Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Democrat Groups Plan to ‘Fact Check’ Private SMS Messages

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | July 12, 2021

Groups allied with the Biden administration are planning on working directly with cellphone network providers to ‘fact check’ private SMS messages if they contain “misinformation about vaccines.”

The revelation is made in a Politico article which explains how the White House is preparing to characterize “conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme.”

The decision to ramp up the information war against vaccine skeptics was made after conservatives showed resistance to the Biden administration’s plan to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates.

“Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages,” states the report. “The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.”

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1414655500344565764?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1414655500344565764%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsummit.news%2F2021%2F07%2F12%2Fdemocrat-groups-plan-to-fact-check-private-sms-messages%2F

The prospect of the DNC and other government-affiliated groups having access to Americans’ private text messages represents a chilling surveillance dystopia.

Interfering with and trying to ‘fact check’ people’s personal conversations is also utterly demented.

Recall that ‘fact-checkers’ infamously declared the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis to be a “debunked conspiracy theory” at the start of the pandemic, only to be forced into a humiliating reversal later on.

In doing so, they may have helped facilitate one of the biggest cover-ups in modern history, so what business such groups have in snooping on people’s private SMS messages is anyone’s guess.

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

YouTube deletes channel of Spain’s political party, VOX

Deleted with no recourse

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 12, 2021

YouTube has deplatformed Spain’s fast-rising conservatives gathered around VOX, currently the second-largest opposition party in the country’s parliament.

A notice on the party’s now-deleted channel reads that it was terminated over multiple copyright infringement claims.

The videos in question have been backed up on AltCensored, a platform set up to keep record of content deleted by YouTube or self-censored on the platform.

Often branded in mainstream Western media as an “extreme-right” and an “Islamophobic” party, VOX earlier this year gained more ground with a strong showing in regional elections in Catalonia, where they took the role of conservative leaders it the local parliament.

VOX, on the other hand, maintains that its goal is to defend Spanish values and way of life, advocate for a smaller state apparatus, and protect privacy from government intrusion.

However, YouTube’s termination notice doesn’t mention any content contentious per se, but rather unspecified alleged copyright infringement. While it isn’t clear what the exact reason for the deletion of the YouTube channel is, it isn’t uncommon for the giant’s copyright rules to be abused as a way to achieve unrelated goals.

False copyright claims can be used for anything from unmasking identities, extorting money, to simply blocking content somebody doesn’t like.

Until the mystery of what exactly prompted YouTube to kick VOX off the platform, what’s certain is that this isn’t the first time the party has had trouble on Big Tech owned social media. In May, Francisco Jose Contreras, a VOX MP, got locked out of Twitter for stating that “a man cannot get pregnant.”

The temporary ban came after Contreras shared a link to a story about a man who had “given birth to his child.”

“That’s a lie. A man cannot get pregnant. A man has neither uterus nor ovaries,” Contreras commented at the time. Twitter then suspended him for spreading “hatred.”

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

How Google and Wikipedia Brainwash You

Internet giants cover-up for Big Pharma, suppress alternative medicine and bury inconvenient facts.

By Ryan Matters | OffGuardian | July 12, 2021

According to research done by We Are Social, the average internet user spends over 6 and half hours online every day.

The internet is both a blessing as a curse. On the one hand, it gives us access to knowledge and technology that improves our lives, but on the other hand, it’s an addictive and dangerous mind-control tool that can be exploited to influence your choices and manipulate your thinking.

The COVID pseudopandemic has seen internet censorship rise to an unprecedented level. The controllers and their minions are scrambling to silence anyone who dares to question the efficacy of vaccines or the existence of Sars-Cov-2.

Let’s recap: In the space of a few months, thousands of YouTube channels and millions of Facebook posts have been deleted. The former president of the United States’ Twitter account was removed, and, Greenmedinfo, a site that aggregates research on natural remedies, had both their Facebook and Instagram accounts deleted losing over half a million followers.

LinkedIn also joined in on the action by deleting the account of Dr. Robert Malone after he questioned the safety of the mRNA vaccines, the technology for which he himself played a huge part in creating.

Parler was removed from the internet and so was the website of America’s Frontline Doctors after they endorsed non-agenda-approved treatments to combat COVID-19. More recently, in a move that’s disturbing yet predictable, Facebook has begun sending users creepy messages relating to “extremist content”.

So content that goes against the mainstream agenda is either censored or outright deleted. We know that. But what about the content that goes against corporate interests but isn’t quite insidious enough to be removed? What does Google, the largest search engine in the world, processing over 40,000 search requests per second, do about such content?

The first thing to understand about Google is that it’s more than just a search engine. Google develops and maintains a network of applications that all work together to collect, analyze, and leverage your data. Each application feeds data into the next, forming a global chain of information exchange.

For example, Google’s driverless car initiative powers Google Maps, which in turn powers Google’s local listings. It is this network effect that has made Google such a powerful and unrivaled force in the search engine space.

As a search engine, Google decides what information you see and what information you don’t. It goes without saying, but any tool with such power needs to be responsibly managed and repeatedly scrutinized.

Anyone who chooses to use such a tool should also be aware that they are seeing the internet through a lens created by Google’s mysterious algorithms and the information they’re receiving doesn’t necessarily come from an objective or neutral source.

Google’s ability to affect people’s thinking was demonstrated by the work of Dr. Robert Epstein when his team found that Google was profoundly influencing the results of elections. Epstein writes that:

Our research leaves a little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidates by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. […] Whether or not Google executive see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giants algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day.”

