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American Bombings of Allied Cities in World War II

Tales of the American Empire | October 16, 2020

One of the mysteries of World War II was the senseless aerial destruction of Axis occupied cities by American bombers. These weren’t bomb strikes to support ground forces, but carpet-bombing raids on city centers. Several cities in Axis occupied China, Italy, Yugoslavia, and France were blasted by American mass bombings. These events are inexplicable and thus overlooked by historians.

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Related Tale: “American Mass Bombings of Chinese Cities in World War II”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvJgL…

Related Tale: “The Senseless and Bloody Italian Campaign 1943-44”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVbX0…

Related Tale: “American Aerial Massacres in Germany”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVee6…

October 17, 2020 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | | 1 Comment

‘We are in a truly Orwellian culture’: Amazon yanks Covid-19 skeptic’s book for ominously vague ’content violations’

By Helen Buyniski | RT | October 17, 2020

Amazon has joined its Big Tech fellows in ramping up censorship of any criticism of the “official” Covid-19 narrative, deploying obfuscatory excuses to justify removing journalist James Perloff’s latest book, he told RT.

After selling a respectable 3,500 copies over the last two months, Perloff’s book on the coronavirus pandemic and its weaponization by world governments, ‘Covid-19 and the Agendas to Come: Red-Pilled,’ was suddenly “banned” by Amazon.com, the writer revealed on Twitter on Thursday.

Perloff spoke to RT on Friday about the platform’s ominous act of censorship and how it seemed to validate his book’s conclusions, expressing concern that “the censorship on Covid has been getting progressively stronger, even as the death rate from Covid has been getting progressively lower.”

“We are in a truly Orwellian culture.”

The first sign of trouble came on Thursday when Amazon requested that he “clarify [his] rights to the book” – something he had already done upon putting it up for sale back in August. But before he could finish gathering the material required to prove once again that he owned the global rights to his own work, he received another email from Amazon, this time claiming they had removed his book “during a quality assurance review of [his] catalog” because it “violated content guidelines.”

While Perloff said he “asked them to specify what guidelines [he] had violated,” their reply merely restated that the “subject matter” of his book had been found to be “in violation of our content guidelines,” declaring the e-commerce behemoth “will not be offering this title for sale on Amazon.”

“We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience and remove the content from sale.”

With five other books already listed on the platform, Perloff has communicated with Amazon extensively over the years, but something was off about these latest messages. In previous communications, “they would usually at least give a first name,” he said. “This time I was dealing with persons – or a person – who was cowering behind total anonymity.”

The book traces how the Covid-19 pandemic has been used by governments around the world to force draconian social control measures upon a terrified populace, evaluates several theories regarding the virus’ origin, and offers some projections about what might lie ahead for humanity – including how populations might work together to avoid some of the most totalitarian outcomes.

Perloff insists the information within was meticulously sourced from medical professionals, academic publications, and frontline physicians, with hundreds of endnotes referencing scholarly journals and other unimpeachable sources. “There is nothing I say in the book that isn’t documented,” he said, pointing out that several other coronavirus dissenters are selling their books on the platform without incident.

The political analyst is far from the first to run afoul of Amazon’s increasingly stringent censorship. But while he is familiar with the trials and tribulations of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who found his own corona-skeptic tome temporarily squelched until billionaire Elon Musk drew attention to the censorship on social media, Perloff cynically lamented that he himself lacks “friends among the rich and famous” to rescue his book from Amazon’s growing digital bonfire.

Ultimately, however, he has faith in the Streisand effect, in which heavy-handed censorship efforts backfire and draw attention to the content they seek to suppress. “If you say to people, ‘Don’t read this book,’ their instinct is to go and read it.”

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

October 17, 2020 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | 1 Comment

An Environmental Nakba: The Palestinian Environment Under Israeli Colonization

Artwork by Andrea Settimo
By Mazin B. Qumsiyeh and Mohammed A. Abusarhan | Volume 23, number 1, Science Under Occupation

Prior to the 1948 war and even the Zionist Congress of 1897, Palestine had some thirteen hundred villages and towns, each with a small and manageable population living sustainably with nature. The land was owned or worked by the Palestinian people, who were 85 percent Muslim, 9.2 percent Christian, and 5.3 percent Jewish.1 This structure changed radically when mostly European Jews mobilized for massive migration to Palestine and began to assume colonial control over the land. In its long recorded history, Palestine has indeed undergone significant environmental and demographic changes, but it is really only in the past century that these changes took on a colonial dimension. The best-known of these changes is the forcible removal of the indigenous population, which reached its peak between 1948 and 1950. During those years, five hundred villages and towns were destroyed by Zionist militias, resulting in the largest wave of refugees after the Second World War.2 But the environmental dimensions of the catastrophe, or Nakba, is little talked about.3 In 1967 Israel occupied the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine, namely Gaza and the West Bank, and built settlements throughout these occupied territories in contravention of to international law (the Fourth Geneva Convention).4 These dramatic transformations were detrimental to the people and nature of Palestine. Here, we focus on the environment and sustainability in Palestine, an often overlooked casualty of the colonial occupation.

Colonial Impact on the Environment

Once Israel was declared a Jewish state in May 1948, native trees (such as oaks, carobs, and hawthorns) and agricultural crops (olives, figs, and almonds) were systematically uprooted and replaced by European pine trees. These planted pines reduced biodiversity and harmed the local environment.5 Pines shed leaves that are acidic and prevent the growth of underbrush plants. These trees are also very susceptible to fire because of their resins. Indeed, fires are now a common occurrence in the areas in which they were planted. Trees, however, were not the only targets of Israel’s colonial practices. Natural resources, primarily water aquifers, have also been confiscated from the Palestinians. This often happened by deliberately building Israeli colonies on hilltops to ensure effective access to these resources and to maintain surveillance over the Palestinians.6 Environmental sustainability was never a priority for Israel, whose practices detrimentally affected the landscape, resulting in the destruction of diverse habitats and water runoff.7

The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 opened opportunities for Israeli industries. Many of the highest polluting companies moved to the West Bank and were provided with tax incentives to do so.8 There the companies only faced the opposition of the Palestinians who had no way to stop them. For example, pesticide and fertilizer manufacturer Geshuri, which faced significant court setbacks in its original plant in Kfar Saba, was moved to an area adjacent to Tulkarm inside the West Bank in 1987. Significant pollution caused by Geshuri and other companies in this area has damaged citrus trees and vineyards.9 Moreover, research on genotoxicity in the Occupied Territories shows the significant impact of the Barkan industrial settlement on the Palestinians of Burqeen village.10 As DNA and chromosomes are damaged, there are increasing cases of miscarriage, cancer, and congenital birth defects. Air and water pollution has also caused diseases ranging from respiratory illness to gastrointestinal failures. Other health-related problems have resulted from the Israeli practice of sending trash, including electronic debris, across the Green Line.11 This debris is often recycled by destitute Palestinians in environmentally harmful ways, such as using fire to remove plastic from useful metals. This practice releases substances that cause serious ailments, including cancer and lung diseases.

