Brookings Institution Calls on Obama to Support a Hypothetical Coup Against Venezuela’s Maduro
By Dan Beeton | CEPR Americas Blog | January 25, 2014
On Thursday, the Brookings Institution issued a memo to President Obama titled “Venezuela Breaks Down in Violence.” As might be expected from the title, the memo (and an accompanying video) depicts an alarming situation where
Venezuela is experiencing declining export revenues, accelerating inflation and widespread shortages of basic consumer goods. At the same time, the Maduro administration has foreclosed peaceful options for Venezuelans to bring about a change in its current policies.
But, contrary to the alarmist title, the violence is only a possibility in the future: “Economic mismanagement in Venezuela has reached such a level that it risks inciting a violent popular reaction,” and further on the reader learns that actually “[t]he risk of a violent outcome may still be low…”
The possibility of such chaos is troubling to the author, Harold Trinkunas since “it is in the U.S. interest that Venezuela remain a reliable source of oil,” while “[p]opular unrest in a country with multiple armed actors, including the military, the militia, organized crime and pro-government gangs, is a recipe for unwelcome chaos and risks an interruption of oil production.”
Trinkunas, who “previously served as an associate professor and chair of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California” urges the Obama administration to take action. At the top of his recommendations is for the U.S. to enlist Brazil – “whose interests are also at risk” – in an attempt “to convince the Maduro administration to shift course.”
Trinkunas makes clear what course he wants the U.S. government to take should a crisis result in Maduro being removed from power. While one might think that such a hypothetical scenario would indeed be one when the Inter-American Democratic Charter should be invoked (Trinkunas suggests that it be used against Maduro now), that would be naïve. Instead:
…we should also begin quiet conversations with others in the hemisphere on what steps to take should Venezuela experience a violent breakdown of political order. Such an event could potentially fracture the regional consensus on democracy on a scale much greater than that of the Honduran coup in 2009. Maduro’s allies in the region would most likely push for his immediate restoration, but in the absence of functioning democratic institutions, this would only compound Venezuela’s internal crisis. The United States would need to work with key states in the region—Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia—on a regional consensus in favor of rebuilding democracy in Venezuela.
In other words, should a coup occur, Trinkunas wants the U.S. to “work with” the Latin American countries it is closer to politically – and also Brazil – to help it succeed. This is in fact what the Bush administration attempted to do during the short-lived 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez, and the Obama administration worked to ensure that the 2009 coup against the democratically-elected government of Honduras would succeed.
Of course Trinkunas seems to be unaware – despite a passing reference to “distance from the United States over NSA surveillance issues” – that in recent years Brazil’s government has not shied from challenging U.S. foreign policy on a variety of hot-button issues, including over Iran’s nuclear program, the FTAA, and a planned U.S.-Colombia military bases agreement. Brazil led the South American opposition to the Honduran coup and refused to recognize the new government of Pepe Lobo following the November 2009 elections in Honduras. Former president Lula da Silva – who has hinted at another presidential run in 2018 – was always vocal about his support for the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez and released a video in support of Maduro ahead of the April elections last year.
Perhaps Trinkunas can be forgiven if he isn’t aware of these things; they aren’t talked about much in Washington foreign policy circles, where Brazil is still often referred to as part of the “good left” – unlike Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and other bad apples.
Why is Trinkunas so concerned that Venezuela could soon collapse into violence? He cites a number of economic factors, some vague, some not. He frets, for example, about “declining” output by state oil company PDVSA, and that Venezuela had “the highest inflation rate in the world in 2013.” But as CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot recently pointed out in a contribution to the Inter-American Dialogue’s Latin America Advisor:
inflation appears to have stabilized. Inflation data for November and December show a monthly rate of 4.8 percent and 2.2 percent, putting the three-month annualized rate at 60.6 percent; the annual rate for 2013 was 56.1 percent.
