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Editor-in-chief of Russian news outlet arrested in Latvia

Marat Kasem from Sputnik Lithuania has been accused of espionage and could face up to 20 years behind bars

Journalist, editor-in-chief of Sputnik Lithuania Marat Kasem © Sputnik / Nina Zotina
RT | January 5, 2023

Latvia has arrested the editor-in-chief of the Lithuanian branch of the Russian Sputnik news agency. Marat Kasem was taken into custody on a court order, his lawyer announced on Thursday.

The journalist is accused of breaching EU sanctions and charged with espionage, Sputnik reports.

Kasem’s lawyer, Imma Jansone, has not yet been able to review his case materials, according to the news outlet. Jansone asked the court to release the journalist on bail but a judge decided to leave him in custody. Kasem was immediately transferred to Riga’s central jail on Thursday.

Kasem is a Latvian citizen, although he has been living in Moscow for several years working for the Rossiya Segodnya media group, with Sputnik Lithuania being a part of it. Before the New Year’s Eve, the journalist returned to Latvia for family reasons.

Moscow would request assistance of international organizations over Kasem’s arrest, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said. She also blasted the move as a violation of Latvia’s international commitments in the field of freedom of speech protection.

Talking to the RIA Novosti news agency, the head of the Rossiya Segodnya media group, Dmitry Kiselyov, branded Kasem’s arrest “absurd” and “lawless.” He also called such actions a “dangerous tendency” affecting all of the EU. Kiselyov said that Kasem previously frequently spoke of a feeling of being politically persecuted.

Kasem had already faced persecution in the Baltic States before his arrest. Back in 2019, he was detained on arrival to the Vilnius airport and labeled “a threat to the national security” of Lithuania. He was then deported to Latvia. At that time, it was revealed that the journalist was put on a blacklist of people barred from entering Lithuania altogether.

In 2018, another Russian journalist, Sputnik Latvia’s editor-in-chief, Valentin Rozentsov, was detained at Riga airport. He was held in police custody and interrogated for 12 hours before being released. In 2021, Moscow slammed persecution of Russian journalists in the Baltic States as a “flagrant attack on democracy” and considered what it called degradation of media freedoms there “concerning.”

The developments come as the three Baltic nations keep one of the most hardline stances on Moscow’s actions amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Last month, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, as well as Poland and Slovakia all lodged a formal protest against French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal that NATO should offer Russia security guarantees, according to Reuters.

January 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Rep. Adam Schiff’s office asked Twitter to ban New York Post columnist Paul Sperry — Twitter Files

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 4, 2023

An internal  email claims that the office of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, requested that Twitter ban New York Post columnist Paul Sperry and others and heavily censor information about House Committee Staffers.

The November 2020 email was published by journalist Matt Taibbi as part of a Twitter Files thread detailing censorship pressure and requests from the federal government and other elected officials.

According to the email, Schiff’s office had claimed that Sperry and “many” other accounts had “repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies,” accused these accounts of harassing an unnamed staffer, and requested that the accounts be banned from Twitter.

The email also notes that Schiff’s office had requested that Twitter:

  • “Remove any and all content” about House Intelligence Committee staffers from Twitter including quotes, retweets, and reactions to any content about them
  • “Suppress any and all search results” about House Intelligence Committee staffers
  • “Stop the spread of future misinformation” about House Intelligence Committee staffers and “other Committee staff who are not public figures and who were not central actors in impeachment inquiry or the 2020 presidential election”
  • “Label and reduce the visibility of any content” about an unnamed staffer that isn’t removed

Twitter declined most of the censorship requests by stating “no” or “we don’t do this” and Sperry wasn’t banned at the time. However, in August 2022, Twitter banned Sperry after he criticized the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) raid on former President ’s Mar-A-Lago resort.

Schiff made these purported censorship requests after Sperry had published several articles that named Eric Ciaramella, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower whose complaint started the first impeachment inquiry against former President Trump. In one article, Sperry reported that Ciaramella was overheard talking to Sean Misko, a staffer from former President Barack Obama’s administration, in the White House. Sperry also reported that Misko subsequently left the White House to join the Schiff-led House Intelligence Committee.