Israel has also built an extensive network of roads and other infrastructure serving settlers. Trees and any buildings within seventy-five meters of these roads are bulldozed and declared closed military zones to the Palestinians. The total area used in the West Bank for settler roads was 51.2 km2 in 2000 and has doubled since. Added to the 150.5 km2 of built settlement-colonies, this is a huge area that was previously used by Palestinians for agriculture, pasture, or leisure.12 The disparity between settlers and natives in land control and standard of living is compounded by disparity in access to other natural resources, especially water.13 Israeli officials have deliberately ignored facts and selectively presented falsified or inaccurate data to serve their political interests in the Jordan River while catastrophically impacting Palestinian access to water. For example, 91 percent of the total water of the West Bank is expropriated for Israeli settler use.14

The Israeli occupation has resulted in considerable loss of biodiversity in the Palestinian territories. This began many years ago when Israel diverted the waters of the Jordan Valley, and when trees surrounding destroyed Palestinian villages were replaced by monoculture crops.  More recently the apartheid wall in the West Bank obstructs human activities and animal movement, causing a loss of both human and animal biodiversity.15 Humans and nature have been intertwined in Palestine for thousands of years, and the continuing loss of biodiversity irreversibly damages Palestine’s cultural and natural heritage, threatens endangered species, and harms agriculture and environmental sustainability.16

There are many other practices through which the occupation has undermined sustainable development and protection of the environment. These include refusal to issue building permits in most of the West Bank and destruction of any “unauthorized” structures, even including cisterns and solar panels.17 Another example is the policy of Israel to absorb the Palestinian tourism sector, including ecotourism.18

One of the major threats to the Palestinian landscape is the confiscation of land for settlements, sometimes with temporary false excuses of preventing damage to nature.19 For example, the Palestinian village of Ras Imweis and six adjacent areas were initially confiscated under such an excuse then turned into the settlement of Nahal Shilo. In many other instances, the Israeli occupation authorities prevented Palestinian sustainable development by claiming certain stretches of land as “green areas,” then turning them into Jewish settlements within the span of two to three years. Such exploitation was also obvious in the Bethlehem district, where Abu Ghuneim Mountain, one of the largest forests in the Bethlehem district, was turned into the Har Homa settlement in 1997. This is how Israel is “green-washing” the occupation.20

International Failure

Israel’s colonial settlements have had a devastating impact on the Palestinian environment and on indigenous Palestinian lives. This raises significant questions about the possibility of sustainable development under occupation.21 Indeed, there are ample grounds, backed by solid scientific and legal research, to bring claims of environmental injustice to local, national, and international forums.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (which Israel ratified) states that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies,” adding that life in military occupied areas must be allowed to proceed as normally as possible. UN Security Council Resolution 465 of 1980 reads in part that “all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Israel has largely ignored international law. This impunity is enabled by the international community. For example, a 2003 United Nations Environment Program report identified key effects of the occupation on the environment and made over one hundred recommendations but failed to prioritize them or set target dates. This failure of the international legal system to hold Israel accountable is not just related to environmental issues, but extends across many other areas including Israel’s abuse of prisoners and destruction of civilian life.22 Israel’s aggressive political lobby has also influenced many governments and shapes decisions at the UN, where the United States has veto power. [Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto Press, 2004).] The international failure to hold Israel accountable has left the issue—like in South Africa under apartheid—up to organizers and activists on the ground.23

Grassroots Organizing for Environmental Justice

In situations where international law fails, civil society often intervenes, as we have seen in the movements for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) in South Africa and in Palestine against the respective apartheid regimes. The BDS movement and other forms of civil or popular resistance do make a difference.24 That we have not yet reached the post-apartheid era like South Africa is due to the fact that the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine has been strengthened by international complicity and by agreements, such as the Balfour Declaration and resolutions by the League of Nations and the UN, that exclude the Palestinians. The international community has long abrogated its responsibilities and has thus given Israel a green light to engage in significant violations of human rights (including environmental rights). Civil society must increase pressure on international leaders to assume their responsibility to return dignity and sovereignty to the Palestinian people. International bodies must enforce law and implement sanctions against Israel to rectify the rampant environmental injustices that disproportionately harm the indigenous Palestinian population. Palestinians have no recourse to domestic laws since what laws are available are those of an apartheid settler-colonial state.25 There is recent scholarly and activist interest in using international law to buttress environmental justice claims, especially in developing countries, but as Noura Erekat pointed out, this is undermined by the imbalance of power and influence of the Zionist movement around the world.26 Although we are witnessing the growth of the BDS movement, we need much more pressure and mobilization to enforce recognition of Palestinian rights.27

Nevertheless, a significant movement for environmental justice and sustainability is growing even under the very difficult conditions of occupation and colonization. People are working at the grassroots level to build popular institutions that enhance and promote sustainable natural and human communities in the context of a larger anti-colonial struggle.28 Educating new generations of Palestinians in their culture and history can also help address some of the challenges Palestinians are facing.29 Because colonizers work to separate the colonized from their land and destroy their culture and history, strengthening the connection between the indigenous people and their land will help new generations understand the value of nature beyond the exploitative framework imposed by colonialism.30 Environmental struggles are an integral part of the struggle for freedom and justice in Palestine as elsewhere.

Acknowledgement: We thank the Darwin Initiative (UKaid) and the European Union for their support of some of our work at PMNH/PIBS/Bethlehem University.

