Banning ‘sexist’ language won’t make sexism disappear, any more than banning racial slurs killed racism
RT | October 23, 2019
A Massachusetts congressman wants to end sexism by punishing sexist language – specifically the word “b***h” – with fines and even jail. But policing speech doesn’t kill the underlying sentiment – that requires real social change.
Massachusetts Democrat Daniel Hunt’s bill to ban the “b-word,” fining offenders $150 on the first offense and $200 or six months in prison if they can’t stop saying it, sounds like the kind of joke conservatives might make to poke fun at the uber-liberal Bay State. But the bill – titled ‘An act regarding the use of offensive words’ – is real. Worse, any witness to the use of the word can complain.
A person who uses the word ‘bitch’ directed at another person to accost, annoy, degrade or demean the other person shall be considered to be a disorderly person.
Hunt’s bill, which he insists was submitted at the request of a constituent, is far from the only example of the Democratic Party clutching its pearls over speech while giving the sentiment beneath that speech a pass. A vocal segment of the Left has become notorious as America’s “speech police,” calling out offenses real and imagined on social media and inciting outrage mobs to force apologies out of celebrities and businesses, sometimes sincere but often perfunctory and defensive.
Criminalizing “sexist” language to curb sexism reverses cause and effect. Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn’t have gotten very far during the Civil Rights era had he merely strove to end the use of racial slurs in order to achieve equality for the races. Such words are no longer acceptable to use because of significant organizing, marching, and other forms of protest from sit-ins to boycotts. Social change comes first – language is just a reflection of societal norms.
Yet liberals seem to have forgotten even that. College students and professors at the University of Connecticut turned out in protest earlier this week, demanding the arrest of two students who were overheard calling each other racial slurs in a vulgar word game. The mob didn’t stop to realize that the slur – once a commonplace insult directed at black people – is now considered an obscenity thanks to the strides American society has made toward equality. The students were using it to shock – rather like someone yelling “b***h” in a public place.
Politicians should have a better grasp of history than college students, but this is not always the case. Earlier this week, Democratic congressman Al Green pounced on President Donald Trump for comparing his impeachment probe to a “lynching.” Green, who is black, excoriated the president for appropriating his racial history – even though the word simply means an extrajudicial execution by a mob, and Democrats used it to defend their own president Bill Clinton during his impeachment in 1999.
Green’s histrionics allowed Congress to avoid addressing the president’s point – that his impeachment investigation was proceeding at record speed, with little regard for legal precedent, and that it put future presidents in jeopardy. This is the usual outcome of speech-policing: bringing down an outrage mob on the head of whoever used the forbidden word, while utterly obscuring the context and negating any point they may have been making.
It’s not that there isn’t room for improvement in the US with regard to gender and racial equality. Congress – should it desire – could pass laws to help reduce the racial disparities in criminal convictions and sentencing, instead of demanding (in California, at least) that felons be referred to as “justice-involved persons” so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities.
It could mandate paid maternity leave like the rest of the developed world, giving women more opportunities to advance in the workplace without penalizing them for giving birth; instead, some states (California again) mandate “de-gendering” of job titles like postman, policeman, and fireman. But playing speech-police is the easy way to signal virtue, while changing social norms is difficult.
Massachusetts’ ‘b***h bill’ is clearly unconstitutional, civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate told the Herald, and fortunately Hunt is getting some pushback from his fellow legislators. Given the current state of affairs, though, it’s only a matter of time before the speech police strike again.
Survey claims Americans want government-imposed press restrictions & curbs on free speech
© Reuters / Michael Dadler
RT | October 24, 2019
Some Americans are having second thoughts about the First Amendment, a new survey has found. Over half are calling for it to be rewritten, and some 61 percent believe there should be limits on freedom of speech.
The First Amendment, which guarantees Americans freedom of speech, should be overhauled to reflect current cultural norms, according to 51 percent of the respondents to a survey published on Wednesday by the Campaign for Free Speech. The campaign is hoping to call attention to the dire state of Americans’ preeminent civil right with the poll, which breaks down opposition along gender, race, class, and educational lines.
The younger respondents were, the more they supported overhauling the law to restrict speech. However, college graduates were the least likely of all educational groupings to support the restrictions, indicating that the increasingly regulated speech environment at American universities may be backfiring in some cases and producing adults who cherish their rights because they know what it’s like to be deprived of them.
Over half of millennials believe “hate speech” should be against the law, though no definition of “hate speech” was given (and indeed the definition tends to vary given the time and place). Most of those who want a ban on such speech consider jail time an appropriate penalty – though female respondents were the least supportive of such draconian sentencing.
And it isn’t just ordinary speech that Americans want restricted – 57 percent support government action against “newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false,” with nearly half of those agreeing such offenses should carry a jail sentence. The media is not particularly well-liked in 2019, with the average American trusting the press less even than lawyers and members of Congress, and people over 65 years-old were the only group in which the majority opposed punitive government regulation.
Alternative media were the only outlets that escaped the scorn of the majority – just 36 percent agreed that the government should review online content. Even Facebook, hardly expected to be a bastion of openness, saw just 49 percent agree that the platform should censor “offensive speech.” Interestingly, millennials and Generation Z were the most supportive of a censor-free Facebook, with some 47 percent of 18 to 34 year-olds telling CEO Mark Zuckerberg to get his hands off their content.
The survey did some digging into what people believe constitutes the kind of hate speech that the government should regulate, and the results were illuminating. “Racists” were the least popular group, with 52 percent calling for a government crackdown on their utterances, followed closely by neo-Nazis, who were loathed by half the respondents. Radical Islamists were not a priority for anyone but the middle class and those with just a high school education. Holocaust deniers rankled just 35 percent, while anti-vaccine advocates and climate-change deniers were an issue for a fifth or less of the population. Some 37 percent of respondents didn’t think any of those groups should be banned from speaking – a figure that climbed to 42 percent among college graduates.
The 1,004 respondents were not categorized politically, though that might have provided an explanation for some of the more intriguing statistics that suggested college graduates oppose restrictions on so-called hate speech.
College conservatives are crying foul at what they believe are the stifling speech restrictions enacted on modern campuses. In Connecticut, a coalition of Republicans at 22 schools is demanding political ideology be added to the list of protected attributes in schools’ discrimination codes after two allegedly racist incidents at the University of Connecticut sparked calls for stricter ‘hate speech’ codes on campus.
Meanwhile, state schools in Idaho, Michigan and Tennessee are urging professors not to grade writing on its quality, lest they somehow impose “white language supremacy” on their students. Controversial speakers have sparked riots at the University of California at Berkeley, while Evergreen College’s notorious “no whites on campus” day has made headlines two years in a row. The drive to avoid racial hate has inadvertently given rise to its own form of hate, in which any view that deviates from social justice orthodoxy is demonized.
“Hate speech” has also become a cudgel for internet platforms to censor political views they dislike, from slamming criticism of mass immigration as racism to attacking critics of the Israeli government as anti-Semites. YouTube recently enraged its users by proclaiming its devotion to hosting unpopular opinions at the same time it kicked a number of popular but controversial creators off its platform.
It’s ‘unthinkable & absurd’ to jail Catalan pro-independence leaders, former UN special rapporteur tells RT
A protest in solidarity with the Catalan pro-independence politicians in Barcelona, Spain, October 20, 2019. © Jon Nazca / Reuters
RT | October 24, 2019
The prosecution of Catalan pro-independence politicians by Spain violates European law and is simply “absurd,” a former high-ranking democracy and human rights expert at the UN has told RT.
“Political prisoners in Spain… It’s absolutely unthinkable!” Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, who served as the UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, said in an interview with Rafael Correa on RT Spanish.
He branded the jailing of the leaders of the Catalan independence movement “absurd,” especially since the “Catalans have been protesting for many years in a peaceful, democratic fashion.”
Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia voted in favor of independence in October 2017. Madrid called the vote illegal and sent in a massive police force to disrupt the referendum.
Chaotic scenes from the ground with officers in full riot gear beating civilians for merely voting, storming polling stations and snatching ballot boxes made the headlines back then, triggering widespread condemnation from international humanitarian organizations.
Following the voting-day crackdown, Spanish authorities detained a group of prominent Catalan politicians who had been involved in staging the referendum. Former Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras and eight others were sentenced to between nine and 13 years in prison earlier this month.
Spain is now demanding the extradition of former regional president Carles Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium shortly after the failed independence bid.
“Both Puigdemont and Junqueras were elected with a mandate to carry out this [exact] referendum,” de Zayas stressed.
“So, criminally prosecuting someone for actions that were legitimized through a democratic election is … beyond all reason.”
“It violates Article 2 of the [EU’s] Treaty of Lisbon, which says that such issues must be brought up before the European Commission. Yet, I don’t see any complaints coming from Berlin, Brussels or Copenhagen that declare: ‘Things like that shouldn’t happen in Europe.’”
The lengthy prison sentences for pro-independence politicians sparked peaceful protests in Barcelona, which has been marred by night-time rioting and clashes with police. The mass protests raged for several days in a row, culminating in a general strike last Friday, which attracted at least half a million supporters of independence.
Prison-State USA
By Vladimir Odintsov – New Eastern Outlook – 24.10.2019
Washington is incessantly trying to inspire the whole world with this myth that the United States is the most democratic country on the planet, and that only Americans, the chosen nation, have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and establish their own preferred forms of governance there. Unfortunately however, this “American-style democracy” is the cause of growing resentment on many issues.
Let’s take a look at just one of the many reasons why people find this American exceptionalism so outrageous. There are currently more than 2.3 million people behind bars in the United States, which means the US holds more people in prison than any other country in the world. This is a quarter of all the world’s prisoners! When you consider the fact that there are more than 750 prisoners for every 100,000 US nationals, this makes the United States the world’s largest prison state. If we also add the number of Americans who have been released on probation and on parole to the overall sum of prisoners, it turns out that there is actually a total of 7.3 million people in the US prison system! That is, roughly one out of every forty people living in this “democratic country” is under some form of correctional supervision, or one out of every twenty adults!
American prisons are now overcrowded — the number of inmates is at about 200 percent of capacity. In October 2007 for example, there were 170,600 people incarcerated in California prisons with a capacity of 83,000. This has resulted in a large category of so-called “domestic inmates” living outside prisons (and this is about 5 million people), i.e. people living under house arrest, waiting for a bunk to be freed up in prison cell. Their “home confinement” is controlled by an electronic bracelet worn around the ankle, which keeps track of the prisoner’s movements, who have to keep within a 30-meter radius of the house. There is no fixed waiting time for prisoners doing time “at home”.