In a statement to the New York post, Sperry wrote: “I have never promoted any ‘QAnon conspiracies.’ Ever. Not on Twitter. Not anywhere. Schiff was just angry I outed his impeachment whistleblower and tried to get me banned. I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks to Twitter.”

Sperry also questioned whether Schiff’s office was behind his August 2022 Twitter ban.

“Looks like Schiff’s office initially got friction from Twitter gatekeepers. Still, I was banned just a few months after this ‘request,’” Sperry said. “Were there subsequent demands from Schiff? May explain why Twitter would never give me a reason for banning me.”

January 4, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Transmission Denied

The perils of state-sanctioned censorship laid bare

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 24, 2022

How will we look back on 2022? For all but the most die-hard Zero Covid addicts (who had to wait until China punctured this illusion only a few weeks ago), victory was declared over Covid early in the piece when the government backed down from its obscene NHS injection mandate in February and ‘Plan B’ restrictions were also subsequently rescinded.

Yet peace, of course, was subsequently shattered by a confected – albeit shockingly deadly and costly – crisis in Eastern Europe, providing a helpful smokescreen for those that wished to obscure the obvious fallacies propping up the mainstream Covid narrative.

Of course, for most lockdown sceptics, Covid-19 should never have had a name, nor should it have been a ‘thing’. Had we had our way, the UK might now have the financial muscle to invest in schools, hospitals, updating creaking infrastructure, … this list feels endless, not dissimilar to the climb we face to reclaim the lost ground since society leaped off the cliff and into the abyss of draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions in March 2020.

These days, of course, it is fashionable to decry the harms of the over-zealous response, almost as if there had been no dissenting voices or opinions at the time. Unfortunately this is another convenient smokescreen, as the true scale of falsehoods shared by official information campaigns – or should we call them disinformation campaigns co-ordinated by officials – is now becoming impossible for even the most ardent Covidean Cultists to ignore.

We have previously reported on very strange goings-on in the upper echelons of the institutions co-ordinating various aspects of the ‘pandemic response’. Senior personalities and shadowy nameless characters that populated government committees such as SAGE – riven with conflicts of interest and serving many masters, the precise opposite of the ‘public servants’ they were portrayed as – favoured both corporate tyranny and crony capitalism.  Actions speak louder than words: achieving good outcomes for people they are meant to be serving seem not to have been the top of their agenda.

This just replicated what happened across the Western world. Consider the treatment meted out on three ‘centrist’ senior academics (hailing from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard, no less) behind the Great Barrington Declaration, an attempt to promote a rational response to the grand panic so as to minimise collateral damage. A senior honcho within US National Institutes of Health smeared them as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ and stated that there “needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises”:

Various such rent-a-quote ‘take downs’ duly appeared in the following days, and a rival rallying flag – the John Snow Memorandum – was hastily erected, receiving the blessing of various official mouthpieces such as Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, as well being promoted in The Lancet. The John Snow Memo was merely a totem – a weak document that has laughably failed to stand the test of time – and it was correctly critiqued at the time. It is littered with hostage to fortune statements such as “Japan, Vietnam, and New Zealand, to name a few countries, have shown that robust public health responses can control transmission, allowing life to return to near-normal, and there are many such success stories”. Oops.

But despite these clangers, the ‘women and children last’ brigade were given a free pass by the mainstream press to use the John Snow Memorandum as a stick to beat — and silence — those that fought to limit collateral damage. Mission accomplished: pharma profits maximised.

This all came to light back in 2021… it is old news, though it is noteworthy that even lockdown sceptic Isabel Oakeshott recently mislabelled the centrist creed as the ‘Barrington Declaration’ (perhaps assuming the ‘Great’ was self-aggrandisement, rather than the more prosaic fact of being a geographical label referring to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the Declaration was signed).

A new development is that Anthony Fauci, head of the NIA, is now unable to recall these matters when providing an ‘on the record’ legal deposition, stating that he didn’t “have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration”… despite writing a few days after the above email from Collins that he had “come out very strongly against the Great Barrington Declaration”.