About the Authors

Mazin B. Qumsiyeh is a professor and researcher at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities. He previously served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee, Duke University, and Yale University. He and his wife returned to Palestine in 2008 to start a number of institutions and projects, including the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University. He, his wife, and volunteers and staff at PIBS have “joyful participation in the sorrows of this world” and make a difference for sustainability of nature and human communities.

Mohammed A. Abusarhan is a masters student in biotechnology at Bethlehem University and Palestine Polytechnic University. He earned a degree in Biology from Bethlehem University. Since 2017, he has worked at the Palestine Museum of Natural History as a Museum Biologist conducting animal collecting, taxidermy, and identification. His research interests are focused on conservation, museum digitization, biodiversity databases, and bat echolocation. He has published several research articles and spent the summer of 2019 in Germany in a prestigious laboratory as an exchange researcher.

References

  1. “Demographics of Historic Palestine prior to 1948,” Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East CJPME, July, 2004, https://www.cjpme.org/fs_007.
  2. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publication, 2006).
  3. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, “The Coming Environmental Nakba” in The Third Palestinian Environmental Awareness and Education Conference. EEC (Bethlehem, 2013), 57–59.
  4. Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). See also Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
  5. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
  6. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2012).
  7. ARIJ, Status of Environment in OPT (Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem, 2015).
  8. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation of the Palestine People: The Unrealized Oil and Gas Potential,” United Nations, 2019 Report.
  9. ARIJ, Status of Environment in OPT.
  10. Khloud M. Hammad and Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, “Genotoxic Effects of Israeli Industrial Pollutants on Residents of Bruqeen Village (Salfit District, Palestine),” International Journal of Environmental Studies 70, no. 4 (2013): 655–62.
  11. Nadia Khlaif and Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, “Genotoxicity of Recycling Electronic Waste in Idhna, Hebron District, Palestine,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 74, no. 1 (2017): 66–74.
  12. ARIJ, Status of Environment in OPT.
  13. Neve Gordon, “From Colonization to Separation: Exploring the Structure of Israel’s Occupation,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2008): 25–44. See also Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation.
  14. Clemens Messerschmid and Jan Selby, “Misrepresenting the Jordan River Basin,” Water Alternatives 8, no. 2 (2015): 258–79.
  15. Qumsiyeh, Mazin B. Unpublished data.
  16. Alon Tal, Pollution in a promised land: An environmental history of Israel (Berkeley, Calif:Univ. of California Press, 2002); International Union for Conservation of Nature – Regional Office for West Asia (IUCN – ROWA), State of Palestine Fifth National Report to the Convention on Biodiversity. Amman, Jordan 2015; Abdallah T, Swaileh K. “Effects of the Israeli Segregation Wall on biodiversity and environmental sustainable development in the West Bank, Palestine,”  International Journal of Environmental Studies 68: 543-555 (2011).
  17. MOPAD, “State of Palestine National Development Plan 2014-2016’” (Ministry of Planning and Administrative Development, 2014).
  18. Talia Shay, “The Ethnocracy of the Palestinian Urban Space and the Indigenous Approach: Praxis and Theory,” Archaeologies 12 (2016): 73–90. See also Rami Isaac, C. Michael Hall, and Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, eds., The Politics and Power of Tourism in Palestine (London: Routledge, 2015).
  19. Dror Etkes and Hagit Ofran, “Construction of Settlements and Outposts on Nature Reserves in West Bank,” Peace Now, February 13, 2007, https://peacenow.org.il/en/nature-reserve.
  20. Sara Hughes, “‘Greenwashing’ the Occupation: The Role of Environmental Governance and the Discourse of Sustainability in Sustaining the Israeli Occupation of Palestine,” in The Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, 2018.
  21. Jad Isaac, Khaldoun Rishmawi, and Abeer Safar, “The Impact of Israel’s Unilateral Actions on the Palestinian Environment,” (Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, 2004).
  22. Susan M Akram et al., eds., International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Rights-Based Approach to Middle East Peace (London: Routledge, 2010). See also Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019).
  23. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
  24. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine.
  25. “Environmental Injustice in Occupied Palestinian Territory: Problems and Prospects,” Al-Haq, August 4, 2015.
  26. Ruchi Anand, International Environmental Justice: A North-South Dimension (London: Routledge, 2017); Erakat, Justice for Some.
  27. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, “A Critical and Historical Assessment of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in Palestine,” in Conflict Transformation and the Palestinians (Routledge, 2016), 114–29.
  28. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, “Nature Museums and Botanical Gardens for Environmental Conservation in Developing Countries” BioScience 67, no. 7 (2017): 589–90. See also Mazin B. Qumsiyeh et al., “Role of Museums and Botanical Gardens in Ecosystem Services in Developing Countries: Case Study and Outlook,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 74, no. 2 (2017): 340–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/00207233.2017.1284383.
  29. Mazin. B. Qumsiyeh, “Ethnoecology of Palestine: Preserving Culture Heritage of Palestine’s Natural History,” presented at the 4th Hyperheritage International Seminar Proceedings (International Conference): Smart Heritage, 2018.
  30. Michael R Dove, “Indigenous People and Environmental Politics,” The Annual Review of Anthropology, 35 (2006): 191–208.

October 17, 2020 Posted by | Environmentalism, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | 1 Comment

Facebook COO pledges $2.5 mill to Israel advocacy group, brushing off Palestinian complaints of censorship

Facebook COO pledges $2.5 mill to Israel advocacy group, brushing off Palestinian complaints of censorship

If Americans Knew | October 17, 2020

In the midst of a campaign by Palestinian journalists accusing Facebook of suppressing their content, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has pledged $2.5 million to the ADL, an organization that devotes much of its work to Israel advocacy.

We’ll first look at the complaints about censorship, then at the ADL, and then at Sandberg.

The current campaign is the latest in a long line of complaints that Facebook discriminates against Palestinian users.

A 2016 Fortune magazine article reported accusations that a Facebook agreement with the Israeli government had led to the closing of some Palestinian accounts.

A 2017 article in The Intercept reported: “Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders.”

In 2018 there were reports that Facebook had closed 500 Facebook pages of Palestinian activists, journalists and bloggers.

This month a campaign called “Facebook Blocks Palestine” was launched by Palestinian journalists and activists saying that Facebook restrictions against Palestinian pages had “dramatically increased,” including deleting pages and accounts, removing posts, banning comments sections, restricting pages, blocking live streaming, etc.

