrorist groups like ISIS, in a bid to overthrow the Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad. This has been conducted as part of an eight-year covert war sponsored by Washington and its allies for illegal regime change against the sovereign government in Damascus.

President Trump has given orders for US forces to withdraw from Syria. He says it’s time to bring “our boys” home. As if “our boys” have performed a noble duty there. The fact is American forces in Syria constitute a war crime. They shouldn’t even be there.

So, belated US media reports of American forces bearing down on the remnants of ISIS in eastern Syria are, to say the least, a little anomalous, given the systematic support that Washington has been covertly plying to assorted jihadist terror groups for the purpose of regime change. That is an entirely criminal aggression against Syria.

But the latest operation in eastern Syria is particularly hard to take. It has been the Syrian army along with Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces that largely liberated Syria from the scourge of foreign-backed Islamist terror groups. The war in Syria has been won against the US and its malign criminal partners, not, as American media would have us believe, due to Washington’s “heroic efforts”.

Western news media have lately focused on a small pocket of ISIS hold-outs in eastern Syria as if the US is the liberator of the Arab country – a country which Washington and its NATO allies have infiltrated with jihadists for criminal regime change.

CNN’s coverage this week was especially perverse. Ben Wedeman and his team were showing US military dropping banned white phosphorus incendiaries on civilian areas of eastern Syria in the name of “fighting terrorism”.

CNN’s reportage was without the slightest hint that such military actions amount to gross war crimes. The entire US military presence in Syria is an even bigger violation of international law. The “normalization” of such violations and war crimes by the US media in real time is an illustration of how such supposed news channels are nothing but a propaganda arm for Washington’s imperialist warmongering.

The banal normalization by US news media of what should be viewed as enormous war crimes is something to behold, if not to be nauseated by.

American forces in Syria have killed thousands of civilians. Their latest operations to “liberate” the eastern region from jihadists that they infiltrated with in the first place has caused, this week alone, dozens of civilian deaths from US air strikes. This is a gruesome reminder of the horror that US air strikes inflicted on the Syrian city of Raqqa which was flattened in 2017 by American bombardment.

The charnel house that Syria has been turned into is a direct consequence of American regime-change machinations. And yet US media report a microcosm of the horror in terms suggesting that the American forces are somehow liberators. How grotesque.

Such an obscene distortion is partly why Washington is allowed to continue its criminal wars in other parts of the world. It is because of US media whitewashing war crimes in real time. And CNN has the shameless audacity to call its war propaganda “journalism”.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | 1 Comment

Would-be Maduro drone assassin speaks to CNN

RT | March 15, 2019

The man who claims he planned the exploding-drone attack on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro along with defectors from the Venezuelan military has come forward to tell his story – to CNN, of all people.

The would-be drone bomber says he met with US officials three times after the attack that took place at a military parade in August last year. In an interview with CNN, he claims the US officials seemed receptive to giving them “things in return” for information about the assassination attempt.

A State Department spokesman declined to comment, saying only “Our policy is to support a peaceful transition in Venezuela.”

The assassin, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, provided video of the conspirators tinkering with the improvised drone bomb, which they reportedly built themselves in a farmhouse in Colombia using materials they purchased online from the US. His footage also showed the group practising flying the drones “high enough to not be seen,” then diving steeply to hit their target, before dismantling them and sneaking them into Venezuela.

The man acknowledged the attack could have killed innocent civilians, had the bombs not detonated prematurely when the cellular signal blockers protecting Maduro reactivated, but claimed he was desperate.

“We have tried every peaceful and democratic way to bring an end to this tyranny that dresses itself as democracy,” he told CNN, claiming he had friends who had been jailed and tortured by Maduro’s government.

While National Security Advisor John Bolton initially suggested the attack had been faked to create a “pretext” for a crackdown, US officials have since confirmed to CNN that they believe it was a “genuine attack gone wrong.”

Self-appointed president Juan Guaido believes the attack was staged, telling CNN, “I think this was something internal, done by the government. It ends up making them look like victims.”

Maduro ultimately blamed the “Venezuelan ultra-right in alliance with the Colombian extreme right” for the attack.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Open letter to anyone marching for ‘the climate’ today

By Brian Dingwall | Whale Oil | March 15, 2019

Hi kids,

Many of you will be marching today, demonstrating for an issue you believe to be very important.

Many years ago, I was young, well informed, and absolutely convinced I knew enough to make good decisions for the future of the world, and couldn’t understand just how obtuse all the oldies were, how they just didn’t know the stuff I had just learned.

Malthusian economics drove most of us, the Club of Rome had reported, and to my subsequent shame, I confess that in 1975 I voted for the Values Party…. I wanted a better world, I knew resources were on the verge of running out, the population was out of control, and we were polluting our one and only planet. It was, I thought, time for the change that was so desperately required.