There are more prisoners than there are students in a number of federal states, and the “Champions” in this category include the states of California, Florida and Arizona. The American media have highlighted that there are now more prisons in the US than schools (there are over 5,000 prisons). More than 2.7 million children in the United States have a parent in prison, and the prison population has quadrupled nationwide since 1980.
The government spends a total of over $ 70 billion per year on the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Every second American convict returns to prison within three years of their release. This is a very depressing figure. According to a 2017 report, having done time in a prison, which seeks to profit from inmate labor, increases the risk of incarceration by nearly 20 percent.
This situation with prisoners in the United States has long been more than just a law enforcement problem, there are inherent social and even racial problems. For example, although African Americans make up only 13% of the US population, they make up 40% of US prisoners, and 42% of those on death row. African Americans are sentenced to an average of one year more than white Americans for violent crimes.
Raw Story has previously explicitly stated that the US prison system is clear proof of the existence of institutionalized racism in the country, and has reinforced this argument with a number of examples. To put this in context, there are now more black prisoners than there were black male slaves in the southern states before the start of the Civil War. An African-American man has a 32% chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life, while white men only have a 6% chance. Due to felony convictions, 2.2 million African Americans have had their right to vote taken away from them, i.e. 7.7% of this adult population has been deprived of suffrage, deprived of civil rights, and in three states (Florida, Kentucky and Virginia), one in five African Americans falls into this category.
But the US prison system is also a form of perpetuated “prison slavery” in this country. Believe it or not, this practice is actually legal, given that the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which outlawed forced labor, contains a loophole: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Forced Labor Camp, Georgia, 1930s
American researcher Vicky Peláez writes about the business of “prison slavery”, which usually occurs when state prisons hire out prisoners to private companies to perform labor. This type of business “partnership” does indeed have obvious benefits for private corporations: they pay “hired out” slaves the minimum legal wage set by the state where the labor is performed. And in some places they are even paid below the minimum wage. In the state of Colorado for example, prisoners are paid about $2 per hour, which is significantly lower than the minimum wage. “Prison slaves” are actively exploited by leading American corporations such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores and many others. The popularity of this form of exploitation can be measured by the profits generated from inmate labor, which increased from $392 million to $1.031 billion between just 1980 and 1994.
At some point, the American authorities realized that the federal prison system could no longer cope with its overflowing number of prisoners, and turned to services offered by private firms. It turned out that private firms are able to turn a considerable profit by exploiting this labor force, which they are willing to do for the extra profits, just like what people used to do back in the bad old days of slavery. As a result, private prisons began appearing in the United States in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, and then state prisons continued to be privatized under presidents George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton.
The idea of a cost-effective prison is nothing new — the state of Louisiana turned one of its prisons into a business back in 1844. This “industry” began to develop rapidly in the years that followed.
Private prisons are a multibillion-dollar industry, and it is growing. For instance, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the United States, has seen its revenue increase by over 500 percent in less than 20 years, from about $280 million in 2000 to $1.77 billion in 2017. The three main private prison companies in the US — CoreCivic, the GEO Group and MTC — generate about $5 billion in revenue each year.
By 2018, the combined turnover of these three key business for-profit prisons along with several smaller prison corporations exceeded $7.4 billion. About 10 percent of the estimated 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States are in private prisons. Private prisons receive a fixed sum from the state for each prisoner, regardless of the real incarceration costs. Thus, the prison business aims to cut costs by organizing a system and security regime that requires a minimal amount of work to be performed by guards. In one of CoreCivic’s ultra-modern prisons, there are only five employees guarding 750 prisoners.
It has come to light that there is a very high rate of profit in the US prison industry. This has not gone unnoticed, transnational corporations (TNCs) have reduced and even scrapped the incentive to transfer their production from the United States to less economically developed countries. The prison industry is one of the fastest growing industries, supported by investors on Wall Street.
Private prisons certainly make a bigger profit when they have more inmates, so they inevitably try to lobby policymakers in their own interest to legislate for longer sentences, such as the 1994 “three strikes laws”, which prescribe mandatory life sentences for anyone who is convicted of a severe violent felony and two other previous convictions. It therefore comes as no surprise that between 1992 and 2003, the number of people serving life sentences shop up by more than 80 percent. When President Trump was elected in 2016, the stock prices of private prison companies CoreCivic and GEO soared. And in 2018, private prison companies donated $1.6 million to campaign committees in the midterm elections.
This private prison lobbying, donating money to political campaigns to push for legislation that would allow the prisons to receive more prisoners with longer sentences and squeeze as many taxpayer dollars as possible, is a clear perversion of the American judicial system. Apart from this, we must not forget that the system is often abused in terms of the collusion that goes on between the administration of state prisons and private companies, as production labor is organized by the prison authorities, and prisoners produce products on the basis of contracts with private companies for a price that is usually far lower than that of the regular labor market. It is difficult to determine exactly how many prisoners are employed indirectly by private companies in the United States. That is what makes this underground economy, the prison industry, a “shady business”.
‘Longest trial in history’: Palestinian aid worker charged with funding Hamas attends 129th hearing
Former World Vision employee Muhammed al-Halabi (L) at a district court in Beersheva, Israel. © AFP / Dudu Grunshpan
RT | October 23, 2019
A former charity manager in the Gaza Strip accused of funding Hamas has attended court for the 129th time in what has become the longest trial of its kind in Israel’s history, dragging on as witnesses are blocked from testifying.
The 41-year-old aid worker, Muhammed al-Halabi, was arrested in June 2016 while working for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian group, charged with funnelling kickbacks to Hamas and its armed wing. For nearly four years, however, Halabi has been denied his proper day in court, instead forced to endure an endless series of stop-go proceedings in which key witnesses are barred from testifying.
His most recent hearing on Wednesday was no different, quickly hitting a dead end soon after it began.
“Today’s hearing was cancelled shortly after it started because the witnesses were not present,” Halabi’s brother, Hamed, told Middle East Eye. “The prosecution then threatened that any witnesses who come from Gaza to give their testimony will be detained.”
“They do not want anyone to prove them wrong. All the eyewitnesses and even the officials at World Vision gave proof that he was innocent. But this is not what the prosecution is looking for.”
The Israeli government has denied travel permits to crucial witnesses in the former charity worker’s case, preventing them from leaving Gaza to give testimony in Israeli courts. Halabi’s lawyer, Maher Hanna, says that guarantees he cannot receive a fair trial.
One of those witnesses – the owner of a company implicated in the alleged money transfer scheme – “could totally undermine the accusations they made against Muhammed,” Hanna told the Times of Israel. “He has begged Israel to allow him to go to the court and testify, but they have not permitted him to do so.”
A father of five from Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, Halabi has maintained his innocence since his 2016 arrest and refused to confess to the charges, according to his family, despite facing pressure and even threats from judges. His father said that at one his hearings, a judge promised “long term imprisonment” if Halabi did not admit to collaborating with terrorist groups.
“[The judge] threatened him and tried to force him to confirm the accusations in front of everyone,” Halabi’s father told Middle East Eye.
Halabi’s family also says he has suffered “horrific torture” at the hands of Israeli authorities during several interrogations, including beatings, humiliation and forced sleep deprivation.
A former employee at World Vision said Halabi’s case was part of an ongoing attack on the charity’s aid work in the Gaza Strip and other Palestinian territories.
“There was a political attack on the organisation given that one of its main offices is in the United States,” the employee, who wished to remain anonymous, told Middle East Eye. “The Israeli lobby in the US must have played a major role in impeding the work of the organisation.”
Halabi’s father seconded that take, adding “They know very well that he is innocent, but they cannot release him after four years of interrogation and torture and prove themselves wrong.”
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A Call for a Coup Plus a Week Like No Other for Tulsi Gabbard
Clinton, McRaven and Pelosi all are featured
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • October 22, 2019
There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by last week’s media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous. Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and who has been riding that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues to fail to provide the type of leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever means are necessary. The op-ed entitled “Our Republic is Under Attack by the President” with the subtitle “If President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office” was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as a call for a military coup.
McRaven’s exact words, after some ringing praise for the military and all its glorious deeds in past wars, were that the soldiers, sailors and marines now must respond because “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within.”
McRaven then elaborated that “These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, ‘I don’t like the Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!’”
It is a call to arms if there ever was one. Too bad Trump can’t strip McRaven of his pension and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And the good admiral, who up until 2018 headed the state university system in Texas, might also receive well merited pushback for his assessment of America’s role in the world over the past two decades, in which he was a major player, at least in terms of dealing out punishment. He wrote ““We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.”
Utter bullshit, of course. The United States has been acting as the embodiment of a rogue nation, lashing out pointlessly and delivering death and destruction. If McRaven truly believes what he says he is not only violating his oath to defend the constitution while also toying with treason, he is an idiot and should never have been allowed to run anything more demanding than a hot dog stand. Washington has been systematically blowing people up worldwide for no good reasons, killing possibly as many as 4 million mostly Muslims, while systematically stripping Americans of their Bill of Rights at home. “Good guys” and “champions of justice” indeed!
And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is “Vladimir Putin’s dream,” and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party. She said, clearly suggesting that it would be Tulsi Gabbard, that “They’re also going to do third-party again. I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton explained how the third-party designation would work, saying of Jill Stein, who ran for president in 2016 as a Green Party candidate, “And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
Tulsi responded courageously and accurately “Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”
Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentlessly by the Establishment since she announced that she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday’s Democratic candidate debate the New York Times ran an article suggesting that Gabbard was an isolationist, was being promoted by Russia and was an apologist for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. In reality, Gabbard is the only candidate willing to confront America’s warfare-national security state.
The Hillary Clinton attack on Gabbard and on the completely respectable Jill Stein is to a certain extent incomprehensible unless one lives in the gutter that she and Bill have wallowed in ever since they rose to prominence in Arkansas. Hillary, the creator of the private home server for classified information as well as author of the catastrophic war against Libya and the Benghazi debacle has a lot to answer for but will never be held accountable, any more than her husband Bill for his rapes and molestation. And when it comes to foreign interference, Gabbard is being pilloried because the Russian media regards her favorably while the Clinton Foundation has taken tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and billionaires seeking quid pro quos, much of which has gone to line the pockets of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.
Finally, one comment about the Democratic Party obsession with the Russians. The media was enthusing last Friday over a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up across a table from President Trump and pointing at him before walking out of the room. The gushing regarding how a powerful, strong woman was defying the horrible chief executive was both predictable and ridiculous. By her own admission Pelosi’s last words before departing were “All roads lead to Putin.” I will leave it up to the reader to interpret what that was supposed to mean.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Australian media stages front-page ‘blackout’ to protest against govt clampdown on press freedom
RT | October 21, 2019
In a rare show of unity, all major news outlets in Australia have staged a mass protest against increasingly draconian secrecy laws passed by the government, which are infringing on press freedom and the public’s right to know.
Rivals News Corp Australia and Nine, among others, printed front pages which showed blacked-out, ‘redacted’ text emblazoned with red stamps that read “secret.”
The protest was organized by the Right to Know Coalition, with the support of numerous TV, radio, newspaper and digital outlets.
Collectively, the press are arguing against national security laws which are stifling the freedom of the press and, in doing so, creating a “culture of secrecy” in Australia wherein freedom of information requests relating to even the most trivial government affairs are being denied. Some 60 laws relating to secrecy have been passed in the past two decades.
ABC Managing Director David Anderson warned that “Australia is at risk of becoming the world’s most secretive democracy.” The Australian media argue the government is trying to penalize whistleblowing, criminalize journalism, and infringe upon the public’s right to know.
The protest comes after a series of high-profile raids on the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the home of a News Corp Australia journalist following the publication of articles detailing alleged war crimes and domestic spying carried out by the government.
Three journalists may face prosecution following the raids for their part in the whistleblower articles’ publication.
During these press investigations, it was revealed that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service had bugged the offices of Timor-Leste officials during a multimillion-dollar resource negotiation in 2004.
Meanwhile, Australian Tax Office whistleblower Richard Boyle is facing up to 161 years in prison for revealing abuse of powers by the Australian tax authority apparatus.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that while press freedom was important, it is still subject to the rule of law, adding that “no one was above the law.”
“That includes me, or any journalist, or anyone else.”
A press freedom inquiry is under way, the findings of which will be revealed in parliament next year. The media are fighting for the right to challenge government applications for warrants against journalists, while calling for freedom of information and defamation law reform, and the introduction of special protections for journalists and public sector whistleblowers.
The American Deep State Would Sooner Sacrifice the Republic Than Lose Again to Donald Trump
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 20, 2019
You’d really think the American people would have caught on by now. No sooner did Russiagate fizzle out like a wet firecracker did the Democrats, completely indifferent to the dire consequences, toss another incendiary into the public square. Sooner or later something has got to blow, and maybe it already did.
As Americans experience the brutal whiplash of going from the Mueller probe to presidential impeachment in a matter of days, all pretensions of democratic procedure to guide the show trial have been tossed from the clown car. With the boot-licking media to back their every whim and fancy, the Democrats are dragging the Republic to the brink of destruction as they threaten to take down the 45th POTUS, and without a single witness in the dock.
Last month, Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said the identity of the shady whistleblower who revealed second-hand details of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be made public “very soon.” That claim looks set to be the fifth ‘Pinocchio’ awarded to Schiff in almost as many days.
On Sunday, the truth-impaired Senator said the whistleblower at the heart of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry might not testify in court over concerns about the individual’s safety. That pathetic excuse should incur the wrath of the mainstream media every bit as much as it has incurred the wrath of the Trump administration. Moreover, it cheapens the incalculable sacrifice that every whistleblower assumes when they attach their identities to explosive revelations; without their identity publicly known the claims do not carry the same weight. Unless the whistleblower is fully prepared to lose his career and risk jail time, much like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and numerous others, a cloud of doubt will forever hang over the claims, and even more so in the Ukrainegate affair since we are talking about nothing more than hearsay.
Schiff’s notorious shiftiness didn’t end there. He actually cited Trump’s candidness in releasing the full transcript of the conversation as another reason as to why the ‘courageous’ whistleblower should enjoy full anonymity. This almost makes Trump himself appear as the whistleblower.
“Given that we already have the call record, we don’t need the whistleblower who wasn’t on the call to tell us what took place during the call,” Schiff said in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. In other words, Trump was doomed to be damned if he released the transcript or he didn’t.
The Democrat’s determination to bring down Trump was confirmed earlier when Schiff was caught in yet another lie.
On September 16, the Democratic Senator told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he did not know the identity of the whistleblower. He repeated the same claim the next day when he told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that neither he nor his staff had “spoken directly with the whistleblower.” It is now known that his claims were bald-faced lies, and serious enough to bring the impeachment clown car to a screeching halt. Yet the rules of the game, as is proven time and time again, are always adjusted to suit the Democrats. In fact, the whistleblower may have committed a felony for failing to disclose in his or her official complaint that they had first brought the information to the attention of House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff.
Schiff has little to worry about, however, since the media does not react to Democratic transgressions with nearly the same amount of hysteria as it does with the Republicans, which explains why Trump is fighting a constant uphill battle.
This is where the push for impeachment is becoming a dangerous venture for the Democrats. The people are not stupid, and it does not require the shrewdest political tool to understand that the scales of justice are weighted heavily in favor of the Democrats. From Hillary Clinton escaping punishment for using her home computer to send classified government documents, to former Vice President Joe Biden bragging about arranging a billion-dollar quid pro quo with Kiev to sack Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who just happened to be investigating Biden’s son, Hunter, the Democrats rarely have anything to fear as far as justice is concerned. Yet this special status has certainly not gone unnoticed; with social media revolutionizing the ‘town square,’ the blatant hypocrisies and outright crimes are obvious to everyone.
Just as Russiagate was a conspicuous effort on the part of the Democrats and their lapdog media to deflect attention away from the contents of Clinton’s emails, not to mention the identity of the leaker (as opposed to the ‘Russian hackers,’ that is), Ukrainegate is a desperate attempt to focus attention on a harmless phone call between two state leaders so as to bury the news of corruption at the highest levels of the Obama administration, up to and including not only Joe Biden, but former Secretary of State John Kerry as well. In other words, we are talking about obstruction of justice on a mind-boggling scale, and which could only be pulled off with the full support of the mainstream media. A free-thinking, independent journalistic community would have called foul on such shenanigans long ago.
Lest anyone forget, the Democrats have been under investigation by Attorney General Bill Barr and federal prosecutor John Durham. These two are currently traveling the world in an effort to determine “the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election,” Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec said in a statement on Sept. 25.
In fact, Barr and Durham’s ‘mission’ kicked off back in May, long before the smoke and mirrors of yet another Trump ‘transgression’ took front and center in living rooms across the country. Indeed, while every American has heard of the impeachment inquiry, few realize that the Democrats are under investigation for far greater crimes should they be found guilty, that is. Now, in the event that Barr and Durham attempt to present their findings to the public, the Democrats will scream in one persecuted voice that Trump is attempting to ‘obstruct justice,’ which will certainly be the greatest irony considering the source.
In other words, there are two vehicles – one filled with Democrats, the other Republicans – careening towards an intersection at a high rate of speed, and neither looks willing to yield to the other. This is the situation confronting America at the present time: a smashup of epic, deadly proportions, quite possibly on par with its first civil war. Such a seemingly inevitable event, however, would never have been remotely possible had the media been a fair and just provider of news and information as opposed to being an instigator and provocateur of the first order.
Now, should the Democrats get the impeachment they’ve been dreaming about ever since they lost the 2016 presidential election, at least 50 percent of the American public will understand full well that the scales of justice are tilted against them. That will be the moment when the United States is forced to confront its worst crisis in many years, simply because the Democrats have become so terrified of a longstanding political technology known as ‘free and fair elections.’
Warren vs Facebook: Behind This Battle of US Democrats, There’s Desire to Limit Free Speech – Pundit
Sputnik – October 20, 2019
Just as Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrapped up his speech about the social media platform’s free speech policy, saying it must be protected, Democratic Party presidential candidates were quick to criticise it.
Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has lashed out Zuckerberg for the lack of fact-checking on political advertising accusing him of helping US President Donald Trump win the election.
“Facebook is actively helping Trump spread lies and misinformation. Facebook already helped elect Donald Trump once. They might do it again—and profit off of it”, Warren said in a series of Twitter posts attacking Facebook’s co-founder.
Warren slammed Facebook’s decision to allow paid advertisements that may contain false or misleading information on its platform.
“Facebook had a policy that didn’t permit misinformation in any ads. Facebook built relationships with independent fact-checkers, so they weren’t the sole deciders of what was or wasn’t a lie. But Facebook undermined those relationships and excluded political ads from that policy”, she said.
Zuckerberg defended this policy in a Thursday speech at Georgetown University saying that while he worries “about the erosion of truth” he thinks that most people don’t “want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true”.
Last week, Warren’s campaign intentionally ran “false” ads on Facebook claiming Mark Zuckerberg endorses Donald Trump. But Facebook wasn’t going to do anything about it.
The tech giant’s spokesperson said in a statement that “If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech”.
Staying true to its policy, earlier this month, Facebook refused to remove an ad by Trump’s election campaign against another Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden that accused Biden and his family of corruption in Ukraine. Biden’s campaign insisted that the information was false, but Facebook said that the ad doesn’t violate the company’s policy.
Roberto Vivaldelli, an Italian political observer called the Facebook ad a very controversial story saying that while it’s Warren and other Democrats that have criticised the Silicon Valley giant for influencing the US elections they are the ones interested in “limiting free speech“:
“The senator accuses the platform of influencing the elections but be careful: behind this battle of the American Democrats, there is, in my opinion, the desire to limit free speech. In fact, Warren protested the video published by the Republicans which highlighted the connections between the Ukrainian vice president Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and Ukraine. According to Warren and the Democrats, it was a fake video but it is not”, Vivaldelli said.
Alan Bailey, a political commentator, based in the UK, called Zuckerberg’s defence of free speech just a “PR exercise for a very free speech orientated audience”.
“Actions speak louder than words and time and time again Facebook has been used as a tool to back US foreign policy and censor those who speak against it”, Bailey stressed.
The political commentator also pointed out that many of his fellow activists are regularly blocked or even banned from posting on the platform despite their posts containing zero hate speech.
“If Zuckerberg was honest, he would face the death knell of his product as the negative outpouring from all sides of the political spectrum would finally convince sizeable numbers of users to look elsewhere for a social platform. At the moment with Facebook’s near-monopoly (it also owns Instagram and WhatsApp) it is tough to be heard if you choose not to use Facebook products, but with enough negative PR this can change and some would say needs to change”, Bailey said.
The political commentator also noted that while he does agree that a commercial entity such as Facebook shouldn’t censor or edit political ads on the platform, as there will always be bias, it will never treat neutrally ads from China or Russia as it does those ads from the USA or UK.
“But are his [Zuckerberg’s] words empty and simply preaching to the converted? I think so sadly”, Bailey concluded.
Brexit: Parliament Tethers Britain to a Failing Experiment
Europe is crumbling, & Britain’s elite desperately want to be part of the wreckage
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 20, 2019
Brexit isn’t going to happen. Left or Right – Lexit or Rexit – it’s over. It’s time to make peace with that idea.
Penned in by the absurd Benn Act, No Deal is off the table, which means Britain will be forced to either remain or accept a deal that’s Remain by another name.
The Letwin Ammendment and Johnson’s unsigned extension request are just morbid theatre. Unnecessary nails in a well-sealed coffin.
It’s all very Weekend at Bernies’ – A lame cast of characters, puppeteering Brexit’s corpse to keep up a tired joke that was never funny to begin with.
Parliament has become an absurd pantomime, where a clown Prime Minister – his majority willfully destroyed – sets up straw men that the “opposition” bayonet with increasingly maniacal glee. No thought is given to policy or consequences, only increasing the tally of Boris Johnson’s parliamentary defeats.
Labour, and the bedraggled, hysterical remainers in the Lib Dems/TIG/Green Party, have become nothing but contrarians – automatically gain-saying anything tabled by the government for the simple joy of humiliating the nation’s Court Jester in Chief.
Corbyn has been so successfully gaslighted by his remain-heavy PLP he doesn’t even realise he’s betraying his life-long principles, his mentor Tony Benn, and entire swaths of the Labour’s Northern heartlands, who all voted to leave.
When a general election does come, it will mean nothing.
Labour will likely be destroyed as working-class voters either flock to the Brexit Party or simply collapse into the apathy of the voiceless, and stay home.
If Labour scrapes together enough voters from Remain country in Scotland and London to claw their way to a small majority, well their socialist manifesto will be crippled by the EU’s austerity policy and restrictions on nationalisation.
In either event, Corbyn will be replaced by a New Labour non-entity of little renown and less worth. The papers will declare socialism dead (again), and maybe clap Corbyn on the shoulder for doing “well, considering” and “changing the conversation”.
We’ll be invited the celebrate the new (inevitably) female leader as a sign of “progress”, while society continues to slip backwards.
Whether the hardcore Remainers get their “People’s Vote” or not, and whichever of the carousel of undesirables happens to be Prime Minister when it all eventually wraps up, Brexit is dead. Parliament killed it.
This on-going, slow-burn sabotage is hard to watch – but it’s not what this article is about.
What it’s about is a question. An important question. One that should weigh heavily on the shoulders of Remainers on the eve of their – for want of a better word – victory:
Do we really want this? Does the EU, right now, really look like something we want to be a part of?
Let’s run down the situation on The Continent.
France is miserable, sick of austerity. Sick of spending cuts and falling standards and neo-liberal economics promising a trickle-down that never seems to come.
In Paris – and many other French cities – the Yellow Vests are nearing their fiftieth straight week of protests, and don’t seem to be slowing down (Hopefully they plan something nice for their first birthday).
People have lost eyes, hands, even lives. The Hong Kong protests – so long front-page news in the UK – have been a picnic in comparison.
In Hungary, an elected President is held hostage by the bureaucracy of the EU. Whatever you think of Orban, he was democratically elected to enact the political promises he made during his campaign. That Brussels can sanction him, and threaten to remove Hungary’s voting rights, is perverse. Anti-democracy in the name of democracy.
They say it’s about “protecting European values”, but is it?
That’s pretty hard to believe, considering the situation elsewhere in Europe…
Spain will join France in the flames soon. They already sent thirteen politicians to prison for sedition.
Take a moment to consider that – actual “sedition”.
This comes after sending in riot police to break up a peaceful referendum. Spanish police beat voters, arrested protesters and destroyed ballot boxes.
Madrid has faced no punishment, or even criticism, for this. They – unlike Orban – have escaped any sanction or censure. Police attack Catalonian independence protests on the streets of Barcelona…and Brussels’ silence is deafening.
(Imagine Russia had just jailed 13 opposition politicians for sedition. Imagine Maduro was blinding protestors with rubber bullets. The difference in coverage and attitude would be breathtaking.)
What is the difference between Budapest and Paris? Or Moscow and Madrid?
Well, Orban is anti-EU (as are the Gilets Jaunes). The governments of France and Spain are Pro EU, with a ferocity that fully justifies the capital P.
Follow a pro-EU agenda of austerity, uncontrolled immigration and globalisation and you can blind as many protesters as you want.
The harder you look, the more it seems “European values” is slang for “European power”.
The talk of the EU Army bubbles away on the back-burner, whilst the European Parliament merrily votes through massive funding for “StratCom” programmes to “counter misinformation”.
We hear about peace, but we don’t see it. We hear about prosperity, but we don’t feel it.
Austerity is choking the birthplace of democracy to death, and its – again, for want of a better word – “leaders” are spending tax revenues on propaganda and the military.
Is that going to help a single ordinary citizen out of poverty? Are these moves designed to make life fair, equal or easy for ordinary citizens? Or consolidate and enforce authority?
Look at Europe. Really look at it. It’s burning. And yet Remainers sit amongst the flames and say everything’s fine.
We are lectured on “European Values”, but that phrase has been meaningless for years, and every day edges closer and closer to full-on parody.
Europe is a sinking ship the rats in Parliament refuse to leave.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
Bedouin Mass Eviction is Part of Israel’s Efforts to Drive Palestinians off their Historic Lands
Tens of thousands are to be driven out of their homes because their numbers pose a major demographic threat to a Jewish state
By Jonathan Cook | The National | October 16, 2019
The decades-long struggle by tens of thousands of Israelis against being uprooted from their homes – some for the second or third time – should be proof enough that Israel is not the western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.
Last week 36,000 Bedouin – all of them Israeli citizens – discovered that their state is about to make them refugees in their own country, driving them into holding camps. These Israelis, it seems, are the wrong kind.
Their treatment has painful echoes of the past. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by the Israeli army outside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state established on their homeland – what the Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.
Israel is regularly criticised for its belligerent occupation, its relentless expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and its repeated and savage military attacks, especially on Gaza.
On rare occasions, analysts also notice Israel’s systematic discrimination against the 1.8 million Palestinians whose ancestors survived the Nakba and live inside Israel, ostensibly as citizens.
But each of these abuses is dealt with in isolation, as though unrelated, rather than as different facets of an overarching project. A pattern is discernible, one driven by an ideology that dehumanises Palestinians everywhere Israel encounters them.
That ideology has a name. Zionism provides the thread that connects the past – the Nakba – with Israel’s current ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the destruction of Gaza, and the state’s concerted efforts to drive Palestinian citizens of Israel out of what is left of their historic lands and into ghettos.
The logic of Zionism, even if its more naive supporters fail to grasp it, is to replace Palestinians with Jews – what Israel officially terms Judaisation.
The Palestinians’ suffering is not some unfortunate side effect of conflict. It is the very aim of Zionism: to incentivise Palestinians still in place to leave “voluntarily”, to escape further suffocation and misery.
The starkest example of this people replacement strategy is Israel’s long-standing treatment of 250,000 Bedouin who formally have citizenship.
The Bedouin are the poorest group in Israel, living in isolated communities mainly in the vast, semi-arid area of the Negev, the country’s south. Largely out of view, Israel has had a relatively free hand in its efforts to “replace” them.
That was why, for a decade after it had supposedly finished its 1948 ethnic cleansing operations and won recognition in western capitals, Israel continued secretly expelling thousands of Bedouin outside its borders, despite their claim on citizenship.
Meanwhile, other Bedouin in Israel were forced off their ancestral lands to be driven either into confined holding areas or state-planned townships that became the most deprived communities in Israel.
It is hard to cast the Bedouin, simple farmers and pastoralists, as a security threat, as was done with the Palestinians under occupation.
But Israel has a much broader definition of security than simple physical safety. Its security is premised on the maintenance of an absolute demographic dominance by Jews.
The Bedouin may be peaceable but their numbers pose a major demographic threat and their pastoral way of life obstructs the fate intended for them – penning them up tightly inside ghettos.
Most of the Bedouin have title deeds to their lands that long predate Israel’s creation. But Israel has refused to honour these claims and many tens of thousands have been criminalised by the state, their villages denied legal recognition.
For decades they have been forced to live in tin shacks or tents because the authorities refuse to approve proper homes and they are denied public services like schools, water and electricity.
The Bedouin have one option if they wish to live within the law: they must abandon their ancestral lands and their way of life to relocate to one of the poor townships.
Many of the Bedouin have resisted, clinging on to their historic lands despite the dire conditions imposed on them.
One such unrecognised village, Al Araqib, has been used to set an example. Israeli forces have demolished the makeshift homes there more than 160 times in less than a decade. In August, an Israeli court approved the state billing six of the villagers $370,000 (Dh1.6 million) for the repeated evictions.
Al Araqib’s 70-year-old leader, Sheikh Sayah Abu Madhim, recently spent months in jail after his conviction for trespassing, even though his tent is a stone’s throw from the cemetery where his ancestors are buried.
Now the Israel authorities are losing patience with the Bedouin.
Last January, plans were unveiled for the urgent and forcible eviction of nearly 40,000 Bedouin from their homes in unrecognised villages under the guise of “economic development” projects. It will be the largest expulsion in decades.
“Development”, like “security”, has a different connotation in Israel. It really means Jewish development, or Judaisation – not development for Palestinians.
The projects include a new highway, a high-voltage power line, a weapons testing facility, a military live-fire zone and a phosphate mine.
It was revealed last week that the families would be forced into displacement centres in the townships, living in temporary accommodation for years as their ultimate fate is decided. Already these sites are being compared to the refugee camps established for Palestinians in the wake of the Nakba.
The barely concealed aim is to impose on the Bedouin such awful conditions that they will eventually agree to be confined for good in the townships on Israel’s terms.
Six leading United Nations human rights experts sent a letter to Israel in the summer protesting the grave violations of the Bedouin families’ rights in international law and arguing that alternative approaches were possible.
Adalah, a legal group for Palestinians in Israel, notes that Israel has been forcibly evicting the Bedouin over seven decades, treating them not as human beings but as pawns in its never-ending battle to replace them with Jewish settlers.
The Bedouin’s living space has endlessly shrunk and their way of life has been crushed.
This contrasts starkly with the rapid expansion of Jewish towns and single-family farming ranches on the land from which the Bedouin are being evicted.
It is hard not to conclude that what is taking place is an administrative version of the ethnic cleansing Israeli officials conduct more flagrantly in the occupied territories on so-called security grounds.
These interminable expulsions look less like a necessary, considered policy and more like an ugly, ideological nervous tic.
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From the Archives
Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | May 17, 2019
NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. … continue
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