Mohammad Kareem’s Facebook page was suddenly taken down. Kareem tweeted: “Facebook has blocked my account after 8 years of using it. This is like deleting a history of someone for a weird reason. ‘Something you posted’! What is it?”

An organizer explained that one of the campaign’s goal is to expose the “double-standard policy of Facebook management” in dealing with Israeli and Palestinian content.

A day or two later Facebook deleted yet another Palestinian page: the Arabic account of the Palestinian Information Centre (PIC), a news organization founded in 1997 that had almost five million Facebook followers. According to PIC, Facebook provided no prior warning or justification for its action.

Photograph posted by Palestine Information Center, Aug. 31, 2019

Over the years it appears that Facebook has tried to develop strategies to make fair, rational decisions about which content to remove and which accounts to take down. These have included using content reviewers, instituting a review process, and writing algorithms to catch “hate speech” and “incitement.”

At the heart of of all this, however, are the human beings who review the content, who write the algorithms, and who are in charge of the process.

It is, therefore, problematic when Facebook executives work with the Israeli government to decide what content to remove, when Facebook collaborates with an Israel advocacy organization to “combat cyberhate,” and when top Facebook executives such as Mark Zuckerberg are connected to the top rung of the Israeli government.

And it is problematic when the number two person at Facebook – especially during a time period when Facebook is specifically being charged with anti-Palestinian, pro-Israeli bias – makes a large, very public donation to an organization devoted to advocating for Israel.

The ADL and Israel

On Oct. 16th Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced (on Facebook, of course) that she was making “a personal gift” to the ADL. Sandberg is considered one of the most powerful figures in the tech world.

While many people consider the ADL a benign, almost official organization–and news media virtually always repeat its claims without scrutiny–it is a highly political, private organization with no public accountability and with very  clear agendas.

One of its main agendas is being a “a strong voice for Israel.”

While the ADL was allegedly formed to oppose discrimination, it actively supports a nation based on discrimination. Israel was established in 1948, in the words of an Israeli historian, through a war of ethnic cleansing, and continues this process today.

Numerous groups and individuals have documented Israel’s current systemic discrimination, its long record of human rights violations, as well as its violations of U.S. laws and damage to the U.S.

Nevertheless, the ADL devotes much of its effort to Israel, advocating on its behalf with American elected officials, U.S. media and on American campuses, including producing a guide about how to block campus events aimed at informing students about the Palestinian situation.

Screen shot of ADL page.

And while the ADL claims to oppose defamation, it often attacks groups and individuals its dislikes, particularly those who provide information on Israel-Palestine that the ADL doesn’t wish Americans to know.

While the ADL’s statements may at times constitute outright defamation, almost no one is able to take on the organization, given its assets of $145 million+. Rare exceptions were 1993 lawsuits over the ADL’s vast spying operation on Americans, which had gone on for decades. Eventually, the ADL was forced to settle the suits, paying out unknown sums of money. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m among the ADL’s more recent targets, the organization having published false statements about me that it has refused to retract.)

In 2017 the ADL collaborated with an Israeli think tank to produce a 2017 strategy paper on how to counter the growing public awareness of Israeli violations of human rights. The Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, Brigadier General Sima Vaknin-Gil, said of the ADL-coauthored paper: “The correlation between the Ministry’s mode of operation and what comes out of this document is very high, and has already proven effective… ”

Among its recommendations, the 32-page document called for “industry engagement with corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.”

That same year the ADL launched the “Center for Technology and Society,” whose advisory board contains a number of tech executives.

One is Facebook Vice President Guy Rosen, who studied in Israel and is a member of the TechAviv Community LinkedIn Group, formed “to help Israeli startup founders and their companies succeed by harnessing the collective energy, knowledge, and networks of the global Israeli startup community.”

ADL’s “educational materials”

The ADL considers many criticisms of Israel to be “anti-Semitism,” using a definition formulated by an Israeli minister. The materials it provides for schools are highly selective, often have clear agendas, and are glaring in the ADL’s “PEP” stance (Progressive Except Palestine). For example:

• There is a high school unit on the Rohingya people but nothing on the Palestinian people.

• The ADL provides a lesson plan on “Refugee Crisis in Europe” that makes no mention of Palestinian refugees, a major refugee group and one that began long before the current crisis.

• There is a teaching unit on nonviolent resistance that includes materials on The Holocaust, Civil Rights, sanctuary cities, opposition to the U.S. wall on the southern border, etc, but completely ignores the Israeli wall confiscating Palestinian land, the ongoing nonviolence movement in the Palestinian West Bank (including the killing of participants Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall), and   the massive nonviolent movement launched in Gaza a year and a half ago that has continued for every week since.

• A unit on “Challenging AntiSemitism: Debunking the Myths and Responding with Facts” includes a number of references to Israel and uses as a reference the Jewish Virtual Library, a website managed by the American-Israeli Cooperative Project in order to “to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship.” (The unit includes derogatory references to Christianity, Islam, and Arabs.)

The ADL’s facebook posts periodically focus on Israel. For example, it “welcomed” the decision to remove Palestinian Zahra Biloo from the Women’s March over her criticism of Israel, announced that it would discuss “bias against Israel” with UN officials, and alerted its Facebook followers to a discussion about “how to fight” anti-Zionism.

Sheryl Sandberg and Israel

Sandberg has visited Israel periodically throughout her life.

In August, she went on another family visit to Israel, met with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and others, and inaugurated a new Facebook venture in Tel Aviv.

“I am so excited to be in Israel today.” she announced at the celebration. “This is a country that is deeply meaningful to me personally. But this country is also deeply meaningful for Facebook because… this is a country of startups and entrepreneurs.”

In her Facebook post, Sandberg described the importance to her of her Jewish identity. She said that her horror at the recent tragic “mass murder” of Jews in Pittsburgh (11) and Germany (2) inspired her to make the donation.

The timing of her announcement is startling in its lack of concern for the current Palestinian campaign against unfair treatment by Facebook, and of recent Palestinian deaths and injuries inflicted by the Jewish state.

In the past year and a half Israeli forces have killed at least 326 and injured over 28,000 men, women, and children taking part in demonstrations in Gaza.

Abdullah al-Anqar, 13, at a Gaza clinic, 10 June 2018. He was shot by an Israeli sniper during a demonstration along the Gaza-Israel border in May. (Photo from Medicins San Frontieres)

A search for donations that Sandberg may have dedicated on behalf of these victims turns up only an ambulance – which she presented to Israel, which has suffered massively fewer deaths and injuries.

Chart of Israelis & Palestinians killed

Given Sandberg and the ADL’s opposition to “hate” and “bias,” they may wish to read the extensive documentation of widespread discrimination and hatred in Israel.

Israeli academic and author Nurit Peled-Elhanan has spent years documenting the pervasive anti-Palestinian bias in Israeli textbooks.

“One question that bothers many people,” she says, “is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform.”

Peled-Elhanan said: “I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians.” In studying hundreds of Israeli textbooks she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a “normal person.”

Peled-Elhanan says that as a result of the Israeli school system, Israeli children grow up to serve in the army and internalize the message that Palestinians are “people whose life is dispensable with impunity. And not only that, but people whose number has to be diminished.”

Perhaps Steinberg’s next anti-hate donation could go to Peled-Elhanan.

And perhaps instead of working with the Israeli government to remove Palestinian posts that document the results, Facebook executives could meet with the Palestinian journalists and activists they’re censoring and listen to what they have to say.

October 17, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter rolls out ‘DISPUTED’ warnings for users trying to post ‘misleading’ content after backlash over Biden emails censorship

RT | October 16, 2020

Twitter is cracking down on the spread of “misleading” content ahead of the US election, as users attempting to retweet anything similar to the NYPost’s Hunter Biden leaks will now get a warning the material is “disputed.”

Attempting to retweet offending content will trigger a prompt warning the user that the material they’re trying to post is “disputed,” Twitter revealed on Friday, posting an image of the new warning screen.

The user will be able to click a button to “find out more” about why Twitter doesn’t want the material shared, and then presumably post it anyway.

The new feature arrives in the aftermath of a major controversy arising from Twitter’s censorship of a series of stories critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, published by the New York Post based on emails supposedly extracted from his son Hunter’s laptop.

Conservative politicians, lawmakers and press have slammed Twitter for prohibiting users from even linking to the story, and some users who shared details of the stories found themselves locked out of their account for reasons that ranged from sharing “hacked material” to posting “personal information” without permission.

The social media giant’s guidelines for what is considered “misleading” are themselves somewhat nebulous, having grown since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to encompass not just “disinformation” but also “disputed” content, a vague descriptor that could apply to most of what users post on the platform.

The Republican National Committee on Friday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging Twitter had illegally meddled on behalf of the Biden campaign when it squelched the spread of the Biden-laptop stories. The platform had even briefly blocked a link to the US Congress website, when Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee attempted to skirt Twitter’s censorship by reposting one of the banned articles on their official .gov page.

Twitter also apologized to its users for a prolonged outage on Thursday night, which left many speculating about whether the platform was testing an intensified form of censorship ahead of November’s elections. The site blamed a “system change initiated earlier than planned” that had “affect[ed] most of our servers” – an explanation which likely did little to put conspiracy theories to rest.

Facebook subsidiary Instagram rolled out a feature similar to Twitter’s ‘wrongthink warning’ last year, which alerts users when they are about to post something “potentially offensive.” In April, Facebook began alerting users as to whether they’d shared, replied to, or otherwise interacted with posts that were later deemed to be “misinformation,” specifically content concerning the novel coronavirus that had been “debunked” by the World Health Organization.

In June, the platform further expanded its wrongthink-alert system, warning users when they attempted to share articles that were over 90 days old – regardless of whether they were true or not.

Facebook has also resorted to somewhat more subtle tactics of “shadowbanning” – which on Wednesday was once again confirmed by its communications chief Andy Stone, a former Democratic Party staffer. He tweeted that the platform was restricting the spread of the New York Post’s story until the platform’s fact-checkers could stamp their own judgment on the material.

October 17, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

Turning Kids’ Grey Matter a Mushy Green

By Tony Thomas | Quadrant | September 23, 2020

Australian schools in the past decade have forced literally millions of kids to watch Al Gore’s error-riddled propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth. In 2007 an outraged English truck driver and parent took the education minister to the High Court in 2007 over the film’s gross inaccuracies, with Justice Burton ordering UK teachers must not show it without first warning kids it is politically partisan and contains nine significant errors. Those include Gore’s absurd claim that many low-lying Pacific island populations had already been  evacuated to New Zealand. Despite his vast wealth, Gore has never edited prints of his film to remove the errors.

No such mandatory warnings have accompanied Australian screenings. The Australian Academy of Science, our supposed bulwark against science misinformation, has made no objection to the brainwashing, although its president rushed to condemn a skeptic equivalent film in 2007.

The propaganda cycle is now being repeated. Kids in class are being drenched with Damon Gameau’s saccharine documentary 2040 about purported solutions to a purported climate crisis. The film doesn’t actually tell kids, “Vote Green”, but it calls for strong new political leadership. “Wouldn’t it be terrific if new leaders emerge who could navigate us to a better 2040,” Gameau hints.

Pushing the film into classrooms is Cool Australia, which has provided teachers with at least 32 ready-to-use lessons based on the documentary. The film is backed and part-funded by bedfellows, the Australian and Victorian governments.

Gameau reveals his inner Zeitgeist in interviews, which include an urge to re-shape our democratic ways. He imagines a “shift from a society built upon industry to a life-sustaining civilisation” which he called “The Great Turning”. As he spoke at Byron Bay (where else?) a year ago, a certain Olivia Rosebery “boldly stood in the audience” and sang her own song, ‘No more need for greed and hunger if we respect the Mother’s ways.’”

In an interview last May regarding COVID-19, he likes all the “silver linings”. He says,

Do we really need all these things, this excess of all these things we’re told are going to make us happy? In fact, I’m happier with a lot less of this stuff. And that excess is the very thing that would be destroying us ecologically…. So, I think that’s been a great win. So, how do we take this time to now rebuild with a lot more resilience … with food or energy or even our democracy. This is the time to have those discussions and think quite radically. And thankfully some countries and regions around the world are doing that.

Interviewer: What is bringing you hope during these unprecedented times?

