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.
Forget privacy abuses, liberals call to DeleteFacebook after learning Zuckerberg met with conservatives
By Helen Buyniski | RT | October 15, 2019
Facebook’s history of abusing users’ trust by sharing their private data with corporate partners and government spooks pales in comparison to its CEO’s decision to sit down with prominent conservatives, for some.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been meeting with conservative commentators, journalists, and politicians in “small, off-the-record dinners” and “informal talks,” Politico revealed on Monday, sending shockwaves through the internet. He reportedly discussed “free expression, unfair treatment of conservatives, fact checking, partnerships, and privacy” with prominent right-wing critics of Facebook, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Washington Examiner correspondent Byron York, and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
This, the mainstream media and many liberals on social media have declared, is an outrage. The hashtag #DeleteFacebook was trending for most of Monday as Woke Twitter finally realized the fourth-richest man in the US, who infamously called Facebook users “dumb f***s,” was an unworthy trustee of their digital lives. Just kidding – they were upset that the platform had become yet another tool of white supremacy.
“The fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda,” an anonymous “cybersecurity researcher and former government official based in Silicon Valley” told Politico, giving voice to the fears of many in the Democratic Party. Last week, the platform refused 2020 presidential frontrunner Joe Biden’s campaign’s request to remove a Trump campaign ad accusing Biden of promising Ukraine $1 billion to fire a prosecutor investigating the gas company that had hired his son. While Facebook promised that any “viral hoax” shared by a politician would be “demoted” and displayed alongside a fact-check, it pointed to a recently-revised policy against fact-checking “political speech” as the reason its hands were tied, leaving the Biden campaign – and the #Resistance – fuming.
Wounded liberals took to Twitter to voice their displeasure with Zuckerberg’s secret meetings, accusing Facebook of “poisoning our democracy” even as they made excuses for why they couldn’t delete Instagram or WhatsApp, both of which are owned by Facebook.
Zuckerberg sitting down with conservatives is an odd straw to have break the camel’s back, to be sure. Facebook users sat quietly by when it emerged that the platform had shared their private data, including messages sent to other users, with over 150 corporate “partners” without their knowledge or consent. There was no user uprising when the platform was discovered to be collaborating with phone companies to rate customers’ “creditworthiness” based on their profiles. #DeleteFacebook didn’t trend when the platform quietly suspended tens of thousands of apps for violating users’ privacy and admitted it would be unable to catch all of the other perpetrators, or when a Facebook lawyer made the jaw-dropping claim that users have no expectation of privacy at all.
Facebook notoriously collaborates with the US government to remove accounts both domestically and abroad, and works with the Israeli government to stifle the free speech of Palestinians, many of whom get their news exclusively through Facebook. A recent EU court ruling paved the way for Facebook to be weaponized by European countries to remove so-called “hate speech” by users halfway around the world. And Facebook has even struggled to play down complaints that it exploits children by luring them into spending wads of their parents’ cash on online games.
None of these offenses rankled #Resistance Twitter as much as a friendly (off-the-record) dinner with Tucker Carlson. Users attacked the “hateful, dangerous platform” as “irresponsible” and slammed it for “undermining democracy.” But even liberals have admitted, when polled about other issues, that Facebook content favors the Democratic Party, and formeremployees have admitted to suppressing conservative posts. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the company that has abused its users in every way imaginable was finally kicked to the curb for listening to their complaints and trying to change?
UK under fire for compiling secret database on Britons
By Bianca Rahimi | Press TV | October 15, 2019
London – Human rights groups describe it as “utterly chilling” experts as a “trawling exercise”. The UK government is under fire for a secret database supposedly used to prevent radicalization and terrorism.
The personal details of thousands of people are recorded and can be accessed by any bobby on the beat. Rights groups say it’s purpose is not keeping Britain safe though.
If you live in the UK your most personal information, from what you do and who you associate with, to what you drew as a toddler in nursery, might be on a secret government database. One compiled by counter-terrorism police and fed into by the controversial anti-radicalization program called Prevent.