And following on from confirmation of the active suppression and censorship of the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, the new owner of a recently acquired social media company seems to have unearthed information that led to this exchange:

This is not merely playground politics – it is a matter of life and death. As fashionable as it is to subsequently admit that lockdowns – and the associated excesses which led to such terrible collateral damage – were a mistake, this was known before they were enacted. The shenanigans cost lives, livelihoods, and robbed families of last goodbyes.

It is tempting to see the debacle of recent years as a great misadventure – part of life’s rich tapestry that contributes to the furtherment of human knowledge. Lockdowns – ah, a failed experiment, but we didn’t know any better!

The sad – if unpalatable – truth is that not only should that experiment never have happened, it was known to very many powerful people that the experiment – and its compounding consequences and associated harms – should never have been promoted.  It was a grand self-immolation that happened to enrich various characters that were not necessarily acting in your best interests. As more painful truths come to light, we owe it to our children and children’s children to continue to dissect these discredited lockdown policies, and those that promoted them. Watch this space.

January 4, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The Final Proof of Lockdown and Mask Impact

The Fat Emperor – Ivor Cummins | January 2, 2023

The fact-stuffed short video can be downloaded here for you to keep and upload wherever…. https://we.tl/t-XqUKvZSxZ6

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January 4, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Documents reveal how ‘Russiagate’ was used for Twitter censorship

RT | January 4, 2023

Internal documents from Twitter made public on Tuesday show how the social media platform was pressured to follow the US intelligence community’s lead on censorship back in 2017. Key Democrats in the US Congress, a British university and two media outlets – Politico and BuzzFeed – played a major role in the process, which revolved around the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory, according to research by Matt Taibbi.

In a pattern established in just six weeks, from August to October 2017, Twitter went from being on nobody’s radar to agreeing to take orders from US spies as to whom to censor, Taibbi wrote on Substack.

“Threats from Congress came first, then a rush of bad headlines (inspired by leaks from congressional committees), and finally a series of moderation demands coming from the outside,” he added.

In a 30-tweet thread, Taibbi showed emails and other internal documents he obtained, thanks to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.

Democrats had accused Russia of helping Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. Their claim that Trump had ties with Moscow was a “dossier” fabricated by a British spy. From there, they insinuated that WikiLeaks publishing internal DNC documents and personal emails of Clinton’s campaign had something to do with Moscow, while “Russian bots and trolls” posted “misinformation” on social media that somehow undermined the elections.

By August 2017, Facebook was purging accounts accused of being “linked to Russia.” Unconcerned, Twitter sent over a list of 22 “possible” Russian accounts to the Senate Intelligence Committee, only to be denounced by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat.

By the end of September, Twitter VP for Public Policy Colin Crowell was warning that “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and [the] rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” Crowell also noted the Democrats were  “taking cues from Hillary Clinton,” and that only Warner and his House counterpart Congressman Adam Schiff were seeking any comments from social media companies.

Meanwhile, as Taibbi put it, “a torrent of stories sourced to the [committee] poured into the news,” while several Senators – including Warner but also John McCain, an anti-Trump Arizona Republican – proposed bills that would have cracked down on social media.

A “Russia Task Force” set up by Twitter on October 2 found “no evidence of a coordinated approach” by October 13. The final report on October 23 found “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia.” Of those, only two spent anything close to $10,000 on advertising – and one of them was RT.

Policy Director Carlos Monje admits in an October 18 memo that “our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight.” One of these changes was the October 26 ban on advertising by RT and Sputnik.

A November 22 internal email accuses the Senate Intelligence Committee of leaking Twitter’s internal report to the media. A Politico story accusing Twitter of deleting files is followed by a BuzzFeed article alleging a German-language bot network with “signs of being connected to Russia.” The committee demands a report based on the story, which Twitter’s Yoel Roth dutifully writes up.

“You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions,” Taibbi wrote.

All of this results in the internal instructions to ban anything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” It was the first step in the process that would eventually lead to the FBI and the Biden White House telling Twitter exactly whom to censor.

January 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Injury on ‘Monday Night Football’ prompts 20 vaccine observations …

An uncomfortable question: Could one death save many lives?

Aaron Rodgers was right on vaccines and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was wrong.
By Bill Rice, Jr. | January 3, 2023

By now, millions of Americans (who can still find somewhere to practice free speech) have commented on the apparent heart attack of Buffalo Bills’ safety Damar Hamlin, which occurred last night on “Monday Night Football.”

The extreme interest in this case further confirms that millions of Americans understand a giant elephant has been sitting in our family rooms for more than two years.

Since I now have my own Substack site, I can offer a few of thoughts on this potentially very important (if tragic) news event.

  1. We don’t know if Hamlin’s cardiac event was related to him getting a vaccine, which he almost certainly has received as probably 99 percent of NFL players have been vaccinated.
  2. But his cardiac event could be related to the vaccine. This is the “elephant in the room.”
  3. People began receiving Covid “vaccines” in December 2020 – more than two years ago. In those two years, I have not heard one American announcer broach the subject that vaccines could be dangerous to young, healthy athletes. No announcer has mentioned the thousands of possible vaccine-related injuries and fatalities that have now happened to people around the world (whether these people were playing organized sports, weekend sports, running in a 5k or rock-climbing).
  4. This “radio silence” is strange as every time a current or recently-retired athlete “dies suddenly” throngs of people comment on this (again, at the sites that still allow uncensored comments).
  5. For two years, I’ve been saying that the only thing that might change the “safe and effective” vaccine narrative is if some U.S. athlete died on national television … probably in a game with tens of millions of viewers … a game like “Monday Night Football.”
  6. But even if, God forbid, such a tragedy occurred, I’m no longer certain this would be enough to change the narrative enough to cease all future vaccinations.
  7. Too many groups are now “stakeholders” in the vaccine narrative for these people and organizations to admit they were wrong.
  8. For example, the NFL Players Association could probably go a long way towards challenging the “safe” narrative by simply voting to not play football again until these vaccine demands are stopped. However, this union – created to look out for the well-being of its members (today and in the future) – actually supports Covid vaccines … and supported masking requirements and mandatory testing of non-sick players.
  9. If this union belatedly decided the vaccines might be dangerous to its members, it would be admitting it was wrong (on a life-or-death matter) for three years, something the Union’s leadership will NOT do.
  10. Nor will any announcer or journalist covering sports leagues admit one incredibly-relevant Covid fact: No college or pro sports athlete in the world has died from Covid in the past three years. This means there has been zero mortality risk to these athletes from Covid, according to three years of observable data. This means there was no reason any of these athletes should have been vaccinated in the first place.
  11. Everyone in the world also now knows that the vaccines neither prevent infection nor spread so there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines produce any important benefit for these athletes.
  12. Aaron Rodgers, Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving and tennis superstar Novak Djokovik were right and smart to refuse vaccination.

13. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and every other sports league commissioner was wrong to mandate these vaccines (or to bully, penalize and coerce athletes into doing this). So too was every college sports league and all their member colleges and all the esteemed science department faculty members who comprised these leagues’ “expert” safety panels.

14. Every fine that commissioners have levied against athletes and coaches who didn’t wear masks, or salaries that were withheld because non-vaxxed athletes couldn’t play in certain games, should be returned with interest and punitive damages for discrimination.

15. Every journalist or TV talking head who refused to acknowledge the above facts are cowards who refused to do their jobs and present any of these facts. This, or they are simply obtuse and the public should know our “watchdog” journalists are too ignorant to add two and two together.

16. We’ll never definitively know if the vaccines killed or harmed young athletes because the autopsies that might determine this will either never be performed or the autopsies that are performed won’t look for the right clinical markers. And/or the cause of death will be listed as a medical issue which the vaccines might have caused.

17. Still, a tiny chance (maybe 0 to 1 percent) exists that some officials will rule a high-profile death as being vaccine-caused. If, by some miracle, such an official determination was made, many more people would then have to acknowledge that, at least for pro athletes, Covid vaccines are more deadly than Covid-19 (a disease the vaccines don’t prevent). Such a finding would perhaps qualify as a narrative-changer.

18. … Which, alas, is why this can’t happen.

19. Pfizer is actually a corporate sponsor of the SEC and pays the league untold millions of dollars. In a recent media campaign, the SEC and Pfizer joined forces to “encourage everyone to get their boosters.” The NFL, NBA, MLB, Big-10, Pac-12, etc. are also firmly on the record of endorsing vaccines … just like all the networks that televise the sporting events of these leagues.

20. Question: Are any of these institutions now going to admit they were wrong and were putting the health and lives of athletes at risk all along?

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At one time I thought if one prominent American athlete died on national TV in front of 20 million people such a tragedy might save many lives .. so such a death would actually have a silver lining. But now I doubt this would even be the case.

When you’ve reached the conclusion that one death might need to happen to save many more lives, something’s gone terribly wrong with our society.

January 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Jordan Peterson threatened over political tweets

RT | January 3, 2023

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson said on Tuesday that may lose his license unless he submits to mandatory “social-media communication retraining” by the College of Psychologists of Ontario, his home province’s licensing authority.

“I face public disgrace, mandatory political re-education, disciplinary hearing and potential loss of my clinical licensing for agreeing with [Conservative MP] Pierre Poilievre and criticizing our standing [Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau,” Peterson said on Twitter.

According to Peterson, “about a dozen people from all over the world” submitted complaints to the CPO, alleging his views and comments “harmed people.” None of them were actual clients of his, but lied about it so their complaints would be accepted, he added.

The CPO demands that Peterson undergoes the “retraining” and submits “progress” reports, or face an “in-person tribunal” and suspension of his license to operate as a clinical psychologist.

“If I comply, the terms of my re-education and my punishment will be announced publicly,” he said.

“Canadians: your physicians, lawyers, psychologists and other professionals are now so intimidated by their commissar overlords that they fear to tell you the truth. This means that your care and legal counsel has been rendered dangerously unreliable,” Peterson tweeted.

Peterson was reinstated on Twitter in November, after Elon Musk bought the company and reversed many prior bans that he thought unjust. He had been locked out of his account in July 2022, for refusing to use a transgender actor’s new name and pronouns.

On December 27, Peterson tweeted that Trudeau “appears to me to be perpetually 14 yrs old,” referring to the concept of “psychological age” in his field of expertise.

The psychologist first gained national and international attention in 2016, when he was subjected to similar “re-education” pressure over his criticism of a bill that declared “gender identity and expression” to be protected categories. More recently, he has denounced the “totalitarian” lockdowns and vaccine mandates embraced by many countries – including Canada – in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

January 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel was never a democracy, so why is the West lamenting the end of a ‘liberal’ state?

MEMO | January 3, 2023

Even before the new Israeli coalition government was officially sworn in last week, angry reactions emerged, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s allies in the West. As early as 2 November, top US officials told Axios that the administration of US President Joe Biden is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.

In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own courts in 2007 for supporting a terrorist organisation and inciting racism. US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly “hinted” that Washington will also boycott “other right-wing extremists” in Netanyahu’s government.

However, such concerns looked to be absent from the statement made by the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, on the following day. Nides explained that he had “congratulated [Netanyahu] on his victory and told him that I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond” between the two countries. In other words, this “unbreakable bond” is stronger than any public US concern regarding terrorism, extremism, fascism and criminal activities.

Ben-Gvir is not the only convicted criminal in Netanyahu’s government. Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was convicted of tax fraud in early 2022 and, in 2000, he served a prison sentence for accepting bribes when he was interior minister. Bezalel Smotrich is another controversial character. His anti-Palestinian racism has dominated his political persona for many years. While Ben-Gvir has been assigned the post of national security minister, Deri has been entrusted with the interior ministry and Smotrich has the ministry of finance.

Palestinians and Arab countries are angry, and rightly so. They understand that the new government is likely to sow the seeds of more violence and chaos. With many of Israel’s sinister politicians in one place, Arabs know that Israel’s illegal annexation of large parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories is back on the agenda; and that incitement against Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem, coupled with raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque, will increase exponentially in the coming weeks and months. Moreover, it is expected that the push for the construction and expansion of illegal settlements is also likely to grow.

These fears are not unfounded. Aside from the very racist and violent statements and actions by Netanyahu and his allies in recent years, the new government has already declared that the Jewish people have “exclusive and inalienable rights to all parts of the Land of Israel”. It is promising to expand settlements, while distancing itself from any commitments to establishing a Palestinian State, or even engaging in any “peace process”.

Palestinians and their Arab allies have been largely consistent in recognising extremism in successive Israeli governments, but what excuse do the US and the West have in failing to acknowledge — or even recognise — that the latest Netanyahu-led government is not only the occupation state’s most extreme administration ever, but also the most rational outcome of the West’s blind support for Israel over many years?

In March 2019, Politico branded Netanyahu as the creator of “the most right-wing government in Israeli history,” a sentiment that was repeated countless times in other western media. This ideological shift was, in fact, recognised by Israel’s own media years earlier. In May 2016, the popular Israeli newspaper Maariv described the Israeli government at the time as the “most right-wing and extremist” in the country’s history. This was, in part, due to the fact that far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman was appointed as defence minister.

The West, then, also expressed concern, warned against the demise of Israel’s supposed liberal democracy, and demanded that it must remain committed to the peace process and the two-state solution. None of that was seen in practise. Instead, the terrifying figures within that government were rebranded as conservatives, centrists or even liberals in the following years.

The same is likely to happen now. In fact, signs of the US’s willingness to accommodate whatever extremist politics Israel produces are already visible. In his statement last week welcoming the new Israeli government, Biden said nothing about the threat of Tel Aviv’s far-right politics to the Middle East. Instead, he opted to highlight the “challenges and threats” posed by the region to Israel. In other words, Ben-Gvir or no Ben-Gvir, unconditional US support for Israel will remain intact.

If history is anything to go by, future violence and incitement in Palestine will also be blamed mostly, if not squarely, on Palestinians. This knee-jerk, pro-Israel attitude has defined the apartheid state’s relationship with the US, regardless of whether Israeli governments are led by extremists or supposed liberals. No matter what, Israel is maintaining its false status as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

If we are to believe that Israel’s exclusivist and racist “democracy” is in any sense a democracy at all, then we are justified also in believing that Netanyahu’s new government is neither less nor more democratic than the state’s previous governments. And yet, western officials, commentators and even pro-Israel Jewish leaders and organisations in the US have warned against the supposed danger facing Israel’s “liberal democracy” in the run-up to the formation of Netanyahu’s new government.

This is an indirect form of whitewashing, as these views accept that what Israel has practiced since its creation in 1948 until today has been some kind of real democracy; and that Israel remained a democracy even after the passing of the controversial 2018 Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as a Jewish state, completely disregarding the rights of 20 per cent of the country’s citizens who happen to be non-Jews.

It is only a matter of time before Israel’s latest extreme, far-right government is also whitewashed as proof that Israel can strike a balance between being exclusively Jewish and democratic at the same time.

This happened in 2016, when warnings about the rise of far-right extremism in Israel following the Netanyahu-Lieberman pact disappeared quickly, and then vanished altogether. Instead of boycotting that government, in September 2016 the US government finalised its largest ever military aid package to Israel, amounting to $38 billion.

In truth, Israel has not changed much since 1948, either in its own self-definition or in its treatment of Palestinians. Failing to understand this is tantamount to tacit approval of Israel’s racist, violent and colonial policies in Occupied Palestine over the past 75 years. So why is the West lamenting the end of a “liberal” state that has never, in truth, existed?

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Ben-Gvir plans Negev operation against Palestinians

January 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Zelensky Expands Crack Down on News Media in Ukraine

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | January 2, 2023

President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new bill into law that boosts Kiev’s control over the public’s access to news in Ukraine. Zelensky has already used his martial law powers to nationalize Ukraine’s media.

According to the New York Times, the law expands Kiev’s control over news outlets to print and online sources. In March, Zelensky nationalized broadcast media, effectively quashing dissent.

The Kyiv Independent explains the law will allow a governmental body to give licenses to outlets, any media organization without the proper paperwork can be shut down. The Kyiv Independent noted the body handing out the permits will be under total control of Zelensky.

According to Ukraine’s Institute of Mass Information, under the law, the media regulator is likely to be controlled by the incumbent authorities because its members are appointed by Zelensky and the Ukrainian parliament, where his party has an absolute majority.

While Zelensky’s power grabs throughout the 11-month conflict have largely gone ignored in the American mainstream press, the Times covered calls from human rights groups to put down the law over fears that it will crush the free press.

The Committee to Protect Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists slammed the legislation while it was being debated. Subsequently, Ukraine’s legislature stripped away some of the bill’s more extreme measures. However, the law Zelensky signed will still give Kiev near total control over Ukraine’s news media.

January 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

World Economic Forum will plot how to counter “misinformation” at its 2023 annual meeting

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 2, 2023

The  (WEF), an unelected global organization that seeks to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” has announced the schedule for its 2023 annual meeting which includes a panel on countering “misinformation.”

The panel is titled “Countering Threats in the Age of Black Swans” and will take place on January 18, 2023 at 9 am Eastern Standard Time (EST).

The description for the panel doesn’t define misinformation but claims that “a wide range of actors” have access to “an ever-increasing capacity to spread misinformation.” This capacity, according to the WEF, is supposedly compounding “threats that were once considered outliers.”

During the panel, speakers will discuss how to predict, mitigate, and counter these threats that are supposedly aggravated by misinformation.

While the panel description doesn’t define misinformation, a recent post promoting the WEF’s annual meeting suggests that the group deems criticism of the WEF and challenging mainstream Covid-19 narratives to be misinformation.

In this post, the WEF complains that it has been targeted by “disinformation campaigns” and links to another post where its managing director, Adrian Monck, suggests that criticism of the WEF’s controversial “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” slogan is tied to a “misinformation campaign.”

In addition to branding criticism of this slogan misinformation, Monck also laments “misinformation concerning COVID-19 and vaccines.”

Not only does Monck brand these topics misinformation but he also claims that “misinformation derails free speech” and calls for “action to prevent lies being accepted as truth.”

This post by Monck is one of many examples of the WEF pushing for the censorship of what it deems to be misinformation. The WEF and the global leaders that attend its meetings have previously outlined how Big Tech partners with intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations (UN) to tackle disinformation, demanded that social media companies crack down on “rumors,” and pushed for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to censor misinformation.

 

Related: 🛡 How the term “misinformation” was weaponized as an online censorship tool amid the coronavirus pandemic

January 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Senator Klobuchar wants to allow platforms to be sued for promoting misinformation

Klobuchar calls for an end to Big Tech immunity, to “focus on certain kinds of speech, misinformation.”

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | January 2, 2023

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Sen.  (D-Minn.) expressed support for legislation to regulate Big Tech. The lawmakers expressed their opinions on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Sen. Klobuchar, who has served as chair of the Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, complained that Big Tech is “so powerful” that it can block legislation that has passed the Judiciary Committee.

For instance, a bill she had pushed that would have forced social media companies to hand over cash to mainstream media did not see the light of day because of alleged lobbying from  and Meta.

“We had such strong support for this bill, but these guys just make a few calls,” she said.

She also said that  is “archaic” and should be repealed, arguing that if its protections are removed, platforms would be forced to monitor content better as they could be considered publishers.

Host Chuck Todd asked Klobuchar if Congress would ever amend the law and open up social media companies to “hefty lawsuits.”

“Yes, you can amend [Section 230] and focus on certain kinds of speech, misinformation, disinformation…” Klobuchar said.

However, according to Rep. Gallagher, repealing Section 230 would result in much greater censorship because platforms would prefer to proactively remove content than risk lawsuits over content posted by users. According to the Republican lawmaker, the better solution is demanding more transparency around the algorithms used by platforms.

Gallagher also advocated for data portability, which would allow users to transfer their content to any platform they deem has the best transparency and content moderation policies. He added that he was open to talking to Klobuchar to discuss how best Congress can regulate social media.

Social media regulation should focus on consumer protection, according to Gallagher, as well as forcing platforms to communicate their terms of service better.

“When it comes to our kids, the government can’t raise your kids, can’t protect your kids for you. I have two young daughters. It’s my responsibility to raise them into healthy adults. But there are certain sensible things we can do in order to create a healthier social media ecosystem,” he said.

January 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment