Guardian makes “error” reading MH17 report, accuses rebels of cover up
off-guardian | October 14, 2015
In a report compiled by Luke Harding, Shaun Walker and Julian Borger, entitled “MH17 report suggests efforts were made to cover up causes of disaster”, and published October 13, the Guardian claimed the Dutch report on the downing of MH17 alleged there was evidence of a “bungled autopsy” and attempt to “remove foreign objects” from the body of the first officer. The implication was that this had been done in order to conceal the cause of the crash, and the further implication was of course that Russia and the rebels had been involved.
The report by the Dutch safety board said that more than 120 objects, “mostly metal fragments”, were found in the body of the first officer, who had sustained “multiple fractures”.. When Dutch experts identified the captain’s body they found it had already “undergone an external and internal examination to remove foreign objects”.
Despite apparent attempts to remove shrapnel, “hundreds of metal objects were found”, the report said, as well as bone fractures and other injuries.
After this appeared a rebuttal was posted BTL, by the CiFer known as Pigswiggle, who showed conclusively the report made no such claim, or anything remotely like such a claim.
This is a really bizarre inference from the report.
[…]
The report is merely explaining that the Captain from Team A was not chosen by the public prosecutor as one of the bodies for further “detailed examination.” The Dutch authorities “found” that the Captain’s body “had already ‘undergone an external and internal examination to remove foreign objects,’” because it was part of the investigation procedure that all the bodies were subjected to (as described in the preceding paragraphs of the report). The Guardian is attempting to accuse Russia of a “cover up” based on the investigative actions of the Netherlands Forensic Institute. Indeed, according to the report, the persons responsible for having removed foreign objects from the Captain was a team of “120 forensic specialists from the National Forensic Investigations Team (LTFO) from the Netherlands and 80 forensic specialists from Australia, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Malaysia, and New Zealand.”
The Guardian needs to correct this story. It is highly embarrassing to it and its journalists.
[read full text of this comment here]
Following this, and other complaints, October 14 the Guardian issued what amounted to a retraction:
and reworded the offending part of the article to read:
The report by the Dutch safety board said that more than 120 objects, “mostly metal fragments”, were found in the body of the first officer, who had sustained “multiple fractures”. Dutch experts performed an “external and internal examination on the the captain’s body” and removed “hundreds of metal fragments”. They also observed bone fractures and other injuries.
Shaun Walker even tweeted the retraction:
We made a change to this story. There’s enough confusion/disinfo already so apologies for inadvertently adding to it
Some cynical commenters have pointed out this “error” has had the result of spreading a false and baseless rumour of Russian evidence-tampering around the web. A rumour that the foot-noted retraction will do little to quell – especially since they did not see fit to also change their grossly misleading headline, which as of 20:00 BST October 14 still reads thus:
Which means to all intents and purposes the lie is left to stand, “retraction” or no.
Is this ethical journalism?
Anyone who wants to register their opinion on this and/or ask for further correction can write to the Guardian here:
Erdogan and the Ankara Bombing
By Graham E. Fuller | Consortium News | October 14, 2015
“Hüngür Hüngür Ağlıyorum” is a refrain from a old Turkish folksong — “Bitterly I weep.” It commemorates a bloody turning point at Sakarya against Greek invaders back in 1921. But the words couldn’t more readily apply now to the unprecedented and outrageous bombing attacks in Ankara last week against marchers in a demonstration for peace that has cost the lives of some 100 people. Will that tragedy bring the country to its senses?
That event is the most horrific outcome yet of the escalating violence and mayhem that is emerging from the current Turkish electoral campaign —one capriciously demanded by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was dissatisfied with the electoral setbacks of last June’s elections that thwarted his amassing greater powers; hence he mandated new elections so voters could “right their mistake.”
He is operating under the increasingly unrealistic supposition that the new elections on Nov. 1 will somehow reverse his decline and grant him new authority in his arrogant push to create a new super-presidency. The frightening thing is that his electoral gambits have grown increasingly reckless; it now appears as if the president acknowledges almost no limits to the means used to manipulate the electorate into voting for him.
Elections in Turkey are generally a rough contact sport — even though they are open and democratic; vote-rigging is rare. This time however Erdoğan is pulling out all the stops in an ever-rising campaign of the intimidation and silencing of political rivals, including detention of large numbers of journalists and attacks on media that dare to criticize the president.
Worse, Erdoğan is particularly hostile towards the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), a relatively new Kurdish-oriented party which has actually gained a considerable following among non-Kurds in Turkey — particularly liberals and youth — who value its broad outreach as a secular socialist party. It was this strong showing by the HDP in the June elections that robbed Erdoğan of his expected majority.
He has had blood in his eye ever since and has chosen to exploit ugly nationalist impulses in the country to discredit — perhaps even find grounds to ban — this party that has been gaining some popularity in Turkey as a fresh new political force. Pro-Erdoğan mobs have visited violence upon the party’s headquarters and members in recent months.
It was HDP elements and other liberal forces who dominated the march for peace last week and were the chief victims of the savage bombings. The HDP party leader has directly accused the president of complicity in the bombing of the marchers. There is, of course, no direct evidence of this as such. Indeed it might be too far a stretch to blame Erdoğan as directly responsible for engineering the events — such an act would of course be criminal in the highest degree.
So far Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has suggested that the “Islamic State” or ISIS is behind the slaughter. No reliable facts have been made public so far, and we may never get a clear answer. What is clearer, however, is that — although proving nothing — Erdoğan probably stood to benefit from this event more than other actors.
After inaugurating a bold, admirable and unprecedented initiative in earlier years to open dialog with the main Kurdish rebel group, he now seems to find greater political benefit in discrediting the HDP, perhaps even hoping to unleash unrest among Turkey’s Kurds with the aim of even banning the HDP — thereby removing a major obstacle to a clear-cut victory in the November elections. But to move to mass bombing would be quite another thing.
Erdoğan may also be banking on the hope that much of the Turkish electorate may now be so unnerved by the increased violence and recent attacks from the rebel PKK group that they just might decide to vote for the president’s party as a bulwark against the forces of Kurdish nationalism and chaos. But such a calculation represents a huge gamble that could produce a severe backlash: the electorate may well — and justifiably — fear that the president himself has become such a deeply polarizing, arrogant, erratic and destabilizing figure that he is even willing to put at risk the future stability of the country — and therefore will call for his defeat.
There are other forces that could also be theoretical beneficiaries of the bombing. Extremists within the right-wing nationalist party MHP are one possibility. And ISIS itself, of course, could well be behind the act, as the government claims. ISIS seeks to drive a wedge between Kurds and Turks and also to “punish” Erdoğan for backing away from his earlier, more tolerant view of ISIS in the struggle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And to attack his new willingness to support U.S. attacks against ISIS. Yet ISIS usually claims credit for its terrorist actions; in this case it has not so far done so — for what that’s worth.
Other theories run more heavily to the conspiratorial — that the PKK Kurdish rebels sought to thwart its moderate Kurdish rivals; but the PKK has in fact declared an overall cease-fire, at least until the elections are over. Extreme leftists too (not a serious political force in the country) might seek to sow mayhem to weaken Erdoğan.
But even if Erdoğan’s intimate circle had nothing directly to do with this bombing, there is little doubt that the president has worked to create an atmosphere of xenophobia, fear, instability and anti-Kurdish sentiment that has created an ugly and violent political atmosphere not seen in decades. I worry that he might now even be tempted to create armed confrontation with Russia over Syria as a further distraction — an exceptionally dangerous move.
The major question now is how the Turkish electorate will react to events that seem to be dragging Turkey towards the brink. Will it reject Erdoğan and vote against the AKP in enough numbers to severely curtail his powers and vaulting ambitions in the next parliament? Or will it buy into Erdoğan’s increasingly hollow claims to be the “indispensable leader” who can keep the country on an even keel?
Turkey has before marched up the to political brink in previous years, only to find the electorate ultimately voting wisely to ensure the stability and progress of the country. Here’s hoping their common sense will prevail this time as well. Stakes are high for everybody involved in the region.
Graham E. Fuller is a former senior CIA official, author of numerous books on the Muslim World; his latest book is Breaking Faith: A novel of espionage and an American’s crisis of conscience in Pakistan.
US refuses to receive PM Medvedev’s delegation to coordinate anti-terrorist actions in Syria
RT | October 14, 2015
Washington has refused to receive a Russian military delegation, headed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, to discuss coordinated action on the fight against terrorism in Syria, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
“We have proposed to Americans what President Vladimir Putin informed the public about yesterday, namely, to send a delegation of military experts to Moscow to agree on a whole number of joint steps, afterwards we would be ready to send a high delegation led by Prime Minister Medvedev to Washington,” Lavrov told the Russian Parliament on Thursday.
“Today we were told that they will not be able to send a delegation to Moscow. At the same time, they are unable to receive our delegation in Washington,” he added.
The top Russian diplomat also said that when Moscow invited partners to join Baghdad-based anti-terrorism center it got unconstructive response
“We invited our other partners to take part in activities of the information center so that everyone could see the full picture, so that everyone is on the same page to avoid any misunderstanding. The response was unconstructive. They said why in Iraq? It is not safe there. We explained that according to our estimates, this center can operate in quite favorable conditions. But if there is a wish to coordinate actions in some other place, we are ready for this,” Lavrov said.
“The agreement on the military-technical measures to prevent incidents in the air, which has been practically achieved, will start working from day to day, I hope. Today the finishing touches will be given to coordinate all of its points,” Lavrov told the State Duma.
“And then we are ready to sit down and discuss things, with all the cards in our hands: where THEY think terrorists are, where WE think they could be… I’m sure that if we work honestly, those evaluations will coincide.”
“We should all start with showing our cards, both in direct and indirect sense,” the minister stressed. Then our actions would speak louder than words, calling on the fight against terrorism. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t sit down and discuss [these] things.
“Perhaps, the West thinks that Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS] and Assad should just deplete each other,” he said. But I wouldn’t like to think that our Western colleagues are being guided by such ‘simplified’ logic.”
Defending the Indefensible: How The NY Times Spins for Israel
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | October 13, 2015
It’s a topsy-turvy world in The New York Times. Palestinians are dying, but it is Israelis who are fearful. Unarmed Palestinians face the threat of heavily armed settlers and security forces, but it is not Palestine that has a security problem; it is Israel.
This is the scenario we find today in a story by Isabel Kershner titled “Stabbings, and Deadly Responses, Add to Israel’s Security Challenge.” Here we learn that Israelis have a “shattered sense of personal security” after a series of lone-wolf stabbing attempts.
Kershner takes all the stabbing allegations as fact, rejecting any evidence to the contrary, and nowhere in this lengthy story do we find any concern for how Palestinians are feeling even though more than two dozen have been killed since Oct. 1 and more than 1,300 wounded (compared with four Israelis killed and some 28 wounded in the same time period).
Neither Kershner nor her editors find Palestinian vulnerability at all newsworthy. It is only Israeli sentiments that matter here.
Likewise, it is not the death of so many Palestinians that concerns the Times but the effect on Israel’s reputation. As Israel “resorts to live fire,” Kershner writes, the number of Palestinian deaths is mounting, and this fact “is increasingly opening Israel up to criticism, placing the government in a quandary.”
From then on her article is an attempt to defuse that criticism without giving readers a clear sense of what accusations have been made. She writes, for instance, that Amnesty International “has accused Israel of using excessive force,” as if this refers to past reports by the monitoring group but failing to mention a recent release about the current attacks.
In fact, Amnesty is one of three human rights organizations to speak out against trigger-happy Israeli forces in the past week. Human Rights Watch and Al Haq, a Palestinian group, also raised the alarm about the increasing violence against Palestinian civilians.
Amnesty’s report was titled, “No justification for deliberate attacks on civilians, unlawful killings by Israeli forces, or collective punishment of Palestinians.”
Kershner ignores the findings of all these reports and at the same time attempts to explain away the shocking brutality displayed by Israeli settlers and troops in several videos appearing on social media in recent days. “Some of the videos of police shootings have had the added effect of turning the Israelis, in the eyes of some people, from the victims of terrorism into aggressors,” she writes.
These videos (see here and here) show helpless and unarmed Palestinians surrounded by armed troops or angry mobs. In one of them a boy lies crumpled and bleeding on the pavement as Israelis shout at him, “Die, you son of a whore!” All of the Palestinians are either injured or killed, but once again Kershner’s concern is not for the victims in the videos but for Israel’s reputation.
Kershner concedes that Israelis may have gone too far in a couple of these cases, but she is quick to excuse their aggression as “panic” by traumatized individuals.
After trying to neutralize the effects of the videos and the human rights groups’ reports, Kershner turns her attention to alternative media. The accounts by these outlets have often contradicted the stabbing attempt allegations made by Israeli security forces.
Rather than reporting the contradictions, Kershner states that alternative news media have been “feeding the anger” of Palestinians by often denying that any attack took place. She is implying that these media are not to be trusted and that their reports are inciting Palestinian hostility.
As usual, the Times makes no effort to place the attacks in context, ignoring the ugly realities of the occupation and the enormous disparity in power between Palestinians and Israelis. Thus she implies that the attacks on Israelis arise out of hatred and lack any valid motive. Her reference to “feeding the anger” fits well into that narrative.
Missing from her article are the frequent settler mobs who march through Jerusalem and other cities chanting “Death to Arabs” while police and soldiers stand by to protect them. Kershner ignores this kind of incitement, preferring to stay with the Israelis-as-victims story line.
Israel is a nuclear power with sophisticated weapons and a standing army. Palestine has no army and not a single tank or aircraft, and its unarmed populace has suffered appallingly at the hands of the occupiers. The numbers show Palestinian casualties outnumbering those of Israelis by a ratio of more than 100 to 1 in the first week of this month.
Given all this, it takes some effort to convince readers that Israel—not Palestine—faces a “security challenge.” Kershner, with the blessing of the Times editors, has made that effort, providing us with a story that distorts the reality on the ground, ignoring journalistic standards and the ethical demands of compassion.
MH-17: The Dog Still Not Barking
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 13, 2015
The Dutch Safety Board report concludes that an older model Buk missile apparently shot down Malaysia Airline Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, but doesn’t say who possessed the missile and who fired it. Yet, what is perhaps most striking about the report is what’s not there – nothing from the U.S. intelligence data on the tragedy.
The dog still not barking is the absence of evidence from U.S. spy satellites and other intelligence sources that Secretary of State John Kerry insisted just three days after the shoot-down pinpointed where the missile was fired, an obviously important point in determining who fired it.
On July 20, 2014, Kerry declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “we picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”
But such U.S. government information is not mentioned in the 279-page Dutch report, which focused on the failure to close off the eastern Ukrainian war zone to commercial flights and the cause of the crash rather than who fired on MH-17. A Dutch criminal investigation is still underway with the goal of determining who was responsible but without any sign of an imminent conclusion.
I was told by a U.S. intelligence source earlier this year that CIA analysts had met with Dutch investigators to describe what the classified U.S. evidence showed but apparently with the caveat that it must remain secret.
Last year, another source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me they had concluded that a rogue element of the Ukrainian government – tied to one of the oligarchs – was responsible for the shoot-down, while absolving senior Ukrainian leaders including President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. But I wasn’t able to determine if this U.S. analysis was a consensus or a dissident opinion.
Last October, Der Spiegel reported that German intelligence, the BND, concluded that the Russian government was not the source of the missile battery – that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base – but the BND blamed the ethnic Russian rebels for firing it. However, a European source told me that the BND’s analysis was not as conclusive as Der Spiegel had described.
The Dutch report, released Tuesday, did little to clarify these conflicting accounts but did agree with an analysis by the Russian manufacturer of the Buk anti-aircraft missile systems that the shrapnel and pieces of the missile recovered from the MH-17 crash site came from the 9M38 series, representing an older, now discontinued Buk version.
The report said: “The damage observed on the wreckage in amount of damage, type of damage, boundary and impact angles of damage, number and density of hits, size of penetrations and bowtie fragments found in the wreckage, is consistent with the damage caused by the 9N314M warhead used in the 9M38 and 9M38M1 BUK surface-to-air missile.”
Last June, Almaz-Antey, the Russian manufacturer which also provided declassified information about the Buk systems to the Dutch, said its analysis of the plane’s wreckage revealed that MH-17 had been attacked by a “9M38M1 of the Buk M1 system.” The company’s Chief Executive Officer Yan Novikov said the missile was last produced in 1999.
Who Has This Missile?
The Russian government has insisted that it no longer uses the 9M38 version. According to the Russian news agency TASS, former deputy chief of the Russian army air defense Alexander Luzan said the suspect warhead was phased out of Russia’s arsenal 15 years ago when Russia began using the 9M317 model.
“The 9M38, 9M38M, 9M38M1 missiles are former modifications of the Buk system missiles, but they all have the same warhead. They are not in service with the Russian Armed Forces, but Ukraine has them,” Luzan said.
“Based on the modification and type of the used missile, as well as its location, this Buk belongs to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. By the way, Ukraine had three military districts — the Carpathian, Odessa and Kiev, and these three districts had more than five Buk anti-aircraft missile brigades of various modifications – Buk, Buk-M, Buk-M1, which means that there were more than 100 missile vehicles there.”
But Luzan’s account would not seem to rule out the possibility that some older Buk versions might have gone into storage in some Russian warehouse. It is common practice for intelligence services, including the CIA, to give older, surplus equipment to insurgents as a way to create more deniability if questions are ever raised about the source of the weapons.
For its part, the Ukrainian government claimed to have sold its stockpile of older Buks to Georgia, but Ukraine appears to still possess the 9M38 Buk system, based on photographs of Ukrainian weapons displays. Prior to the MH-17 crash, ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine were reported to have captured a Buk system after overrunning a government air base, but Ukrainian authorities said the system was not operational, as recounted in the Dutch report. The rebels also denied possessing a functioning Buk system.
As for the missile’s firing location, the Dutch report said the launch spot could have been anywhere within a 320-square-kilometer area in eastern Ukraine, making it hard to determine whether the firing location was controlled by the rebels or government forces. Given the fluidity of the frontlines in July 2014 – and the fact that heavy fighting was occurring to the north – it might even have been possible for a mobile missile launcher to slip from one side to the other along the southern front.
The Dutch report did seek to discredit one alternative theory raised by Russian officials in the days after the shoot-down – that MH-17 could have been the victim of an air-to-air attack. The Dutch dismissed Russian radar data that suggested a possible Ukrainian fighter plane in the area, relying instead of Ukrainian data which the Dutch found more complete.
But the report ignored other evidence cited by the Russians, including electronic data of the Ukrainian government allegedly turning on the radar that is used by Buk systems for targeting aircraft. Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine in mid-July 2014 and why Kiev’s Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.
The Dutch-led investigation was perhaps compromised by a central role given to the Ukrainian government which apparently had the power to veto what was included in the report. Yet, what may have spoken most loudly in the Dutch report was the silence about U.S. intelligence information. If – as Kerry claimed – the U.S. government knew almost immediately the site where the fateful missile was launched, why has that evidence been kept secret?
Given the importance of the conflict in eastern Ukraine to U.S. intelligence, it was a high-priority target in July 2014 with significant resources devoted to the area, including satellite surveillance, electronic eavesdropping and human assets. In his rush-to-judgment comments the weekend after the crash, Kerry admitted as much.
But the Obama administration has refused to make any of its intelligence information public. Only belatedly did CIA analysts brief the Dutch investigators, according to a U.S. government source, but that evidence apparently remained classified.
The second source told me that the reason for withholding the U.S. intelligence information was that it contradicted the initial declarations by Kerry and other U.S. officials pointing the finger of blame at the ethnic Russian rebels and indirectly at Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stood accused of giving a ragtag bunch of rebels a powerful weapon capable of shooting down commercial airliners.
Despite Russian denials, the worldwide revulsion over the shoot-down of MH-17, killing all 298 people onboard, gave powerful momentum to anti-Putin propaganda and convinced the European Union to consent to U.S. demands for tougher economic sanctions punishing Russia for its intervention in Ukraine. According to this source’s account, an admission that a rogue Ukrainian group was responsible would take away a powerful P.R. club wielded against Russia.
Among the organizations that have implored President Barack Obama to release the U.S. intelligence data on MH-17 is the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of mostly retired U.S. intelligence analysts.
As early as July 29, 2014, just 12 days after the shoot-down amid escalating Cold War-style rhetoric, VIPS wrote, “As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information. … As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence.”
But the release of the Dutch report – without any of that data – indicates that the U.S. government continues to hide what evidence it has. That missing evidence remains the dog not barking, like the key fact that Sherlock Holmes used to unlock the mystery of the “Silver Blaze” when the sleuth noted that the failure of the dog to bark suggested who the guilty party really was.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Former US Detainees Sue CIA Torture Program Architects
teleSUR | October 13, 2015
Two U.S. psychologists contracted by the CIA are accused of human experimentation, torture and war crimes.
CIA psychologists behind the U.S. intelligence agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program are guilty of torture, non-consensual human experimentation, and war crimes, three former detainees alleged in a federal lawsuit Tuesday.
The civil case was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of plaintiffs Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman, who were all held in CIA detention centers in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.
Not one of the three was ever charged with a crime.
Raham died in a CIA prison in 2002, while the other two were eventually released.
According to the lawsuit, Raham’s autopsy report showed he died from hypothermia caused “in part from being forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants,” with the contributing factors of “dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to ‘short chaining’.”
The case is being brought against psychologists James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, contractors who managed a company that was given a US$81 million paycheck from the CIA over a four-year period, and “helped convince the agency to adopt torture as official policy.”
The duo was also featured in last year’s CIA “torture report.”
The lawsuit sets out that the pair devised the torture program to intentionally inflict intense pain and suffering, on both a physical and mental level. The object was to psychologically destroy detainees through torture and abuse so that they would be unable to resist demands for information. The CIA adopted the methods in 2002, and contracted Mitchell and Jessen to train others in the arts of torture.
“(Plaintiffs) were subjected to solitary confinement; extreme darkness, cold, and noise; repeated beatings; starvation; excruciatingly painful stress positions; prolonged sleep deprivation; confinement in coffin-like boxes; and water torture,” according to the ACLU lawsuit. “Defendants are directly liable because they experimented on Plaintiffs by seeking to induce in them a state of ‘learned helplessness’ to break their will by means of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”
Intelligence agencies expert Steven Aftergood told the Guardian that the tortured men were being studied by medical professionals to note their responses to such treatments, which ACLU said amounted to a war crime.
“These psychologists devised and supervised an experiment to degrade human beings and break their bodies and minds,” said Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “It was cruel and unethical, and it violated a prohibition against human experimentation that has been in place since World War II.”
MH17: What we know on eve of Dutch Safety Board report
RT | October 12, 2015
On Tuesday, the Dutch Safety Board will release its final report on the fate of the crashed Malaysian Airlines MH17 flight. Ahead of the report’s publication we take a look at the key facts, theories and false trails surrounding the investigation.
The crash of Malaysian flight MH17 took place on July 17, 2014, in Eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew members onboard, among them 80 children.
The international probe launched immediately after the crash has taken 15 months to prepare.
Preliminary findings claimed that the plane broke up mid-air after being hit by high-energy objects. The final report of the Dutch Safety Board is expected to be delivered on Tuesday, October 13.
BLAME GAME
On July 23, 2014, it was confirmed that the MH17 black boxes were delivered by Dutch officials to a British laboratory for analysis, promising results “inside 24 hours.” That was nearly 15 months ago and the general public is still unfamiliar with this data. The mainstream media were quick to point the finger at Russia right from the start, claiming that Moscow was responsible for bringing down the plane.
Western media carried strong anti-Russian headlines, most of them blaming President Putin personally for the deaths of all the passengers and crew on board.
That was well before any investigators had even reached the crash site, and the allegations were based on snap judgments and little information. The day after the crash, Ukraine released what it called “intercepted phone conversations,” allegedly proving that anti-government fighters shot down MH17 by mistake. Kiev also alleged that the rebels obtained a BUK air defense missile system from Russia. Moscow dismissed the tapes that could not be verified independently as outright fakes.
INVESTIGATION
Actually, there are two separate international probes into the crash – the technical probe led by the Dutch Safety Board, which is due to present in conclusions on Tuesday, and a criminal probe, carried out by a Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team, which is still ongoing.
While the Dutch Safety Board is looking into what caused the accident, the criminal probe is supposed to reach a conclusion on who was responsible for the crash.
Russia has appealed to the head of the UN aviation agency to intervene in the investigation into the MH17 crash to prevent the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) from ignoring the findings of their Russian counterparts.
A letter from the Deputy Chief of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) claims that the DSB ignored “comprehensive information” relating to the downing of the Boeing 777 over war-torn Eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, provided by the Russian side and violated the principle of “sequence of conclusions.”
There are two main theories as to what brought down the plane, and both imply use of weapons: either a surface-to-air missile, or an air-to-air missile.
Theory #1: ‘Russian BUK Missile’
The Dutch Safety Board delivered a preliminary report about a year ago, concluding that flight MH17 broke up in mid-air and came down after being hit by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the plane from the outside and ruptured the fuselage. The report did not mention where those high-energy objects came from.
The first theory maintains that the MH17 flight was downed by a surface-to-air anti-aircraft missile. It is considered by many as the most likely theory and one that’s been widely cited in the media. The only question is who did it.
The West and Ukraine claim the rebels shot the plane with a Russian BUK missile. In the framework of this theory, a YouTube video of a BUK weapons system with one rocket missing being transported somewhere in Ukraine just hours after the crash was presented as a smoking gun, claiming that the missile system was sneakily cleared out of Ukraine into Russia.
But some local bloggers identified the location as the Ukrainian town of Krasnoarmeysk, which was under control of the Kiev forces at the time.
The fact that the video emerged online suspiciously quickly, was followed by lots of so-called social media evidence, and is almost impossible to authenticate, only fueled suspicions.
Theory #2: ‘Ukrainian BUK missile’
At the same time Russia’s Defense Ministry made public satellite images of the area, taken several days prior to the crash. The satellite pictures showed Ukrainian army positions on three days before the crash, and a BUK missile launcher could be spotted there. But on the day of the crash, it had moved somewhere else. The question is why – and where it had gone?
In June 2015, Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey presented the results of its own probe into the causes of the MH17 crash. Looking into the option of a surface-to-air missile downing the Boing-777, experts stressed that it could only have been caused by one of the missiles from an older modification of the BUK missile system, namely the Buk-M1 – the type of the weapon the Ukrainian army is equipped with. The Russian army uses modern and later BUK missile systems.
Theory #3: ‘Air-to-Air Missile’
Another theory is that Flight MH17 may have been shot down from the air.
Russia’s Investigative Committee (IC) has been conducting its own investigation into the crash. On June 3, the Committee identified the key witness to the MH17 crash as Evgeny Agapov, an aviation armaments mechanic in the Ukrainian Air Force. Agapov testified that on July 17, 2014 a Ukrainian Sukhoi SU-25 jet aircraft piloted by Captain Voloshin “set out for a military task” and returned without ammunition. Agapov implied that an air-to-air missile was missing and claimed he overheard Voloshin say to his colleagues that some plane was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Also, in a video shot by Ukraine’s anti-government militia when they arrived at the crash site immediately after the catastrophe and released by an Australian broadcaster almost a year after the tragedy, one important part was largely ignored.
The video, shown by News Corp Australia, is a short, 5-minute clip made from an original video 17 minutes long, but the channel published online a full transcript of the original version.
The transcript cited the rebel commander as saying “the Sukhoi jet brought down the civilian plane and ours brought down the fighter jet.”
Later, the same person says once again that there were two planes shot down, and another voice in the background says, “They decided to do it this way, to look like we have brought down the plane.”
Those who oppose the theory say the Sukhoi Su-25 close support fighter jet spotted in the skies at the time of the incident cannot reach a height of 10,000 meters, where the Malaysian airliner was at cruising altitude. But a documentary crew making a film about the MH17 catastrophe has actually proven them wrong, staging an experiment and taking an Su-25 to a height of 11,880 meters – with a pilot wearing an oxygen mask.
The report coming out Tuesday will be technical in nature. Its goal is to specify how the plane was brought down, not to place blame on any side. This is the responsibility of the criminal probe, which is still ongoing.
READ MORE: Bogus photos of ‘Russian’ air-defense systems in Ukraine debunked by bloggers
Putin and the Press: The Demonology School of Journalism
By James Petras | October 11, 2015
The major influential western print media are engaged in a prolonged, large-scale effort to demonize Russian President Putin, his politics and persona. There is an article (or several articles) every day in which he is personally stigmatized as a dictator, authoritarian, czar, ‘former KGB operative’ and Soviet-style ruler; anything but the repeatedly elected President of Russia.
He is accused of hijacking Russia from the ‘road to democracy’, as pursued by his grotesquely corrupt predecessor Boris Yeltsin; of directing the bloody repression of the ‘freedom loving Chechens’; of jailing innocent, independent, and critical oligarchs and robber barons; of fomenting an uprising in the ‘democratic, newly pro-Western’ Ukraine and seizing control of Crimea; of backing a ‘bloody tyrant’ in Syria (elected President Bashar Assad) in a civil war against ISIS terrorists; of running the Russian economy into the ground; and of militarily threatening the Baltic and Eastern European NATO member countries.
In a word, the media have propagated an image of an ‘out-of-control autocrat’, who makes a mockery of ‘democratic’ norms and ‘Western values’, and who seeks to revive the ‘Soviet (aka Evil) Empire’.
The corollary is that ‘Western powers’, despite their peace-loving propensities and fraternal attempts to bring Russia into the democratic ‘fold’, have been ‘forced’ to now surround Russia with NATO military bases and missiles; to finance a violent coup in the Ukraine (on Russia’s frontier) and arm the Ukrainian putsch government and neo-fascist militias to ‘restore democracy’ and violently suppress ethnic Russian ‘separatists’ in Eastern Ukraine. We are told that US and EU sanctions against Russia were carefully crafted ‘diplomatic’ measures designed to punish the Moscow ‘aggressor’.
In reality, the Western media has relentlessly demonized Vladimir Putin in a campaign to further NATO military expansion and undermine the Russian economy and its national security. The goal is ultimately to force a ‘regime change’, restoring the neo-liberal elites who had pillaged Russia’s economy during the 1990s and whose brutal economic policies led to the premature death of over 6 million Russians due to deprivation and the collapse of the healthcare system.
Putin: Demon or Realist, Autocrat or Democrat, Vassal or Independent Leader?
The Western media has backed every oligarch, gangster, and fraudster who has gone on trial and been convicted during Putin’s term in office. The propagandists tell us the reason for this affinity between the Western media and the gangster-oligarchs is that these convicted felons, who claim to be ‘political dissidents’ and critics of Putin’s rule, have been dispossessed, and jailed for upholding ‘Western values’.
The Western media conveniently ignore the well-documented studies on the source of the gangster-oligarchs’ wealth: The violent and illegal seizure of multi-billion dollars-worth of natural resources (aluminum, oil and gas), banks, factories, pension funds and real estate. During the Yeltsin period the oligarchs controlled thousands of armed gangsters and engaged in internal warfare during which thousands were killed, including top government regulators, police officials and journalists who dared to oppose or expose their pillage and property grabs.
Putin’s prosecution of a mere fraction of the most notorious oligarch-gangsters has won the support of the vast majority of Russian citizens because it represents a return to law and order and the return of stolen public wealth.
Only the Western media has dared to refer to these convicted felons as ‘political victims and reformers’. They did so because the oligarchs had become the most loyal and submissive assets in the US and EU governments’ efforts to convert Russia into an irreversibly weak vassal state.
The Western media constantly refer to President Putin as the ‘authoritarian ruler’, despite the fact that he has been repeatedly elected by large majorities in competitive elections against Western backed and funded candidates. His popularity is attested to by opinion polls conducted by Western agencies.
In 2015, President Putin’s support soared to over 85%. The pro-Western Russian neo-liberal politicians scored in the low single digits according to the same independent polls.
Clearly the Russian public does not want to return to the poverty and chaos of the Western-backed gangster politics of the 1990s.
Whatever reservations working and middle class Russians have over President Putin’s style of decision-making, they clearly value his crackdown on gangster-controlled elections, Chechen terrorism, and his restoration of Russian military defense of its frontiers, including the annexation of Crimea, following the US-engineered coup in Ukraine.
Every day, the Western media recycle reports of the ‘decline and demise’ of the Russian economy, blaming ‘statist’ mismanagement of the economy by Putin. They claim ‘declining living standards’, the ‘negative growth’ of the economy and the ‘growing isolation’ of an ‘expansionist’ Russia in the face of Western sanctions.
These media claims are laughable. Readily available data demonstrate that living standards of the vast majority of Russian citizens have significantly increased under President Putin’s administration, especially after the utter collapse under the free marketers of the 1990s. Russian workers receive their pay, pensioners their pensions, enterprises their loans – on time. During the ‘free market’ days of Boris Yeltsin, workers went up to a year without pay, pensioners were selling their heirlooms in the street to survive and enterprises paid extortionate interest rates to oligarch-gangster controlled banks! Comparative data, easily obtained, are deliberately ignored by the mass media because it doesn’t fit the demonological narrative.
The mass media present the neo-liberal ‘opposition’ and ‘liberal critics’ as Russian democrats defending ‘Western values’. They forget to mention that these ‘liberal critics’ have been directly funded by Western foundations (National Endowment for Democracy, Soros Foundation, etc.) and Russian non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) with longstanding ties to US and EU governments, intelligence agencies and exiled Russian billionaires. The so-called ‘Russian’ democratic opposition revealed their abject servility to Western interests when they openly supported the Ukrainian coup and Kiev’s bloody assault on ethnic Russian-Ukrainians in the eastern ‘Donbas’ regions of Donetsk, Luhansk and Odessa. Whatever shreds of respectability and credibility the ‘democratic opposition’ retained with the Russian public, up to that point, was lost. They were seen for what they are: propaganda arms of Western imperialism and mouth-pieces for neo-fascists.
The Western mass media charge Putin’s government with the same crimes that their own governments commit. After the US State Department’s Victoria Nuland admitted to channeling $5 billion to fund the 2014 coup in Ukraine and after the Polish regime boasted of training far right street fighters, whose mob violence served as a pretext for the coup, and after neo-fascist coalition partners in Odessa of burned alive four dozen ethnic Russian-Ukrainian citizens opposed to the coup, the Western mass media accused Putin of ‘intervening’ in Ukraine. This was because Russia had convoked a referendum in Crimea, in which over 80% of the electorate voted to secede from the illegitimate Ukrainian coup regime and rejoin Russia.
In truth, the Putin government is a victim of the Western power grab in the Ukraine, with Russia having to absorb hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russian refugees driven out of the Donbas, yet the Western media portray Putin as the executioner. Meanwhile the Western coup-makers and their far-right allies are depicted as victims… forced to bomb and decimate the Donbas region.
The charade continued. The Western media portray the subsequent punitive, economic sanctions imposed by the expansionist US and EU on Russia as a result of Putin’s ‘aggression’, referring to Russia’s defense of Crimea’s self-determination and the rights of the millions of bilingual ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine.
The absurdity and convoluted nature of Western demonological propaganda has reached new even more bizarre heights with their hysteria against Russia’s military support of the secular Syrian government against ISIS and other jihadi terrorists.
The Western mass media have launched a global campaign charging that the Russian air force bombs ‘non-ISIS military bases’, presumably the bases of Western-backed ‘friendly’ jihadi terrorists. This ridiculous ‘reportage’ and its accompanying ‘photos’ were published before the Russian air strikes even took place!!
Apparently timing doesn’t matter in Washington’s ‘alternative universe of lies’!
NATO passed its political line to the media that Russian support for the legitimate regime of President Assad must be discredited; that the Russian presence is ‘provocative’ and responsible for ‘creating tensions’ in the region – after years of Western-sponsored jihadi terrorism against Syria!
Obedient to its masters, the Western media breathlessly ‘reported’ that the Russians were ‘really’ engaged in Syria in order destroy the pro-Western ‘fighters’, leaving ISIS alone.
No credible evidence for this propaganda was ever presented. They trotted out aerial photos of wreckage, which had likely been lifted from previous US bombings.
The media’s clumsy execution of the Pentagon’s line managed to embarrass even the US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, who backed off of such claims and called for an explanation from Russia. Even Secretary Kerry, who now seeks to secure Putin’s military support for the US against ISIS while withdrawing Russia’s political backing of President Assad, has cautioned the media to modify its line, now that the US favors ‘greater coordination’ with Russia — but under US leadership. The media has recently conformed to this line, although it has not managed to explain how Washington could now work with the demonic President Putin.
Conclusion
Western media is engaged in an intense long-term propaganda campaign to demonize President Putin. Its role is to convince world public opinion and world leaders to blindly follow the US and EU, as well as their ‘allies’ and vassal states, in a campaign to degrade and undermine Russia, and consolidate a unipolar empire under US tutelage.
The Western mass media is important; but it must be remembered that the media is an instrument of imperial state power. Its lies and fabrications, its demonization of leaders, like President Putin, are one part of a global military offensive to establish dominance and to destroy adversaries.
The more intense the imperial campaign, the riskier the power grab, the greater the need to demonize the victims.
This explains how the escalation of the rabid anti-Putin propaganda campaign coincides with the single biggest Western power grab — the Ukraine coup (‘regime change’) — since West Germany annexed East Germany, and NATO and the EU incorporated the Baltic States, Eastern Europe and the Balkans into the West’s strategic alliance. The West’s bloody break-up of the Yugoslav federation was part of this strategic program.
The problem with the Western demonization of adversaries, whether it is Russia, Iran and China today, or earlier Cuba, Libya and Yemen in the past, is that Washington and the EU face severe economic crises at home and military defeats abroad by armed Islamic and nationalist resistance movements.
The US had invested hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up a shaky puppet regime in US-occupied Iraq, yet the US-trained and supplied Iraqi Army fled as the Baathist-Islamist ‘ISIS’ quickly over-ran half the country.
US troops have occupied Afghanistan for fourteen years, losing tens of thousands of lives and limbs and yet the nationalist-Islamist Taliban can easily take over Afghanistan’s third largest city, Kunduz (population 300,000), and occupies three quarters of the rest of the countryside.
Libya and Somalia are a disaster. And still Washington allocates a half billion dollars to train pro-Western mercenaries to overthrow Syria’s President Assad – mercenaries who give up their arms or join ISIS the moment they cross the border from Jordan or Turkey. The US trained mercenaries have handed over untold millions of dollars worth of heavy and light weapons and armored carriers to ISIS and Al Qaeda. The EU and the US face the dismal reality that Libya, Somalia and Syria are over-run by anti-Western Islamic fighters.
In Asia, China is demonized in the Western media, portrayed as being on the verge of collapse, facing a hard landing, even as China grows at 7%. The Western media wring their collective hands over the crisis in China while Beijing finances two new international development banks for $100 billion, raises its contribution to the IMF and brings 50 countries, including most of the EU but minus the US and Japan, into a new infrastructure lending institution.
Two big questions face the US and EU:
Why do the Western media launch a campaign of demonization that doesn’t correspond to reality? What is the goal of such demonization, which objectively undermines the possibility of forming tactical alliances to end the US’ military losses, political defeats and diplomatic isolation? The US needs Russia to defeat ISIS.
For Moscow, the fight against ISIS is crucial to Russian national security: thousands of Chechen terrorists (some trained by the US) are fighting with ISIS and threaten to return to the Caucuses and terrorize Russia. Unlike the US public’s opposition to Washington’s role in forcing ‘regime change’ in Syria, the Russian public supports Moscow’s military support for the Syrian government because the Chechens’ campaign of terror within Russia, especially the 2004 massacre of hundreds of school children, teachers, and parents in Beslan, is seared into their memory – a fact conveniently ignored by Western media when it ‘sympathizes’ with Chechen ‘freedom fighters’.
In reality, Washington should have a common interest to ally with Russia in the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. However Obama is committed to ousting Assad (Russia’s ally) to expand US dominance in the Middle East in partnership with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Clearly there are insurmountable contradictions between short-term military objectives (fighting ISIS) and strategic imperial political imperatives (consolidating US-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East and Iran).
Washington has moved to end its isolation in Latin America by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. Meanwhile, Washington retains the economic blockade of Cuba and its huge US military base in Guantanamo. Cuba is seen as a tactical political ally in ‘moderating’ the leftist government of Venezuela and pressuring the Colombian FARC to disarm, even as Washington deepens its military presence in the continent.
Obama signed off on a nuclear agreement with Iran (but the crippling sanctions and blockade remain in place) in order to secure Tehran’s support for the war against ISIS in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Temporarily, the Western mass media has ‘toned-down’ its demonological reporting on Iran and Cuba, for tactical purposes.
The Obama regime has adopted a ‘good cop/bad cop’ (or schizophrenic) posture with Russia on Syria – Secretary of State John Kerry speaks of joint co-operation with Moscow while Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter proposes to militarily confront ‘Russian aggression’. The media hasn’t made the switch because they don’t know which orders to obey or which line to ‘parrot’.
In the meantime, the domestic economic crisis deepens, ISIS advances, the Taliban approaches Kabul, the Russians are arming and defending President Assad and millions of refugees, fleeing the war zones, have over- run Europe. European border wars are raging. And Obama wrings his hands in impotence. Demonology offers no allies, no solutions and no positive path to peace and co-existence.
What is the Israeli Lobby in Australia Doing in Interfaith Dialogue?
By Ali Kazak | Dissident Voice | October 11, 2015
For years Israel and its lobby around the world have been trying to normalise their relations with Arabs and Muslims without solving the Palestine Question.
One of the methods they resorted to in the last few years is using human rights and community organizations such as interfaith dialogue and Multiculturalism to achieve this objective and to: isolate the Palestinians, marginalise the Palestine question, end Israel’s isolation, and prevent criticism of Israel, knowing that these organisations will be the first to stand against Israel’s violations, racial and religious discrimination.
The group responsible for this task in Australia is The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC); its Director of International & Community Affairs, Jeremy Jones is in charge of lobbying religious community organizations, specifically Muslims and Christians. Consequently he convened the Faith Communities for Reconciliation, founding participant in the Australian Partnership of Religious Organisations and the Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims & Jews.
AIJAC is a private political propaganda group. It is recognised as the main Israeli lobby in Australia. It coordinates its activities and works intimately with the Israeli embassy in Canberra and different institutions in Israel. It is privately funded by some Jewish businessmen. It monitors closely Australian politicians, the media, ethnic and religious groups, (especially Arabs and Muslims), unions and academics on their stands towards Israel and the Palestine question.
AIJAC’s task is to spread Israel’s misleading propaganda, targets all those who oppose Israel’s violations and foil the Australian government and community from taking a stand in support of Palestinian rights. Its mouthpiece was Australia/Israel Review renamed later The Review.
The fact that, as a professional pro-Israeli lobby group and not a religious organization or representative of the Jewish community, AIJAC’s self-appointment to represent Judaism and the Jewish community highlights the political objectives it is trying to achieve by serving Israel’s interests and infiltrating ethnic and religious community organizations under the pretext of ethnicity, religion and “religious dialogue”.
Stephen Rothman, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies President, said “AIJAC is a private think-tank. It is not a body that is in any way elected or in a democratic sense representative of the community” (“It was mishandled – community president” in Australian Jewish News (AJN) on 7 Nov. 2003).
Adding to this irony is the major role AIJAC has been playing for years in inciting against Palestinians, Arabs, Islam and Muslims in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Region by inviting and organizing speaking tours of anti-Muslim racists, and underneath the surface of its representative Jeremy Jones’s sweet talk and attempt to climb to the highest steps of morality, virtue and principles which he tries to impress his audience with and outbid everyone else, there is an ugly reality that speaks to the contrary.
Let me give you some examples.
Jones was reported in the AJN, on 19 Feb. 1988 as saying “I am concerned at the fact that Islam is today the major non-Christian religion in Australia”! Imagine if someone expressed their concern at the number of the Jews in Australia? This is the man who is disguised as working for reconciliation, the partnership of religious organizations and dialogue.
Jones’s hostility towards Palestinian human and national rights goes back to his activism in the Jewish Union of Students on campus. He intentionally confuses between anti-Semites and critics of Israel’s crimes and violations whom he accuse of having a hidden anti-Semitic agenda. In his “Media Watch” column which Jones wrote in the AJN for eight years as well as his column in The Review he was renowned for attacking all critics of Israel’s crimes from community group leaders, politicians, academics, journalists and Christian, Moslem and Jewish religious leaders such as the Neturei Karta. Furthermore he attacked the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees and called for the Australian government to use its contribution to pressure the UN organization to adopt policies suitable to Israel, the perpetrator of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Federal Member of Parliament, the Hon. Leo McLeay, said in a speech to parliament ‘It amazes me how intolerant Mr Jones and the pro-Israeli lobby can be. If you are not an enthusiastic supporter of the Sharon version of the Berlin Wall, you are considered to be anti-Jewish. When will the Jeremy Joneses of this world understand that criticism of the Israeli government and its actions is not anti- Semitism?’ (Hansard 11.8.2003 House of Representatives)
In a letter to the editor F. Pojer wrote in the AJN of 8 November 1991, commenting on the “Media Watch” column “as a loyal reader of the AJN over many years I am speaking, I believe, on behalf of many others, about the content and tone of the regular feature Media Watch. The articles are always written in an aggressive and antagonising manner rather than in a rational and conciliatory style more acceptable to the majority of peace-loving people.” This comment is not in isolation but typical of people who objected to Jones’s extremism.
In 2003 Jeremy Jones, then president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, vigorously attacked the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding the Sydney Peace Prize to Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian activist, academic and Member of Parliament who has been a tireless worker for justice and peace in the Middle East.
Throughout the years AIJAC has been inviting and organizing speaking tours of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racists.
One of the speaking tours they organized in Australia and New Zealand is for David Pryce-Jones, who was reported in the Weekend Australian of 1-2 Dec. 1990, as describing the Arabs as having a “culture of violence”, saying “aggression and war are nearly inevitable in the Arab world” and that “Arab culture is a closed circle of status-seeking from which the Arabs cannot escape”. “When the West tries to be understanding and progressive in its dealing with the Arabs, it is really making the mistake of thinking that the Arabs are just like us”.
And on another speaking tour organized also by AIJAC he was reported by the Melbourne Herald-Sun on 7 Nov. 1995 saying “to shoot one’s prime minister is what the Arabs do, not what the Jews do”, ironically he said that at a time when Israel’s prime minister Rabin was shot by an extremist Jewish terrorist. He furthermore, described the Arabs and Palestinians in particular, as assassins, lawless and living like animals. Arab society he says is a violent society. But this time as a result of a complaint by the Australia Arabic Council, under the Racial Hatred Act, AIJAC was forced to make a public apology which appeared in the Herald Sun on 23 Dec. 1997. If you think that AIJAC’s apology was genuine you are mistaken. More speaking tours were organized by AIJAC for David Pryce-Jones.
Another favourite and regular guest of AIJAC’s is Daniel Pipes, who built his career on preaching hate against Muslims and Islam. A review of one of his books in the Washington Post in 1983 found his work exhibiting “a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims… and frequently contemptuous of them.” He has repeatedly called into question the loyalty of American Muslims and singled them out as somehow anti-American.
On a visit to Australia in 1998 Pipes vilified and offended the Australian Moslem community. His aims were to stereotype Moslems and incite the public against them, especially the Jewish community by deliberately mixing Zionism with Judaism and showing Moslems as anti-Jewish rather than against Zionism and Israel’s occupation and racial discrimination.
He was reported in the AJN of 18 Dec. 1998 as saying “Antisemitism is now primarily a Moslem phenomenon… I advise Jewish organizations to take their eyes off the Christians and start focusing on Islam.” And to a question about Palestinians who favour peace? He replied “Show me a moderate Palestinian.”
In an article in The Nation on 11 Nov. 2002, Kristine McNeil wrote: “Pipes is notorious for calling Moslems ‘barbarians’ and ‘potential killers’ in a 2001 National Review article, and accusing them of scheming to ‘replace the [US] constitution with the Koran’. In a 1990 National Review article [he] insisted that ‘Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene… All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Moslem customs are more troublesome than most.”
Another AIJAC guest professor Raphael Israeli, was reported by the AJN of 16 Feb. 2007 urging Australia to cap its intake of Muslim immigration warning “life will become untenable, unless the Muslim population is kept in check … then they control whole section of the economy … even students who apply to come from Islamic countries to the West” and called for a “preventative policy” to protect national security and ensure Muslims remained a “marginal minority.”
Only following a storm of protest over his racist comments, AIJAC was forced to withdraw its support.
An article in the AJN on 23 Feb. 2007 titled “A few facts in the service of gross distortion” expressed the views of many Jews who are unhappy with the extremist activities of some mainstream Jewish organizations and AIJAC, Dr Mark Baker wrote: “One needn’t be a prophet in an age of Google to predict what Professor Israeli would speak about behind open doors. The same can be said for Melanie Phillips, the author of Londonistan, whose visit is being sponsored by AIJAC to provoke the same message of fear and discord. No doubt, the invitation has also been extended to Bat Yeor, author of Eurabia, along with the annual visit by Daniel Pipes, thought-patroller of western academia.”
And Mr. Gordon Drennan wrote:
My congratulations to Mark Leibler and Dr. Colin Rubenstein at AIJAC. It’s quite an achievement to arrange things so that you get to have your cake and eat it too. They invite Professor Raphael Israeli to Australia, knowing full well he’s an Islamophobe. They could not know, they could not have invited him for any other reason – he’s written 20 books. Then they make sure his views end up in the mainstream media so they then get the chance to disown him and say his racist views are repugnant to Jews. But he still gets to stay here, give his talks and spread his race hate, and he gets way more publicity when he does. Masterful. (AJN, “AIJAC Achievement” (9.3.2007)
Those are only some examples of the anti-Muslims and anti-Arabs amongst the numerous guests of AIJAC and some other Jewish organizations in Australia.
It is an absolute farce to have Israeli apologists in an “interfaith dialogue” when Israel is grossly violating both Christian and Muslim Palestinians human and religious rights, ethnically cleansing Muslims and Christians and preventing their return to their homeland just because they are not Jews and preventing those under occupation from moving freely in their own country to go to their Churches and Mosques to worship in Jerusalem.
Since its creation in Palestine in 1948 Israel has destroyed and desecrated thousands of churches, mosques and cemeteries and turned some historic mosques into restaurants-bars.
To mention but a few cases: the mosque of the village of Ain Hud in the Haifa district has been transformed into a restaurant bar. The mosque of the village of Caesaria similarly serves as a restaurant bar. The mosque of the city of Safad in the Galilee has been transformed into an art gallery, while the central mosque of Beer Sheba serves as the city museum. The Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel and the adjacent park, named Independence Park, are built on the site of Abed Al-Nabi Muslim cemetery. The Jerusalem Plaza Hotel and the adjacent park, also named Independence Park, are likewise built on the site of the Mamilla Muslim cemetery.
The pillaging of the historic Islamic cemetery of Mamilla Cemetery with thousands of graves is still ongoing today to build housing, shops and the so called “Museum of Tolerance”!! This is not to mention the massacres, such as Al Aqsa Mosque massacre (8.10.90) and the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre (25.2.94), the frequent desecration and arson attacks against churches and mosques carried out by Jewish extremists who are armed and protected by the Israeli army and their recent murderous arson attack on the Dawabsheh family while sleeping in their home burning alive the father, mother and 18 month old baby, leaving a 4 year old boy orphaned with second-degree burns on more that 60 percent of his body.
In their government-funded schools, Jewish religious extremists teach hatred and racism to the pupils. One example of this is a song sung by children of Kiryat Arba settlement in the West Bank in an SBS Australian Television documentary “A Season inside God’s Bunker” screened on 3 May 1994. The song went as follows:
All the world hates Arabs,
And the main thing is to kill them one by one,
With these feet I stepped on my enemy,
With these teeth I bit his skin,
With these lips I sucked his blood,
And I still haven’t had enough revenge.
AIJAC has never condemned Israel’s racial and religious discrimination against non-Jews in Israel and the 1967 Palestinian occupied territories. How could one support the rights of one indigenous people and not another? Or support multiculturalism and equal religious coexistence in one country and not another?
There is nothing wrong in interfaith dialogue; in fact it is a civilized and healthy conduct if it is held in good faith, for understanding and against all form of religious discrimination. But what is wrong here is that a lobby group which does not represent Judaism or the Jewish community is using the dialogue to advance a political agenda on behalf of one of the most oppressive violators of religious rights in the world today. This is contempt and an affront to the other parties of the dialogue and to the society as a whole and should not be acceptable
Unfortunately, some Muslim groups accept of AIJAC in Australia, out of ignorance of its role. And the establishment of relations with it has given AIJAC credibility and misled other Muslim organizations overseas, such as Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in Indonesia, the world’s largest membership Muslim organisation, which hosted Jeremy Jones recently and introduced him as “a friend of NU and a pioneer in Jewish-Muslim dialogue”. Prior and subsequent to his visit, Jones embarked on a speaking tour organised by the NU participants in this January’s Muslim-Jewish dialogue in Israel hosted by AIJAC.
It was reported that during his visit, he met “politicians, political advisers, human rights NGOs, representatives of both the historic and new organisations of Jewish Indonesians, academics and religious leaders, represented Judaism at the Jakarta Interfaith Hallal BiHallal (a post-Ramadan event designed to improve interpersonal relations).”
Muslim group leaders in Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere need to review their relations with AIJAC and Jones and put the interest of equality and peace in Palestine above personal and other interests.
Ali Kazak is a former Palestinian ambassador.
Featured Video
Saudi Led Destruction of Yemen’s heritage
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Israel: Strategic Ally or Liability?
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Declassified UK exposes British man who fought for ‘Israel’ in Gaza
- West’s death cult in a theater near you
- How the Yandex ‘Russian bots’ lie fell apart
- Burnham’s ‘Russia did Brexit’ ruse crumbles
- Estonia making movies and games to encourage war against Russia
- Four in five new UK jobs taken by foreigners – report
- Here’s what Trump’s latest U-turn really means for Russia and Ukraine
- The Houthis Are Not an Iranian Proxy
- Europe’s Energy Hypocrisy, Russian LNG Profits and US Dependence
- ICC ignored ‘very well-documented’ NATO crimes – ex-Libyan minister
- If Americans Knew
- Activists Abused By Israel Return to New Freedom Flotilla Mission
- 60 Minutes won’t tell the full truth about Israeli settler violence
- Nearly 50,000 women, girls killed or severely injured in Gaza since October 2023: UN Women
- ADL is working with AI companies to suppress alleged ‘antisemitism’
- Israeli occupation forces using social media surveillance unit to target hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank
- Israel’s New – and Terrifying – Security Doctrine
- Israeli Attacks Kill Five in Gaza, Including a four-year-old and a woman
- Air Force Major Who Called for Trump’s Impeachment Held in Solitary Confinement
- It’s a Genocide, I’m Into It’: Seinfeld Mocks Protest over Palestinian Children Killed
- Universities fire dozens amid pressure from Zionist billionaires
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
