‘Israel’ Dared to Bomb Only Barrens: Balance of Deterrence with Hezbollah Still Valid
Al-Manar | August 5, 2021
Although the latest Zionist aerial aggression on Lebanon is considered unprecedented since the all-out war in 2006, scrutinizing it thoroughly can indicate clearly that the enemy could break the rules of engagement on the Lebanese borders.
Two out of three anonymous missiles, which were fired on Thursday at noon from Lebanon, fell in the barrens of the settlement, Kiryat Shmona, and caused a major fire.
In response, the Zionist artillery bombed immediately an open area in Al-Khiyam plain as well as barrens of other villages.
However, the Zionist circles considered that the response was not up to the challenge, so the enemy decided to escalate the situation.
The Israeli air force decided to participate in the aggression, launching overnight air raids on Al-Mahmoudiyeh barrens as well as other open areas.
Meanwhile, Zionist military circles stressed that the occupation entity is not interested in escalating the confrontation on the borders with Lebanon, adding that this explains why the Israeli air strikes on Lebanon targeted only barrens.
Thus, the enemy did not dare to strike other than barrens during its aggression on southern Lebanon, and the balance of deterrence on the borders, maintained by Hezbollah is still valid.
Washington’s Terrorist Friends: Prominent Americans Continue to Support a Murderous Cult
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 5, 2021
One might ask if Washington’s obsession with terrorism includes supporting radical armed groups as long as they are politically useful in attacking countries that the US regards as enemies? It is widely known that the American CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to create al-Qaeda to attack the Russians in Afghanistan and the same my-enemy’s-enemy thinking appears to drive the current relationships with radical groups in Syria.
Given the fact that Iran continues to be the Biden Administration’s enemy du jour, it is perhaps not surprising to observe that the US also supports terror groups that are capable of attacking targets in the Islamic Republic. To that end, recently a number of former senior government officials and politicians were involved in cultivating their relationships with the Iranian terrorist group Mojahedin e Khalq (MEK), which held its most recent annual international summit in Paris for three days starting on July 10th. The event was online due to French COVID prevention guidelines and the featured speaker was Michele Flournoy, former US undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama. Flournoy was once considered a front runner to be President Joe Biden’s defense secretary and she currently heads a consulting firm WestExec Advisors that she co-founded with current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken which has had considerable influence over staffing and other issues in the White House. In her talk, she accused Iran of posing a danger to the security of the Middle East, the United States, and to its own people, elaborating how “Since 1979, every US administration has had to deal with the threat posed by Iran’s revolutionary regime and the Biden administration is no different. Iran is one of the most urgent foreign policy issues on the president’s desk.” She called for an “internal regime change” in the Islamic Republic.
A bipartisan group of US lawmakers also spoke before the online gathering. Speakers included House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Democratic Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Also participating were Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida and both Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile also spoke as did former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said that the MEK should be “blessed and protected.”
The summit self-described as “the largest-ever online international event dedicated to liberating Iran” with the objective of “inciting uprisings against the government in the Islamic Republic.” Though it would be charitable to suggest that the congressmen and former officials were largely involved to pick up the generous fees paid to speakers, it must also be noted that knowledge of MEK and its history is readily available on the internet and elsewhere. Flournoy in particular should have known better but even she, after the fact, claimed implausibly that she did not know that she was speaking to a former terrorist group that had killed Americans.
It should also be observed that the participating Congressmen all have extremely close ties to Israel and its domestic lobby, which have been assiduous in their efforts to vilify Iran as America’s designated enemy. To be sure, no one at the summit even mentioned Israel’s use of MEK operatives to carry out assassinations of scientists and sabotage operations inside Iran.
MEK is a curious hybrid creature in any event in that it pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians. It is considered to be both irrelevant and ineffective but Iran hatred is so prevalent that it is greatly loved by the Washington Establishment which would like to see the Mullahs deposed and replaced by something more amenable to US and Israeli worldviews.
