Saudi writer critical of UAE’s regional policies sentenced to 5 years in prison
Press TV – Aug 18, 2018
Saudi authorities have handed down prison sentence to a writer in the conservative oil-rich kingdom as part of a widening crackdown led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman against Muslim preachers, members of the press and intellectuals.
The rights group Prisoners of Conscience, which is an independent non-governmental organization advocating human rights in Saudi Arabia, announced in a post on its official Twitter page that Mohammed al-Hudhaif was sentenced to five years in jail after being found guilty of “ insulting a friendly country.”
The post added that Saudi officials passed the ruling against Hudhaif at the end of a “secret trial” in late May.
The writer had reportedly published posts on his Twitter page, warning about the threats the neighboring United Arab Emirates poses to the Riyadh regime, and the fiendish plans that Emirati officials have for the Middle East region.
The report came only a few days after human rights activists said prominent Saudi Muslim preacher and political dissident Salman al-Odah, who has been in prison since September 2016, has been transferred from Dhahban Central Prison in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah to al-Ha’ir Prison in the capital Riyadh, and is about to stand a secret trial.
Earlier this week, Prisoners of Consciousness also reported that political dissident and Muslim preacher Sheikh Suleiman al-Doweesh had lost his life due to severe torture he was subjected to during criminal investigations.
Saudi Arabia has recently stepped up politically-motivated arrests, prosecution and conviction of peaceful dissident writers and human rights campaigners.
Saudi officials have also intensified security measures in the Shia-populated and oil-rich Eastern Province.
Eastern Province has been the scene of peaceful demonstrations since February 2011. Protesters have been demanding reforms, freedom of expression, release of political prisoners, and an end to economic and religious discrimination against the oil-rich region.
The protests have been met with a heavy-handed crackdown by the regime, with regime forces increasing security measures across the province.
Over the past years, Riyadh has also redefined its anti-terrorism laws to target activism.
In January 2016, Saudi authorities executed Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, an outspoken critic of the policies of the Riyadh regime. Nimr had been arrested in Qatif in 2012.
Corbyn’s Labour Party is Being Made to Fail: by Design
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | August 17, 2018
The Labour party, relentlessly battered by an organised campaign of smears of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn – first for being anti-semitic, and now for honouring Palestinian terrorists – is reportedly about to adopt the four additional working “examples” of anti-semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
Labour initially rejected these examples – stoking yet more condemnation from Israel’s lobbyists and the British corporate media – because it justifiably feared, as have prominent legal experts, that accepting them would severely curb the freedom to criticise Israel.
The media’s ever-more outlandish slurs against Corbyn and the Labour party’s imminent capitulation on the IHRA’s full definition of anti-semitism are not unrelated events. The former was designed to bring about the latter.
According to a report in the Guardian this week, senior party figures are agitating for the rapid adoption of the full IHRA definition, ideally before the party conference next month, and say Corbyn has effectively surrendered to the pressure. An MP who supports Corbyn told the paper Corbyn would “just have to take one for the team”.
In a strong indication of the way the wind is now blowing, the Guardian added:
“The party said it would consult the main [Jewish] communal bodies as well as experts and academics, but groups such as the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour have not been asked to give their views.”
No stomach for battle
The full adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism will be a major victory both for Israel and its apologists in Britain, who who have been seeking to silence all meaningful criticism of Israel, and for the British corporate media, which would dearly love to see the back of an old-school socialist Labour leader whose programme threatens to loosen the 40-year stranglehold of neoliberalism on British society.
Besieged for four years, Corbyn’s allies in the Labour leadership have largely lost the stomach for battle, one that was never about substance or policy but about character assassination. As the stakes have been constantly upped by the media and the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy, the inevitable has happened. Corbyn has been abandoned. Few respected politicians with career ambitions or a public profile want to risk being cast out into the wilderness, like Ken Livingstone, as an anti-semite.
This is why the supposed anti-semitism “crisis” in a Corbyn-led Labour party has been so much more effective than berating him for his clothes or his patriotism. Natural selection – survival of the smear fittest for the job – meant that a weaponised anti-semitism would eventually identify Corbyn as its prime target and not just his supporters – especially after his unexpectedly strong showing at the polls in last year’s election.