Gameau: I would say, the fact that we do have closed shops, the streets are empty and we’ve got these silent skies. I think that’s a clue that we do care about each other, somewhere deep down…

As a documentary, his 2040 would normally be laughed away, but played in class to susceptible kids from about age 6 upwards, it’s pernicious. He’s also happy to do speeches on how to save the planet. But, “Please note that a speaker fee will be applicable.”

This essay will first detail the workings of leftist lobby Cool Australia, then analyse the content of 2040.

Few parents know that Education Departments around Australia have farmed out much of their kids’ schooling to green/Left lobbies. The most significant is Cool Australia, operating in 8,400 primary and secondary schools —  90 per cent of all schools. Nearly half our teachers use the lessons, downloading 2.1 million of them last year.[i]

Cool Australia delivers a win-win for everyone except Coalition supporters. Its agenda is anti-capitalism, anti-growth, and anti-coal, gas and petroleum. It’s pro the re-writing of the Constitution for the benefit of the Aboriginal industry, and watering down our Western heritage in favor of all sorts of multi-culturalism. Cool Australia’s CEO and founder, Jason Kimberley, boasts how Cool turns kids into green activists, whether or not they’ve yet learnt to tie their shoelaces.[ii] The video below shows how it’s done:

While most of Cool Australia’s ready-to-use topics are innocuous or praiseworthy, recall that the Antifa and BLM mobs now torching US cities are “mostly peaceful”. Our kids are lining up as Greens cadets, demanding “zero carbon” and the up-ending of two centuries of capitalist progress. Another example is Cool Australia’s foisting the anarchism of dark-green Canadian raver Naomi Klein onto teens and pre-teens.

I’ve been documenting Cool Australia’s work for half a decade (here, here, here) and have noticed how the organisation has ratcheted up in the past year by pushing into classes a barking-mad climate “documentary” called 2040. The film, after five years’ gestation, sports high production values, cute actors and story line. It’s had respectful reviews in the New York Times and LA Times and, according to Gameau, ‘the UN is going to show three minutes [of it] to all world leaders’. Taxpayers paid for some of it via the Australian Government and Screen Australia and the Victorian Government and Film Victoria.[iii] Below is a sample of what taxpayers got for their money.

Cool’s 32 lessons are half an hour or more.[iv] Add the kids’ viewing of the entire 92-minute film, and a typical nipper might tangle with this travesty for  a full day of school. Never mind the 3Rs, where Australian kids’ performance is sliding internationally.

The Cool Australia charity was founded in 2008 by Just Jeans heir[v] and climate alarmist Jason Kimberley, now teamed with leftist warriors including WWF, Earth Hour and the Human Rights Commission, and titans like Google, Atlassian and Foxtel. Cool Australia gets into classes on-line with 1400 ready-to-use lessons tapped by 120,000 teachers for 3.2 million kids.

Cool Australia has only eight full-time staff, $1.3 million in revenue (none from government) and a flock of savvy pedagogues. (Charity watchdog ChangePath rates it zero stars out of three for transparency). But Cool Australia has leveraged its way into almost all schools by mapping its free lessons according to teachers’ required curricula. Because of a mandatory cross-curricula priority for “sustainability”, Cool Australia is pushing against an open door. The priorities were designed in 2008-09 by Julia Gillard and state Labor governments.

At a recent gathering with Cool Australia, the former president of the Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, is quoted by Jason Kimberley, “Only UNICEF has a greater school’s penetration and they had a 50-year head start … You are, quite seriously, the good guys in education.”

Cool Australia saves teachers 1.65 million hours of lesson-preparations yearly, and plugs the yawning holes in their worldly knowledge with its own climate, refugee, “global citizenship” and gender tropes. Teachers love it, since about 45 per cent of them are teaching outside their expertise and three-quarters complain of unmanageable workloads. Says one teacher: “I haven’t touched Geography since the mid 1980s, and there I was, explaining resources – with an eventual focus on water – to Year 7! Cool Australia rescued me at a time of dire need and ever so slight panic.”

The Human Rights Commission is notorious for its years-long persecution of innocent Queensland University of Technology students who complained on social media about being kicked out of an Indigenous-only computer room.[vi] Cool Australia quotes ex-HRC head Gillian Triggs, “With values such as empathy, collaboration and real world learning there [has been] a close synergy with Cool Australia. In just a few months, our animated video, interactive time-line and lesson plans reached more than 1,200 schools.” This HRC grievance-mongering involved 640,000 students and 14,000 lessons.

Cool Australia’s overt goal is to turn kids into child soldiers in the culture wars, via its “unique action-based pedagogy”. Jason Kimberley says, “Cool Australia’s role is to educate in a way that empowers young people to take agency and tackle the many challenges that urgently require twenty-first century skills. Our focus is always on what can be done.”

Cool Australia’s surveys show that after absorbing its materials, 70 to 80 per cent of kids adopt its positions, change their behaviour towards social and environmental issues, and are ready “to take action”. Here’s from a set of guides for 10-to-12 year olds, most unable or unwilling to put their singlets in the wash.

Step 1: Think about some of the big issues that are facing the world at the moment. How can we ensure that the world’s population can have its basic needs around food, water, housing, clothing, employment, education and health met whilst also looking after the environment and reducing the effects of climate change? … Your idea could aim to make a change in your house, your street, your school or your neighbourhood.

A mainstream Cool Australia cause is Earth Hour, when the woke folk dispense with electricity for 60 minutes (renewables’ unreliability is already achieving that). But Cool Australia’s Earth Hour folderol by last year had reached 2.3 million kids via 50,000 downloaded lessons.[vii]

Now let’s get back to the 2040 documentary. By time travelling into the future, the film can pretend that every green policy works. Make way for rainbows and unicorn stampedes! Its climate solutions include swapping steaks for seaweed and pulling down levels of evil CO2 to return the atmosphere to 350ppm CO2 (now 412ppm). That’s some feat.

To scare and prime the kids, the perceived status quo is from Al Gore’s climate-porn: allegedly CO2-caused cyclones, floods, droughts, acid oceans, bushfires, melted ice-caps and those long-foreseen but invisible millions of climate refugees. While touting its message as positive, there’s enough doom-talk in this film to give kids and even credulous adults a lot of what Gameau calls “climate grief”.