It would also appear that Google is inherently biased towards pro-drug, pro-vaccine, Big Pharma medicine. In 2019, the search engine made an update to its algorithm that just so happened to shadow-ban health websites not affiliated with billion-dollar corporates.

The websites affected included GreenMedInfo, SelfHacked, and Mercola.com. Some of these sites lost over 90% of their organic traffic, overnight.

When searching for most health-related topics on Google, the first page is almost always filled with content from websites like WebMD, whose history is filled with conflicts of interest and open collaborations with Monsanto, Merck, and other corporates.

In 2017, the search engine blacklisted naturalnews.com, a natural health advocacy organization that reports on controversial health topics including vaccine safety, GMOs, and pharmaceutical experiments, de-indexing over 140,000 of their webpages.

In a 2019 article, the founder of NaturalNews, Mike Adams, had this to say about Google (emphasis in original):

Make no mistake: Google is pro-pharma, pro-Monsanto, pro-glyphosate, pro-pesticides, pro-chemotherapy, pro-fluoride, pro-5G, pro-geoengineering and fully supports every other toxic poison that endangers humankind.”

Google’s ties to Big Pharma are well-known. In 2016, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, partnered with GlaxoSmithKline to create a new company focused on research into bioelectronics – a branch of medical science aimed at fighting diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body. GSK also works directly with Google thanks to a deal between the two companies that allows GSK full control over the data that they use. What data? Whose data? That isn’t disclosed.

Alphabet is also heavily invested in Vaccitech, a UK-based vaccine company founded by researchers at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, the Vatican (vaxxican?) of vaccine research.

Finally, it has recently come to light that Google’s charity arm, Google.org, provided funding for research and studies carried out by Peter Daszak and his charity, EcoHealth Alliance – the same charity that previously worked with the Wuhan lab involved in so-called ‘gain of function’ research.

These conflicts of interest alone should call into question the search engine’s ability to provide an unbiased view of health content on the internet.

Google’s “autocomplete” algorithm is another source of manipulation that works to affect people’s perceptions about the danger of vaccines and the efficacy of natural treatments.

For example, if you type “vaccines cause” into Google, the top suggestion is “vaccines cause adults”. I mean, seriously? In contrast, if you search “Chiropractic is”, the top suggestions are “quackery”, “pseudoscience” and “dangerous”.

Autocomplete is supposedly based on data collected from real Google searches, especially common and trending ones. However, data from Google trends clearly show that ever since 2004, “vaccines cause autism” has been searched far more times than “vaccines cause adults”, and “Chiropractic is good” has received a far higher popularity score than “Chiropractic is quackery”, the top suggestion.

A similar trend can be observed for terms such as “supplements are”, “GMOs are”, “glyphosate is”, “organic is”, “homeopathy is”, and “holistic medicine is”.

Looking at the way Google favours Big Pharma content, it’s reasonable to suspect that their “data lakes” are being poisoned. In fact, this was confirmed in 2019 when former Google software engineer, Zack Vorheis, leaked 950 pages of internal company documents providing evidence that Google was shaping election results, implementing stealth censorship programmes, and maintaining undisclosed blacklists.

Google’s algorithms are shrouded in mystery, based on black-box machine learning models that few people understand.

Machine learning models must be “trained” and as long as Google feeds them data to say “non-drug medicine is bad, Big Pharma is good”, the algorithms will continue to re-bias the internet in that direction, altering people’s perceptions of natural health and presenting drug-based medicine as the shining light in a dark world filled with invisible enemies.

When it comes to psychological manipulation, Google’s “partner in crime” is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

If you’ve ever searched for anything on the internet, you’ve likely seen Wikipedia show up towards the top of the search results. When it comes to questions without any commercial impact, such as “What’s the capital of Turkey?”, Wikipedia does a pretty good job.

But when it comes to multibillion-dollar industries, things get a little murky. Big corporates have big pockets and they aren’t opposed to the concept of “pay-to-play”. This was highlighted in 2012 when British PR firm, Bell Pottinger, was exposed for its involvement in manipulating Wikipedia entries for paying clients.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is no saint, either. In 2008 he used the platform as his personal relationship break-up tool by updating his relationship status on his Wiki entry before telling his girlfriend. And in 2010, he was embroiled in a Wikipedia pornography-removal scandal that saw him “voluntarily” relinquish certain editing and admin privileges.

One of the industries where Wikipedia’s bias is most noticeable is healthcare. In an article for the Orthomolecular News Service, Howard Strauss, Grandson of Max Gerson, MD (the creator of the Gerson cancer therapy) states that:

This writer and many others in the field of alternative medicine and natural healing have experienced Wikipedia bias personally when contributing well-documented, carefully researched articles to the site, only to have them be radically altered and deleted, by anonymous “editors,” then being banned from further editing or contributions. This is impossible to reconcile with a free flow of information.”

And this can be verified as Wikipedia keeps a public record of all edits made to an article over time. He goes on to comment on the history of Wikipedia and states that:

At first, it was interesting to see uncensored information flow through the site, and even contribute to it. Then corporate America realized that Wikipedia, and similar sites, were distributing information they had carefully and thoroughly suppressed in the media, and set about correcting that omission. Soon, Wikipedia entries about natural healing, holistic medicine, and other subjects began to resemble publicity blurbs from Monsanto, or Merck, or the NIH. Contributors are supposed to be anonymous, “volunteer” editors were supposed to be both anonymous and neutral. But it was clear that for certain sensitive subjects, this was far from the case.”

If you want to see Wikipedia’s bias for yourself, just search for any medical discipline that isn’t drug-based. And if you want to make things really fun, take a shot of whiskey every time you see the word ‘pseudoscience’.

Here are real snippets from Wikipedia entries on alternative forms of medicine and natural healing, taken from the first few sentences of the entry…

  • Chiropractic: “Chiropractic is a pseudoscientific alternative medicine…”
  • Chinese medicine: “Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a branch of traditional medicine in China. It has been described as “fraught with pseudoscience.“
  • Homeopathy: “Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine.”
  • Ayurveda: “The theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.”
  • Acupuncture: “Acupuncture is a pseudoscience.”
  • German New Medicine: “Germanic New Medicine (GNM), also formerly known as German New Medicine and New Medicine, a system of pseudo-medicine.“
  • Functional Medicine: “Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses a number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments.“

The editors display a shocking level of bias by cherry-picking references, many of which are not peer-reviewed or scientific, and make hollow claims which they portray as facts.

The entry on Functional Medicine is particularly difficult to get through. Functional Medicine is a form of medicine focused on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. It often involves treatments to correct nutritional imbalances and gut dysbiosis.

However, the author claims that functional medicine encompasses a number of ‘unproven’ and ‘disproven’ treatments and cites two articles on sciencebasedmedicine.org, a notorious ‘Skeptic’ publication, both written by the same author.

The articles, far from scientific or scholarly, read as opinion pieces written by an MD with a chip on his shoulder, who clearly has no understanding of what functional medicine really is. The author, Dr. Wallace Sampson, passed away in 2015. Here’s his author bio:

Retired hematologist/oncologist, presumptive analyzer of ideological and fraudulent medical claims, claimant to being founding editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, and to detecting quackery by smell.”

Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry for the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, says that it is a discontinued medical journal and that it was evaluated at least three times by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing in MEDLINE, but rejected each time. What a shame.

Furthermore, in 2003, a California Appeals Court found Dr. Sampson “to be biased and unworthy of credibility.” Yet these are the kind of charlatans that Wikipedia endorses as “experts”.

Instead of citing ‘quackbuster’ publications written by biased, outdated, and nutritionally uneducated MDs, the editors would do well to dive into Alan Gaby’s Nutritional Medicine (over 16,000 scientific references), or Dr. Alex Vasquez’s Inflammation Mastery. That’s presuming they have the intelligence to read high-level, academic texts, based on real, unbiased science (not opinions).

If I were an editor at Wikipedia, I may choose to rewrite the article on chemotherapy, claiming it is a pseudoscience by citing this 2004 study which found the overall contribution of chemotherapy to cancer survival to be barely over 2%, or this study in Nature Medicine that found chemotherapy to increase tumour growth and survival.

Wikipedia made its stance on alternative health quite clear in 2014 when founder Jimmy Wales ridiculed an 8,000-signature petition on Change.org calling for a fairer discussion of alternative and complementary medicine on the encyclopedia. The petition stated that:

As gatekeepers for the status quo, they [Wikipedia] refuse discourse with leading-edge research scientists and clinicians or, for that matter, anyone with a different point of view”

Instead of recognizing his lack of expertise in the area of healthcare and re-evaluating the fraudulent and dubious wiki entries, Wales demonstrated his lack of awareness by stating that:

What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of ‘true scientific discourse’. It isn’t.”

Quite frankly, it’s not surprising to hear such a response from the man who heads an organization that serves the interests of the Big Money Machine and its quest to dumb down the populace. As Dr. Vasquez puts it, in a recent critique of a New York Times propaganda piece on the “danger” of nutritional supplements to fight coronavirus:

The scaffolding of our institutionalized ignorance requires structural support from publications and organizations that pretend to inform and empower us while simply leaving us dumber and weaker than before.”

So when did Wikipedia become an extension of Big Pharma? The truth is that the health section of Wikipedia was commandeered by a bitter group of skeptics who live within their own, egoic constructs of reality and health.

This anti-health movement ramped up in 2006 when Paul Lee, then the listmaster of Quackwatch, made a forum post inviting skeptics to come forward and begin writing content on Wikipedia about natural and complementary health topics.

Quackwatch, a “Skeptic” website aimed at “debunking” and smearing non-drug medicine, was founded by Steven Barrett, an unlicensed MD who failed his psychiatric board exam, and has authored zero published research (at least I haven’t been able to find any). During a court proceeding, he admitted ties to the AMA, the Federal Trade Commission, and the FDA (though his sources of funding are likely far more expansive).

Lee was in full violation of Wikipedia’s neutrality policy and knowing this, he stated:

Any coordination of efforts should be done by private email, since Wikipedia keeps a very public history of every little edit, and you can’t get them removed. We don’t need any accusations of a conspiracy.”

Needless to say, a coordinated effort over private email IS a conspiracy. And not a very sophisticated one at that.

Then, in a move demonstrating both the organization’s ethical and moral standards, Wikipedia made Paul Lee a senior editor with special rights and privileges.

The influence that both Google and Wikipedia have is astonishing when you consider that Google receives more than 1 billion health-related questions per day. How many of those people have turned away from effective treatments due to the information Google fed them? How many people wrongly believe that COVID vaccines are safe effective?

But who do we blame for the increasing power and influence that Google and Wikipedia hold? Perhaps we are to blame. Blindly trusting in “authorities” to have our best interests at heart is the kind of infantile thinking that got us into this mess.

As the number one visited website in the world, Google controls ~90% of global search traffic. Our minds, health beliefs, political stances, and world views are inseparably linked to information we read on the internet and neither Google nor Wikipedia is an objective source for this information.

It is time that we take responsibility for our own health. We have to develop the ability to read and assess health knowledge objectively and intuitively.

Do you suffer from depression? Maybe you need to get your vitamin B12 or vitamin D levels checked, maybe you need to cut out processed and neuroinflammatory foods from your diet.

The internet is not a miracle worker. The internet doesn’t know what’s best for you, no one does. Your body is different from mine. Treatments that work for you may not work for me. But as long as we learn to listen to our bodies, to understand our own, unique inner landscape, we can begin to seek treatments and practitioners that truly make a difference.

The lesson is this: You are the authority. Read, learn, understand, and don’t take anything at face value. We need to learn to develop our intuition in parallel with our critical thinking skills.

Discernment is our secret weapon. We’re fighting an information war. Arm yourself with knowledge and be free.

Ryan Matters is a writer and free thinker from South Africa. After a life-changing period of illness, he began to question mainstream medicine, science and the true meaning of what it is to be alive. Some of his writings can be found at newbraveworld.org, you can also follow him on Gab.

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Larry Sangar is right, Wikipedia has become the establishment thought police – just look at my entry there

By Eva Bartlett | RT | July 12, 2021

For some years now, Wikipedia has had a libellous smear entry on me that cannot be edited to be less of a smear. So, imagine my surprise to learn a co-founder of the site accuses it of not being neutral.

In February 2021, Larry Sanger, one of the founders of the online encyclopedia, said, “The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone.” This was not his first time speaking out against Wikipedia. Personally, I was surprised to learn that Wikipedia was ever neutral.

In his more recent post, ‘Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever’, Sanger wrote:

“Wikipedia, like many other deeply biased institutions of our brave new digital world, has made itself into a kind of thought police that has de facto shackled conservative viewpoints with which they disagree. Democracy cannot thrive under such conditions: I maintain that Wikipedia has become an opponent of vigorous democracy.”

I would extend his criticism to note that it is not only conservative views that are censored, but anti-Imperialist views, health care, and, specifically in the case of Syria, voices who have reported extensively from on the ground and contest official narratives about the country. These include myself and British journalist Vanessa Beeley. Not coincidentally, we have both been subjected to relentless smear pieces from the Western media and the self-proclaimed fact checkers of Snopes, branding us cheerleaders for terrorists in Syria.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the wiki-smears on us consists of those character assassination articles.

There are of course many more voices who have reported honestly on Syria but, for some reason, I couldn’t find smear entries on them. On the contrary, some have what appear to be glossy PR entries of a more biographical nature, lauding their work.

But for Vanessa Beeley and I, although much biographical information on each of us is widely available online, the Wiki entries remain devoid of the usual bios and instead are just designed to discredit us.

Sanger noted that, “All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia,” declares a policy page, “must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV).”

He went on to detail what this “neutrality” means or should mean.

“From a truly neutral article, you would learn why, on a whole variety of issues, conservatives believe one thing, while progressives believe another thing. And then you would be able to make up your own mind.

Is that what Wikipedia offers? As we will see, the answer is No.”

He went on to give numerous examples of Wikipedia’s stark lack of neutrality on critical issues. For the sake of brevity, I would encourage readers to check out Sanger’s article for the full list.

However, let’s look at the entries on myself and Vanessa Beeley.

Mine refers to me as “a Canadian activist and blogger who is known for promoting conspiracy theories about Syria.” Relegating me to a “blogger” was clearly intended to dispute my credentials as a journalist. Credentials which the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club deemed journalistically credible enough to award. Likewise, award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger more recently deemed my latest article on the Douma chemical hoax an “outstanding report.”

The Wiki smear also states that I “write op-eds for the television network RT.” For a while, that line read, “She blogs for the Russian-controlled outlet RT”, a bogus claim that many journalists (including the fact checkers of Channel 4) have copy-paste repeated without bothering to see that, like tens of other journalists, what I write is actually for the op-edge section of RT’s website.

The entry goes on to cite from the litany of smear articles against me since 2016, smears which I have refuted, and which always read the same: copy-paste character assassinations that whitewash terrorism in Syria.

Then, there is the clear instance of libel: Wikipedia’s assertion that I, “went on a government-sponsored trip to North Korea.”

In fact, my August 2017 trip to the DPRK was not paid for by any government, but by myself, with some support from a colleague who knew I lived on a shoestring.

This lie was most recently regurgitated by British journalist (and I use that term generously) Brian Whitaker.

Any defamation lawyers out there?

Similarly, the Wiki smear entry on Vanessa Beeley relegates her to mere “blogger” status (although John Pilger thinks highly enough of her, and myself, to have highlighted our “substantiated investigative work”) and in 2018 she was included on a list of the most respected journalists in the UK.

It includes the same“conspiracy theories and disinformation” line that mine does, as well as the usual, predictable anti-Russia rhetoric.

But even I was shocked to see Wikipedia’s claim that Beeley has, “been a frequent guest on InfoWars.” When I asked her about this, she replied: “This is an outright lie. I have never been a guest of Infowars. I challenge Wikipedia to publish the multiple interviews they claim exist. They can’t.”

So there we have it. Not only are the entries not even close to neutral, each contains outright fabrication in addition to the character assassinations.

At some point in 2018, I shared an email I had received from a Wikipedia editor, which noted:

“Dear Eva, I’m writing to inform you that we have taken action against a banned user who evaded their ban to create an article about you. The article has been removed. I do not have the full context here, but the content seems to have been extremely problematic and from your Twitter and the flood of supporter emails we received yesterday, I gather this has been an issue for some time.”

And indeed, supporters told me they had contacted Wikipedia to challenge the smear entry on me and were successful in making changes to read more fairly. Yet, in short time, the entry returned to nearly exactly as it had originally been.

The Wikitalk portion of the smear entry on me points out: “Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.”

But no, that hasn’t happened in my entry.

On the same page, supporters called Wikipedia out: “It’s bordering on WP:ATTACK. Nothing about her early life, education or volunteer activities etc, which you’d expect to find in a Biography. It’s just a monologue of critical opinion pieces, with a couple of lines thrown in at the end to cover her response & with a selective focus on the usual slanted key words used to disparage.”

Another critic of the entry pointed out the sources used were “questionable”, including noting that one source, Al Jazeera, is, “owned by the Qatari Royal family… and Qatar has been funding some of the Salafi rebels in Syria. Seriously, does anyone think they will report even remotely fairy on Eva Bartlett?”

In his June post on Wikipedia, Larry Sanger wrote:

“Democracy requires that voters be given the full range of views on controversial issues, so that they can make up their minds for themselves. If society’s main information sources march in ideological lockstep, they make a mockery of democracy. Then the wealthy and powerful need only gain control of the few approved organs of acceptable thought; then they will be able to manipulate and ultimately control all important political dialogue.”

Similarly, Vanessa Beeley had this to say on the matter: “The Jimmy Wales Wikipedia enterprise is little more than a McCarthyite echo chamber that is weaponized to discredit journalists and academics who are influential in challenging US or UK Imperialist policies. There is virtually no redress for the targeted individuals, ‘editors’ scrub any corrections almost immediately. Wikipedia is effectively a gatekeeper for the ruling class.”

In any case, for those interested in a fairer rendition of who is Eva Bartlett, someone created an entry on a site called Everpedia, and otherwise I have an about me section on my blog.

Unfortunately, many will first come across the wiki entries on myself and colleagues, and many will stop there. But, after all the smears, my skin has grown thick and I’m at peace with the fact that I know I’ve reported honestly.

I highly doubt the editors behind such Wiki smears can say the same of their edits.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | | 4 Comments

House committees pass $20 mill per day on behalf of Israel

By Alison Weir | Israel-Palestine News | July 12, 2021

Congressional committees recently passed two bills that contain provisions to disburse a total of over $7 billion on behalf of Israel in the year 2022. This works out to almost $20 million per day.

These provisions were included in the bills despite the fact that Israel just committed another onslaught against Gazan men, women, and children; despite Israel’s many actions that harm Americans; despite the fact that most Americans think the U.S. already gives Israel too much money; and despite the fact that aid to Israel is illegal under U.S. laws.

On June 30th, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense approved a bill that gives Israel half a billion dollars, and on July 1st the House Appropriations Committee advanced a bill that disburses nearly $6.4 billion on behalf of Israel.

APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE BILL

The latter bill, currently called the “2022 State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations” bill, includes a measure that would give Israel $3.3 billion in military aid. The Committee’s press release on the bill, however, does not mention the funding for Israel.

In addition to this $3.3 billion, the bill includes the following funding that benefits Israel:

• An additional $58 million on related programs for Israel, which AIPAC points out in a series of proud tweets that list them.

• The bill provides $1.65 billion to Jordan and $1.4 billion to Egypt stemming from previous agreements with their governments to desist from advocating for Palestinian rights.

• It also contains a section to provide $225 million for alleged assistance to Palestinians. In reality, such funding is largely intended to benefit Israel, and is often proposed and/or receives support from Israel partisans such as Nita Lowey.

Rationales given in the bill for this funding are that it would “advance Middle East peace” (i.e. lead Palestinians to accede to Israeli demands); “improve security in the region” (be used by the Palestinian Authority to continue to round up resistance fighters – the Palestinian Authority is known as Israel’s “day-to-day partner in governing the West Bank”); and to “address urgent humanitarian needs” (but doesn’t mention that these needs are caused by Israel’s ongoing military attacks and financial policies against Palestinians).

Portions of the aid are used as a combination threat and bribe; the money will not be provided if “the Palestinians obtain the same standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof” or if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

Such ‘humanitarian’ funding for Palestinians is considered important for Israel, as two prominent Israel advocates explain:

“Funding for Palestinian assistance programs has always flowed with bipartisan support because it was determined to reinforce Israel’s security and provide a measure of U.S. leverage and influence.

This logic was ratified by the support of the Israeli government for these programs. Israeli authorities understood that a breakdown in security, an economic collapse or a humanitarian crisis in the West Bank would place an enormous burden on Israel.”

These additional provisions bring the total amount of Americans’ tax money to be disbursed on behalf of Israel in the Appropriations Committee bill to at least $6.7 billion.

Added to that is the half billion in the defense subcommittee bill passed on June 30th, making the total amount of money to be disbursed on behalf of Israel approximately $7.2 billion. 

These provisions were passed despite the fact that most voters would likely oppose them, since, as mentioned above, surveys indicate that the majority of Americans don’t support such large funding to Israel. However, very few Americans know about the proposed funding, since mainstream U.S. news companies almost never report on such legislation (unlike Israeli and Israel-focused U.S. media).

EVEN MORE MONEY FOR ISRAEL…

And there are numerous additional expenditures on behalf of Israel throughout the bill that are not included in the above tabulation.

Among these are funding for operations to dismantle the Arab League boycott of Israel; millions of dollars provided for Jews resettling in Israel; portions of the $20 billion to “Democracy Programs” and the $4.5 billion to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that are used to oppose support for Palestinian rights as allegedly ‘antisemitism’; funding to countries such as Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, and others resulting from enticements to procure their ‘normalization‘ policies with Israel, etc. A thorough examination of such additional programs could quite possibly add another billion dollars to be disbursed for Israel.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before House Appropriation Subcommittee hearing on 2022 State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill on June 7, 2021. (Blinken had helped give Israel millions of additional dollars during its 2014 massacre of Gazans.) (C-Span)

AIPAC IS PLEASED

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – possibly the most famous of the hundreds of pro-Israel groups in the U.S. – applauded Congressional leaders for their action in passing the measures:

This money to and for Israel is not new. Over the years, Israel has received far more U.S. tax money than any other country on earth: on average over 7,000 times more per capita than anyone else.

And in addition to all of this are the lives destroyed and the multi-trillion dollar cost of the Iraq war, a tragic and disastrous quagmire promoted by Israel and its American partisans.

And on top of this are the costs, in both lives and treasure, of Israel-influenced policies regarding Syria, Iran, and others.

It’s time to end Israel’s strangle hold over American politicians. To tell your Congress members to vote against this massive funding for Israel, go here.

(And to tell them to enact legislation that protects Palestinian children, go here.)

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. 

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , | 7 Comments

The Fight to Save Lifta, the Last Remaining Palestinian Village

By Jessica Buxbaum | MintPress News | July 9, 2021

Yacoub Odeh is 81 years old but he can still remember his childhood in the Palestinian village of Lifta as if it were yesterday. Children playing together in the gardens, swimming in the pools and laying in the grass.

Today, Lifta remains as a frozen time capsule. While the residents were expelled during Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing campaign (Nakba), the ruins of their homes still stand. These ruins carved into the lush hillside are perceived as a symbol of the Palestinians’ right of return. This is the only town Israel did not demolish after the Nakba, but a government plan may soon change that.

In May, the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), the government agency in charge of managing public lands, issued a new tender for construction in Lifta. The development scheme, known as Plan 6036, seeks to build 259 housing units along with a commercial and business space and a luxury hotel on top of and around the existing houses. Daphna Golan-Agnon, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and part of the Save Lifta Coalition’s board, explained that while the homes may not be demolished, “the village will disappear behind walls of concrete needed to hold new construction.”

The bid was supposed to be held on July 4, but significant public opposition delayed it to July 29.

The ruins in Lifta, a Palestinian village ethnically cleased in 1948. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News

Attempts to demolish Lifta have been ongoing for years. The ILA first published a tender for Plan 6036 in 2010 after the Israeli state approved the construction plan for Lifta in 2006. A 2012 Jerusalem District Court ruling found Plan 6036 insufficient and requested amending it in accordance with a conservation survey on Lifta from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

The IAA survey was completed in 2017 and found that Plan 6036 could not be executed without making significant adjustments in order to preserve the ancient village. Plan 270b was drawn up to fit the survey’s findings but in 2017 the Local Planning and Building Committee of Jerusalem temporarily halted the initiative for further examination.

The recent ILA announcement was met with hundreds of letters to Jerusalem’s mayor rejecting the sale. When reached for comment, the Municipality of Jerusalem told MintPress News that it “wasn’t informed about the publication of this tender and didn’t approve it. The mayor of Jerusalem asked all the relevant authorities to reconsider the construction plan.” The Israel Lands Council, which operates the ILA, did not respond to a request for comment.

‘In one hour, we became refugees’

Lifta’s strategic location at the edge of Jerusalem has made it a prime target for land grabs. Acting as a suburb of Jerusalem, Lifta’s placement next to the Jerusalem-Jaffa Highway makes for an easy trip to the Mediterranean while still being tied to the city of Jerusalem.

Lifta, often referred to as the entrance to Jerusalem, was a wealthy, agricultural community supported by olive presses and flour mills and situated atop the Wadi al-Shami spring. Homes made of limestone were cut into the hillside and Lifta’s roads wended through the valley.

Prior to the 1948 Nakba, Zionist militias like the Haganah saw seizing Lifta as necessary to cement Jewish control over all of Palestine. According to the Haganah Historical Archives, “[s]ecuring the western exit of the city [of Jerusalem] entailed the eviction of Arabs.”  Israeli historian Benny Morris said the Haganah fired the first shots in 1947, setting off the mass expulsion of Lifta’s 2,960 residents.

In December 1947, the Haganah killed a Palestinian business owner in Lifta. Later that month, one of Lifta’s two coffeehouses was ambushed with gunfire and grenades. The attack killed six and wounded seven. Two months into 1948, the Jewish Agency chairman and future first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, boasted of the ethnic cleansing’s success, telling his political party members: “From your entry into Jerusalem through Lifta — Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, King George Street and Mea She’arim — there are no strangers. One hundred percent Jews.“

Odeh, head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission, was 8-years-old when Lifta came under siege by Zionist forces.

Yacoub Odeh, Nakba survivor and head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News

“I remember one day my mother was preparing the fire to heat our room, and then [the Zionist miltiias] began to shoot. My brothers began to cry, ‘Mama, mama! They’re shooting us!’ My mom took us inside the room in the corner and under a table to protect us,” Odeh said, recalling two stories of Lifta — the town’s beauty and charm and then its tragic fall.

“There is the beautiful life and then began the miserable life because of the occupation.”

Toward the end of February 1948, Odeh’s father put him, his siblings and his mother into a truck heading to Ramallah to escape the violence in Lifta. Odeh’s father stayed behind to defend the village from the Zionist gangs.

“We were only wearing the clothing we had on because we are coming back tomorrow. We are coming back. Now we just want to be far from the shooting.” Odeh took a deep sigh and said, “In one hour, we became refugees.”

Today, 55 buildings out of approximately 450 remain in Lifta, including a club, mosque, cemetery and school, which now operates as a school for Israeli Jews. Liftawi refugees are estimated at around 30,000 and live in Jerusalem, the Occupied West Bank and the Diaspora. Most of the homes are empty, but a few are occupied by Israeli settlers. According to Zochrot, the Israeli nonprofit seeking to raise awareness of the Nakba, the “settlements of Mey Niftoach and Giv’at Sha’ul were built on village lands and now have become parts of the suburbs of Jerusalem.”

Saving Lifta

The Save Lifta Coalition orchestrated the campaign to the mayor and has been organizing since 2010 against Plan 6036. The organization spent five years working with scholars, activists, conservation specialists and higher education professionals to develop an alternative to 6036.

Their proposal aims to “expand the area of the national park and turn the village into a natural urban space for the adjacent neighborhoods,” while preserving Lifta’s cultural landscape.

The World Monuments Fund added Lifta to its list of endangered sites in 2018 and UNESCO added the village to its tentative list of world heritage sites.

‘Not something we can discuss now’

When asked about the plan’s responsibility regarding the right of return for Palestinians, Golan-Agnon said, “our plan is a plan to save Lifta as it is for the future generations to decide upon its fate.” She explained:

Many of us [in the coalition] do think there should be a right of return for Palestinians but we know it’s not something we can discuss now. So we say, it’s beautiful, keep it open, and then one day there can be a decision about what happens and who’s coming.

Dana Amawi’s grandmother grew up in Lifta and was expelled from the village in 1948. Now the family lives in Amman, Jordan. The 20-year-old said she was shaken to her core upon hearing the news of the sale. “Lifta symbolized a tiny, very small bit of hope that maybe we will be able to return to it,” Amawi told MintPress. “And now to think that other people might live in the house that I have the right to be in, it’s very sad.”

A Palestinian woman holds a partially eaten fig picked from a tree in Lifta. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News

Amawi said that her grandmother fell ill after learning of the auction. “She got sick. She had a fever and she was really, really sad because to her, this is where she grew up. This is where her earliest memories are and this is where she has the right to be,” Amawi said.

Stone houses like the one Odeh spent his early childhood in now crumble from neglect. The walls are sprayed with graffiti and piles of trash line the floors. On Shabbat (the Jewish sabbath), you’ll often find Israelis bathing in the spring’s waters.

Aseel AlBajeh, advocacy officer and legal researcher at the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, visited Lifta in 2018. Her grandmother, who lives in Ramallah, is from Lifta. “It was a painful experience,” AlBajeh said of her time in Lifta. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come back to Lifta in this situation.”

‘You are here as a visitor’

During her visit, AlBajeh tried recalling her grandmother’s memories of a flourishing Lifta, but she said those stories were disrupted by the fact that she’s only in Lifta because of a permit she received from the Israeli government to enter 1948-occupied Palestine or modern-day Israel from the West Bank. “You are here as a visitor. It’s like it’s not a place where you belong, or this is what [the Israeli government] intends for refugees to feel like,” AlBajeh said. “Settlers were swimming in the spring of the village and they were blasting loud music, and it also disrupted my ability to even imagine Lifta as Palestinian.”

Israeli settlers in Lifta hold a middle finger to a group of Palestinian children. Blekh | MintPress News

To help her reclaim Lifta, AlBajeh took a small piece of the village’s remains during her visit. She collected a broken tile painted with traditional designs from one of the house’s floors, knowing this might be the last physical object she can have of Lifta.

“Lifta is a witness of what happened during the Nakba,” AlBajeh said, explaining:

We have this connection as Palestinians, and when we see the cactus plants, we connect this as evidence that displacement happened here. And if you go to Lifta, you’ll see the huge amount of cactus. So even if the houses remain and [Israel] tries to remove the cactus, it’s still painful… It’s not about the stones or about the trees. It’s about the whole identity of Lifta and the Palestinian history, which we still connect to. “

‘We were kings in our village’

Odeh’s memories paint Lifta as an idyllic place, an oasis carved into the steep slopes of Jerusalem where life was carefree and bountiful. “We were kings in our village,” Odeh said. “Everything we need, we had — a life so simple. We didn’t need cinema or computers, no, everything we needed came from our land.”

But the minute Odeh and his family became refugees, their resources became scarce. “At that time there were no charitable associations or agencies ready to help,” Odeh recalled. “You know what Nakba means? Nakba does not mean to destroy homes. No, Nakba means to destroy the life — economic life, social life, educational life, political life. They destroyed our life.”

Upon reminiscing about Lifta, Odeh said his dream is to go back home:

I miss my childhood. Palestinian children have lost their childhood life to play like children, to go to the theater, to concerts, to football. No, until now we have house demolitions, we have arrests, we have land confiscation and killings. Every day we have events like these — if not my family, my neighborhood.”

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Documents reveal US pressure on ex-Yemeni regime to agree on normalizing ties with Israel

Press TV – July 12, 2021

The interior ministry of Yemen’s National Salvation Government has released a series of confidential documents detailing the United States pressure on the administration of former Yemeni dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to normalize relations with Israel and lift the blockade on products made in the Israeli occupied territories.

According to the documents, the US embassy in Sana’a had asked then-Yemeni authorities to end the economic embargo on Israeli goods, and not to participate in any activities deemed harmful to the Tel Aviv regime, the official Yemeni news agency Saba reported.

The papers expose the level of Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s discontent and frustration with the blockade, and how US officials left no stone unturned to force former Yemeni officials into opening the Arab country’s market to Israeli businesses and their products.

The former US ambassador to Yemen, Thomas C. Krajeski, called on Saleh’s regime to lift sanctions on companies with first-, second- or third-degree ties to Israel, which was not turned down by the Yemeni side.

Then-Yemeni foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, later told the US ambassador that the so-called embargo on US and Israeli goods was not actually being enforced.

The documents go on to reveal that the US embassy urged the Yemeni foreign ministry not to dispatch representatives to an anti-Israel event at the University of Damascus in Syria.

Moreover, the American diplomat described Yemen’s removal of boycott of Israeli products as the fundamental prerequisite for the Arab state’s membership in the World Trade Organization, and its access to free trade and international investment.

Last month, Spokesman for Yemen’s Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree announced that Yemeni security forces had arrested a man involved in espionage activities on behalf of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

Saree said in a tweet at the time that more details on the matter will be provided in a documentary entitled “The Spy of Mossad in Yemen.”

The documentary will shed light on part of Israel’s intervention in the country and “the plan to target Yemen militarily, and other secrets revealed for the first time,” the senior Yemeni military figure pointed out.

The developments come as earlier reports said that Israel and the United Arab Emirates have been working to establish a spy base on Yemen’s strategically-located island of Socotra.

The UAE has also been accused of constructing an air base on the Mayyun Island, situated off the Yemeni coast in the Bab el-Mandeb.

Both activities have drawn strong condemnation from the Yemeni government, which has described them as violation of Yemen’s sovereignty and international law, especially following the illegally-run tours to Socotra from Abu Dhabi, some of which included Israeli tourists.

“The transfer of tourists to the Socotra Island reveals the plans and programs of the occupying UAE, which are in line with the Zionist schemes to dominate Yemeni islands as well as the steps towards normalization with the regime,” a statement read back then.

Yemen’s popular Ansaullah resistance movement has previously threatened to attack Israel if it was “involved in any action against Yemeni people.”

The Israeli regime took the threats seriously, and deployed its Iron Dome and Patriot missile systems around the southern city of Eilat early this year.

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces demolish water pond in northern Jordan Valley

WAFA – July 12, 2021

JORDAN VALLEY – Israeli forces today demolished a water pond near Bardala village in the northern Jordan Valley, according to sources.

Moataz Bsharat, an activist, told WAFA that the Israeli forces escorted a bulldozer to the village, where the heavy machinery tore down the 250-cubic-meter pond, which was used for agricultural purposes and belonged to Samer Sawaftah. The pool was a donation from the Ministry of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces seized a caravan, east of Yatta, south of Hebron.

Coordinator of the Popular Anti-Wall and Settlement Committees, Rateb Al-Jabour, stated that the Israeli forces seized a caravan used to serve as a physical and mental health clinic in Zweidin area, east of Yatta.

The clinic used to provide medical support and treatment to more than 1,200 residents of the area.

Under international law, driving residents of an occupied territory from their homes is considered forcible transfer of protected persons, which constitutes a war crime. But residents of Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley are no strangers to such disruptive Israeli policies.

The valley, which is a fertile strip of land running west along the Jordan River, is home to about 65,000 Palestinians and makes up approximately 30% of the West Bank.

Since 1967, when the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, Israel has transferred at least 11,000 of its Jewish citizens to the Jordan Valley. Some of the settlements in which they live were built almost entirely on private Palestinian land.

The Israel military has also designated about 46 percent of the Jordan Valley as a closed military zone since the beginning of the occupation in June 1967, and has been utilizing the pretext of military drills to forcefully displace Palestinian families living there as part of a policy of ethnic cleansing and stifling Palestinian development in the area.

Approximately 6,200 Palestinians live in 38 communities in places earmarked for military use and have had to obtain permission from the Israeli authorities to enter and live in their communities.

In violation of international law, the Israeli military not only temporarily displaces the communities on a regular basis, but also confiscates their farmlands, demolishes their homes and infrastructure from time to time.

Besides undergoing temporary displacement, the Palestinian families living there face a myriad restrictions on access to resources and services. Meanwhile, Israel exploits the resources of the area and generates profit by allocating generous tracts of land and water resources for the benefit of settlers.

Israeli politicians have made it clear on several occasions that the highly strategic Jordan Valley would remain under their control in any eventuality.

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

Israeli military isolated Mohammad, 17, in solitary confinement for 35 days

Defence for Children Palestine | July 6, 2021

Israeli forces detained 17-year-old Palestinian teenager Mohammad in solitary confinement for 35 days in total for interrogation purposes. In this video, he describes his experience at the hands of the Israeli military and shares the lasting effects his time in solitary confinement have had on his mental health.

Sign the petition to end solitary confinement: https://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/peti…

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | 2 Comments