Worse, Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. As a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, the accusations of anti-semitism have clearly pained him. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers. He has tried to maintain unity with people who have no interest in finding common ground with him.
And as he has lost all sense of how to respond in good faith to allegations made in bad faith, he has begun committing the cardinal sin of sounding and looking evasive – just as those who deployed the anti-semitism charge hoped. It was his honesty, plain-speaking and compassion that won him the leadership and the love of ordinary members. Unless he can regain the political and spiritual confidence that underpinned those qualities, he risks haemorrhaging support.
Critical juncture
But beyond Corbyn’s personal fate, the Labour party has now reached a critical juncture in its response to the smear campaign. In adopting the full IHRA definition, the party will jettison the principle of free speech and curtail critical debate about an entire country, Israel – as well as a key foreign policy issue for those concerned about the direction the Middle East is taking.
Discussion of what kind of state Israel is, what its policy goals are, and whether they are compatible with a peace process are about to be taken off the table by Britain’s largest, supposedly progressive party.
That thought spurred me to cast an eye over my back-catalogue of journalism. I have been based in Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee, since 2001. In that time I have written – according to my website – more than 900 articles (plus another few hundred blog posts) on Israel, as well as three peer-reviewed books and a clutch of chapters in edited collections. That’s a lot of writing. Many more than a million words about Israel over nearly two decades.
What shocked me, however, as I started to pore over these articles was that almost all of them – except for a handful dealing with internal Palestinian politics – would fall foul of at least one of these four additional IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt.
After 17 years of writing about Israel, after winning a respected journalism prize for being “one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East”, the Labour party is about to declare that I, and many others like me, are irredeemable anti-semites.
Not that I am unused to such slurs. I am intimately familiar with a community of online stalkers who happily throw around the insults “Nazi” and “anti-semite” at anyone who doesn’t cheerlead the settlements of the Greater Israel project. But far more troubling is that this will be my designation not by bullying Israel partisans but by the official party of the British left.
Of course, I will not be alone. Much of my journalism has been about documenting and reporting the careful work of scholars, human rights groups, lawyers and civil society organisations – Palestinian, Israeli and international alike – that have charted the structural racism in Israel’s legal and administrative system, explaining often in exasperating detail its ethnocractic character and its apartheid policies. All of us are going to be effectively cast out, denied any chance to inform or contribute to the debates and policies of Britain’s only leftwing party with a credible shot at power.
That is a shocking realisation. The Labour party is about to slam the door shut in the faces of the Palestinian people, as well as progressive Jews and others who stand in solidarity with them.
Betrayal of Palestinians
The article in the Guardian, the newspaper that has done more to damage Corbyn than any other (by undermining him from within his own camp), described the incorporation of the full IHRA anti-semitism definition into Labour’s code of conduct as a “compromise”, as though the betrayal of an oppressed people was something over which middle ground could be found.
Remember that the man who drafted the IHRA definition and its associated examples, American Jewish lawyer Kenneth Stern, has publicly regretted their impact, saying that in practice they have severely curbed freedom of speech about Israel.
How these new examples will be misused by Corbyn’s opponents should already be clear. He made his most egregious mistake in the handling of the party’s supposed anti-semitism “crisis” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a violation of one of the IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt: comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
He apologised for attending an anti-racism event and distanced himself from a friend, the late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, who used his speech to compare Israel’s current treatment of Palestinians to early Nazi laws that vilified and oppressed Jews.
It was a Judas-like act for which it is not necessary to berate Corbyn. He is doubtless already torturing himself over what he did. But that is the point: the adoption of the full IHRA definition will demand the constant vilification and rooting out of progressive and humane voices like Meyer’s. It will turn the Labour party into the modern equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee. Labour activists will find themselves, like Corbyn, either outed or required to out others as supposed anti-semites. They will have to denounce reasonable criticisms of Israel and dissociate themselves from supporters of the Palestinian cause, even Holocaust survivors.
The patent absurdity of Labour including this new anti-semitism “example” should be obvious the moment we consider that it will recast not only Meyer and other Holocaust survivors as anti-semites but leading Jewish intellectuals and scholars – even Israeli army generals.
Two years ago Yair Golan, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, went public with such a comparison. Addressing an audience in Israel on Holocaust Day, he spoke of where Israel was heading:
“If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.”
Is it not a paradox that, were Golan a member of the Labour party, that statement – a rare moment of self-reflection by a senior Israeli figure – will soon justify his being vilified and hounded out of the Labour party?
Evidence of Israeli apartheid
Looking at my own work, it is clear that almost all of it falls foul of two further “examples” of anti-semitism cited in the full IHRA definition that Labour is preparing to adopt:
“Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
and:
“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
One hardly needs to point out how preposterous it is that the Labour party is about to outlaw from internal discussion or review any research, scholarship or journalism that violates these two “examples” weeks after Israel passed its Nation-State Basic Law. That law, which has constitutional weight, makes explicit what was always implicit in Israel as a Jewish state:
- that Israel privileges the rights and status of Jews around the world, including those who have never even visited Israel, above the rights of the fifth of the country’s citizens who are non-Jews (the remnants of the native Palestinian population who survived the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948).
- that Israel, as defined in the Basic Law, is not a state bounded by internationally recognised borders but rather the “Land of Israel” – a Biblical conception of Israel whose borders encompass the occupied Palestinian territories and parts of many neighbouring states.
How, one might reasonably wonder, is such a state – defined this way in the Basic Law – a normal “democratic” state? How is it not structurally racist and inherently acquisitive of other people’s territory?
Contrary to the demands of these two extra IHRA “examples”, the Basic Law alone shows that Israel is a “racist endeavour” and that we cannot judge it by the same standards we would a normal western-style democracy. Not least, it has a double “border” problem: it forces Jews everywhere to be included in its self-definition of the “nation”, whether they want to be or not; and it lays claim to the title deeds of other territories without any intention to confer on their non-Jewish inhabitants the rights it accords Jews.
Demanding that we treat Israel as a normal western-style liberal democracy – as the IHRA full definition requires – makes as much sense as having demanded the same for apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s.
Unaccountable politics
The Labour party has become the largest in Europe as Corbyn has attracted huge numbers of newcomers into the membership, inspired by a new kind of politics. That is a terrifying development for the old politics, which preferred tiny political cliques accountable chiefly to corporate donors, leaving a slightly wider circle of activists largely powerless.
That is why the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy are quite content to use any pretext not only to root out genuine progressive activists drawn to a Corbyn-led party, including anti-Zionist Jewish activists, but to alienate tens of thousands more members that had begun to transform Labour into a grassroots movement.
A party endlessly obsessing about anti-semitism, a party that has abandoned the Palestinians, a party that has begun throwing out key progressive principles, a party that has renounced free speech, and a party that no longer puts the interests of the poor and vulnerable at the centre of its concerns is a party that will fail.
That is where the anti-semitism “crisis” is leading Labour – precisely as it was designed to do.
Facebook removes pro-Palestinian Occupy London page
RT | August 17, 2018
A Facebook page containing pro-Palestinian posts has been taken down by the social media giant. The latest in a string of pages removed by Facebook, it has renewed claims of “censorship” against the company.
The closure of the Occupy London page, which has garnered more than 150k followers since its opening in 2011, follows the “continual removal of posts related to Palestine”, an Occupy London spokesperson told The Canary.
They added that it is not the first time the social network attempted to “censor” its content.
“It feels like censorship. For months, we faced removal of posts related to Palestine. Perhaps once every few weeks or so, a post would be taken down and admins for the page were frozen out of their personal accounts. Then, today, Facebook unpublished the entire page.
“We want to see our page back up with immediate effect,” he added.
It follows renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald claiming Facebook had bowed to pressure from the Israeli government to silence Palestinian activists. According to an Intercept report, of some 158 requests made by Tel Aviv to Facebook (over just four months) for the removal of Palestinian content, 95 percent were granted.
Facebook has apparently intensified its crackdown on alternative outlets since it joined Apple and video platform YouTube in banning the conspiracy-oriented outlet Infowars.
An event page for a counter-protest against the Unite the Right 2.0 rally in Washington last weekend was also removed because one of the six administrators allegedly showed disingenuous activity.
Venezuelan news outlet, teleSur, which tends to report on affairs which go against the US government position and mainstream media perspective, was removed from Facebook in May. Facebook also removed pages belonging to leftist independent grassroots Venezuela Analysis and Haiti Analysis. They too are highly critical of US foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean region.
Corbyn attacked for Islamist hand-sign, claims it was in solidarity with Cairo massacre victims
RT | August 15, 2018
Jeremy Corbyn has found himself involved in a row after a picture of him making a sign linked to the Muslim Brotherhood surfaced. His spokesperson said it was done in solidarity with the victims of a 2013 massacre in Egypt.
The picture, published by the Daily Telegraph and reportedly taken in Finsbury Park Mosque in 2016, shows Corbyn with four outstretched fingers and his thumb tucked in against his palm. The hand-gesture is called Rabbi’ah and used by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in a sign of solidarity with ex-Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and the victims of the Rabaa massacre.
Morsi, who was democratically elected following the Arab Spring and the subsequent fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown by, now-president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a July 2013 coup d’etat.
A spokesperson for Corbyn said he had been “standing up for democracy” when he used the Rabbi’ah symbol, telling the paper: “The four fingered gesture is a well-known symbol of solidarity with the victims of the 2013 Rabaa massacre in Cairo.”
The hand gesture stems from the August 2013 massacre, when Egyptian security forces under the command of el-Sisi raided two Morsi supporter camps in Cairo; including one in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square where the gesture gets its name. Human Rights Watch, who described the raids as “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history,” estimated that a minimum of 817 people and more likely at least 1,000 died during the dispersal.
The Islamist MB is a transnational organization which originated in Egypt, before spreading across the Arab world. Its brand of political Islam has influenced groups such as Hamas in Gaza, and cites Turkey and Qatar amongst its supporters. The organisation is listed as a terrorist group by countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia and Syria
In 2003 the Supreme Court of Russia listed MB as a terrorist organisation for its role the creation of a largely Chechen Islamic extremist group, which has committed multiple terrorist attacks on Russia
While it is not considered a terrorist group by the UK, upon the conclusion of an investigation into the MB ex-British prime minister David Cameron said aspects of the group’s ideology “run counter to British values of democracy.”
EU ‘disinfo-busting’ outlet targets ‘Russophiles’ in McCarthyist campaign to push own narrative
By Danielle Ryan | RT | August 15, 2018
In a stunt that would have made Joe McCarthy proud, a Brussels-based think tank endeavoured to brand Twitter users posting about a scandal involving French President Emmanuel Macron’s former bodyguard as ‘Russophiles’.
EU DisinfoLab, whose raison d’etre is to “fight disinformation with innovative methodology,” published a report about “hyperactive” Twitter accounts that were sharing news about Alexandre Benalla, Macron’s former deputy chief of staff and bodyguard who was fired in July when it was revealed that he had violently assaulted a protester during an annual May Day rally.
French media excitedly latched onto the DisinfoLab report (The Russians! The Russians!) and soon headlines appeared about Russian “bots” and their apparent involvement in the Benalla scandal, prompting national discussions about what could be done to combat social media manipulation by the “Russophile” accounts. During all the hysteria, the EU DisinfoLab graciously decided to clarify its findings to say that not all of the accounts posting about Benalla were of the ‘Russophile’ variety. But, according to the NGO’s co-founder Nicolas Vanderbiest, the case was a hot topic for the “Russophile ecosystem” and a sizable 27 percent of the accounts were part of the “Russian disinformation system”.
If you were wondering, the “Russian disinformation system” is, according to DisinfoLab, comprised of anyone sharing content from RT or Sputnik or anyone promoting the “Russian narrative” in any way.
Because remember, in good, free, open Democratic societies, questioning established narratives is unacceptable and grounds for public shaming and having your name immediately placed on some kind of Twitter blacklist. You might also be as surprised as I was to hear there is apparently an overarching “Russian narrative” for every world event, regardless of whether or not it relates to Moscow in any way.
Making matters worse, the NGO released the raw data which it used in its research which appeared to categorize users with labels such as “jew,”“lesbian” and “homo” – prompting questions from users about why they were being politically profiled in such a public way. The NGO then seemingly deleted the those files and denied posting them before appearing to admit to publishing them and releasing an apology to those affected.
Ironically, funding for the report on this alleged suspicious Russian Twitter activity was provided by none other than Twitter itself. Luckily, Twitter had some money lying around for such purposes; the very money it had received from RT and Sputnik to run ads on its platform. Having realized the error of its ways, Twitter pledged that money to “civil society” projects such as EU DisinfoLab – who was the happy recipient of $125,000, according to the organization itself.
Immediately, the furor surrounding the ‘Russophiles’ list reminded me of a similar attempt by a European ‘think tank’ to brand anyone remotely associated with RT as Kremlin stooges. In October of last year, the US-government funded, Prague-based ‘European Values’ outfit published a list of 2,327 people who have appeared as guests on RT, branding them “useful idiots” for the the Kremlin.
Included on that list were well-known Russian agents Greta van Susteren, Gloria Steinem, Bob Woodward, Dick Cheney, Naomi Klein, Kofi Annan, Perez Hilton, Denzel Washington and Pierce Brosnan.
The think tanks that produce utterly pointless reports like this claim that it is all in an effort to fight disinformation and cleanse the news environment of false or misleading information. In reality, these reports are nothing more than exercises in public shaming and serve no legitimate, useful purpose whatsoever. They are not designed to protect or promote truth per se, but to bolster their preferred narrative and ensure that no-one is exposed to any other dangerous ideas or perspectives — and that if they are, they quickly discount them in favor of the safer, sanctioned narratives.
They are part of a long history in the West – but particularly in the US – of linking political opponents or dissidents to Russia in an attempt to discredit them. They are the modern-day incarnation (if far less effective) of the McCarthyist pamphlets of the 1950s, denigrating public figures (or these days just random Twitter users) for the alleged crime of being sympathetic to the Soviet Union/Russia.
The infamous Red Channels pamphlet which listed 150 actors, writers, journalists, musicians and other entertainers who were purportedly communist sympathisers ended careers and threatened to ruin lives. No doubt, the likes of EU DisinfoLab and European Values would love to be so influential, but luckily, in today’s media landscape, it’s much easier to call them out for the chancers that they are.
Considering that, as EU DisinfoLab admitted, only 27 percent of those posting about the Benalla affair are ‘Russophiles’ (and the rest were presumably not) and that there was no evidence of any Russian government “interference” in the case, it would seem more likely that a wide variety of French citizens, from all points on the political spectrum, were not wholly delighted with the fact that their president’s bodyguard pretended to be a police officer and beat people up at a protest— and decided to tweet their frustrations, as is their prerogative.
But it would be a bit more difficult to produce a “disinformation” report about that.
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ
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Internet Censorship: Appeal to Reinstate “American Everyman”
OffGuardian | August 15, 2018
Just a week or so after Spotify, Google, Apple and Facebook made the curiously synchronized move to kick Alex Jones and InfoWars off their platforms, and just days after Facebook shut down Venezuelan news network TeleSur’s facebook page (for the second time), the war on the free internet has opened up another front.
Small independent blogs are being shut down, seemingly without reason and certainly without explanation.
AmericanEveryman.com has been closed without notice or warning, according to the blog’s owner Scott Creighton. Allegedly for violating WordPress’ “terms of service”, although they have apparently been entirely vague about how.
Other such blogs – fellowshipofminds.com and jaysanalysis.com – have suffered the exact same fate, on the exact dame day. There is undeniably a push to silence dissent and purge it from the internet. There may well be dozens – even hundreds – of other examples.
If you object to censorship, of any kind, please fill out a form on automattic.com and request that these blogs are reinstated.
Please support our friends who wish to do nothing but tell the truth. If enough of us make an appeal, they will listen.
… and if this website disappears, well, you know what happened.
Alex Jones suspended from Twitter after tweet calling to end censorship
RT | August 15, 2018
Controversial right-wing commentator Alex Jones has been banned from tweeting after he posted a link to a video of himself calling on President Trump to “take action” against tech companies censoring his content.
Infowars Editor Paul Joseph Watson tweeted a screenshot of the notification sent by Twitter staff to Jones. According to Twitter, a tweet by Jones one day earlier was considered to be “targeted harassment,” and, as a result, the Infowars host would have his access to the social-media platform restricted for one week. Watson described the situation as “truly, monumentally, beyond stupid.”
In the video, Jones ranted about the censorship of conservative voices by Silicon Valley tech companies, directing much of his scorn at Apple CEO Tim Cook. He called his own ban from various tech platforms a “total anti-American attack,” and called on President Trump to “do something about it.” Along the way, he bashed Democrats, criticized the mainstream media, and accused Cook of working with the Chinese government to undermine America.
Jones’ Twitter page will remain visible for the duration of the ban, but he will not be able to tweet, retweet, follow, or like.
Last week, Infowars found itself banned from the platforms of almost every major Silicon Valley company – including Facebook, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify – for violating their community standards and spreading ‘hate speech.’
Until Tuesday, Twitter was one of Jones’ last safe havens online, and CEO Jack Dorsey said that Jones would not be banned until he broke the site’s rules.
Jones’ excommunication was cheered by many in the US, including Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who called Infowars “the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies.” He demanded even more censorship in the name of ‘saving democracy.’
Jones’ supporters blasted the companies for censoring the rabble-rousing host, and former UKIP leader Nigel Farage called him a “victim of collusion by the big-tech giants.”
While effectively banned from much of the internet, Jones still posted content to the Infowars website, and via the Infowars app, which has surged in popularity amid the furore. However, on Tuesday, the Infowars website went offline in what staff called a cyberattack. Upon landing on the site, visitors would simply find an error message, which was later replaced with a low-fi splash page directing them to several other affiliated sites.
Senator Mark Warner Proposes the End of Free Speech – The Revenge of Hillary
By Martin Armstrong | Armstrong Economics | August 13, 2018
Senate Democrats are circulating a proposal based upon their claim of Russian hacking that will completely takeover the internet and social media which has been leaked. They are adopting the EU approach to silence political criticism. They claim it is necessary, just as the EU argued, that they must act to prevent Russian hackers and “restore” the people’s trust in our institutions, democracy, and the free press. They are proposing comprehensive GDPR-like data protection legislation following the EU. They are calling it a proposal for “Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms,” and the draft was created by Sen. Mark Warner.
The entire regulation is based upon Russians and it claims they are deliberately spreading disinformation. To justify this act, they also point back to the old Soviet Union stating they attempted to spread “fake news” denigrating Martin Luther King. Despite the Democrats and their campaign to start World War III over Hillary’s emails, of which nobody denied were fake just hacked, their proposal is effectively to shut down anything they can call “hate speech” targeted at them, not Trump of course.
Warner’s paper suggests outlawing companies who fail to label bots and impose Draconian criminal penalties and huge fines. Effectively, they want people to pay for everything. The Democrats want full disclosure regarding ANY online political speech. They even want the Federal Trade Commission to have unbelievable power and require all companies’ algorithms to be audited by the feds as if they even have qualified staff to conduct such audits. On top of that, they have proposed tech platforms above a certain size MUST turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,” scams, “user propagated misinformation,” and harassment—data that could be used to “inform actions by regulators or Congress.” This is a complete violation of both the First and Fourth Amendment. They want the same mechanisms in Europe where anyone can complain and demand the content be taken down or subject to fines that can confiscate all assets. Sounds to me like retirement is on the horizon.
This bill would effectively end all our freedoms. This is what is wrong with career politicians. They look at the world ONLY through the eyes of government – NEVER the people. What we are facing is the Revenge of Hillary – loss of Free Speech and this constant push to reestablish the Cold War and move to World War III. The Democrats have become the party of hate and they have been the party that always starts wars with the only exception being Iraq and that was Dick Cheney & Donald Rumsfeld.
YouTube Is Censoring New 1.5-Hour Long Video “Russian Military Campaign in Syria 2015-2018”
SouthFront | August 12, 2018
YouTube is censoring SouthFront’s new 1.5-hour long video “Russian Military Campaign in Syria 2015-2018.”
This video is a detailed summary of military and political developments in Syria since the start of the Russian military operation until now. It was released by SouthFront on August 11.
Less than 2 hours after the release, this video was placed behind an age restriction because it allegedly includes “violent or graphic content that appears to be posted in a shocking, sensational, or disrespectful manner”. The age-restriction clearly impacts a possible reach of the video because it does not allow people without YouTube accounts to watch it.
SouthFront immediately appealed this age restriction. Our video “Russian Military Campaign in Syria 2015-2018” includes no “graphic content” and was made solely for informational purposes. So, it does not violate any rules.
After the further review, YouTube found that SouthFront’s video “does not violate” Community Guidelines. However, the video remained age-restricted because “it may not be appropriate for a general audience”.
Summing up: The video violates no YouTube Community Guidelines, but despite this, a manual decision was made to age-restrict the video in order to limit its potential audience reach. This situation can be considered as another example of censorship imposed against alternative media and an independent point of view.
SouthFront has repeatedly faced various sophisticated attacks aimed at censoring it on YouTube [systematic ‘false flagging’ and other hostile actions] or damaging its website.
For example, about a year ago, SouthFront became a target of preplanned campaign to damage its work:
In mid September 2017, SouthFront’s YouTube channel received two community guidelines strikes and its work on this platform was temporairly frozen. Then, thanks to public support of our audience and partners, SouthFront was able to restore its channel and continue releasing videos on YouTube.
Separately, the project faced a new wave of propaganda aimed at damaging it in the MSM. In October 2017, Military.com, The Hill, McClatchyDC and The Daily Beast united their efforts arguing that SouthFront among few other websites targets “US military personnel and veterans with conspiracy theories, misinformation, and other forms of junk news about military affairs and national security issues.”
The recent developments on YouTube may indicate that a similar campaign could be launched against SouthFront once again soon.
Butina Case: Neo-McCarthyism Engulfs America
By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 09.08.2018
The United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association (NRA) by having two Russian citizens take out life memberships in the organization with the intention of corrupting it and turning it into a mouthpiece for President Vladimir Putin. Both of the Russians – Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin – have, by the way, long well documented histories as advocates for gun ownership and were founders of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence front organization of some kind and is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.
Maria Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in solitary confinement in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion with Torshin and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. It is unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, but she has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a “flight risk,” likely to try to flee the US and return home. It is to be presumed that she is being pressured to identify others involved in her alleged scheme to overthrow American democracy through NRA membership.
Indeed, in any event, it would be difficult to imagine why anyone would consider the NRA to be a legitimate intelligence target. It only flexes its admitted powerful legislative muscles over issues relating to gun ownership, not regarding policy on Russia. In short, Butina and by extension Torshin appear to have done nothing wrong. Both are energetic advocates for their country and guns rights, which they appear to believe in, and Butina’s aggressive networking has broken no law except not registering, which in itself assumes that she is a Russian government agent, something that has not been demonstrated. To put the shoe on the other foot, will every American who now travels to Russia and engages in political conversations with local people be suspected of acting as an agent of the US government? Once you open the door, it swings both ways.
One might dismiss the entire Affair Butina as little more than a reflection of the anti-Russia hysteria that has been sweeping the United States since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, but that would be unfair to those remaining honest FBI agents who may have investigated Butina and Torshin and come up with what they believed to be a plausible case for an indictment. There were possibly suspicious money transfers as well as email intercepts that might be interpreted as incriminating.
But two important elements are clearly missing. The first is motive. Did the Kremlin seriously believe that it could get anything substantial out of having a gun totin’ attractive young Russian woman as a life member in the NRA? What did the presumed puppet masters in Moscow expect to obtain apart from the sorts of group photos including Butina that one gets while posing with politicians at the annual NRA convention? Sure, the photo might even evolve into a cup of coffee together, but what is the end game?
Second is the lack of any of the hallmarks of an intelligence operation, which is referred to in the business as tradecraft. Spies meet secretly or at least outside the public eye with prospective agents whereas Maria operated completely in the open and she made no effort to conceal her love for her country and her desire that Washington and Moscow normalize relations. Spies also communicate securely, which means that they use encrypted systems or various cut-outs, i.e. mis-directions, when maintaining contact with those who are running them. Again, Maria did none of that, which is why the FBI has her emails. Also spies work under what is referred to as an “operating directive” in CIA-speak where they have very specific information that they seek to obtain from their contacts. There is no indication that Maria Butina in any way sought classified information or intelligence that would relate either to the security of the United States or to America’s political system. And finally, Maria made no attempt to recruit anyone and turn them into an actual controlled Russian agent, which is what spies eventually seek to do.
It has come down to this: if you are a Russian and you are caught talking to anyone in any way influential, there is potentially hell to pay because the FBI will be watching you. You are automatically assumed to be part of a conspiracy. Once “evidence” is collected, you will be indicted and sent to prison, mostly to send a message to Moscow. It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union’s judiciary used to function is now becoming standing operating procedure in the United States.
Social Media Users in Scotland Planning on Boycotting BBC
Sputnik – August 9, 2018
Following the removal of the prominent Scottish independence blogger, Wings Over Scotland, social media users in Scotland are preparing for an outright boycott of the BBC. Earlier Sputnik spoke to the political analyst, Joe McGregor about this story.
Sputnik: So Joe can you explain a little bit about why people are planning on boycotting the BBC? Why are such a large proportion of Scots so disenfranchised with the BBC?
Joe McGregor: I’m deeply disenfranchised with that because it seems like Scotland don’t have a voice on the channel whatsoever – it’s very Westminster-centric, very England-centric. I don’t mean that as coming from the point of view that as a Scotsman I should be opposed… not at all. It seems to be that the BBC likes to show only the worst side of Scotland, or not give the SNP (Scottish National Party) a voice, when they are national broadcaster.
Sputnik: Does this have effect on Scottish political issues such as campaigns for Scottish independence and if so what kind of effect?
Joe McGregor: Eventually you become used to it. Say for the youth of Scotland that are coming through and they’re only having that information they would be guided to believing that information thinking that having nuclear weapons and having the nuclear base is a great thing. Scotland should be proud of having that there but they don’t show other side things, with nuclear apparatus being driven through city centers like Glasgow. If there was to be a problem there, it would wipe out most of central Scotland. Why does Scotland have to house that when Scotland doesn’t want to house that and why does the BBC not show that, that Scotland isn’t with that? They only tend to say ‘If it wasn’t there, then so many people would be out of work’ and that the local businesses wouldn’t have the customs of the people who work there – which I find ridiculous.
Sputnik: Is this boycott anti-English and what would you say to critics who suggest that it is?
Joe McGregor: It’s not anti-English, its anti-BBC. If the BBC was to give Scotland a fair crack of the whip and report the SNP are doing great things in Scotland and report on the fact that people aren’t happy having nuclear weapons on their doorstep, I think you would find that people don’t think its anti-English, its simply anti-BBC.
Sputnik: What would you like to see from the BBC that would improve the image of the broadcaster in your eyes?
Joe McGregor: I would just like to see every nation in the UK getting a fair crack of the whip. It’s not just Scottish issues; there’s Welsh issues, Northern Ireland issues… it’s not just Westminster-centric issues, it’s not like Westminster is big brother and its do what you say and everything will be ok and you know what, keep drinking beer because that will nullify any of the effects that may occur.
See also:
BBC Was in Bed With the Government to Flush Out ‘Subversives’ – Archives
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Not Hamas-Israeli conflict: The Palestinian cause belongs to the world
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | October 15, 2023
This, in his thinking, could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”
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