The end-result of the solutions in 2040 is ecstatic kids literally playing ring-a-rosy in the park (I’m not making that up) and birds twittering in a car-less CBD (ditto). Car parks become vege plots and push-bikers wave to sharers of electric driverless cars. Trucks? Who needs those when we live in green self-sufficient communes?

In the plotline 2040‘s protagonist helps his real-life 4-year-old daughter, Velvet, to navigate through climate perils to his 20-years-hence nirvana. He spends half the film in airports and planes to Bangladesh, Stockholm etc. He’s begged off the guilts by using carbon credits and planting a few trees to save 90 tonnes of CO2 by 2040. China happens to be putting out 10 billion tonnes CO2 a year, but Gameau doesn’t mention China once. Here’s how director Gameau shows kids how to deal with sceptics.

# Governments spend $10 million a minute subsidising fossil fuels.

He doesn’t say which governments or which currency, but it looks like $A5.3 trillion a year. Australia’s total GDP is only $2 trillion.

# US fossil fuel vested interests are now spending $US1 billion a year preventing us from lowering emissions, using the tobacco-lobby playbook of creating doubt and confusion.

This $US1 billion appears sourced from a debunked 2013 paper by “environmental sociologist” Robert J. Brulle in the journal Climatic Change.[viii] He added up the total spending of 91 US conservative organisations instead of their fractional spending on climate, and mysteriously lumped even arch alarmist James Hansen among his list of “deniers”.[ix] The tobacco analogy is febrile hand-waving from Naomi Oreskes in her Merchant of Doubt tract, 2010.

# Sceptics create websites full of misinformation like claiming the science is not settled and that climate-peril is a religion.

No science is settled, as Einstein would vouch. The IPCC’s now-disgraced skirt-chasing leader Rajendra Pachauri himself said his cause was religious.[x]

# Exxon-Mobil finances multiple “denier” groups to make it look like “denialism” has broad support.

The oil giant funded 43 skeptic groups with a total $US16 million from 1998 to 2005. That was $US260,000 per group and it ceased 15 years ago. For perspective, Australia’s climate princess, Dr Joelle “Paper Withdrawn” Gergis, got $A692,000 taxpayer money just for one study, which she had to retract in 2012 because of statistical flaws pointed out by skeptics, and she re-did it over the subsequent four years 2013-16. Renewables are now a $US1.5 trillion per year juggernaut. Meanwhile, world-leading skeptic bloggers like JoNova (Perth), Paul Homewood (UK) and Anthony Watts (US) mostly live off tip jars.

# “Deniers” create algorithms and “bots” masquerading as humans to populate the web with climate falsehoods.

The source list points to a 2011 blog post. Its content is just nuts].

The film’s “fact-based dreaming” has spooky or inspirational music to reinforce its messages. It starts with Gameau’s house getting filled with choking smoke after he stokes his fireplace. That represents rising CO2. He mourns that little daughter Velvet will be facing “a deteriorating environment” as ice caps “melt faster than scientists predicted”. That’s odd as the Arctic ice extent has been stable for half a decade and the Antarctic is cooling, not heating.

The oceans, which are alkaline anyway, we’re told are getting so acidic that its animals struggle to make their shells (nonsense). In fact NOAA concedes the historic ocean pH measurements are unreliable, so no conclusions are possible.[xi]

Sea rise, continues the flick, threatens “hundreds of millions” of people. (The UNEP in 2005 predicted a 50 million horde of climate refugees by 2010. When none showed up, it sneakily changed their arrival date to 2020. Now they’d better advance it again to 2030).

Every ten minutes Gameau interviews some of his 100-kid stockpile in the six-to-eleven age bracket, and they repeat memes from adults, like

Ten-year-old girl: “I would like for the government to have done something on global warming and pollution as now I think they are not really doing anything about it.” [Except waste $US1 trillion a year].

“I don’t want to see people eating meat because that is from animals.” [Gameau says we’ll be salivating over “pretty convincing” meat substitutes].

 “The sea looks like a big big mess.”

“The beach would not be the same if you could not swim in the water and whales are all gone.”

 “I wish they would stop killing off animals and forests like that. That would be cool.”

Gameau comments without irony: “It’s sobering to learn how pre-occupied kids are with the state of the planet.”

Daughter Velvet, berates a guilty adult: “What were you guys thinking?”

Adult (shame-facedly): “Well sometimes we weren’t.”

Gameau’s first solution is from Bangladesh (would we all just love to live like Bangladeshis? OK, probably not), which he celebrates for deploying “solar microgrids” powering what looks like 15W light globes. (The others enjoy fossil-fired mains 220V power. Renewables in Bangladesh are currently 2.5 per cent of its electricity capacity, and the renewables target is only 10 per cent.[xii] Mustn’t tell schoolkids that inconvenient truth, Mr Gameau.

His narrative also claims that somehow we will get those all-important solar household batteries “so cheap you are not even going to notice”. The cost of a battery system: currently between $2000 and $20,000., which are certainly numbers large enough to be noticed. Many countries, he dreams, could be close to 100 per cent renewables by 2040, presumably when the sun will be shining at night and the wind never stops.

He trots out a succession of “experts”, like Oxford’s Dr Kate Raworth. She’s a “renegade economist”  and “the brain behind the widely influential theory of Doughnut Economics.” She plans for a free economy where the value created is shared more equitably, granting prosperity to everyone in the world without climate change or pollution, the film says.

Cars are scrapped or converted to electric drive (wow, what would the mechanic charge?). The film provides another of those wonderful ‘peak oil’ forecasts:  “If no-one buys (normal) cars, oil demand will peak and go down dramatically and never come back”. We will have “less road rage” and actually hear birds singing in the city. (The flick’s sound editor splices helpfully “tweet, tweet” into the sound-track at this point).

Another of Gameau’s talking heads is author/film-maker Helena Norberg-Hodge, who “has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for more than 30 years.” She pushes purer living patterns in both “North and South” hemispheres, according to her blurb, which explains she mastered her green methods over decades of work in Ladakh, Kashmir, which is famous for its religious mask-dancing and weaving. Her books include Learning from Ladakh and the rather ambitious Schooling the World.