The Values party did not get in, to our surprise the resources did not run out, Simon won his bet with catastrophist Erhlich, as countries became more wealthy they cleaned up their environments, particularly water, farmlands, and air.

China is now wealthy enough to be doing exactly that right now, following in the footsteps of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. We certainly never see the famous foaming rivers of industrial Japan anymore.

Economists now understand that the ultimate resource, the human imagination, never runs out.

So is it likely to be with climate change. I urge you to never abandon your scepticism, for a critical mind is your most important asset.

Be able to articulate exactly what evidence has persuaded you to your opinion. Opinions though, are not evidence. Consensus is not evidence.

The world has many historic consensuses that have turned out to not be so. So far, I don’t mind sharing with you, I have yet to be persuaded.

My background is in science, with a smattering of economics, and statistics and I well understand the case for catastrophic climate change. I find it unconvincing.

As do a raft of well qualified experts in many fields, even Nobel prize winners, and I urge you to find out who they are, and why they have reservations.

There are two sides to this debate, but only one is well resourced, so you have to work a bit harder to find the arguments of the sceptical scientists.

One of the very great tragedies of the whole issue is that since 1990, it has been very difficult for scientists to garner resources from governments to research natural climate change, but we can be certain that the forces that wreaked great climate changes in the past are still active, and may be a much greater magnitude than those wreaked by CO2.

For today please reflect on these things:

All the CO2 being released today is simply being returned to the atmosphere whence it came, and is now available to the biosphere, which we can see is already flourishing as a result. Global temperatures have increased (about 0.7C degrees in last 100 years) ever since the little ice age, and continue to but at nothing like the rate predicted by climate models.

We live from the equator to (nearly) the poles, and hence are particularly adaptable, and will adapt to minor temperature changes and have in the past through climate optima, and little ice ages.

Much of the land surface of the earth is too cold for habitation or agriculture, some warming of the northern latitudes of Canada and Russia for example will be welcomed.

Here in New Zealand, we produce food for the world, with one of, if not the lowest “carbon footprints” of any country. Should you actually succeed in killing this industry, that production will be conducted elsewhere, at a higher carbon cost….. so the improvement as you see it, in New Zealand’s emissions will be more than offset by extra emissions elsewhere…. we will be adding to the problem, not mitigating it.

It is also very important that each of you understands that for any complex problem, there are a range of decisions, trade-offs, to be considered. Do we understand all the benefits that follow from the use of fossil fuels? How many of these are we prepared to sacrifice? What would a fossil fuel-less world look like for you (hint: I don’t think you would like it very much).

Have you read or even heard of the “moral case for fossil fuels”, and do you understand the extent to which they feed and clothe the world, provide us with our tools, and our leisure, empower our devices, and enable our travel at present? House us and clean us?

You are not informed if you only read one side of the case. I happen to believe in free markets, the economics of von Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Simon, McCloskey, and many of the moderns but I have also read Marx, and various of the collectivist economists, you must know what all the opinion leaders are saying and why.

So do seek out “lukewarmers” like Curry, Lewis, Christy, Soon, Balunias, they will lead you to a raft of others “the counter-consensus” that you, like me, may find rather more convincing than the orthodox climate church.

Personally I have learned that what I knew at your age (vastly more than my parents knew, of course) was not always right….now captured in the expression “it’s not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so”.

We once believed in leeches, blood-letting, that washing our hands was not important, that continents didn’t drift, that stress causes ulcers, a daily aspirin is good, and that there is always an imminent catastrophe on the horizon that never materialises.

The question is whether what we know for sure that the specific climate change you worry about is human caused, will have a measurable and substantial impact, and is real. What climate change would have been quite natural? Will we look back in years to come and think “we believed what?”

Have we included accurately in our models the impacts of short and long term natural oceanic cycles, cosmic rays impact on cloud nucleation, clouds, the sun and sunspots, what, if anything, is there still that we don’t know that we don’t know? Can we get initial conditions right?

Always examine closely the logic of the case… we have only one world so all we can do is create computer models of the climate, and wait to see if nature tells us the models are a good approximation of the real world suitable for projecting future climates….. and if climate is a 30 year average of all our global “weather” then we probably have to wait at least two preferably more periods of 30 years simply to validate the models so 100 years or so.

So far the projections and predictions have been wildly wrong, the polar ice is healthy, the Manhattan freeway is not underwater, sea-level rise is not accelerating, and snow is far from “a thing of the past”. As climate scientist and keeper of one of the satellite records ironically observes “the models all agree the observations are wrong”.

And the economics don’t work, as Nobel prize winner Nordhaus teaches the cost of mitigation is an order of magnitude greater than the cost of the problem, so the cure is worse than the disease.