MEK is run like a cult by its leader Maryam Rajavi, with a number of rules that restrict and control the behavior of its members. One commentary likens membership in MEK to a modern-day equivalent of slavery. A study prepared by the Rand corporation for the U.S. government conducted interviews of MEK members and concluded that there were present “many of the typical characteristics of a cult, such as authoritarian control, confiscation of assets, sexual control (including mandatory divorce and celibacy), emotional isolation, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options.”
The group currently operates out of a secretive, heavily guarded 84 acre compound in Albania that is covertly supported by the United States intelligence community, as well as through a “political wing” front office in Paris, where it refers to itself as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). MEK is financially supported by Saudi Arabia, which enables it to stage events in the United States and in Europe where it generously pays politicians to make fifteen-minute speeches praising the organization and everything it does. It’s bribing of inside the Beltway power brokers and its support by Israel proved so successful that it was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Hillary Clinton even though it had killed Americans in the 1970s.
As indicated above, MEK made the transition from terrorist group to “champions of Iranian democracy” by virtue of intensive lobbying of Iran haters. A Guardian article also describes how “A stupendously long list of American politicians from both parties were paid hefty fees to speak at events in favor of the MEK, including Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Elaine Chao and former Democratic party chairs Edward Rendell and Howard Dean – along with multiple former heads of the FBI and CIA. John Bolton, who has made multiple appearances at events supporting the MEK, is estimated to have received upwards of $180,000. According to financial disclosure forms, Bolton was paid $40,000 for a single appearance at the Free Iran rally in Paris in 2017.”
It apparently has never occurred to the congressmen and senior officials that the MEK group had a whole lot of history before it appeared on the scene in Washington and began buying American politicians. MEK, which consisted of a group of dissident students having Marxism inspired anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist roots, had a bloody falling out with the Iranian revolution leaders in 1979, forcing it to resettle at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad. It was protected by Saddam Hussein and used to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. It was also fiercely anti-American beginning back in the 1970s when it was still in Iran, to include attacks on US businesses and denunciations of the United States presence in Iran under the Shah. In 1979 it supported executing the US Embassy hostages rather than negotiating their release. One of its songs went “Death to America by blood and bonfire on the lips of every Muslim is the cry of the Iranian people. May America be annihilated.”
Within the US government, MEK was notorious for its assassination of at least six US Air Force officers and civilian defense contractors. One particularly audacious ambush in which two air force officers were murdered by MEK while being driven in from the airport was reenacted for each incoming class at the Central Intelligence Agency training center in the late 1970s to illustrate just how a perfectly executed terrorist attack on a moving vehicle might take place.
Given how currently nearly every news cycle includes stories about fake news on social media, it is surprising that MEK is never mentioned. Its current Albanian operational center uses banks of computers manned by followers, some of whom are fluent in English, who serve as bots unleashing scores of comments supporting regime change in Iran while also directing waves of criticism against any pro-Iranian pieces that appear elsewhere on social media, to include Facebook and Twitter. By one account, more than a thousand MEK supporters manage thousands of accounts on social media simultaneously. The objective of all the chatter is to convince the mostly English-speaking audience that there is a large body of Iranians who are hostile to the regime and supportive of MEK as a replacement.
It is an indisputable fact that over the past ten years, members of both major parties in Congress have either traveled to the group’s compound in Albania or spoken via video messages or live appearances in exchange for hefty speaking fees. The support provided by prominent officeholders and policymakers to include effusive praise of a terrorist group that is viscerally anti-American and has killed US officials is a disgrace. It is also a symptom of deeper problems in terms of how our foreign policy has been developed through the ascendancy of special interests. That America’s Iran policy should lead to praise of a radicalized extremist cult that is funded by authoritarian Saudi Arabia and politically supported by apartheid Israel ignores US actual interests at our peril.