Australian actress, Davini Malcolm, plays a shaman in Gameau’s film. She was born “Lindy” but received the name “Davini” from her Indian spiritual teacher, Osho, in 1994. She went on to help produce and write the 13-part children’s TV Series Teenie Weenie Greenies and do a film, Lotus Birth, of her experience having twins in the bath. The births were preceded by her partner, Peter, and their two boys around the piano singing what the DVD notes call their famous and delightful “fart song”.

In 2040 a glum fellow Eric Toensmeier lectures our kids that “even if we ceased all our human emissions altogether, cut emissions to zero, we would still be toast” because we’ve passed some phony tipping point “and on our way to a point of no return”. So we have to sequester and store existing “carbon” (he means CO2 but only nerds do chemistry). Experts describe how to “flip” global crop and livestock farming to cut emissions through soil regeneration and fence-free cattle grazing. Gameau’s case study is Cole Seis who has reworked his 2000 acres at Shepparton and claims savings of over $2 million – except “I don’t know where the $2 million went,” he says.[xiii]

The future-stepping Velvet explains that someone did get stung for the costs of all this transformation: “Those who polluted our era with excess carbon [she means CO2] had to pay a penalty and the money raised paid farmers to clean our air.” This innovative economic planning is accompanied by vision of “smoke” aka steam, billowing from a coal-fired power station.

Next up is marine permaculture for the oceans “to get the overturning circulation going again”, quite a task. A 100 square kilometre patch of oceanic desert between Australia and America would be switched to permaculture, producing food to stave off those “unprecedented numbers of [climate] refugees”, according to Gameau. Seaweed farms flourish for thousands of kilometres in the Bay of Bengal and around the coast of Africa, contributing to ‘thriving local economies’.

The film’s explanatory notes say, “Kelp and seaweed are nature’s climate warriors … Researchers estimate that if 9 per cent of the world’s ocean surfaces were used for seaweed farming, we would be removing 53 billion tonnes of CO2 per year from the atmosphere.” Hmm, what’s 9 per cent of the oceans? On my estimate, four times the size of Australia. That’s a challenge.

Cool Australia tells kids:

Students will investigate the relationship between seaweed farming, the health benefits of eating seaweed and climate change. They will use this info to develop an infographic that uses numbers to convince their peers to eat more seaweed.

Can we surmise Cool Australia founder Jason Kimberley does his bit by lunching on kelp and algae? Somehow I doubt it.

De-commissioned oil rigs, we learn, “become exciting tourist destinations for those keen to explore marine life.” Who needs silly old oil and plastics? Newsreader Angela Pippos is wheeled on to read this fake script: “Big banks continue to take a hit as the public shifts its money away from organisations that support fossil fuels.” […]

He closes his concoction with rapturous music and vision of youngsters of all colors and creeds dancing in a hi-tech ambience through a forest. One white-clad 20-something grows from her shoulder-blades giant butterfly wings that actually flap. Gameau rhapsodises that this generation is “celebrating regeneration” (geddit?) because CO2 levels are coming down. This must be the cheesiest movie clip ever made or even imaginable.

Gameau leaves his world-straddling Boeing at the airport and heads home to start planting stuff, as distinct from planting stuff in kids’ heads. There are so many helpers involved in this 92-minute mock epic that ten minutes are needed for the closing credits.

Cheryl Lacey is an education strategist and author of Marching Schools Forward (Connor Court, 2019). She comments:

Whether schools are being used by Al Gore, Cool Australia, Gillard, the Greens, or even the Liberal party, the truth is that schools have become nothing more than a playing field for power and wealth distribution. This ‘child abuse’ isn’t new. Education’s been bastardised for at least 50 years: the Greens especially have  deeply penetrated young minds.  It’s no surprise that 90% of all schools are buying into Cool Australia’s propaganda. Just print and distribute. No teaching required. As for thinking? Impossible.

Remarks in a Tagespiegel article from Germany last week seem quite applicable to Australian schools. The former Potsdam Climate Institute Director, Prof. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber is quoted: “The closing of ranks of science and youth in the fight for a new society that is sustainable in its management and living is like a ‘big bang’. We need these heroes and heroines who are not even of age”.

Tagespeigel comments,

These minors are well organized in their own schools – that is their basis. But something has changed fundamentally. Whereas ten years ago, the climate and environment clubs in the schools themselves were not taken seriously by students and particularly frequented, today they are the smallest units from which mobilization and organization for the big demonstrations are done. (Translation by Pierre Gosselin, Notrickszone )

I know conservative politicians are timid but why are they supporting schools’ campaign for their own extinction?

Tony Thomas’s new book, Come To Think Of It – essays to tickle the brain, is available here as a book ($34.95) or an e-book ($14.95) 

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/hinter-den-kulissen-von-fridays-for-future-berlin-was-die-jungen-aktivisten-treibt-und-wer-sie-sind/26197788.html

[i] Cool Australia Impact Report, 2019

[ii] Impact Report: “The outcome is better engaged students who commit to individual and community action. This approach goes beyond a simple transfer of knowledge. It builds on an individual’s capacity for transformational change.”

[iii] Some items I’ve tracked include Film Victoria: 2018-19, $22,000; 2017-18, $88,000; 2016-17, $10,000. Screen Australia, 2016-17, $15,000 (development), unstated (production).

[iv] In a search, “2040” comes up in 64 lessons

[v] Craig Kimberley sold his Just Jeans empire for $64m in 2001.

[vi] The HRC also trawled for complaints about The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak, who died of a heart attack during the furore.

[vii] Cool Australia Impact Report, 2019

[viii] Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations

[ix] Hansen is known as “the father of the global warming movement” from his 1988 testimony to Congress.

[x] Pachauri: ‘For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.’

[xi] The data collected prior to 1989 are typically not well documented and their metadata is incomplete; therefore, such data are of unknown and probably variable quality.

[xii] 48 power plants with a combined generation capacity of 16,875 megawatts (MW) are under construction in Bangladesh. State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid says the power division has been working on uninterrupted, reliable and quality power at reasonable and affordable prices.

[xiii] “Colin Seis discovered a new way of farming after his 2,000-acre family farm burned to the ground in a devastating bushfire. The disaster forced Colin to rethink his approach and develop a radical new farming technique. It was so successful it became a global agricultural movement, known as ‘pasture cropping’.”

October 17, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Film Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment