A senior European Union security official says the body is looking into Israeli technology for online surveillance in Europe.
EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove said Tuesday that the bloc was turning to Israeli methods after internet companies proved reluctant to monitor individuals.
The official cited a series of deadly attacks across Europe which had prompted officials to think of using Israeli technologies.
Once focused on “meta data” or information regarding individuals’ communications patterns, Israeli spy agencies now have refocused on social media as a complementary means of snooping on Palestinians.
An Israeli military official who administers these methods said human intervention is required to set parameters such as age, religiosity, socio-economic background for the population being monitored.
Traditionally a source of funds for the Israeli military to maintain its “edge” in the Middle East, the US and Europeans have recently turned to a major customer of Israeli weapons.
Last month, the US military said it had tested an Israeli short-range missile for possible use in its European network of missile systems to deter Russia.
Major General Glenn Bramhall of the US Army’s Air and Missile Defense Command said a variant of the Israeli “Tamir” rocket which is incorporated to Tel Aviv’s so-called Iron Dome missile system had been tested.
Last month, a report said European countries were increasingly purchasing weapons from Israeli arms manufacturers, promoting their products on the grounds that they have been “field-tested” against Palestinians.
The report came as 29 Israeli arms makers displayed their military technologies earlier this week at the Eurosatory conference in Paris, one of the world’s largest land defense exhibitions.
French purchases of weaponry from Israeli firms more than doubled in 2015 compared to a year earlier, amounting to $355 million.
In 2016, Israel is projected to overtake Italy as the world’s seventh-largest weapons exporter, the report said, citing IHS Jane’s.
Many of the Israeli arms technologies being sold to Europe are used in the repression of Palestinians, including in the destructive 2014 war on the besieged and densely-populated Gaza Strip.
The war left over 2,200 dead — mostly civilians — while injuring thousands more and displacing nearly 500,000 people, according to UN figures.
Human Rights Watch has criticized the purchase of field-tested Israeli weapons, saying the group has documented “violations of the rules of war that appear to rise to the level of war crimes in Gaza using some of these weapons.”
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – The Israeli occupation police have handed professor Jamil Hamami, secretary-general of the higher Islamic commission in Occupied Jerusalem, a written order banning his travel abroad and to the West Bank.
According to this police order, Hamami will be prohibited from entering the West Bank for four months and the previous ban on his travel abroad will be extended for six months.
The police justified the measure against Hamami by saying that he is involved in banned activities and his departure for other countries will constitute a security threat to Israel.
For his part, Hamami, who works as a lecturer at al-Quds University, condemned Israel’s decision against him as “unjust and a violation of the Palestinians’ right to travel and movement”. He considered this Israeli step as “part of the Israeli campaign that targets the Palestinian dignitaries in Jerusalem.”
Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?
Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.
A report released last week by Rights Watch (UK) highlights these and other children’s experiences under a U.K. countering violent extremism (CVE) program known as Prevent. Prevent imposes a legal obligation on schools to implement policies assessing whether children have “extremist” views or are at risk of engaging in terrorism, and to “intervene as appropriate.” Intervention may include referring the child to a related program in which panels of police officers, teachers, and other government employees identify children they think are vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.
Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.
While there’s no similar government-imposed duty on American schools, U.S. CVE initiatives are based on the Prevent model. Due to this, a core component of the U.S. CVE plan tasks teachers, social workers, and school administrators with monitoring and reporting to law enforcement on children in their care. An FBI document released earlier this year tells teachers to spy on their students’ thoughts and suggests that administrators essentially turn schools into mini-FBI offices. Rights Watch’s report shows what might happen if American schools actually follow the FBI’s proposals.
Prevent, unsurprisingly, turns out to be controversial and divisive—a “toxic brand.” Earlier this year, the United Kingdom’s largest teachers union voted to reject the program, calling it ineffective and counterproductive and stating that it causes “suspicion in the classroom and confusion in the staff room.”
We’ve written before about one fundamental concern with CVE programs: They are premised on disproven theories and junk science. Despite years of study, there is no reliable indicator to predict who will engage in violence. In the absence of reliable indicators, the Rights Watch report shows that U.K. programs rely on over-broad and ambiguous criteria describing common and entirely innocent conduct. These so-called indicators include changing one’s style of dress or appearance to match a certain group, expressing a need for identity or belonging, or “becoming quieter” — factors so general it would be difficult to find a child or teenager who hasn’t exhibited such behavior at some point.
Unsurprisingly, when teachers are required to report on “extremist” thoughts or conduct using unreliable and vague criteria, some of those teachers’ suspicions reflect society’s prejudice. Rights Watch found that although Prevent purports to apply to all children at risk of extremism, it disproportionately targeted Muslim children. According to Rights Watch:
“[T]argeting Muslim children, making them feel that they are not welcome to discuss political or religious matters at school, and creating a dynamic in which Muslim youth come to be fearful of the educational setting and distrustful of their teachers and their classmates, is counter-productive, discriminatory, and a violation of the fundamental rights that are at the heart of the very civil society the government seeks to protect.”
CVE programs in the United States using similarly over-broad and ambiguous criteria will inevitably result in discriminatory and unfair targeting of American Muslim children, too.
Another concern about CVE programs is that the government uses them to task people to spy on each other. The Rights Watch report bears out this concern — and its consequences. In the U.K., students fear that reading “controversial” books or engaging in classroom discussion may cause teachers to report them as potential terrorists. Teachers in turn report that Muslim students are ceasing to engage in classroom debate and that teachers themselves are self-censoring the topics they discuss in classrooms. Rights Watch found resulting violations of students’ freedoms of speech and association and their rights to privacy and equal treatment in education.
Here in the United States, the first principle of the National Education Association’s Code of Ethics is a commitment to the student. Teachers may not deny a student’s access to different viewpoints, deliberately suppress or distort subject matter relevant to a student’s progress, or restrict benefits to any student on the basis of race, national origin, or political or religious beliefs. The Rights Watch report is a warning to American principals and teachers of how CVE programs can violate that first principle. It’s also a warning to the U.S. agencies charged with formulating or implementing CVE, including the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Education.
There are some things we just shouldn’t import — and on the top of that list should be a discriminatory government program that turns teachers into spies and stifles children’s ability to learn, ask questions, and debate ideas.
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel has slammed a newly-passed Israeli law designed to facilitate the expulsion of publicly-elected Palestinian parliamentarians in the Knesset.
The law, approved overnight by a vote of 62 to 45, is described by Adalah as posing a “grave danger to basic democratic rights”, and intended to expel those Arab Knesset members “who ‘dare’ to stray beyond boundaries dictated to them by Israeli Jewish majority.”
As Adalah explains, under the new law, “a majority of 90 Knesset members may oust a serving Knesset member on two grounds, as enumerated in Section 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset: 1) incitement to racism; and 2) support for armed struggle against Israel.”
In addition, “the law stipulates that when the Knesset decides on an expulsion, the statements of the ‘suspect’ Knesset member will also be examined and not only their aims or actions.”
The law also provides that: 1) a member’s expulsion lasts for the full period of the Knesset’s remaining term; 2) the commencement of expulsion proceedings requires the support of 70 Knesset members, including a minimum of 10 opposition members; and 3) suspension proceedings may not commence during an election campaign.
Described as “the latest attempt by the government to trample on the political rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel”, according to Adalah, “there are no existing laws in western democratic states comparable to Israel’s new Expulsion Law.”
The Expulsion Law is the latest expression in a disturbing national tendency over the past several years – including many attempts to disqualify Arab Members of Knesset and Arab party lists from participating in the elections, the government’s decision to outlaw the Islamic Movement in 2015, and the Knesset’s approval of a series of laws such as the ‘Electoral Threshold Law’, the ‘Nakba Law’, and the ‘Boycott Law’ – all intended, via varying means, to silence the Arab public.
Recently, President Obama held a town hall meeting to address the growing tension between minority communities and police forces after the shootings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the police officers in Dallas. He urged police officers to forge trust with communities and recommended better training and more resources.
Many groups around the country have been asking for better training programs, mandatory body cameras, and other reforms. These may indeed help to reduce shootings of civilians, but a deeper concern has to do with the laws surrounding the use of deadly force by law enforcement. What legal standards exist that police officers can use to defend their actions after the fact?
Last year, Amnesty International conducted an investigation into the legal standards for the use of deadly force by police officers in the United States, comparing them with current Supreme Court rulings and international human rights standards, and found enormous disparities.
* It turns out that nine states and the city of Washington, DC have absolutely no legal standards about when officers may use deadly force in arresting suspects.
* There are no states in the country that comply with international law enforcement standards. The current United Nations standard is that police officers should only use deadly force when it is a last resort, and then, only to prevent grave harm or imminent death to themselves or another person.
* What is even more astounding is that there are 13 states that that do not even comply with current constitutional standards set by the US Supreme Court. In the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, the Court ruled that police officers may only use deadly force if they have probable cause that the suspect poses significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officers or others.
My home state of Oregon is one of these places out of step with the Constitution, along with the very populated states of New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California. In Oregon, for instance, police officers are allowed to shoot to kill if the police officers have a reasonable belief that a fleeing suspect has committed a kidnapping, arson, burglary, or indeed, any felony at all, even if the suspect is not posing an immediate threat of death of physical harm. Oregon law does not require that a suspect be given a warning of the use of deadly force, even though such a warning is an international legal standard. Up to 20 states allow police officers to kill a suspect simply for trying to escape prison or jail.
Given this legal framework, incidents of police shootings will not be reduced by body cameras or better training alone since it is the law itself that licenses wide discretion on whom and when police can kill.
This year, at least one state, Missouri, has started working to change that. After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the protests that followed, legislators looked at the use of force provisions (which allowed officers to kill suspects who they believed had committed a felony) and found that it was out of step with the Garner standard.
Everyone who is concerned about the tension in the country and the grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement should press their state lawmakers to ensure that law enforcement officials in their states are at least upholding the US Constitution.
The Jewish Holocaust occupies a unique position in modern Western society, in that questioning the facts of the Holocaust is suppressed and vilified on a global scale as no other topic of human history. Why is research into the Holocaust so problematic? Why is it that serious research by scientists, historians and other academics is rejected out of hand as immoral? Why is the suppression of research into ANY aspect of history acceptable?
At present there are 14 countries that criminalise ‘Holocaust denial’, i.e. publicly questioning, or disseminating research that questions, any aspect of the approved Holocaust narrative: Canada plus 13 European countries including Germany, Austria and France. In many of these countries legislation was passed decades after the end of WWII, in France only in 1990. As recently as 2015 a German court convicted 87 year old Ursula Haverbeck of ‘Holocaust denial’ and sentenced her to 10 months prison. Other revisionists who have served jail sentences include the German publisher Ernst Zündel and the British historian David Irving, who was arrested, sentenced and imprisoned in Austria in 2005. Academic Robert Faurisson was convicted in France of holocaust denial in 2006 and given a three month suspended sentence. In Germany convictions are rising steadily: in 2000 there were more than 2,666 violations of the Holocaust denial law STGB 130, as compared with 437 in 1987.