German Pathologist: Fatal Consequences of Vaccinations Underestimated
German pathologists like Schirmacher dare to question the official script on vaccine safety
21 Wire | August 4, 2021
Dr. Peter Schirmacher, who serves as Director at the Pathological Institute of the University of Heidelberg, is sounding the alarm on fatal vaccine injuries after performing over forty autopsies on people who had died within two weeks of receiving their COVID shot.
The German daily, Augsburger Allgemeine, reports:
“Schirmacher assumes that 30 to 40 percent of them died from the vaccination. In his opinion, the frequency of fatal consequences of vaccinations is underestimated – a politically explosive statement in times when the vaccination campaign is losing momentum, the Delta variant is spreading rapidly and restrictions on non-vaccinated people are being discussed.”
Right on cue, a flurry of criticism has moved on Schirmacher, including from inside Chancellor Merkel’s administration, calling his findings “incomprehensible.”
Schirmacher, who also leads a state-subsidized autopsy project on people who have ‘died from Covid-19,’ recently expanded his work to include the autopsies on people who died after being vaccinated.
Germany’s Federal Association of German Pathologists has stepped up to defend Schirmacher, supporting the urgent need to perform more autopsies on deceased vaccinated people.
Dr. Stella Immanuel sues CNN for $100 Million after being vindicated on Hydroxychloroquine
Big League Politics | July 31, 2021
Dr. Stella Immanuel, the pro-hydroxychloroquine doctor who was derided by the fake news media for attempting to save lives near the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, is striking back against CNN.
Immanuel has launched a $100 million lawsuit against CNN and host Anderson Cooper for what she believes were false and defamatory statements made against her character.
“In an effort to vilify, demonize and embarrass President [Donald] Trump, Cooper and CNN published a series of statements of fact about Dr. Immanuel that injured her reputation and exposed her to public hatred, contempt, ridicule, and financial injury,” the lawsuit stated. It was filed in federal court on July 27.
Immanuel said that she believes Cooper and CNN “effectively caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands whose lives would have been spared if they had been treated early with HCQ.”
Big League Politics has reported on the suppressed science showing that hydroxychloroquine can effectively treat COVID-19:
“A new study has demonstrated that treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine makes patients 84 percent less likely to be hospitalized.
The study is set to be published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents in December. It has determined that “low-dose hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc and azithromycin was an effective therapeutic approach against COVID-19.”
The doctors came to their conclusions after treating 141 coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine for five days. They compared them with a control group of 377 coronavirus patients who did not receive hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. They found that “the odds of hospitalization of treated patients was 84% less than in the untreated patients.” Only one patient from the group treated with hydroxychloroquine died while 13 people died in the other group…
The elites are suppressing hydroxychloroquine because they want the public to feel helpless against the virus. They never intend to give the public their liberties back, hoping that the public will accept a “new normal” of globalism and technocracy.“
A victory for Immanuel in court would be a powerful rebuke to the propaganda machine set up to maximize profits for Big Pharma and demonize whistleblowers who actually want to help patients.
Baylor Professor Calls for Prosecution of Criticism of Fauci and Other Scientists as Hate Crime
By Jonathan Turley | August 4, 2021
Physicist Richard P. Feynman once said “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” statement captures how science depends upon constant questioning and challenging of assumptions. Yet, what is healthy debate to some is criminal dissent to others. Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine is calling for federal hate-crime protections to be extended to cover criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists. The frequent MSNBC and CNN guest wants Congress to expand hate crimes to “scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States.”
In a July 28 paper in Plos Biology titled “Mounting Antiscience Aggression in the United States,” Hotez encourages Congress to focus on the “band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists.”
Hotez insists that it is not enough to support such science but to criminalize attacks on their research. This suggestion is just one of a number of ideas briefly put forward to support scientists but it is the most chilling. Referring Nazi and fascist movements in history, Hotez argues that good science requires cracking down on the right. He concludes:
“As Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once pointed out, neutrality or silence favors the oppressor. We must take steps to protect our scientists and take swift and positive action to counter the growing wave of far-right antiscience aggression. Not taking action is a tacit endorsement, and a guarantee that the integrity and productivity of science in the United States will be eroded or lose ground.”
The federal hate crime laws focus on basis of a person’s characteristics of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. We have seen calls for adding professions like police officers, which I also opposed. As with police officers, the inclusion of such professions would have a direct and inimical impact on free speech in our society. Indeed, it would create a slippery slope as other professions demand inclusion from reporters to ministers to physicians. Hate crimes would quickly apply to a wide array of people due to their occupations.
What is most striking about the Hotez article is its lack of analytical balance. He rages against the right without even acknowledging how social media companies have already enforced a massive censorship program that bars even reporting the results of public clinical trials or repeating CDC positions on vaccinations. For a year, Big Tech has been censoring those who wanted to discuss the origins of pandemic and those who suggested the lab theory were attacked as right-wing conspiracy theorists. It was not until Biden admitted that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan lab that social media suddenly changed its position. Facebook only recently announced that people on its platform will be able to discuss the origins of Covid-19 after censoring any such discussion.
Many of us have criticized the hateful rhetoric on both sides of our politics. However, there remain important debates over not just the underlying science relating to Covid-19 but the implications of such science for public policies. Criminalizing aspects of that debate would ratchet up the threats against those with dissenting views, including some scientists. That would harm not just free speech but science in the long run.
Double jabbed? That’s no protection from the Covid Cops
By Bridget Jones | TCW Defending Freedom | August 5, 2021
LAST week I had a house call by a Covid officer to check compliance with post-holiday quarantine following my return from the Balearics. After a lovely holiday in a destination on the green list which later turned amber, my punishment consisted of ten days’ forced isolation in three rooms (including lavatory) covering 500 square feet and no outside space.
As an unvaccinated Untouchable, I looked on in envy at my double-poked friends who returned to London being able to move about freely and my travel companion who’d be showing off her tan. I wistfully imagined the glamorous parties they’d be attending whilst I’d be limited to surfing murder mystery reruns on ITV with a slightly acidic bottle of rose.
But be careful what you envy, ladies . . .
Two such double-jabbed friends, both travelling back to the UK from amber list countries, Spain and Denmark, on different budget airlines, were pinged and ordered to self-isolate on their return. It turned out someone on both of their flights had tested positive for the virus.
Now, neither of them is dumb enough to have the NHS track and trace app but their details were taken from the forms they were required to complete to board the planes bound for home.
So it turns out that getting the poke is no guarantee of regaining your freedom at all, and definitely not any kind of insurance policy for risk-free travel abroad. This was in spite of the fact that both of them, having taken tests within 48 hours of boarding and on day 2 after landing in UK arrivals, tested negative for the virus. The one returning from Denmark was fortuitously pinged after day 2, which she interpreted to mean that her isolation could be shortened to 7 days. Both friends were also required to take a test on day 8 of isolation (so in her case after it was over), and unlike myself, their Untouchable counterpart, could not do a day 5 test to get out early for good behaviour.
Everyone keeps telling me that as of August 16 the double-vaccinated will be able to move around freely regardless of whether they have been pinged. But as in this context ‘pinged’ refers to the app presumably the new freedom pass will not apply to the situation both of my friends found themselves in. Such is the absurdity that will prevail in the approaching mid-month holiday peak that there will be no way to ascertain whether it is worth travelling to a green-list rock in the Atlantic or going the whole hog and risking a turn from amber to red, with consequent pay-to-play prison sentence on return.
I wonder whether the government (which I no longer spell with a capital ‘G’ as I do not recognise its legitimacy) justifies all of this on the premise that people who dare to go on holiday must be treated as putrid receptacles of contagion and thereby do penance for their hubris.