The police say recording referrals ensures accountability and allows forces to understand when vulnerabilities are increasing; but human rights campaigners say it is nothing more than a trawling exercise.
Schools now have a legal duty to act but experts warn that educators are poorly trained. Teachers are scrutinizing pupils as young as 4 for signs of radicalization but according to their unions, teachers feel burdened by this responsibility and may refer too often and arbitrarily to cover their backs.
How The US Quietly Lost The 1st Amendment
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/12/2019
While many would argue that Americans’ First Amendment rights have long since dwindled from the liberties initially granted in The Bill of Rights, a decision by the European Union’s highest court could well mark the final nail in the coffin of free speech.
As Politico reports, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that Facebook can be ordered to track down and remove content globally if it was found to be illegal in any EU country. In its ruling, CJEU said that EU law allowed local judges to order the world’s largest social network to remove illegal content, as well as delete material that conveyed a similar message under certain circumstances.
The decision is not just a slap in the face of worldwide citizens’ freedom of expression, but a big defeat for Facebook as it will force them to be more responsible for what is appearing on the internet (and thus what is seen by those who make the rules as not appropriate for the genpop).
“This judgement raises critical questions around freedom of expression and the role that internet companies should play in monitoring, interpreting and removing speech,” Toby Partlett, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement.
“We hope the courts take a proportionate and measured approach to avoid having a chilling effect on freedom of expression.”
Of course, it won’t as EU bureaucrats have hardly shown the ability to undertake measured responses when it comes to cracking down on non-sanctioned thoughts, words, and memes. Facebook officials went to exclaim that:
… the ruling “undermines the longstanding principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country.”
As Politico details, the ruling stems from a lawsuit filed in 2016 by Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, an Austrian lawmaker, who had requested that Facebook delete defamatory posts made about her by an anonymous user.
When an Austrian court sided with her, the company initially only removed the content from being viewed in Austria, but subsequent appeals had focused on whether such takedowns should apply globally, and if Facebook should be required to remove similar content once it has been made aware of the defamatory material.
Following the ruling by Europe’s highest court, her case will now be referred back to Austrian judges, who will make the final ruling about how to apply Thursday’s decision.
As one would expect, digital rights campaigners were incensed by the breadth of the decision:
“The court’s decision opens the door for serious restrictions on freedom of expression due to the takedown of legitimate speech. Extending removal to the vague concept of “equivalent” content is harmful because the context as well as motivation of users re-sharing content may significantly differ with each re-upload,” said Eliška Pírková, Europe policy analyst at Access Now, a campaigning group.
Those who believe tyranny cannot come to the United States should take a look around because it’s already here and as the EU court’s decision shows, it is not just Washington that Americans should fear.
Sanctioning Away Free Speech: Americans Meet With Iranians at Their Peril
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 10, 2019
The issue of the United States waging what seems to be a global war by way of sanctions rarely surfaces in the western media. The argument being made by the White House is that sanctions are capable of putting maximum pressure on a rogue regime without the necessity of having to go to war and actually kill people, but while economic warfare may seem to be more benign than bombing and shooting the reality is that thousands of people die anyway, whether through starvation or inability to obtain medicines. It is often noted that 500,000 Iraqi children died in the 1990s due to sanctions imposed by the Bill Clinton White House and current estimates of deaths in Syria, Iran and Venezuela number in the tens of thousands.
Meanwhile the regimes that are under siege through sanctions do not, in fact, capitulate to American demands even when they are feeling considerable pain. Cuba has been sanctioned by Washington since 1960 and nothing has been accomplished, apart from providing an excuse for the regime to tighten its control over the people. Indeed, one might argue that free trade and travel would have likely succeeded in democratizing Cuba much more quickly than threats coupled with a policy of economic and political isolation.
Apart from their ineffectiveness, the dark side of sanctions is what they do to third parties who get caught up in the conflict. America’s recently imposed total ban on Iranian petroleum exports comes with secondary sanctions that can be initiated on any country that buys the oil, alienating Washington’s few remaining friends and creating universal concern regarding the United States’ long-term intentions. Indeed, the United States was a country that prior to the “Global war on terror” was generally liked and respected, but today it is widely regarded as the most dangerous threat to peace in the world. This shift in perception is due to the actual wars that the US has started as well as the sanctions regime which has as its objective regime change of governments that it disapproves of.
Another aspect to sanctions that is somewhat invisible is the impact that government action has had on what are regarded as the constitutional rights of American citizens. Max Blumenthal has written an interesting article on a recent application of sanctions that has affected a group of citizens who were seeking to attend a conference in Beirut Lebanon.
Blumenthal describes how the attempt to criminalize any participation in a conference sponsored by the Iranian NGO New Horizon as a “significant escalation in the Trump administration’s strategy of ‘maximum pressure’ to bring about regime change in Iran.” A number of Americans who had intended to speak or otherwise participate in the conference were approached in advance by FBI agents, evidently acting under orders from Sigal Mandelker, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. The Agents warned that any participants in the conference might be subject to arrest upon return to the US because New Horizon is under sanctions. One of those who was approached by the Bureau explained that “They’re interpreting the regulations to say that even if you associate with someone who has been sanctioned, you are subject to fines and imprisonment. I haven’t seen anything in the regulations that allows that, but they’ve set the bar so low that anyone can be designated.”
The New Horizon Conference is an annual event organized by Iranian TV host and filmmaker Nader Talebzadeh and his wife, Zeina Mehanna. New Horizon was placed under financial sanctions earlier this year by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). [Full disclosure: the author attended and spoke at the conference in Mashhad last year]
US government interest in New Horizon conferences appeared to begin in 2014, after the Jewish Anti-Defamation league (ADL) called that year’s meeting an “anti-Semitic gathering” that “included US and international anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and anti-war activists.”
Potential participants in the Beirut conference made strenuous efforts to find out just what the consequences might be if they were to attend the event, but the Treasury Department refused to be drawn into a debate over restrictions that were arguably unconstitutional. Lawyers who were consulted warned that any notice from the FBI that someone might be arrested should be interpreted as meaning that someone will be arrested. Other sources in the government suggested privately that the Trump Administration would be delighted if it could make an example of some Americans who were soft on Iran.
Now that the conference has been concluded without any significant American presence, there has been some clarification of how the sanctions might be applied. Responding to a query by a potential participant, an OFAC employee explained that “transaction” and “dealing in transactions,” as those terms are used by OFAC, are broadly construed to include not only monetary dealings or exchanges, but also “providing any sort of service” and “non-monetary service,” including giving a presentation at a conference. Any person engaging in that activity could be subject to legal consequences because the Treasury Department and OFAC have broad latitude to take action against persons who violate its rules or guidelines, and that a range of factors are taken into consideration when deciding to take action against any specific person or for any specific violation.
When asked whether dealing with non-sanctioned Iranian organizations might also be construed negatively, the OFAC employee observed that there could or might be consequences. That’s because Iran (along with North Korea and a few other countries) is a “comprehensively sanctioned” country, meaning that anything having to do with “supporting it” is sanctionable.
Exactly how speaking at any Iranian sponsored event is damaging to American interests remains unclear, in spite of the “clarification” provided by OFAC, but the real damage is to those US citizens who choose to travel to countries that are at odds with Washington to offer a different perspective on what Americans actually think. And there is also considerable value in those travelers returning to the United States to share with fellow citizens perceptions of how foreigners regard US foreign policy, insofar as anything describable as a policy actually exists. In truth, the sanctions regime with its steady diet of punishment has now entered a new phase, as Blumenthal observed, where White House aggression overseas is now blowing back, eroding the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights in an act of self-destruction that is both unnecessary and incomprehensible.
Israel to build camps as preparation for displacing Arab citizens
MEMO | October 8, 2019
Israel’s District Planning and Building Committee considered a plan on Sunday submitted by the Bedouin Settlement Authority in the Negev which aims to build camps as preparation for the displacement of 36,000 Arab citizens, Arab48.com has reported. The plan targets Palestinian-Arab residents within Israel who live in Bedouin villages “unrecognised” by the Israeli occupation government.
Such villages have often been in place for hundreds of years before the creation of the Israeli occupation state. Nevertheless, it is insisting on displacing their residents and replacing the villages with housing projects for Jewish Israeli settlers.
A letter has been sent to the head of the District Planning and Building Committee asking them not to accept the plan. It was sent on behalf of Adalah Centre, an Israeli rights group seeking justice for Arab residents, along with the Regional Council for the Unrecognised Villages in the Negev, the Peaceful Coexistence Club and Shatil Association.
Submitted by lawyer Suha Bsharah from Adalah, the letter stressed the importance of rejecting the plan, which is simply a tool to displace Arabs from their homes and villages within Israel. It also reiterated that such an action amounts to a “flagrant violation of the basic rights of the Arab citizens on top of which is the right to respect, dignity and equality.”
The letter noted that this plan reinforces the suffering inflicted on the Arab residents of the unrecognised villages as Israel is planning to displace them under the pretext of carrying out government projects. “It is unreasonable that the authorities displace tens of thousands of residents from their homes and lands,” wrote the signatories. “[The plan] will destroy a complete generation of Arab children, women and youths.”
According to Bsharah, “The Israeli authorities are seriously looking for a legal cover for the displacement of Arabs by getting the approval of the District Planning and Building Committee. They are not looking for a just and appropriate solution that would maintain the right to live with respect, dignity and safety for the Arabs who have been living here for decades, if not hundreds of years.”
The head of the Council of the Unrecognised Villages, Atiyyeh Al-Asam said: “The Council rejects this plan because its implicit and explicit goal is to forcibly displace the residents of the unrecognised villages. We believe that this plan is materialising the spirit of the [withdrawn] Prawer Plan which was based on displacing tens of thousands of Arabs.”
Former CIA Chief Brennan Unblinkingly Rewrites Entire Basis Of US Judicial System In One Short Sentence
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/06/2019
The presumption of innocence, as a foundation of the US judicial system, has seemingly been under attack since November 8th 2016. An allegation is made, media runs with the narrative, the seed of possibility of guilt is implanted in the minds of zombie Americans, and the accused is maligned forever – no court required. Simple.
And now, none other than former CIA Director John Brennan clarifies exactly how the deep state sees “due process”…
In an interview on MSNBC, Brennan, unblinkingly states that “people are innocent, you know, until alleged to be involved in some kind of criminal activity.”
And not even a skip of a beat from the MSNBC anchors.
Some have suggested, in Brennan’s defense, that he was being sarcastic, or even joking, but nothing in his delivery suggests that and furthermore, it’s not the smartest thing to say given the goings on at the margin of the legal system and the death–by-allegation media narratives that are swarming around the enemies of his deep-state attack.
Of course, we should by now know full well how to treat anything that comes out of Brennan’s mouth…
Utterly without value.
Featured Video
Spain train disaster raises questions over Israeli-linked security contractors
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Zelensky spent over 740 days outside Ukraine while West serves as his real home
- Indian captain of Russian ‘shadow fleet’ tanker faces 10-year jail term in UK
- Europe, US face higher heating bills amid Iran war fallout
- The Leak That Arrived Right on Cue
- No, New York Times, California’s Climate Has Always Been a Land of Flood, Drought, and Fire
- Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
- German CDU MPs Seek Climate “Misinformation” List
- The ‘Gaza Treatment’: How Media Headlines Obscure Who is Bombing Yemen
- Ro Khanna urges Democrats to strip Israel ‘integration’ provision from defense bill
- Why Iran designated British MI6, Royal Navy, and RAF as hostile, terrorist organizations
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- German Authorities Start Initiative To Evaluate Public Register For Climate “Disinformation” Spreaders!
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