Don’t take my word for it, or anyone’s. Read for yourselves, go to source. Do not trust any scientist who calls a peer scientist a “denier”. Understand peer review, and that a peer reviewed paper is more often than not just the opening salvo in a chain of events that may or may not ultimately expose a scientific truth.

Be very careful of any theory where the accepted facts (historic temperatures, and the location and number of the thermometers)) change regularly to suit the narrative.

And finally, enjoy your day, be yourselves, trust your own judgment, read widely, and look behind the data to the motives of the players.

There is a (slim) chance you are right, but even if you are, trust in human ingenuity, that fabulous engine of change, to ensure survival not of the world as we know it, but of an even better world than previous generations enjoyed…. we will not revert to sleeping with our food animals on dirt floors with unpainted walls! As humans have done for most of our time on earth….

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

The Horrific Long-Term Consequences of Regime Change

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 15, 2019

84-year-old Emma Thiessen Alvarez has never forgotten the day in 1981 when Guatemalan officials came to her house looking for her daughter, a student leader who had escaped from military custody. Unable to find her, the officials settled for Thiessen’s 14-year-old son. She never saw him again.

Thiesen’s story was highlighted in a recent New York Times article because the Guatemalan legislature is now contemplating granting a blanket amnesty to military officials who participated in the rein of terror that the Guatemalan national-security establishment inflicted on the Guatemalan people for period of some 36 years.

Thiessen and other Guatemalans who were victimized during that period of time are not happy about the proposed amnesty. As Edgar Perez, a human-rights lawyer, put it, “For the victims, the sentence is their certificate of truth. It is their history.”

Guatemalans are not the only ones who have an interest in what is now occurring in that country. So do the American people. That’s because it was the U.S. national-security establishment that set into motion the events that ultimately led to the death of Emma Thiessen Alvarez’s son, along with 200,000 other Guatemalans, as well as to massive human-rights violations at the hands of the Guatemalan national-security establishment.

As Americans reflect on the mass carnage, destruction, and suffering and the hundreds of thousands of deaths produced by U.S. regime-change efforts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, and Afghanistan, it’s important to also keep in mind the deaths produced by U.S. regime change in Guatemala in 1954. That was when the CIA initiated a military coup that succeeded in destroying Guatemala’s democratic system and replacing it with a brutal, unelected military dictatorship.

Guatemalan voters had democratically elected a socialist named Jacobo Arbenz, a man whose economic philosophy mirrored those of many American politicians today, both Democrat and Republican. U.S. officials concluded that Arbenz was a threat to U.S. national security, not only because of his socialist policies but also owing to his desire to reach out to the communist Soviet Union, including Russia, in a spirt of peace and friendship. By this time, the U.S. national-security establishment was waging its Cold War against the Soviet Union, which ironically had been America’s WWII partner and ally. The Pentagon and the CIA were convinced that the Russians were coming to get us as part of a worldwide communist conspiracy based in Moscow. In the minds of the Pentagon and CIA, Arbenz was part of that communist conspiracy and, therefore, needed to be removed from office before the Reds were able to come and take over the United States.

The CIA targeted Guatemalan officials with assassination. Americans are still not permitted to see which officials were going to be murdered (“national security,” of course), but surely Arbenz was at the top of the list. He was able to escape the country before the CIA could assassinate him.

Not surprisingly, the CIA installed into power a brutal “law and order” military tyrant, one whose military dictatorship proceeded to wage a vicious war against leftist-oriented Guatemalans. As the leftists fought back, the country was thrown into a violent civil war that lasted 36 years. At least 200,000 people were killed, with the full support of the U.S. national-security establishment, which took the position that their military regime was protecting America and the world from the worldwide communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow and that was supposedly coming to get us.

At the time it succeeded in ousting Arbenz and installing a military regime in his stead, the CIA was ecstatic over its success. Internal celebrations were held and medals were awarded. The same thing happened after the CIA’s regime-change operation in Iran in 1953, the year before the Guatemalan regime-change operation. After succeeding in destroying Iran’s democratic system and installing, training, and supporting the viciously brutal tyranny of the Shah, the CIA internally celebrated its success and handed out the medals to those who had brought it about.

Today, more than half-a-century later, Americans, Iranians, and Guatemalans are still living with the horrific long-term consequences of those U.S. regime-change operations. It’s something for Americans to keep in mind as the U.S. national-security establishment continues to effect regime-change operations in various parts of the world today. Just ask 84-year-old Guatemalan Emma Thiessen Alvarez, who still feels the pain of losing her 14-year-old son to U.S.-supported Guatemalan military brutes.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Carbon Eugenics

Genocide in the name of the environment is still genocide

By James Corbett | The Corbett Report | December 11, 2009

TRANSCRIPT: The first person to stand up to any great evil is always the most courageous. To be the first one to call out any great injustice is to invite ridicule, scorn, even persecution. It is difficult to imagine today just how brave were the first slave owners to call for the abolition of slavery, the first men and women to advocate women’s suffrage, the first activists to call for the end of Apartheid. In the end, their cause is recognized as just and these brave souls are lauded, often posthumously, as heroes. But in the beginning, no one wants to admit that they are a party, even unwittingly, to a great evil. The wildest injustices can be legitimized simply because they are popular.

Today, just such a popular injustice exists. It has been infused into our culture and taken up as a cause. It is fervently believed in and advocated with great passion and force, and to speak out against it is to risk persecution and scorn. But speak out against it we must.

The terrible injustice of our age has its roots in a most unlikely place: in the quaint villages and manicured gardens of the 19th century British gentry. Amongst that set lived one Francis Galton, a gentleman scientist who had investigated everything from meterorology to statistics. Shortly after his cousin, Charles Darwin, published his Origin of Species, Galton became fascinated with the idea that the “survival of the fittest” did not just take place between species, but within them. This idea became a pseudo-science, a study of the presumed racial characteristics of this group or that group with an aim to explaining why the various peoples of the world occupy the positions they do.

In order to confirm their pre-conceived notions of their own self-worth, Galton and his friends started a new field of inquiry called eugenics. Unsurprisingly, it concluded that the rich and powerful were rich and powerful because they were genetically superior, and it offered a simple solution for improving the lot of humanity: make sure that the affluent upper classes breed as much as possible (preferably within their own families, in order to preserve their superior stock), and make sure the lower classes breed as little as possible.

This junk science, pandering as it did to the most rabid the most racist the most elitist interests of the moneyed class, became universally accepted in the Western world within a generation. Soon, country after country had implemented laws to allow the government to sterilize those citizens it deemed to be “unfit.”

The true horrors of this strain of thought came to light when the German eugenicists, based at the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute , gave the Nazi regime an ideological excuse to take the idea to its logical conclusion. Many of the Germans who went along with the holocaust did so because they genuinely believed the scientists who were telling them that the Jews and Gypsies, the communists and homosexuals were genetically inferior and needed to be eliminated from the gene pool.

After World War II, when the full magnitude of the slaughter that had taken place in the name of eugenics began to become apparent, the eugenicist pseudoscientists scrambled to find a way to re-legitimize their racist and classist drivel. They wrote openly in the journals of their once-esteemed eugenics societies that they would now have to continue their studies and practices in a more covert fashion. Eugenics had to become crypto-eugenics.

This was accomplished in a number of ways. The British Eugenics Society, for one, merely changed its name to The Galton Institute. The American Eugenics Society morphed into the Population Council, a group set up by John D. Rockefeller III, where members continued to advocate the same policies for reducing the population of third world countries as they always had, only now they did so in the name of fighting “overpopulation” rather than fighting “bad genes.”

Julian Huxley, brother of the famous writer, helped organize UNESCO in 1945. In the founding document of UNESCO entitled UNESCO: its philosophy and its purpose, he argues that one of the key aims of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization would be the re-legitimization of eugenics so the idea would once again become thinkable. He also went on to co-found the World Wildlife Fund with Nazi SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

Within a generation, science was once again ready to tell us why the only way to save humanity was to stop people from breeding: this time, the public was whipped into a furor not about Jews and Gypsies, but about carbon dioxide and environmental sustainability. The cover had changed, but the racist eugenicist text remained the same.

In the logic of the eugenicists, the meaning of human life is itself transformed. Instead of something valuable, something precious, something to be desired and nurtured, fought for and celebrated, humanity is re-imagined as a cancer, something inherently evil, the mere existence of which is a burden on the world. This, unsurprisingly, encapsulates the modern environmental movement’s position almost perfectly: human life is no longer something to be treasured, but something to be measured in carbon and then reduced.

In the manmade global warming myth, humans are merely an obstacle to the proper functioning of nature. In the eugenicist fantasy, the earth is saved when people die. In both ideologies (if they really are separate) the ultimate genocide becomes thinkable.

Now the “leaders of the world” are meeting in Copenhagen to decide on the future of your world, of my world, of the world of our children and grandchildren. They are proposing a reorganization of the world economy. Punishing austerity is being urged in all corners. Groups of population control eugenicists are now arguing for carbon offsets to be used to stop the developing world from having children. The choir of madness is growing by the day and everything seems set to reach an intolerable crescendo.

And then, in the darkest hour, just as it seems the eugenicists are about to take over, along comes an insider—a hero—at the University of East Anglia to leak the emails and documents with which the entire manmade global warming myth is exposed and the carbon reduction agenda is deligitimized.

It is not always popular to stand against great injustice, but it is always right.

March 15, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | 6 Comments