Even where Holocaust revision is legal, those who are involved in it or support it in any way are liable to be vilified, persecuted and generally treated as lepers. British academics like Irving and Nicholas Kollerstrom saw their careers destroyed, and every effort is made to deny revisionists any sort of platform; it goes without saying that they are subjected to vindictive trolling on social media. Some, like Faurisson and Zündel, have been physically assaulted on more than one occasion. After pro-Palestine activist Paul Eisen wrote an article ‘The Holocaust Wars’ in which he suggested there were questions to answer about the Holocaust, he experienced an extraordinary campaign of vilification and ostracism, especially from the pro-Palestine movement he had given so much to. That he was Jewish himself was no defence against the charge of antisemitism. As Eisen himself says, ‘I had metamorphosed into that lowest of animal life forms, the maggot at the bottom of the food chain – a Holocaust denier’.
Paul Eisen saw an unexpected rise in his profile during the 2015 campaign for election of the leader of the UK Labour Party. It was discovered that Jeremy Corbyn had had some links with Eisen in the past, including appearing on the same platform as him. The media, who had hardly been supportive of Corbyn’s candidature, had a field day accusing Corbyn of associating with a Holocaust denier. Jeremy Corbyn’s response to accusations of an association with Eisen was unequivocal : ‘had I known he was a Holocaust denier I would have had nothing to do with him […]. Obviously Holocaust denial is vile and wrong’. (From 2.47 mins in the following)
There are two principle assumptions relating to the Holocaust, both implicit in Corbyn’s denial of Paul Eisen:
It is an an indisputable fact that Adolf Hitler planned to exterminate the Jews of Europe, that he did so by gassing them with cyanide in specially constructed gas chambers, and that he was thus responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews
People who question any of these premises, do so ONLY because they are neo-Nazis and white supremacists, who wish to conceal the crimes of the Nazis while at the same time sharing their ideology. They are ‘Holocaust deniers’, and all Holocaust deniers are of necessity antisemitic.
The immutability of these two premises leads to another, that anyone who questions any aspect of the Holocaust or who supports the right of others to question the Holocaust, is at best morally compromised, and probably downright evil, deserving responses ranging from suspicion, condemnation, vilification, isolation, hate mail, through to arrest and imprisonment, sometimes for many years. Those who accept unreservedly the two premises are automatically morally superior to anyone who smells a rat.
In 2012 Piers Morgan interviewed the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and asked him about his attitude to the Holocaust. I say ‘asked’, but Morgan puts his own position very clearly.
Morgan states that ‘it is an indisputable fact’ that over 6 million Jews were annihilated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. ‘Do you dispute that 6 million Jews died or no.’ Although Ahmadinejad tries to voice his suspicions about the narrative, aroused principally because so much effort goes into suppressing research, Morgan is unmovable: the Holocaust is a fact: either you believe in it or not (subtext: and if you don’t it’s because you choose to, because you are a bad person).
The biologist Richard Dawkins sees Holocaust debate in precisely the same terms as Piers Morgan:
So according to Richard Dawkins, too, the Holocaust’ is an immutable fact, and those who question it are intellectually on a par with people who think the earth is flat, and morally on a par with racists. Again, the Holocaust is presented as just one fact, a single package – you either believe in it or you don’t.
What is particularly interesting about Dawkins’ position is that he is one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, ostensibly dedicated to pointing out all that’s wrong with religion. One might have thought he would be sensitive to the features of the Holocaust narrative and the protectors of its memory that are evocative of the most intolerant religions, for example Catholicism in medieval times. Criminalising Holocaust denial is like burning Bruno Giordano at the stake for claiming that the earth goes round the sun.
A number of writers have in fact analysed the parallels between the Holocaust and religion, most notably the Israeli writers Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Shraga Elam, Gilad Atzmon, and Yoshua Shalev. Their arguments have been summarised as follows: Most Jews today are either atheists or shun the religion of Judaism. Therefore, the Jewish people had to adopt belief in the ‘Holocaust’ as their new religion. They have spread this religion all over the world. ‘Holocaust’ museums are the new houses of worship and are present in most major cities. The new religion has its commandments, its decrees, its prophets, its high priests, its circle of saints, its rituals and its pilgrimages. It knows neither mercy, nor forgiveness, nor clemency but only the duty of vengeance. The Holocaust religion is coherent enough to define the new ‘antichrists’ (the Deniers) and it is powerful enough to persecute them (Holocaust denial laws).
The ‘Ten Commandments’ of this ‘Holocaust Religion’ have been enunciated as follows:
Remember what Amalek (the Non-Jews) has done to thee.
Thou shalt never compare THE HOLOCAUST with any other Genocide.
Thou shalt never compare the Nazi crimes with those of Israel.
Thou shalt never doubt the number of 6 million Jewish victims.
Thou shalt never doubt that the majority of them died in gas chambers.
Thou shalt not doubt the central role of SATAN Hitler in the extermination of the Jews.
Thou shalt never doubt the right of Israel to exist as the Jewish state.
Thou shalt not criticize the leading Jewish organizations and the Israeli government.
Thou must never criticize Jewish organizations and the Zionist leadership for abandoning the European Jewry in the Nazi era
Thou shalt take these commandments literally and never shew mercy to them that doubt!
So what if you question this Holocaust religion? There is an almost universal assumption that if you don’t believe in the Holocaust it is not because you have an inquiring mind, it’s because you are innately evil. The belief underlying the draconian legislation relating to Holocaust denial would seem to be that the Holocaust is only questioned by neonazis, whose ‘denial’ is motivated by hate and so they should be locked up before they contaminate anyone else.
I have to confess that when I recently learned of the existence of Ursula Haverbeck and her prison sentence for ‘Holocaust denial’, in a European country in the 21st century, for carrying out, as I saw it, serious research into history, I was shocked to the core. I mentioned this to various acquaintances here in Wellington, who were equally horrified, not at the imprisonment of Ursula Haverbeck, but at the thought that I appeared to be questioning the Holocaust narrative. I was quickly made to understand that if I thought there was something worrying, something odd about this punitive response to historical research, it indicated a moral flaw in my makeup.
Soon after I had a twitter exchange with one Daniel Finkelstein, peer of the British realm, ex-editor of The Times. I came across his savage indictment of a prolific tweeter, who had defended David Irving, the notorious ‘Holocaust denier’. When I commented that the said person ‘opposes land theft (in Palestine), ethnic cleansing and child abuse – what’s not to like? Finkelstein, twitter handle ‘Dannythefink’, responded by asking me what I thought of the Holocaust. The exchange continued as follows:
It comes as no surprise that Daniel Finkelstein, who is in total support of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and cruelty in Palestine, assumes morally superiority to me, since I have spoken in defense of a man who has spoken in defense of a man who does research into a field of history. And of course I have refused to commit myself to the undeniability of the Holocaust package …
One can assume that all these experts on the Holocaust, who know enough to be confident of the immutable truth of the Holocaust narrative, whether it be Piers Morgan, Dawkins, or Daniel Finkelstein, would also know another immutable truth about the Holocaust, that the Director of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss was tortured for three days and three nights, and that his testicles were smashed beyond repair,as happened to 137 out of 139 Germans ‘interrogated’ before the Nuremberg trials. One can assume that this makes no difference to their perception of the Holocaust narrative, and they will remain confident of their moral superiority to those of us who are distressed and alarmed by the knowledge that German witness statements at Nuremberg were obtained under the most brutal torture. (From Höss’s confession was derived the figure of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz; the figure was later revised down to 1 million.)
‘Holocaust denial’ is generally conflated with antisemitism, ‘Jew hate’ or racism, and so automatically deserving of vilification. However, even if revisionism is considered to be intrinsically antisemitic, protectors of the Holocaust narrative like to bolster their case by pointing to more general indicators of racism in the culprit.
To the uninitiated the best-known Holocaust revisionist is probably the British historian David Irving, who was convicted of Holocaust denial in an Austrian court and sentenced to three years in prison. Irving was interviewed by Tim Sebastian on the BBC’s Hardtalk in 2000. The programme’s style is intended to be aggressive, but when I watched the programme in 2000, knowing nothing about either Irving or Holocaust denial, I was repelled by Sebastian’s overt hostility to Irving, and I believe that any other impartial person would be too. (Sebastian underlined his antagonism by refraining from shaking Irving’s hand at the end of the interview.)
Sebastian suggests that to deny the gas chambers is hurtful and tasteless (Holocaust denial is immoral per se). But like many others he feels the need to shore up this assumption by showing that there is other evidence that David Irving is a racist, and though he has few examples to work with he is relentless on this point. Irving’s suggestion that he is no more racist than millions of other people is brushed aside with the rather strange claim from the interviewer that there is no evidence for this whatsoever (so only Holocaust deniers are racist). Furthermore, it would appear that honest but naive David Irving confessed in an interview with the Independent that he once called someone a ‘nigger’, something he immediately regretted and remained bitterly ashamed of. As someone put it in the comments below the YouTube video, David Irving is probably the most honest person on the planet.
Another protector of the Holocaust narrative is Max Blumenthal, an American Jew who has a profile as a supporter of the rights of Palestinians. Blumenthal has attracted criticism from some pro-Palestine activists, who see him as an ‘antizionist’ zionist (AZZ), or gatekeeper, due to his attacks on other activists such as Alison Weir and Gilad Atzmon, his opposition to criticism of Jewish power, his prioritising of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and his peddling of the NATO narrative on Syria; Gilad Atzmon sees him as racist, agressive and supremacist. In 2008 Blumenthal attended a meeting by David Irving when he was touring the States, and created this video:
The video is interesting for several reason. Blumenthal has interspersed his footage with clips from old German propaganda films promoting Germans superiority – of course if you question the Holocaust you must be a Nazi and white supremacist. Like Piers Morgan he presents the question of the Holocaust in bald holistic terms, with no allowance for individual aspects, or degrees of doubt. ‘Are you a Holocaust denier’, he asks, pretty much as one might ask ‘are you a paedophile?’
And as Holocaust denial is such a heinous crime, Blumenthal is justified in first finding out the location of the meeting (given freely to him by David Irving), and then outing Irving to the Vicar of the church hosting the meeting as a ‘Holocaust denier’. The smugness, the self-satisfaction of Blumenthal are palpable; he clearly sees himself as a hero, where others might just see a manipulative sneak. In any case we are left in no doubt that Max Blumenthal, the anti-German racist, the Palestine activist who along with Israel promotes the destruction of Syria, is morally superior to the ‘Holocaust denier’ David Irving, regardless of the latter’s transparent integrity.
The claim that ‘Holocaust denial’ is innately antisemitic was blown out of the water when Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, took into his head to declare that the Holocaust was the brainchild of the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Husseini (so not Hitler afterall), that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews, not exterminate them (thereby breaking Commandment 6, see above). There was anger and ridicule in Israel and amongst Jews abroad and Netanyahu was forced to climb down. Although Netanyahu was in general accused of ‘playing into the hands of Holocaust deniers’, he was actually guilty of Holocaust denial as it is defined, ie questioning an aspect of the Holocaust discourse – any German who made Netanyahu’s claim would be arrested. If one accepts the ruling that says ‘Holocaust denial’ is antisemitic, Netanyahu must be antisemitic. Which is clearly nonsense – Netanyahu’s racism does not lie in antisemitism, but in an overweening belief in Jewish exceptionalism.
Conclusion
It could be that those protecting the approved version of the Holocaust with such intolerance, aggression, and hate are absolutely right, that 6 million Jews died, in gas chambers, according to a plan drawn up by Adolf Hitler. I wouldn’t know – I haven’t done the research necessary for me to form an opinion.
However it is manifestly clear that those who question or deny the Holocaust are not united by a common neo-Nazi philosophy, of a type that on the one hand insists that Hitler was not guilty of the crimes attributed to him and on the other claims ‘Hitler was right’ to commit these crimes. Mainstream Holocaust revisionists are academics, philosophers, German patriots or Palestine activists. They do not necessarily support the far-right – many of them probably vote for left of centre parties. Some of them are notable for their immense compassion, such as Paul Eisen, who has always been a strong advocate of justice for Palestine. All of them have shown great courage and integrity, and are prepared to look for the truth and to speak it as they see it.
Regardless of the facts of the matter, criminalisation of responsible research into the Holocaust, and the vilification and isolation of those who carry it out, or even those who simply support their right to do so, is an outrageous denial of academic endeavour and historiography as a discipline. Anyone who supports such criminalisation, vilification and isolation is NOT morally superior but in fact morally and intellectually compromised. Furthermore, any honourable person with a modicum of intelligence and a modicum of courage will fight for the right of all people to carry out research into any branch of history, without treating one particular aspect as sacred and therefore exempt from scrutiny.
An inquiry published Saturday has revealed that there is virtually no physical evidence to support the Mexican government´s version of the 2014 disappearance of 43 students traveling by bus to Mexico City. Government officials insist that a drug gang kidnapped the students at gunpint, killed them and burned the bodies at a dumpsite near the southwesten town of Iguala, but the report, based on forensic records requested by the Associated Press, revealed no signs of a fire on the night in question.
But the notes of a forensic examination of the Cocula dumpsite in Guerrero state in western Mexico shows that investigators could not confirm a fire on the night that the students vanished on September 26, 2014. The AP obtained the documents under a freedom of information request permissible under Mexican law.
The AP inquiry is the latest in a series of independent investigations that undermines the Mexican government´s version of events. Police say that five suspects have confessed to the crimes but an international panel of experts earlier this year concluded that the confessions were obtained by torture.
Earlier this year the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) found animal and human remains at the dumpsite but said none of the remains corresponded to the government´s allegation that the bodies were incinerated by members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel. The Attorney General’s Office in April presented evidence of a huge fire and the discovery of the remains of at least 17 adults but the bone fragments were too badly burned to identify, the Argentine team said.
The government´s handling of the case has triggered massive protests that include parents and friends of the students, trade unons and grassroots organizations who believe that law-enforcement authorities are complicit in the slayings of the 43 students, who had effectively stolen a bus, ironically enough, to attend the commemoration of a 1968 police massacre of students.
The case has marred the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office promising to reduce violence, curb corruption, and human rights abuses in the country.
The death toll from the Nice attacks on the 14th of July, 2016 is rising. Latest reports suggest 84 deaths and possibly one hundred more injured. There have been reports of gunfire and the driver of the truck which drove into the crowd near the beach in Nice is reported to have been shot dead. Once again (as with the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks) there is no-one to stand trial and truthfully answer the questions that need to be asked – who and why?
At this point, there is not much that can be verified about the attack. One cannot exclude the possibility that it may have simply been the action of an insane individual. Atrocities of that type are rare but have happened in the past. But there is, however, the strong suggestion and indeed likelihood that this atrocity is a terrorist attack by ‘Islamists’. So, what does all this mean?
French domestic intelligence (DGSI) chief Patrick Calvar warned on the 26th of June 2016 that an ‘Islamist’ attack on French children would be the trigger for a civil war. He said France was currently on the brink of that civil war. Calvar also predicted that ISIS (Da’esh) would use trucks as weapons. It is not unusual in the never-ending war on terror to hear accurate predictions by intelligence officials before attacks, with the same officials seemingly powerless to prevent them.
This ‘uncanny coincidence’ could be the defining event of our time.
French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls is on record stating that the state of emergency in France would be permanent. There has been increasing pressure on the Hollande regime in France to change course in the Middle East. Attempts to reconcile with Russia and lift the sanctions have been blocked by Hollande and Valls, who are puppets of the Jewish Lobby. The Zionists want to continue the war on Syria, Iran and Russia. The Zionists have full control over US/NATO policy. Therefore, the ‘war on terror’, which was created as a pretext to further Zionist geopolitical interests, must be continued.
I believe this is the trigger for a civil war French intelligence warned us about. The question is whether the war will become high intensity or continue on a relatively low-intensity trajectory. There have been police ‘whistleblowers’ in France who have warned of huge caches of arms in major cities, capable of arming hundreds of thousands of men. However, one must be cautious in referring to such ‘whistleblowers’ as they have proven to be highly unreliable and may be spreading disinformation.
In any case, the public’s belief that we are in a ‘state of war’ and that all military interventions abroad are therefore necessary will be enough to make citizens look to the state for protection – an oligarchic state which is currently pursuing a brutal class war against workers.
As 90 percent or more of intelligence operations today involve media disinformation, we cannot possibly assume that any of the reports we are hearing are accurate. However, it is hard to see how a psyop could have been carried out in the Promenade des Anglais which is so central in Nice. What we can say for sure is that the attack serves the two constants of the war on terror dialectic. The narrative would read as follows:
1. Make the state of emergency permanent, empowering the oligarchic state and further demoralising citizens by dividing the working class along religious and racial lines. This is part of NATO’s ‘strategy of tension’ in accordance with the longstanding intelligence operation Gladio. Citizens must turn to the anti-social state for ‘security’, thus precluding social revolt.
2. Justify an all out attack on Syria to finish the job of destroying Arab civilisation, in accordance with Zionism’s geopolitical interests. Only the willfully ignorant could possibly believe that ISIS is an enemy of France when the French have never had better relations with the country which openly backs them – Saudi Arabia. The intelligence reports, declassified documents and admissions of the highest officials of the French and American governments all confirm that ISIS is Israel’s Arab legion.
Both those two above-mentioned goals serve Zionism and until the French people liberate themselves from its yoke, Zionism will continue to poison the minds of men, making them consent to policies that no honest and compassionate human being would countenance. An awakening of working-class militancy is occurring but the labour movement in France remains divided and led by social-democratic reformists. Now, more than ever, seeing the link between terrorism and class war is essential if any political and social change is to occur. In an era of high-finance treason, oligarchy, austerity, and the triumph of avarice, terror increasingly becomes a feature of the normal rather than an exceptional exercise of state power.
In the aftermath of last night’s bizarre ‘terrorist’ attack in Nice, France, one of the most poplar talking points which appears throughout much of the western media coverage is this idea that terrorism is now a ‘normal part of our everyday lives’ and that a permanent state of military alert at home is something the public needs to get used to.
One of the central voices of this police state talking is French Prime Minister and avid Israeli advocate Manuel Valls. Earlier today Valls stated that, “France has to learn to live with terrorism.”
In this way, the security state is attempting to integrate terrorism as a day-to-day 24/7, 365 day per week agenda issue – which is said to require a hyper-militarized security state, just like Israel (notice how Israel is invoked by neoconservatives and western Zionist supports ad nauseam in the security conversation), to deal with ‘the threat.’
This seems to be the cornerstone of Valls’ political relevance, which he has basically repeated over and over, for the better part of the last two years despite the fact that both the Charlie Hebdo and Paris Bataclan events exhibited very clear signs of GLADIO-style domestic terror stage play.
“We have entered – we all feel it – a new era characterised by the lasting presence of ‘hyper-terrorism.’
“We must be fully conscious of the threat, and react with a very great force and great lucidity. There will be attacks. Large-scale attacks. It’s a certainty. This hyper-terrorism is here to stay.”
TERROR SUMMIT: Admitted Zionist Manuel Valls pictured together with Israel’s fundamentalist Zionist leader Benjamin Netanyahu
In January 2016, while addressing an Israeli lobby delegation, Valls read off a list of ‘ISIS’ terrorist attacks along with other ‘terrorist’ incidents in Israel, claiming that this was proof that, “we are in a world war”, while not ever uttering a word about Israel’s brutal, militarized occupation and their systematic ethnic cleansingregime waged against the native Palestinian residents since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Israeli CRIF spokesman Roger Cukierman applauded Valls’s single-sided adherence to the Israeli lobby, by saying, “On a number of occasions, you said very powerful things: That anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, that France without its Jews is no longer France,” Cukierman said. “This makes you a dear politician.”
Is this a case of the state and its transnational security conglomerates manipulating the public into unquestioningly accepting an indefinite siege mentality and a permanent, full-blown police state?
It appears once again, that we are witnessing an attempt to transform large parts of western society – through a further realignment of public and state political and economic priorities into what is commonly referred to as “security theatre,” which, in reality, has nothing to do with actual security, and everything to do with domestic political and geopolitical theatre.
In an interview with Hala Gorani of CNN, the man who served as Tony (the war criminal) Blair’s Director of Communications from 1997 to 2003, Alastair Campbell, denounced referendums as a danger to democracy. Campbell is clearly enraged that the British people had the audacity to vote against the wishes of the establishment; and his remarks are the epitome of elitist thinking – which holds that ordinary people are too stupid to make important decisions on their own.
We pick the conversation up just after Campbell discusses the surge in working class people who voted for Brexit in the UK, and are supporting Donald Trump in the US:
Gorani: “Is that a failure of the establishment in not having responded for decades to real concerns of how globalisation has hurt common, ordinary workers?”
Campbell: “Absolutely it is. But the point is… this is why referendums… I said this the day after the last general election; I was on BBC Question Time and the first question was will Britain leave the EU? I said I hoped not, because I hope the British people will save the politicians from themselves; and I said then and was howled down for being anti-democratic: referendums are dangerous in a parliamentary democracy.”
Gorani: “Why is that?”
Campbell: “Because we’ve had a referendum in one of the most ill-informed, lying debates that I can ever recall anywhere in the world. We’ve been like a banana republic in the last few days; this has been a joke.”
So in Campbell’s view, the Brexit referendum is “dangerous” because the people of Britain had been lied to by the leave campaign in the run-up to the vote. This is coming from the man who was a pivotal figure in disseminating the tsunami of lies, fear and war propaganda in order to convince the public that Britain had to launch the most destructive war of the 21st century: the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. The man who was an integral part of pushing the slogan that the West was ‘bringing democracy to the Middle East;’ believes a democratic vote in Britain is “dangerous.”
Campbell was responsible for circulating the two fraudulent dossiers – the September and the Iraq – into the mainstream media in order to convince the British people that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ It was revealed in 2010 that Campbell had ordered the September dossier to be altered to fit more in line with a speech from George (the war criminal) Bush in 2002, after Bush stated that Iraq would be able to build a nuclear bomb within a year, whereas the initial draft of the British dossier said it would be at least two years.
Campbell is also regurgitating the Orwellian propaganda line that is being spread throughout the Western media: that somehow a democratic referendum is undemocratic. Just because the vote flew in the face of the British establishment, the presstitutes are engaging in intellectual jujitsu in order to demonise the leave vote. Would they be doing so if Britain voted to remain in the EU? I think not.
The Guardian (which was pro-remain) is at the forefront of pushing this narrative. This is evident in their article titled: Can we have our parliamentary democracy back please? The article actually quotes former British PM, Clement Attlee, who said referendums have too “often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism.” It’s just ridiculous; this is spin on steroids – trying to associate a democratic referendum with fascism.
Considering the fact that Britain commits incessant crimes overseas in the name of democracy, it is abhorrent that the democratic wishes of the British people are being marginalized by the establishment.
The establishment is terrified of direct democracy, and giving the people votes on issues that actually matter. The majority of parliamentarians in the UK are in the pocket of special interests, and represent the interests of the people in no way, shape, or form.
In Britain’s ‘great parliamentary democracy,’ the people were taken into a war (despite widespread public opposition) that killed and destroyed the lives of millions of innocent people in 2003. Britain’s ‘great parliamentary democracy’ has brought the people a surveillance state beyond the Stasi’s wildest dreams, in addition to involving Britain in Libya, Syria and countless other abominations. How can the people do any worse than our great parliamentarians?
The Western elite are terrified of democracy, and they view the wishes of the people as a danger to their rule. If the British people voted in favour of remaining within the EU, the establishment would not be demonising the vote as “dangerous” and fascistic.
Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report.
Wednesday, two shocking videos of police officers fatally shooting civilians (Alton Sterling and Philando Castile) surfaced. The day before, many were appalled to hear the Director of the FBI announce that Hillary Clinton would not be charged for mishandling classified information. The two events may seem unrelated, but at bottom, they concern the same fundamental problem: impunity.
Impunity is the essence of power. What, after all, is power? Is it simply the capacity to exert unjust force? The ability to impress one’s will upon the flesh or belongings of another? No, it’s more than that.
Most anyone can wield unjust force. Anyone could walk out onto the street right now and exert their will on somebody weaker: say, pushing over an old lady or stealing candy from a baby. And the toughest, or most heavily-armed guy in town can strong-arm just about any other single person.
But isolated incidents of aggression do not constitute power. The “reign” of the rogue rampager is generally short-lived. It only lasts until the community recognizes him as the menace to society that he is and neutralizes him.
Power isn’t simply about the exertion of unjust force. It is about what happens next, after the exertion. Does the perpetrator generally get away with, or not? Systematically getting away with it – or impunity – is where power truly lies. And that is what makes agents of the State different from any other bully. State agents can violate rights with reliable impunity because a critical mass of the public considers the aggression of state agents to be exceptionally legitimate. Impunity is power, and as Lord Acton said, power corrupts.
The Impunity of the Badge
State impunity is at the root of the problem of police violence. As agents of the exalted State, the police are seen as paladins of public order. The populace grants cops a special dispensation to commit violence that would be considered criminal if perpetrated by anybody else. This privilege is enshrined in law most clearly as the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” As Evan Bernick of the Institute for Justice wrote:
In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise ‘qualified immunity’ as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights.
When victims of police violence or their heirs seek redress and are awarded monetary payments, it is taxpayers, and not the cops, who pick up the tab. Police officers are rarely even prosecuted for violence inflicted while they’re on the clock. The worst that an offending officer can generally expect to face is getting fired, but he will more likely just get a paid suspension.
Thus insulated from responsibility, officer treatment of “mundanes” is predictably often grossly irresponsible. Confident in being sheltered from consequences by their “blue privilege,” officers are far more prone to indulge in lethal cowardice: to place “officer safety” so far above civilian rights that they are willing to gun down a stranger at the slightest whiff of potential danger. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile each carried a gun, as they have the natural right to do. Neither threatened the officers with his weapon, or even brandished it. Yet in both cases, merely becoming aware of the guns sent a cop into a murderous panic. Both Sterling and Castile were fatally shot multiple times in the chest.
The Impunity of High Office
State impunity not only corrupts the regime’s low-level enforcers, but its elite policy makers as well. The FBI let Hillary Clinton off the hook for secrecy violations she committed as Secretary of State, even though these were much more egregious than violations that have earned lower-level personnel decades in prison. She used technology that was more open to being compromised by spies and hackers, while at the same less open to legal and public scrutiny.
But the kinds of activities she was hiding are far more criminal than the fact that she hid them. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton played a key role in bringing war to such places as Libya, Syria, and Honduras, and in escalating the war in Afghanistan. She is complicit in causing untold death and misery.
Yet, thanks to her connections and her position in the state power apparatus, she faces no consequences for her crimes, and is free to acquire even more immunity and power as a likely President of the United States.
It is the “sovereign immunity” she enjoys as an officeholder that has made Hillary Clinton so reckless and cavalier about the havoc she has wreaked around the world. If she thought she might ever be held accountable for upending entire countries, she would have likely been far less warlike in her policies.
From policing to foreign policy, impunity corrupts, and absolute impunity corrupts absolutely.
A radical transformation is occurring inside US society as local police, government agencies and even colleges are stockpiling military-grade weapons, as well as military training. How did this perilous scenario come to pass under a Democratic president?
Ironically, and potentially tragically, at the very same time Sheriff Obama seems determined to disarm Americans of their cherished Second Amendment, US police forces are steadily stockpiling an arsenal of weapons that would be the envy of many a foreign army. And those weapons are not just harmlessly gathering dust in the closet. Indeed, with alarming regularity the weapons, equipment and training are being put to use against the very citizens the police were meant to serve and protect.
In 2014, the ACLU released a startling report on the militarization of US police forces. In it, investigators examined the cache of weapons being collected by US states, which then distribute the hardware to localities. Here is a list of the military toys that just one state – Arizona – got courtesy of Uncle Sam: 32 bomb suits, 704 units of night vision equipment, 1,034 guns, of which 712 are rifles, 42 forced entry tools, such as battering rams, 830 units of surveillance and reconnaissance equipment, 13,409 personal protective equipment (PPE) and/or uniforms, 120 utility trucks, 64 armored vehicles, 4 GPS devices, 17 helicopters, 21,211 other types of military equipment.
The immediate problem with handing over such massive firepower to state and local agencies is the same problem confronted by every military: Eventually those spanking new weapons, and regardless how lethal they are, will be used. Yet the Obama administration, which has had a full 8 years to address the issue, has let the problem fester to the point where trust – as witnessed by the tragic events in Dallas last week – has completely broken down between members of the American public and the police.
The argument I would like to make here, in light of the ongoing string of American tragedies, is that the militarization of the police – as opposed to the police officers themselves – is the real culprit. Our civil servants were never meant to be members of standing armies, working on behalf of faceless corporate entities.
Last year, according to an exhaustive report in the Washington Post, 990 Americans were killed by the police – more than two times the recently reported compilation of fatalities. Meanwhile, with over 500 US citizens already killed by the police this year, 2016 is on track to exceed last year’s recording-breaking tally by a wide margin.
Incidentally, lest we think police-related killings are simply a manifestation of race, the number of White Americans killed by police last year (494) was almost two-times the number of Black Americans killed in the same period (258). The investigative journalism group ProPublica, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012, reported that 44 percent of all those killed by police were in fact white.
If the police had more training on how to defuse potentially explosive situations instead of receiving military tactical training, would the streets of America be the better for it? I think the answer to the question is obvious.
Presently, citizens and police alike are being victimized by a system that recklessly throws a lot of military weapons and military training into communities in the belief that firepower alone will deter crime (which, in many cases, is symptomatic of a faltering economy). That militaristic approach has clearly failed. All things considered, it would be more helpful and less divisive for Americans to promote the idea that ‘Human Life Matters’ – as opposed to Black Lives, White Lives or What-have-you Lives – when considering the disturbing new phenomenon of police violence.
How did we get here?
I am just old enough to remember the days when American neighborhoods were not the running battlefields many have become today, a less neurotic time when police resorting to armored vehicles, menacing weaponry and military tactics was the great exception not the rule. Observatory Hill, the diverse, middle-class Pittsburgh neighborhood where I enjoyed a crime-free childhood in the 1970s, is no longer remotely recognizable to me. A healthy, vibrant, God-fearing community just 30 years ago, Observatory Hill now plays occasional host to visiting SWAT teams searching for the latest drug pusher or violent offender.
These SWAT visits, however, are no longer reserved for hunting down the occasional criminal in the hood. Excessive police force is also being employed to crackdown on democratic demonstrations against the powers-that-be. To use my hometown of Pittsburgh yet again as an example, consider what happened in October 2009 amid a G-20 Summit. University of Pittsburgh students, protesting peacefully against the global movers and shakers, said they were subjected to heavy-handed police tactics that included the use of tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and, freshly introduced for the first time in the US, sound cannons [officially known as the Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, the only other time this device was reportedly used was by the US military in Iraq]. Nearly 200 people were arrested during the protests.
Bill Quigley, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, explained in an interview with Democracy Now what he saw in Pittsburgh during the G-20.
“Well, we saw a heavily militarized town… The police really were supposed to be there for terrorists, and when no terrorists showed up, they turned their power and their toys, including this, first time in the United States, sound cannon, on protesters, and unfortunately, in the evenings, on the students… It was a complete overreaction. The people of Pittsburgh worked really hard to put on a good peace protest, to talk — challenge globalization, to talk about immigration, Iraq, Afghanistan and all these things. And the security forces were just totally out of hand.”
Following Pittsburgh’s no-contest showdown against Robocop, Boston got a glimpse of full-blown martial law following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings in which three people died. Former Senator Ron Paul said the government’s over-the-top response to the attacks should frighten Americans more than the attack itself.
In an article entitled ‘Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston’, Paul compared the door-to-door searches without warrants for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to “scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic.”
“These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul wrote.
The former US statesman could have been paraphrasing one of America’s Founders when he reminded: “We have been conditioned to believe that the job of the government is to keep us safe, but in reality the job of the government is to protect our liberties. Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe… they can only do so by taking away our liberties. That is what happened in Boston.”
Benjamin Franklin was of a similar mind when he warned over 200 years ago: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
From the streets of Los Angeles to New York City, an increasing number of Americans are asking, as investigative reporter Radley Balko did in his 2014 book, ‘Rise of the Warrior Cop,’ how Americans came to inherit a system where “protests are met with flash grenades, pepper spray, and platoons of riot teams dressed like Robocops… and order is preserved by armed government agents too often conditioned to see streets and neighborhoods as battlefields and the citizens they serve as the enemy?”
The answer can be found in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Sept 23, 1996, Section 1033 of the NDAA allowed for the transfer of excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies.
The American public only started getting suspicious about the transformation of their police into something akin to a paramilitary outfit following the 2014 shooting of unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, and the protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri thereafter. In response to the riots, police deployed armored MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) assault vehicles and firearms, together with police that appeared better outfitted for a role in a Star Wars battle scene as opposed to a public protest in a suburb of St. Louis.
Forbes magazine put the police purchases into perspective: “Pentagon donations to the police reached $532 million in 2012 and $449 million in 2013. The figure has already topped $750 million in 2014…. A new MRAP sells for somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000 but law enforcement agencies are picking up these valuable beasts for free through the 1033 program.”
This inexplicable hoarding of guns and ammo presents not just a threat to the citizens of the United States. It also presents a real problem for the police themselves who are increasingly now looked upon with fear and loathing by many people who believe the police no longer uphold the motto to “protect and serve.” Better to de-militarize the police forces and let the US Army keep their lethal toys for themselves.
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