Is Bibi A Lizard?
By Gilad Atzmon | September 12, 2016
Netanyahu’s recent ethnic-cleansing video offers us a spectacular glimpse into Jewish identity politics and the ease with which the Jews morph between ideology and political stance. In the video below, PM Netanyahu accuses the Palestinians and their supporters, by making it a condition of peace that Israel withdraws its illegal settlement, of leanings towards ethnic cleansing.
I am not here going to argue with Netanyahu’s ridiculous idea. I am obviously in total agreement with Gideon Levy and others who have taken the trouble, time and again, to prove that Israel is the only ethnic cleanser between the river and the sea.
But if Israel is the only ethnic cleanser in Palestine, then all Bibi is doing is simply projecting i.e. attributing his own racist symptoms onto the Palestinians and their supporters. Now, I’m no great fan of Freud and even less enthusiastic about his terminology, but he sure did help us understand the Jew or, shall we say, the Jewish psychological nature. Seemingly, projection is at the core of the Jewish psyche. Jews see racism everywhere, simply because they attribute their own racism to others. So, Netanyahu, in accusing others of ethnic cleansing, is simply projecting his own symptoms onto the Palestinians.
But it goes further. The concern with people being ethnically cleansed is a humanist, empathic position, traditionally associated within Left and progressive thought. It is in fact totally foreign to the Lebensraum, racist ideology that drives the Zionist precept of which PM Netanyahu is a devout follower.
So one may wonder how Bibi managed to transcend himself from oppressor to victim? How does he manage to so abruptly switch sides from being a practitioner of Lebensraum into a ‘progressive voice’? The answer is devastatingly simple. For a Jew to switch sides, to move from the hard right into the poetic left and vice versa is a mere verbal exercise. This capacity of metamorphosis is embedded within Jewish identity politics and I guess that Kafka was the first to point us towards it.
So, with a little help from Binyamin Netanyahu, Israelis mange to simultaneously be oppressors as well as victims. But are the anti Zionists that different?
How long did it take Max Blumenthal to morph from being an enthusiastic Zionist Nazi Hunter into a pro- Palestinian who only occasionally hates Germans for being White. The same can be said about pretty much every Jewish Left and anti-Zionist organisation. They preach anti-racism in the name of the most enlightened liberal and progressive ideologies but at the same time, they themselves operate within racially inclusive political cells.
The so-called ‘antisemites – those who hate Jews for being Jews, used to refer to Jews as chameleons. They simply could not understand the lack of integrity at the heart of Jewish politics. They could not grasp how Jews switch allies so rapidly.
Netanyahu’s video this morning certainly made me wonder at how comfortable he seems lying compulsively in front of the camera. But what, I wonder, happens to Bibi when he faces himself, alone in the morning in front of the mirror? Who (or what) does he see in front of him? Is it the head of the Likud party? Is it a progressive humanist? Or is it simply a lizard, a chameleon who morphs constantly as it moves along.
I guess David Icke has, more than once, attempted to address this question…
Reported Death Of TTIP – An Abhorrent Political Deception
By Graham Vanbergen | TruePublica | September 9, 2016
The global mainstream media have loudly hailed the stunning success of the peoples uprising against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP in the light of its demise. In the last few years protests broke out all over Europe as the unelected bureaucrats steamed ahead with this unpopular trade deal, even after the results of the largest ever consultation study in the EU Commission’s history resulted in a 97% negative response of 150,000 people.
The emerging movement spawned enormous online activism never seen before, culminating in the largest petition in Europe’s history with a staggering collective of over 3.2 million signatures delivered by passionate foot-soldiers right to the epicentre of where the political elite inhabit in the EU. The beating heart of TTIP activism was Berlin, Paris and London. This is not to forget the huge protest effort made by citizens across almost all of the EU’s major cities.
Infographic: Corporate Europe Observatory
When preparing for TTIP negotiations, 560 meetings took place between 2012 and 2013. Just 4% were represented by public interest and civil society. Unashamedly, the Commission allowed 92% of all TTIP meetings to be dominated by lobbyists and corporate trade associations Today, these shadowy agitators amount to over 30,000 grey suits stalking the halls of the Commission HQ in the de facto capital of the European Union in Brussels.
In May of this year Wikileaks confirmed that TTIP amounted to “a huge transfer of power from people to big business.” Greenpeace Netherlands then leaked 248 secret pages of the controversial trade deal between the U.S. and EU, exposing how environmental regulations, climate protections and consumer rights were effectively being “bartered away behind closed doors.” Tensions amongst civil society rose to fever pitch with the devastating news.
Der Spiegel Germany wrote “Protests Threaten Trans-Atlantic Trade Deal” as the leaks became public. With concerted effort activists seemingly brought the trade agreement to the brink of collapse within days. At the same time, Merkel’s grandly staged meeting with US President Barack Obama in Hanover was nothing more than showmanship. It aimed to show the strain of negotiations, as if somehow Germany (and therefore the EU) was going to get a better deal from TTIP and pacify the building rage of her citizens.
As if to rub salt into the wounds a report by TruePublica, published in The European Financial Review confirmed that corruption in the EU trading bloc had now reached 14 per cent of GDP – a staggering €1 trillion. By now 70 per cent of all European citizens believe corruption to be at the heart of their respective governments and the EU Commission itself, and that a corporate coup d’tat is taking the place of democratic principles that Europe fought so hard for over generations.
Then, out of the blue, an unexpected announcement is made last week. The media on all sides of the spectrum is broadly going along with the story that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls and German Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel have agreed that negotiations between the EU and the US on TTIP, have essentially failed. That’s it – the deal is dead. Hoorah!
The Telegraph – “EU’s TTIP trade deal with the US has collapsed, says Germany”
The Independent – “TTIP negotiations should stop, French government says”
ZeroHedge – “The Americans Give Us Nothing”: France Effectively Kills TTIP’
RT – ‘TTIP negotiations between EU and US have de facto failed’ – German economy minister”
Not so fast. You don’t think that the American’s are going to let the biggest trade deal in human history fail just because 97% of citizens reject it do you? No, France and Germany just need a plan. After Brexit, Britain can stay out of the firing line of the protest movement for a while.
Mass protests in Japan
So, they looked to Japan. It had the same problem with its version of the trade deal similarly called TPP. Mass protests broke out as the same secret meetings gripped the political foreground. Its Prime Minister “Shinzo Abe, instructed the coalition early in the year not to “forcibly” proceed with the TPP negotiations until after elections, Kyodo News reported. Abe genuinely “feared a voter backlash in the Upper House elections” amid the growing scandal of a 242 page leaked document laying bare the bones of the deal. Having been elected June 11th, Abe now intends to force the deal through “this fall”.
I made enquiries with sources close to the ground on the EU/US TTIP deal along the same lines; was this simply a delaying tactic until after elections in 2017 for France’s Hollande and Germany’s Merkel? The response was not wholly unexpected.
“The seemingly early celebration of the end of TTIP has also surprised us a bit. Despite last week’s statements by the German and French trade ministers and the way these have been portrayed, we are continuing to campaign against the deal.”
In another exchange:
“The declarations of French and German leaders aim to: divert attention away from CETA, reduce the numbers in the streets of Germany on 17th September, put TTIP on hold while elections take place in France, Germany and the USA. The fifteenth round of TTIP negotiations will happen in the first week of October… This has been confirmed by our US friends.”
I then contacted Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). It is a research and campaign group working to expose and challenge the privileged access and influence enjoyed by corporations and their lobby groups in EU policy making. They have been exposing the misinformation and propaganda of the EU Commission for years.
The CEO response to my same question was emphatic and quite clear:
“Public opposition to CETA and TTIP has led French and German leaders to please voters with words against TTIP. Unfortunately, the next round of TTIP negotiations is scheduled for early October and no EU leader has publicly said he or she will vote against CETA in the EU Council in October. This is clearly not the end of TTIP and CETA, just the beginning of electoral campaigns in France and Germany.”
Germany and France have taken the same stance as Japan on these trade agreements, they are not dead at all – they are lying.
I then spoke to Peter Koenig, an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources and posed the same question. He said:
“Following a debate on PressTV Edition Française, where I was one of the interviewees, the focus was on the German and French Ministers’ expressed conclusion that TTIP negotiations failed. I wrote an article “The TTIP is Dead”, hoping that spreading of this ‘promise’ by the highest authorities of the two key countries in the EU would make sure among the European populace that any deviation from this ‘promise’ would be perceived as a lie and receive strongest public expressions of protest.”
“In the meantime, it has become clear that the TTIP and TISA ‘deals’ are not at all dead. In fact, shortly after the German and French announcements, Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelected President of the European Commission, declared majestically that for him the negotiations are not dead.”
Koenig continues,
“There are other means to infiltrate the TTIP into the EU, i.e. through CETA and according to Juncker, doesn’t need ratification of each EU members’ parliament. Then there is TISA, the even more secret ‘trade agreement’ between 50 countries around the globe. TISA could easily be used to clandestinely impose TTIP rules on Europe.”
Nick Dearden, Director of Global Justice Now confirmed what Peter Koenig is saying in a Guardian piece “Think TTIP is a threat to democracy? There’s another trade deal that’s already signed”
“TTIP is not alone. Its smaller sister deal between the EU and Canada is called CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement). CETA is just as dangerous as TTIP; indeed it’s in the vanguard of TTIP-style deals, because it’s already been signed by the European commission and the Canadian government. It now awaits ratification over the next 12 months.
The one positive thing about CETA is that it has already been signed and that means that we’re allowed to see it. Its 1,500 pages show us that it’s a threat to not only our food standards, but also the battle against climate change, our ability to regulate big banks to prevent another crash and our power to renationalise industries.
CETA contains a new legal system, open only to foreign corporations and investors. Should the British government make a decision, say, to outlaw dangerous chemicals, improve food safety or put cigarettes in plain packaging, a Canadian company can sue the British government for “unfairness”. And by unfairness this simply means they can’t make as much profit as they expected. The “trial” would be held as a special tribunal, overseen by corporate lawyers.”
What is missing from this statement is that any American corporation headquartered in Canada can sue any nation in the EU via CETA for the same reasons – namely, loss of ‘expected’ profits. They don’t actually have to be Canadian corporations.
As Global Justice also confirms, Canada has itself fought and lost a plentiful and diverse range of legal cases brought by US corporations under the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) for “outlawing carcinogenic chemicals in petrol, reinvesting in local communities and halting the devastation of quarries.” If TTIP doesn’t bring this horrific erosion of democratic power to the shores of Europe, CETA will. ‘Brexit’ will mean for nothing. It will be sold to the British people as a global trade agreement which will be heralded as a great success and supported by much of the media who themselves have a vested interest in such deals.
In the end, does it matter if it’s called TTIP, CETA, TISA and the like, they are all shadowy unaccountable acronyms designed to enrich the few via extreme neoliberal capitalism under the guise of free trade.
CIA Continues to Cover Up Its Involvement in Chile’s 9/11 Coup
Victim of one the many coups on democracy carried out by the United States: Salvador Allende
teleSUR | September 9, 2016
Though intelligence documents from the 1973 coup period have been declassified since 1999, the CIA continues to censor them.
The CIA continues to withhold information on its involvement in the Sept. 11, 1973 coup that led to the death of President Salvador Allende in Chile, followed by a deadly dictatorship, according to documents posted Friday by the National Security Archive.
In the list of published documents, the section regarding Chile is censored. The President’s Daily Briefs, the intelligence reports given daily to the U.S. president, in particular former President Richard Nixon days before Allende’s death, were among those censored.
According to Peter Kornbluh, director of the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, censorship on this issue makes no sense since the intelligence agency has officially acknowledged its ties to those who plotted the coup from inside the Chilean military, and declassified several intelligence reports since.
“The CIA is trying—but failing—to hold history hostage,” Kornbluh said. “The CIA is attempting to cover up what Nixon knew about coup plotting in Chile and when he knew it, as well as hiding the CIA’s own contacts and connections to the coup plotters.”
According to the documents, three days before the coup—and on the day of the coup—the CIA gave Nixon an intelligence report on the progress of the efforts inside the Chilean military to overthrow Allende, a socialist.
In one document, a CIA operative in Santiago named Jack Devine identifies the new date of the planned coup for the next day, September 11, and confirms all three branches of the Chilean armed forces along with the police “are involved in this action.”
The same sources told the CIA that General Augusto Pinochet, who would later become a dictator with the support of the U.S., was in communication with Air Force General Gustavo Leigh about the planned coup. The Air Force would later bomb La Moneda presidential palace, where Allende and his closest allies were on Sept. 11.
The CIA told the White House that a “key officer” in the coup attempt requested U.S. assistance in case the Chilean military encountered any resistance, according to the documents.
Kornbluh said his institution would press for the release of the censored information.
“The documents provided to Richard Nixon on Chile can and should be released for the sanctity of the historical record. The public has a right to know what the President knew, and when he knew it,” he said.
The Facts Of 9/11 Must Be Suppressed
The towers didn’t fall down. They blew up.
Winter Patriot | September 10, 2016
One day when I had nothing to do, I watched a video in which John McMurtry tried to explain why the facts of 9/11 are suppressed.
McMurtry expresses himself in long sequences of long words, in complex paragraphs peppered with academic jargon but no explanation of what these specialized words mean. It’s easy to see why they call him “Professor.”
The video runs for almost an hour, and I suppose he finally comes to a coherent point, but I can’t tell you for sure, because I fell asleep long before the end. But that’s probably all right, because I must have needed the sleep.
I don’t mean to be harsh on Professor McMurtry, for I admire what he’s doing. Too few of our smartest people have said in public what they all must know in private: that the official story of 9/11 is impossible to believe if you know anything at all about it.
It seems to me that those with academic credentials ought to be leaders in all realms of thought, especially the search for truth, and certainly including the truth about 9/11. Too many of them have failed us by pretending we already have the truth, when clearly we don’t.
I give Professor McMurtry a world of credit for standing up and speaking out. I only wish we could all understand what he has to say.
~~~
Why the Facts of 9/11 Must be Suppressed
I have my own notion of why the facts of 9/11 must be suppressed, and I can explain it in five short paragraphs:
(1) The official story of 9/11 has been used to justify drastic military actions by the United States and its allies, actions which have brought death, destruction, and chaos to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and many other countries.
(2) The same story has also been used to justify drastic changes in domestic policy, in the United States and in much of the world. These changes have resulted in the persecution, incarceration, torture, and death of many innocent people, not to mention the erosion of civil rights and the perversion of the democratic process in every nation that once enjoyed these things.
(3) If it were widely and clearly understood that the official story of 9/11 is not only obviously false but a carefully crafted fiction, the military actions described above would be seen as unjustified acts of mass murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity; the policy changes would be seen as acts of treason; the people responsible for these actions might be in danger of accountability; and the new policies themselves might even be in danger of reversal, in which case the people who benefit from these policies might need to find a new way to feed at the public trough.
(4) If the official story were true, the facts of 9/11 would support it, and independent research would confirm it. Therefore the facts would be widely publicized and independent researchers would be encouraged. But none of this is happening, and that’s because the facts of 9/11 undermine the official story, and the independent researchers destroy it.
(5) Therefore the facts and the independent researchers must both be suppressed. Otherwise the new policies would be in danger, the people who implemented them would be in danger, the people who profit from them would be slightly inconvenienced, and the perpetrators of 9/11 might actually be brought to justice.
~~~
Some Facts of 9/11 that Must Be Suppressed
We now come to the part of the story that cannot be told in an hour, or even six hours.
The following list contains some facts of 9/11 that defenders of the official story wish you didn’t know, some questions they wish you wouldn’t ask, some thoughts they wish you wouldn’t entertain, some conclusions they wish you wouldn’t draw … and some hints that could help you talk yourself out of taking it seriously, which is exactly what they want you to do.
— It is not unthinkable, unknown, or even uncommon for a government to attack its own people, blame the attack on an enemy, and use the attack as a pretext for a war which would otherwise be considered unjustified. Such an attack is often called a “False Flag” attack, and the trick has been played again and again throughout American History. Fortunately, most Americans are well-enough educated to be virtually unaware of history, so they can’t even imagine such a thing.
— In 2000, a think tank called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) published a position paper called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” (RAD) which called for enormous and rapid increases in US military spending in order to secure “full spectrum dominance” over the entire world, but noted that “the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” Of course, having called for a major attack, they sat back and waited to see what would happen.
— A year later, following the theft of the 2000 Presidential election, several PNAC members, signatories of RAD, occupied key positions in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney as Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, and Paul Wolfowitz as Assistant Secretary of Defense. These men were perfectly positioned to prevent the attacks, if they had wanted to do so. They were also legally obligated to prevent them, whether they wanted to do so or not. But patriotic Americans are smart enough not to know this.
— In July of 2001, the Italian city of Genoa hosted an international economic summit. The Italian government, fearing a potential terrorist attack, installed anti-aircraft batteries around the city. What could this mean? If your mind was warped, you might think that since no terrorist group has an air force, the Italians must have been worried about terrorists flying hijacked airplanes.
— During the Genoa summit, President Bush and the rest of the American delegation didn’t sleep at the hotel with all the other delegates. They stayed on an aircraft carrier offshore, where anti-aircraft security was even better. If you’ve had too much to drink, you might assume the Americans were even more worried than the Italians.
— Less than two months later, Bush and others in his administration claimed to have been caught by surprise, and said no one could have imagined terrorists using a hijacked airplane to attack a building. And you might wonder: if they were so afraid of it in July, why couldn’t they imagine it in September? But that’s a lunatic thought.
— According to the official timelines, the FBI knew the names of all 19 hijackers before the FAA knew that 4 airplanes had been hijacked. You might ask yourself how the FBI knew the identity of the hijackers before the FAA knew the planes had been hijacked, but only if you were hallucinating.
— We have never seen any credible video evidence that any of the 19 hijackers were in any of the airports from which the hijacked flights originated, on the day of the attacks. Shortly after the attacks, FBI agents were reportedly working double-shifts, scanning the airport security videos for signs of the hijackers. But later, we were told no security videos from those airports were available, because their recording systems had failed. If you were unreasonably suspicious, you might wonder whether this was true.
— Shortly after the FBI identified the dead hijackers, at least six of them contacted major news agencies to say that they were still alive, that they’d had nothing to do with the attacks, and that they were surprised to see their names and faces on the news. The FBI never changed its original list, nor did it acknowledge that its list could not possibly be correct. But fixation on such minor details is a sure sign of mental illness.
— The World Trade Center complex consisted of seven buildings, and all seven were destroyed on 9/11, although only the Twin Towers (Buildings 1 and 2) made an impact on the news cycle. But it would be silly to think the other 5 buildings were deliberately ignored.
— The official report of the 9/11 Commission, which claims to be a complete account of the events of the day, fails to mention the destruction of Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6, which were also never mentioned in any official reports. This is only to be expected, because these buildings were less than 100 stories tall.
— The 9/11 Commission also failed to mention the destruction of Building 7, which was the subject of a subsequent NIST report. The existence of the NIST report proves beyond any doubt that the 9/11 Commission did not tell us the whole story, although the Commission specifically claimed to have done so. But nobody in his right mind would be concerned about such an irrelevant detail.
— The destruction of Building 7 was reported by both BBC and CNN, more than twenty minutes before it happened. To this day we have had no credible explanation for how this could have happened. But only a crackpot would expect or require one.
— The jumbo jet that allegedly hit the Pentagon left a hole much smaller than itself, but immediately after the crash, no airplane parts could be seen outside the building. If you wonder why not, you are seriously deranged.
— We were told that the plane nearly melted on impact, flowed through the small hole in a semi-liquid state, and wound up inside the building, where none of it was found because it had vaporized. And you might wonder how the plane could have melted, when all the other planes that have ever crashed, in the entire history of aviation, have crumpled and broken apart — but only if you were unhinged.
— According to the official story, the hijackers who attacked the Pentagon were identified by DNA analysis of their remains. You might be tempted to ask: What can vaporize an airplane while leaving human DNA intact? But that’s a stupid question.
— After Flight 93 crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the first responders on the scene could find no wreckage, no luggage, and no passengers. But only a fool would ask whether an airplane had crashed there at all.
— Even though the plane dove so deeply into the Shanksville soil that none of it could be seen by any of the eyewitnesses, a passport and a bandana which belonged to one of the hijackers were recovered from the scene. If you were paranoid, you might wonder whether the passport and the bandana had been planted.
— The alleged hijacker pilots could barely fly single-engine Cessnas and had no experience in the cockpits of large airliners. And yet they are said to have flown with speed and precision that our most proficient pilots cannot match. If you have no imagination, you might wonder how they did it.
— All four of the alleged flight paths are dubious, because no jumbo jet can fly at the speeds claimed by the official story (more than 500 miles per hour) except at high altitude. Such speeds are not possible at or near sea level, for planes which are not designed for it. So if you are mentally ill, you might wonder what actually hit the buildings.
— President Bush and Vice-President Cheney testified before the 9/11 Commission on terms that they themselves set: behind closed doors, together, and not under oath, with no notes or recordings permitted to be kept. Therefore the Commission may have conducted the only criminal investigation in history in which suspects were allowed to stipulate the conditions under which they would cooperate. But you won’t allow this thought to cross your mind unless you are profoundly anti-American.
— The 9/11 Commission was nominally headed by Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton, but it was actually run by Philip Zelikow, a specialist in the creation and maintenance of public myths who came to the attention of the PNAC crowd after publishing a paper about catastrophic terrorism and the political uses to which it could be put. None but the most unbalanced would see anything wrong with this.
— Zelikow began the investigation with a detailed outline of the final report, with chapter titles, section headings, sub-headings, and even sub-sub-headings. And he did his best to keep his outline secret from the Commission staff, some of whom thought they were engaged in a legitimate investigation. But why should he have shown it around? What good would that have done?
— When an independent researcher asked why the FBI’s Most Wanted list had an entry for Osama bin Laden but did not say that he was wanted in connection with the 9/11 attacks, an FBI spokesman revealed that the FBI has no hard evidence linking bin Laden to the attacks. But hard evidence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
— You may recall that Afghanistan was bombed, invaded, and occupied for allegedly harboring the mastermind behind the attacks. But you have never seen any evidence supporting the assertion that Osama bin Laden was connected to 9/11. The FBI would happily show you some, if it had any. But it doesn’t, so let’s not dwell on it.
— Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds testified to Congress for more than 3 hours. When she was finished, her testimony was stricken from the record and she was hit with a State Secrets gag order. Years later, she defied that order and revealed facts which had been kept under wraps for too long, including that Osama bin Laden had enjoyed “an intimate relationship” with the CIA until 9/11. She’s what you’d call a seriously disgruntled former employee.
— An extensive body of evidence indicates that explosives were used in the destruction of the World Trade Center. This evidence includes eyewitness testimony, mainstream media news reports, forensic examination of the remaining steel, and videos in which we can see and hear explosions. According to the defenders of official story, none of this evidence exists. Clearly it would be unpatriotic, and very rude, to contradict them.
— Five of the nine 9/11 Commissioners are on record as saying they didn’t get the story right, that they had been lied to, that the Commission had been set up to fail, and so on. And another would-be Commissioner resigned at the outset, calling the Commission “a national disgrace.” But only a madman would expect such honest people to believe the story they’ve been telling.
— Five young men were seen dancing and celebrating as the attack on the WTC unfolded. They were found, arrested, and interrogated, but ten weeks later, after considerable political and diplomatic pressure, they were released, having failed multiple polygraph tests. If you have no moral compass, you might see something unseemly in this.
— It turned out that these men were Israelis and some of them were connected to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. After they returned to Israel, they appeared on television and explained that they were in NYC on 9/11 because “our purpose was to document the event.” You might think this indicates foreknowledge, but only if you’re anti-Semitic.
~~~
This list above is woefully incomplete, and some of the items I have omitted may be more important than any of the items I have included.
There are so many missing items that I wouldn’t have time to list them all, even if I tried. And you wouldn’t have time to read them all, either.
If I added another 20 or 50 items to the list, it would still only amount to the tip of an iceberg.
Furthermore, it could be argued that each item on my list is itself the tip of an iceberg.
For instance, the story of the five dancing Israelis is the tip of the iceberg called “Israeli complicity.” But I would have to be a raving Jew-hating anti-Semite to tell you more about that.
Demonize and Distract: Sanitizing Syria for the Masses
By Jason Hirthler | CounterPunch | September 9, 2016
Summoning the Humanitarian Pretext
The arch pragmatist Machiavelli once wrote that, “If you watch the ways of men, you will see that those who obtain great wealth and power do so either by force or fraud, and having got them they conceal under some honest name the foulness of their deeds.” You couldn’t pen a better description of the relationship between the imperial corporate state and its supplicant media. Once the coffers of vulnerable nations are ransacked by American wars of aggression, it is the media that sweeps the crimes of state beneath a carpet of piety. The truth may come out in due time, although it is always ex post facto. Thanks to the the coordination between the corporate sector, the state, and the media, the American doctrinal system is largely a self-contained narrative. It comes complete with a smooth internal logic. Corporations set priorities, the state produces a storyline that rationalizes the pursuit of those priorities, and the media distributes and reifies the storyline until it is gospel. This is no surprise, since the corporations own the politicians and the presses. Yet one way to examine the functioning of this kind of systemic propaganda is by looking at some of the keywords on which the stories hinge.
The foul deeds Machiavelli mentioned now principally occur in the Middle East, where vast resources lie and where power may be usefully projected deep into Eurasia. The Syrian proxy war between forces east and west is a nice example of how the dissimulations initiated in Washington are disseminated through the MSM. For instance, The New York Times, and its deputies in the vast clearinghouses of state propaganda, would have us believe that the White House is supporting freedom-loving rebels in Syria who are politically moderate and fighting for their lives in a civil war against a despotic regime led by an evil optometrist, Bashar al-Assad.
But we know that the entire Syrian fiasco was engineered by the CIA with cash, guns, and training, and unceasing support from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at our behest. It is a long-standing neoconservative plan to break the so-called Shia Crescent that runs from Lebanon through Syria to Iran. These are, of course, the independent-minded states that have thus far refused to accept either Israeli colonization of Palestinian land or permit Western-backed energy projects to take shape on their territory. Hence the need to dismember them into tiny, feckless statelets that pose no challenge to either Tel Aviv or Washington.
But this is hidden behind the fog of war and a domestic haze of media nuance. This entire conflict could reasonably be said to hinge on a single phrase: “moderate rebels.” The words “moderate” and “rebel” make all the difference in the telling of this fable. The truth is that we have hijacked Arab Spring discontent and festooned it with brigades of terrorist mercenaries procured from around the Middle East and Asia, all with the singular mandate to take down the Assad government. Tens of thousands of jihadists have been injected by NATO into a multi-confessional state governed by an elected leader who won a larger percentage of the electorate than our liberal messiah Barack Obama.
But this more truthful interpretation of events is unacceptable. To concede that the White House is now backing al-Qaeda terrorists in an effort to capsize a Middle Eastern democracy would implode the religion of American exceptionalism on which elite power depends. Thus the media cannot point out that the Pentagon’s recent admission of having troops in Syria violates the Nuremberg Principles on wars of aggression as well as the United Nations Charter. Omissions of this kind are what prevent average Americans from a) knowing what we’re really doing; and b) resisting it.
Demonize and Distract
But it isn’t enough to simply cloak our own crimes in the holy cloth of exceptionalism. We must defame our enemies. We must plant false flags in their soil now so that we can bury bombs in them later. It happens the same way every time. ‘Shocking’ discoveries are made about one of our most reviled enemies, usually provided by a defector with a farcical alias (think “Curveball”). Instantaneous mainstream reports issue a coordinated condemnation of the country in question. Each media outlet chooses a particular keyword to drive home the horror. Popular terms include “crimes against humanity”, “war crimes”, the words “industrial scale” in front of any noun or verb, the word “mass” in front of any noun or verb, “brutal crackdown”, “regime”, and so on. Grisly images are plastered across the front pages of the MSM. Often the images are fakes or are from unrelated incidents.
Once the reader has been stupefied, at least one columnist or politician will draw a deep breath, and then ‘draw comparisons’ to either Hitler and Auschwitz or Slobodan Milosevic and mass graves. (Recently Milosevic was declared innocent of all genocidal charges by the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, albeit years after he died in prison after being denied medical treatment by his civilized captors. This process of posthumous exoneration is now practiced on an “industrial scale” by Obama’s drone assassination when various innocents are discovered to have been innocent after they’ve been “terminated”.)
Not only is the supposedly noble Syrian uprising a fraud, but so is our equally principled goal of wiping ISIS from the face of the earth, if the facts on the ground are of any import. Washington has gone after ISIS in a strangely half-hearted way. Why hasn’t it provided air cover for Syrian Arab Army when its helicopters were rendered useless by terrorist TOW missiles? Missiles sold by the United States to Saudi Arabia, likely for the express purpose of funneling them to al Nusrah and other rogue bandits in Syria. Why did the U.S. not immediately attack ISIS-controlled oil wells and oil trading routes–ISIS’ chief source of funding–as Russia did on its entry into the conflict? Why did the Obama administration produce a record-setting arms deal with the Saudis, the leading proselytizer of Wahhabism in the world? Why do we refuse to work with Moscow or the SAA or Iran? Why do we not share grids and intelligence and join their joint operations room in Baghdad?
Isn’t it obvious? We have different goals. We want Assad out and a daft, pliant puppet in charge, presiding over a vast arsenal of domestic police, ready to crush resistance on contact. Of course, any such resisters would be legitimate freedom fighters, as are the Palestinians. But the media takes care to call Palestinians “terrorists” and called citizens resisting the Iraqi occupation “insurgents”. Words matter. They shade the story and bring neutral readers over to the side of empire. They blame the victim for the violence that victimized them.
The dissimulation becomes even clearer when you realize that ISIS emerged from an American interrogation camp in Iraq, in a way that suggests CentCom was more than happy to release radicalized Islamists into the wild. To what purpose? The failed state in Libya and the collapsing scenery of the Syrian state provide plenty of fodder for speculation.
The Wages of Propaganda
Thanks to years of conditioning by the media, the population will do little to resist the escalation to come. Eventually the Syrian “regime” to be eventually overthrown by relentless American-backed violence. Hillary Clinton will win the election and gain control of the Oval Office. As Glen Ford wrote at Black Agenda Report, Clinton will “… ride into the White House on a warhorse”. She is the thinking man’s neocon, unlike President Bush, who represented the anti-intellectual strain of the American character, and Barack Obama, whose reluctance to pour troops into Arab prairie fires was widely predictably condemned as a sign of weakness.
Hillary is neither stupid nor soft. She will doubtless find a useful pretext by which to declare a no-fly zone in Syria, which would inhibit the efficacy of Russia’s campaign against various terrorist clans. (A House resolution is already afoot to lay the groundwork.) She will move more troops into the polder of northern Syria, violating all kinds of charters and conventions and declarations with an icy mixture of contempt and indifference. (See the UN Charter, Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the bootless scraps of paper she will trample.) Perhaps most importantly, she will green light the transport of more arms, ammunition, and psychopaths into Syria to make a push for Damascus in the hopes of repeating the Libyan calamity.
Should that project succeed, Hillary will quite possibly ‘discover’ that Iran has been violating its bogus nuclear agreement with the P5 +1. Anonymous administration sources will be “troubled” by the development. This isn’t idle speculation. For lack of a better title, the long-term strategy for the “new world order,” as George H.W. Bush put it, is contingent on splitting the Shia Crescent, removing Iran as a regional antagonist, then moving farther into Eurasia to control Sino-Russian development. And we know how a confrontation with Tehran would play out. With rabid spittle cresting his white beard, Wolf Blitzer will escort numberless brigadier generals through The Situation Room to reassure Americans that the bearded mullahs in Qom are indeed a fearsome clan. Hillary will threaten, and perhaps use, tactical nuclear weapons (B-61s) on Iranian nuclear sites, backed by either a UN Security Council resolution of dubious authority or a coalition of the bullied, bought, and willing. As the mushroom cloud envelops the region in radioactive waste, Israel will be seen fastidiously colonizing more West Bank land, Benjamin Netanyahu rubbing his hands in frenzied anticipation, a dogeared copy of the Yinon plan stuffed in his jacket pocket. Saudi Arabia’s Deputy and Crown Princes will celebrate the fall of their hated rivals. Laconic onlookers in Washington and Europe will shrug and say nothing. CIA plants in D.C. will fastidiously distance Hillary’s bombs from Hiroshima’s, and Tel Aviv will move against Hezbollah in a final confrontation, since the Shia Crescent will by then be nothing more than a few shards of Mesopotamian culture atop a flaming midden.
With the Middle East finally brought “to heel,” as Hillary once proposed doing to young black boys, the ground will have been cleared for the pulse-racing showdown with Russia itself, the greatest thorn in Washington’s side. With Assad out of the way and Tehran chastened, the Kremlinologists and conspiracy theorists can be set loose to harrow the public into a state of high anxiety about the “expansionist” state to the East. NATO will inch closer to Russian borders and shout that Russia is moving closer to NATO. Destabilization will proceed apace. It will be called “democracy promotion” and will be paid for by fronts called “endowments”. Sanctions will tighten the economic screws. Verbal salvos will hit targets on either side of the water. New proxy wars will be touched off. Only a giant peace movement or stray asteroid could prevent something like this from happening. Perhaps the BRICS will halt the spread of empire with a collective stance, but Washington is agile if not artful at executing its core strategy to destabilize, divide, and rule its rivals. Until then, if you want to know what contempt looks like, look at this picture of Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin meeting at the G20 in China last week. The tenor of tomorrow is written all over their faces.
Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry and author of The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
Guardian “Facebook fact-check ” on 9/11 – every bit as poor as you would expect
By Catte | OffGuardian | September 10, 2016
The Guardian is no better at telling the truth about the nature of the 9/11 debate than about Syria, Ukraine or indeed anything. Its recent bid at being both social-media savvy and weirdly Orwellian, “Facebook Fact Check”, has this little snippet up atm:
The paper they are referring to is On the Physics of High Rise Building Collapses, which we have published here, and the “professor” who, according to them, “left Brigham Young University in disgrace” is of course physicist Steve Jones, who was the subject of a hostile media campaign after he and his BYU research team claimed to have discovered evidence of nanothermite in tiny “red gray chips” found in the dust from the WTC explosions.
For the record, Jones’ research work on the red gray chips has been challenged, but never debunked, and his experiments have been replicated successfully by independent researchers elsewhere in the world, such as Mark Bazile. Jones was suspended from his teaching duties and then offered “early retirement” by BYU in 2006 in the midst of the media campaign against him.
BYU’s reasons for this action were never publicly disclosed but the Guardian’s claim that Jones was “disgraced” is little more than a sleazy bit of innuendo, so gross it doesn’t even appear in the sourced WaPo article, which does at least try to be a tad objective. “Disgrace” is just the Graun’s own little bit of tabloidese. Because tabloid is all it seems to do now.
Jones’ three co-authors are described in this piece as “a retired professor and two longterm 9/11 truthers.” I guess the Graun didn’t want to admit two of them are structural engineers as well as being “truthers”?
When the (ironically named?) “fact-check” briefly discusses the physics of 9/11, it’s simply to offer yet more deception. The investigation by serious professionals of the still not fully explained and extraordinary triple collapses on 9/11 is listed along with claims we didn’t go to the Moon and some random nonsense about Hillary Clinton, presumably in some attempt to discredit by proximity. Instead of honestly addressing the very real areas of uncertainty which the scientists of NIST have quite openly admitted, the Graun does what many other agenda-driven “debunkers” do and tries to reframe the issue as being between “settled science” (to borrow a term) on one side and crazy, discredited or otherwise unreliable kooks on the other.
This, we need to clearly understand, is a purely propagandist ploy meant to convince only the under-informed “masses” (ie us), and not those on either side versed in the real issues. If you read their report and other commentaries, the experts of the National Institute of Standards and Technology are well aware that the explanation they have produced for the 9/11 building collapses is neither complete nor beyond rational question. They are well aware there is plenty of room for science-based interrogation and counter-hypothesis.
But for some reason it seems to be very important to the manufacturers of consent that we, the public, are not made aware of these continuing and probably understandable uncertainties. So, through outlets such as the Guardian (and many others) they disseminate simplistic statements, soundbites and frank lies, designed to convince people that what is uncertain, poorly explained and capable of interpretation is simple, settled, dusted and done.
The link the Guardian provides that is alleged to “disprove” all such “conspiracy theories” is to the 2005 Popular Mechanics article that did indeed claim to do this. The Guardian doesn’t mention that this article has itself been “debunked” and makes several provably false assertions.
If the fire-induced collapse explanation for the events of 9/11 is really beyond debate, why do outlets such as the Graun (and indeed Popular Mechanics) not make this self-evident by simply allowing both sides to place their evidence before the public on their pages, so that readers can make up their own minds? Outlets don’t need to take a side and defend it. In fact they work best when they try to avoid this and do their best to offer argument from all sides.
We aren’t claiming Jones and his co-authors are ultimately correct. We’re just pointing out that scientific truth doesn’t need to be defended by spin or censorship or grotesque ad hominem.
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From the Archives
USS Liberty Massacre: A Pivotal Moment in the Hostile Takeover of America
By Kevin Barrett | Crescent | Dhu al-Qa’dah 24, 1445
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” … continue
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