Just like me, my vaccinated friends are sitting at home this week, watching the tan fade and bingeing on Thai food delivered in a box whilst staring at some dystopian feminist melodrama on Channel 4 for human company. My Danish friend lives in a 350 square foot studio flat in Notting Hill but at least she has a balcony on which to smoke and sunbathe; otherwise I don’t know what she would do as in such a small space confinement is unbearable.
Not for her dressing up to visit Tesco Express or setting a playlist to walk in the park; no stolen glances at the hot barista on the morning coffee run. The Covid gods have spoken, and her sentence is to wake up every day in the fiery furnace of quarantine to be purified until such time as she may be released by her gracious overlords.
Lots of articles have been written recently about the pingdemic and I daresay most employees who can’t work from home are delighted to get a ping. These serfs will doubtless not be looking forward to August 16 (another ‘freedom day’), and were I one of them I would consider coming up with a strategy to deal with the impending fall-out. An efficient tactic could be the collection of bulk quantities of LF tests to multiply potentially positive results and, via photographic replication, establish a vault of templates for passing around when needed.
I digress. Back to being stalked by the Covid marshal. He knocked at the door twice, politely, and when I opened it he met me with sheepish eyes over a medical mask to request proof of ID. You can never be too careful in verifying the identity of someone who answers their own door during a spell of quarantine.
Neither of my vaccinated friends who were told to self-isolate received a visit from the NHS. I have now started quite feeling special that someone actually cared enough to check up on me.
Come to think of it, I should have invited the Covid marshal in for a drink . . .
Toxic Horror Show Geelong Grid Backup Battery Fire Finally Extinguished
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | August 3, 2021
Imagine if people were crazy enough to install these difficult to extinguish battery incendiary devices in their homes or automobiles, or near populated areas. Imagine what such foolishness could do to insurance premiums, once companies catch on to the risk of batteries acting as potent initiators and accelerants in house fires, or realise they might have to unexpectedly cover the cleanup cost of adjacent homes and gardens contaminated with poisonous residues from the battery smoke.
Blaze at Tesla Big Battery extinguished after three days
By Lucy Battersby and Cassandra Morgan
Updated August 2, 2021Fire crews have extinguished a blaze at Victoria’s new Tesla Big Battery, the largest lithium-ion battery in the country, after taking more than three days to bring it under control.
One of the Tesla megapack batteries at the site in Moorabool, near Geelong, caught fire during testing shortly after 10am on Friday.
The Victorian Big Battery, with a capacity of 300 megawatts and 450 megawatt-hours, is three times bigger than the initial size of billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla big battery built in South Australia in 2017.
…
The authority said that, because of the nature of the fire – a 13-tonne battery – firefighters couldn’t put water on it or employ ordinary suppression methods. Instead, they had to let it “burn out” and wait for the container to cool down enough to open its doors.
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Authorities had warned of toxic smoke billowing from the site on Friday. Victoria’s Environment Protection Authority has been monitoring air quality at the site over the weekend, and determined it was “good” by Monday afternoon.
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At the very least in my opinion these batteries should be sited well away from densely populated areas, and the practice of storing large batteries near or inside homes should cease. As political vanity causes grid scale battery packs to grow in size, the potential for long term harm to anyone unlucky enough to breath the smoke or eat produce grown in battery smoke fallout contaminated soil will also rise.
Net-Zero Will Cripple British Households As Costs Get Slipped Into Energy Bills
BY DR. BENNY PEISER | CLIMATE CHANGE DISPATCH | JULY 29, 2021
In recent weeks, ministers and officials have announced that UK households and businesses will have to fund many of the government’s Net-Zero plans via their energy bills and cost of living.
Currently, UK consumers are funding renewable energy investors to the tune of £12 billion per year, taken from consumer bills as stealth taxes.
These subsidies are projected to grow over the coming years, reaching a total of about £13 billion a year in the mid-2020s.
But on top of this huge and rising cost, the government now plans to add a whole catalog of additional Net-Zero subsidies, as the recent news reports below reveal.
- The government plans to force consumers to subsidize the installation of charging stations for electric vehicles (EV) by raising electricity bills.
- Ministers are in the process of drawing up legislation that will force households to fund the construction of new nuclear power plants through the use of a surcharge on energy bills.
- Households face paying an extra £200 per year to fund greenhouse gas removal technology.
- The wind energy lobby has warned that consumers will have to subsidize offshore wind farms indefinitely, refuting the oft-repeated claim that renewables are close to becoming “subsidy-free”, and confirming analysis showing that wind power costs have not fallen.
- Energy bills face an additional rise in cost as the power grid operator is increasingly forced to pay wind farms to switch off turbines. ‘System balancing’ costs alone were £2 billion last year and could hit £2.5 billion per year over the next decade as renewable capacity continues to grow.
Industrial and commercial consumers with the option of relocating to countries with cheaper energy will obviously do so.
Households, on the other hand, will simply have to cut down on food and other expenditures in order to pay their energy bills and cut their standard of living.
The GWPF’s director Benny Peiser said:
“It is fairly certain that most households would be unable to keep their heads above water as this torrent of additional Net-Zero costs overwhelms their domestic budgets.”
“Neither Boris Johnson nor his government would survive this unwise and unjust imposition on the British people.”
Israel’s Pegasus spyware and its global consequences
By Sari Orabi | Palestinian Information Centre | August 4, 2021
Israel’s export of technology used by repressive regimes to establish their authority, not only over their political opponents, but also against large parts of civil society, is nothing new. News of this has been spreading since 2017 at least and the inauguration of the Arab-Israeli alliance under the auspices of the Trump administration.
There is no doubt that the relationships hidden before the alliance was made public included the use of Israeli technology. This is what mostly unites the repressive Arab regimes with Israel. In 2019, WhatsApp informed 1,400 of its users that they had been under surveillance since 2016. We can guess how much further spyware has been developed over the past five years.
The scandal is the recent revelation about Israel’s Pegasus spyware and the number of those targeted by such technology, as well as the number of the Israeli company’s clients. Even some of Israel’s allies have been spied upon, such as French President Emmanuel Macron.
Israel benefits from this in three ways. There is a direct security aspect, as the database that is created by its customers and their espionage activities will eventually flow into Israeli servers. This turns its customers into security agents for the occupation state. Ironically, they pay for this dubious privilege. Israel not only sells the technology but also gleans the information generated by customers’ espionage. It’s a very profitable deal for Tel Aviv.
This is just part of the economic aspect which benefits Israel enormously. It is worth pointing out that the technology being sold by Israel — whether this sort of spyware or advanced weapons systems — are all “field tested” on the Palestinians. This makes it very attractive to repressive regimes.
This is also ironic because Israeli technological and intelligence development stems, in part, from the state spying on Arab countries, some of which buy the same technology for their own use. Moreover, Israel has become the headquarters and partner of many Western technology companies, especially from America. Since this type of technology is only sold with government approval, it is more than likely that the US itself is involved at the highest level, not just Israel. There are many political indications that this is the case, including the alliance launched by the Trump administration.
There is also a huge political aspect to these developments. Israel has made itself and its technology indispensable to many governments around the world, including regimes in Arab states. It is a complex situation which encourages conflicts to be prolonged — or at least not brought to a peaceful conclusion — so that Israel has a market for its products, and buyers know where to go for what they need to defeat their opponents. Ensuring that conflicts remain ongoing not only guarantees Israel an important industrial sector, security and hegemony, but also guarantees Arab subordination at very little cost to the colonial-occupation state.
The Arab regimes are thus paying large sums to spy on friends and foes alike and, in doing so, are serving Israeli interests. US support for the high-tech sector in Israel is part of the project to help the state protect itself. This is done within a regional environment that is not conducive to Israel’s presence due to its lack of any historical, social or political legitimacy.
The Arab masses do not accept Israel’s presence in their midst. Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2017 that Israel’s problem lies with the Arab people, not the Arab governments. The Zionist state’s policies will, therefore, focus on maintaining the repressive Arab regimes and their alliance with Israel, as well as ensuring their subordination.
In the meantime, of course, Israel’s existence continues to depend on a fabricated historical narrative, the ethnic cleansing and oppression of the people of Palestine and unquestioning Western support. The state has no qualms about doing all it can — legitimate and illegal; good and bad — to promote depravity in human relations around the world because, in short, it needs conflict in order to survive.
The Pegasus spyware scandal illustrates clearly that “Israel the ally” is, simultaneously, “Israel the belligerent”, a state that recognises and respects alliances only as long as they benefit its own interests. Looked at objectively, the whole world is a potential victim of the evil that is Israel and its pernicious ideology, Zionism. The sale and use of Pegasus spyware has global consequences.
Translation by MEMO
Why People Don’t Trust the Mainstream Media
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | August 4, 2021
An article in the Washington Post about the January 6 protests at the Capitol goes a long way toward explaining why people do not trust the mainstream media. The article, written by a Post reporter named Mike DeBonis, focuses on allegations that the FBI infiltrated the ranks of the protestors and actually helped to incite them to illegally enter the Capitol and engage in mayhem after doing so.
The overall tone that DeBonis sets forth is one that is oftentimes found in the mainstream media when it comes to alleged wrongdoing by the federal government. The article has a mocking tone to it, suggesting that the people who are making this allegation are conspiracy theorists for actually believing that federal officials would do such a horrible thing.
There is a critical sentence in DeBonis’s article: “The FBI declined to comment.”
Why is that line important? Because there are two ways that a reporter can go when he is writing a story about this type of allegation.
On the one hand, he can mock and ridicule those who are making the allegation, pointing out that they haven’t produced any evidence to support their “unfounded claim.”
On the other hand, he can aggressively go after FBI officials and demand a definitive yes-or-no answer instead of simply settling for a “no comment” by the FBI and also engage in an aggressive investigative effort to determine whether there is evidence to support the allegation.
DeBonis chose the first route. But why? After all, a “no comment” answer by the FBI is about as incriminating as an answer can be, short of an outright admission of wrongdoing. That’s because if the FBI were not guilty of the wrongdoing, it would undoubtedly simply say, “The allegation is false.” The FBI clearly did not do that with its “no comment” answer. It’s “no comment” answer leaves open the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that the FBI was involved in wrongdoing,
DeBonis makes a big issue of out of the fact that the people who are making this allegation have not provided any evidence to support their allegation. But what people have pointed out is a similar course of conduct by the FBI in other cases, which would be enough to cause any reasonable person to assume that it might have engaged in the same course of conduct with respect to the January 6 protests.
For example, consider the case that involves the alleged kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. DeBonis is aware of that case because he links to an article from BuzzFeedNews.com about the case. That article alleges that the FBI played a major role in inducing the defendants in the case to commit the kidnapping. Even if what the FBI allegedly did wasn’t enough to support a defense of entrapment, its alleged actions are nonetheless enough to cause any reasonable citizen, including investigative journalists, concern.
But that’s not all. As journalist Glenn Greenwald has documented, the FBI has a long history of inciting people to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is to incite people to commit crimes so that the FBI can then be praised and glorified for busting them up. See Greenwald’s July 24 article “FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots.” Also, see the July 31 article “Will More Media Bias Save Democracy?” by James Bovard.
Given the history of the FBI engaging in this type of misconduct, you would think that any journalist worth his salt would say, “I need to get to the bottom of this latest assertion. I need to know whether the FBI did the same thing here. Rather than mocking and ridiculing these people by pointing out that they have furnished no evidence to support their allegation, I need to do my job and go after the FBI to see if there is any evidence to support the allegation.”
Rather than do that, DeBonis goes off on the other track by implicitly assuming that the FBI would never do such a thing and implicitly assuming that those who are making the allegation are nothing more than “conspiracy theorists.”
That’s why so many people don’t trust the mainstream media.
This is not a recent phenomenon.
We can go all the way back to Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s secret program in the 1960s and 1970s whose aim was to acquire CIA assets from within the mainstream press, whose secret job would be to come to the defense of the national-security establishment whenever necessary, including but calling people “conspiracy theorists” whenever they allege wrongdoing on the part of CIA officials.
According to the Wikipedia entry on “Operation Mockingbird,”
In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee’s report and said that around 400 press members were considered intelligence assets by the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, columnist and political analyst Stewart Alsop and Time magazine. Berstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major US news agencies had for many years served as the “eyes and ears” of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media.[6]
The best example, of course, of the deference to the authority of the national-security establishment relates to the Kennedy assassination. Today, there are two separate worlds when it comes to that assassination: the world of the mainstream media and the world of Internet. They are two completely different worlds — actually, parallel universes.
On the Internet, it’s possible to find people analyzing, questioning, and challenging the official lone-nut theory of the case, pointing to the mountain of evidence, for example, that establishes that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 as well as the recorded presentations at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s recent conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.”
Not so in the mainstream press. It is considered verboten in the mainstream press for any reporter or commentator to challenge or question any aspect of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination. Woe to the reporter or commentator who does so. He will be looking for a new job post haste — somewhere on the Internet.
In the December 6, 1963, issue of Life magazine, a well-known Life magazine reporter named Paul Mandel wrote an article about the assassination in which he claimed that the famous Zapruder film showed that the president had turned around to face the Texas School Book Depository. The president’s action, Mandel said, explained how it was that the president was shot in the throat.
No one could verify Mandel’s statement because Life magazine had purchased the film from Abraham Zapruder for $150,000, which in today’s dollars amounted to around $1.2 million. Life locked the film away, saying that it wanted to protect the American people from ever having to see such violence.
In 1969, Jim Garrison, the district attorney in New Orleans, brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw in which Garrison alleged that the Kennedy assassination was actually a sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison subpoenaed the Zapruder film from Life magazine and showed it in court. The film showed that the president had never turned around and faced the school book depository. By this time, of course, the official story revolved around the magic bullet theory, which posited that the president had actually been shot in the rear of the neck (i.e., not through the throat), with the bullet supposedly having come out the front (and then supposedly striking Gov. John Connally in multiple places, with the bullet magically ending up in a pristine condition.)
In other words, Mandel had lied, either intentionally or because someone at Life magazine had falsely told him that that’s what the film showed. There is no other conclusion that can be reached. There is no way that Mandel’s allegation could be construed to be an innocent mistake, because Life magazine had the film.
There is another interesting aspect to the saga. According to Wikipedia:
General Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson (March 16, 1902 – September 18, 1964) was a United States government propagandist and senior executive of Time Inc. As an expert on psychological warfare he served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later as Special Assistant to the President in the Eisenhower administration…. After Abraham Zapruder took the famous film in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Jackson purchased it on behalf of Time/Life to “protect the integrity of the film.” Upon viewing it on Sunday morning, he ordered it locked in a vault at the Time/Life building in Manhattan.
In 1972 — three years after the Zapruder film was shown in the Shaw trial — Life magazine, which had been one of the most popular weekly magazines in history, cease publication as a weekly. Some people said that it was because of the rising popularity of television. Another possibility is that people no longer trusted Life magazine.
For the past 25 years, the mainstream media has been losing readership and money. Some people blame it on the rising popularity of the Internet. Another possibility is that people no longer trust the mainstream media.
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Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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