Further, citing an analysis by Bank of America, Weisbrot states:
BOA sees Venezuela’s current debt as sustainable. A devaluation would not likely have much effect on the economy, as previous devaluations did not. Nor is social unrest a likely prospect, as there are no elections for two years, and most opposition protests in Venezuela tend to focus on elections…
Trinkunas attempts to cast doubt on Venezuela’s electoral process (the same one that former president Jimmy Carter called “the best in the world” ahead of the October 2012 elections). He writes, “A now unified national opposition continues to emphasize elections as the solution, but the playing field is hardly level, and elections are not scheduled to take place again until 2015.” Venezuela observers know that the opposition has been relatively unified for some time now, coming together to support the presidential candidacy of Henrique Capriles in both October 2012 and April 2013. Capriles lost both times, and last month the opposition was dealt a blow by a poorer showing in municipal elections than it had hoped. Analysts and some members and supporters of the opposition now question Capriles’ status as an opposition leader, so if anything the opposition is probably now less unified than it was prior to these recent elections.
Ironically – perhaps unaware that Brookings’ website is available to the public, as is YouTube – Trinkunas writes, “Overt U.S. criticism of the Maduro administration or efforts to exert our limited economic leverage would be grist for the mill of the Venezuelan propaganda machine; we should avoid that.” Certainly if one of the most prominent Venezuelan think-tanks called for supporting the overthrow of the U.S. government, that would simply be ignored by the U.S. “propaganda machine,” right?
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Israeli militarism predicated on 9/11 deception
By Brandon Martinez | Press TV | January 26, 2014
No more than an hour after the World Trade Center Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001, Israel’s leaders initiated a coordinated campaign to blame their enemies for the attacks.
Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, appeared live in studio at the [state-run] BBC on 9/11, wherein he described his desire for the United States and other major powers to lead a global campaign of annihilation against the Arab/Muslim world. “[T]his is the time to deploy a globally concerted effort led by the United States, UK, Europe and Russia, against all sources of terror,” the Israeli war criminal stated. Dubbing this campaign a “global war on terror,” Barak continued: “It’s a time to launch an operational, complete war against terror even if it takes certain pains from the routine activities of our normal society.” “Bin Laden sits in Afghanistan… Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea… these kinds of states should be treated as ‘rogue states,’” said Barak, in a call for the US to take pre-emptive actions against countries that Israel views as impediments to its domination of the Middle East.
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister on 9/11, duplicated Barak’s war cry against the Muslim world. “[The] war against terror is an international war,” Sharon said at a press conference in Israel shortly after the disaster, describing an impending global conflict as “a war of a coalition of the free world against all the terror groups and against whoever believes they can pose a threat to freedom.” The Israeli politician Shimon Peres forwarded an identical sentiment as his Likudnik compatriots. “The war against terror is an international war,” he said, adding: “This is a war between the good and the bad.” “The fight against terrorism,” Peres proclaimed, “is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life.”
Later on the day, Ehud Barak and the Israel-first champion Richard Perle appeared on a [state-run] BBC program where they outlined what amounted to a Zionist war plan of quick, successive offensives against all of Israel’s enemies. Barak pointed fingers at Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad as “rogue actors” that need to be dealt with. Richard Perle emphasized the need to deal with the “states that sponsor terrorism,” and not just disparate groups of armed rebels who reside in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. The following day Benjamin Netanyahu added the Palestinian Authority to the list of enemies.
Nine days after the attacks Netanyahu expanded his list of foes that would be prime targets in the Zionist-devised “war on terror.” At a speech before the US House of Representatives’ Government Reform Committee on September 20, Netanyahu suggested that US vengeance in the face of 9/11 terrorism should be visited upon “Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan.” Netanyahu also named “Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, Hizbullah and others in Syrian-controlled Lebanon, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the recently mobilized Fatah and Tanzim factions in the Palestinian territories, and sundry other terror organizations based in such capitals as Damascus, Baghdad, and Khartoum” as legitimate targets. Netanyahu’s diatribe was no less than a declaration of war against the entire Arab/Muslim world with few exceptions.
The revealing statements of these Zionist warmongers were consistent with a broader Israeli strategy outlined by Benjamin Netanyahu and his Zionist associates in the 1980s. In 1979 and 1984 Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders organized two conferences to discuss terrorism under the auspices of the Jonathan Institute. The purpose of the two events was to seduce Western military, intelligence and political figures to join Israel’s crusade against the Muslim world, deceptively disguising their imperialist agenda as a “war against terrorism.” The second conference in 1984 produced a book edited by Netanyahu entitled Terrorism: How the West Can Win. “The two conferences organized by the Jonathan Institute, in Jerusalem in July 1979 and in Washington, D.C., in June 1984, were major events and highly effective for Israeli and Western propaganda,” wrote Edward S. Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan in their book The “Terrorism” Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror.
It did not take long for Israeli leaders to inform us of how beneficial the 9/11 attacks were for Israel’s anti-Arab/Muslim agenda. On Sept. 12, 2001, the New York Times quoted a jubilant Benjamin Netanyahu. In reference to the 9/11 attacks, Netanyahu said: “It’s very good. … Well it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel].” “[The September 11 attack will] strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror,” he said. The Israeli public, the New York Times reported, “took cold comfort in concluding that Americans now share more of their fears.” The article further reported that Israel’s political and military leaders were content the attacks “would awaken the United States to the threat of global terrorism” and have the effect of lessening American government pressure on Israel, giving the regime in Tel Aviv a free hand to suppress the Palestinians.
Netanyahu reiterated this sentiment in 2008 when he told an Israeli university audience that “We [Israel] are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” adding that the atrocity “swung American public opinion in our favor.” Ariel Sharon and his inner circle of Likudniks and Mossadniks came to a similar conclusion, announcing that the 9/11 attacks were nothing less than a “Hanukkah miracle” of good fortune for Israel. “The Israeli political-security establishment is coming to the conclusion that the terror attacks on September 11 were a kind of ‘Hanukkah miracle’ for Israel, coming just as Israel was under increasing international pressure because of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians,” reported Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Aluf Benn, writing for Haaretz, further observed:
“Osama bin Laden’s September 11 attacks placed Israel firmly on the right side of the strategic map with the U.S., and put the Arab world at a disadvantage as it now faces its own difficult decisions about its future. That’s the impression left by the speeches given by Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and National Security Council chairman Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, at this week’s Herzliya conference on national security.”
Ami Ayalon, a former chief of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet, confirmed that Israel’s leadership was overjoyed. “Since September 11, our leaders have been euphoric,” Ayalon told France’s Le Monde newspaper. “With no more international pressures on Israel, they think, the way is open.” An Israeli professor named Ehud Sprinzak told the UK’s Telegraph newspaper: “From the perspective of the Jews, [the September 11 attack] is the most important public relations act ever committed in our favour.” Within hours of the event, pro-Israel analyst George Friedman, the director of Stratfor, announced that the “big winner” of the day was Israel. “The big winner today, intended or not, is… Israel,” wrote Friedman on his website, speculating that “The United States is obviously going to launch a massive covert and overt war against the international radical Islamic movement that is assumed to be behind this attack.” Friedman explained that the tragedy would have the effect of aligning “U.S. and Israeli interests [and it will also make] the United States dependent on the Israelis.” Friedman concluded: “The Israeli leadership is feeling relief. Given that pressures for Israel to restrain operations against the Palestinian Authority and other Palestinian groups will decline dramatically.”
Surprisingly, Efraim Halevy, the director of the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency on 9/11, also admitted that Israel benefitted exponentially from the attacks. In an interview on The Standard, a Canadian current affairs television program, Halevy was asked about the theories that Israel’s Mossad was involved in 9/11 for political gain. “Obviously Israel benefited,” Halevy capitulated. Predictably the Israeli spymaster denied any involvement, leading us to believe that 9/11 working out to Israel’s advantage is purely coincidental.
Coincidentally, one day before 9/11 the Washington Times reported on a 68-page study released by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), which contained some telling revelations about Israeli conduct. The study was geared towards devising a plan to enforce a Palestinian-Israeli peace accord. Acknowledging Israel’s penchant for ruthlessness and deception, the paper’s authors described the Israeli Army as a “500-pound gorilla … well armed and trained. Operates in both Gaza and the West Bank.” Israel is “known to disregard international law to accomplish mission” the authors added. In their assessment of the Mossad, the group of US Army strategists said the Israeli agency is a “wildcard” that is “ruthless and cunning” and has the “capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”
Israel’s long history of false-flag terrorism includes events like the King David Hotel bombing in 1946, wherein Zionist terrorists from the Irgun militia (which later became the Likud Party) detonated bombs in the Jerusalem hotel to spur the British into relinquishing their control of Palestine. Ninety-one people died in the bombing. The Lavon Affair of 1954 saw Zionist terrorists explode firebombs in British and American-owned buildings in Egypt with the intention of having the attacks blamed on Muslims. Then there was the USS Liberty assault in 1967, where Israel deliberately attacked a US surveillance ship during the Six-Day War, killing 34 American servicemen. And those are just a few of the more well-known false-flag terror operations of… [Israel] against its perceived “allies.”
Did Israel pull off its grandest deception of all on 9/11? A clue into the whole matter was revealed by the Telegraph newspaper, which reported that in August of 2001 Israel’s Mossad warned the CIA that terror attacks on major US landmarks were imminent. The Mossad’s warning was unspecific as to where and how the attacks would occur, but related that a cell of 200 terrorists were present on American soil and were planning a major operation. The Israelis linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told their American counterparts there were “strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement.”
Even the Bush administration admits that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, so Israel’s attempt to link Iraq to the plot in their dubious “warning” is telling. Immediately after 9/11, Israel and its neocon partisans in the US initiated an intense campaign of innuendo to connect Iraq, as well as Arabs and Muslims generally, to the attacks. Aman, Israel’s military intelligence service, quickly disseminated disinformation asserting Iraq was involved in 9/11. Rafi Eitan, a veteran Israeli intelligence chief, duplicated Aman’s anti-Iraqi propaganda when he publicly proclaimed that Saddam Hussein was the “mastermind” of the attacks. Jewish neocons in Washington also spread the Israeli-contrived myth of Iraqi involvement with a determined passion. This deceitful Zionist campaign of disinformation was so intensive that polls later showed a large percentage of the naive American public believed Saddam Hussein and Iraq were involved in 9/11.
The Mossad’s August 2001 warning is evidence of manipulation on the part of the Israelis, considering that 200 suspicious individuals did happen to be in the United States in the months leading up 9/11, but they were not Arabs or Muslims. In December of 2001 Fox News aired a four part series detailing a “secretive and sprawling investigation” into Israeli espionage in the US. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron reported that 200 Israelis had been arrested shortly before and after 9/11 in connection with the inquiry into the attacks. Some of the Israeli suspects, reported Cameron, belonged to electronic surveillance intercept and explosive ordinance units in the Israeli military. In the first part of the video series Cameron said: “A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins.’ But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’”
The first and only people arrested on the very day of September 11, 2001, were not Arabs or Muslims with links to al-Qaeda or Iraq, but were Israelis with ties to the Mossad. Five Israelis were witnessed video taping the plane impacts into the WTC. A witness named Maria saw three of the Israelis on top of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment in New Jersey. Minutes after the first plane hit the tower she saw them celebrating, laughing and shouting with joy and mockery, as well as taking pictures of themselves smiling with the burning towers in the backdrop. Alarmed by what she saw, Maria called the police who later pulled over the five Israelis and arrested them. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, informed the police: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
The Jewish daily newspaper, The Forward, confirmed that two of the five Israelis were Mossad agents whose names appeared in a national intelligence database. They worked for a New Jersey-based moving company called Urban Moving Systems whose Israeli owner, Dominik Suter, abruptly and suspiciously fled the US back to Israel days after 9/11, leaving his moving business in complete shambles. Journalist Christopher Ketcham revealed that Urban Moving Systems was a front for Israeli intelligence.
It is inconceivable that the five dancing Israelis didn’t know exactly what was going to happen on 9/11. Some reports suggested the Israelis had set up their cameras to film the attack prior to the first plane crash. The former CIA officer Robert Baer said they were in place to film before either plane hit the WTC. If that is so, then the Israelis must have had intimate prior knowledge of the time, place and nature of the attacks. It is indisputable that the five Israelis were indeed celebrating before the second plane hit the south tower. Most people thought the initial plane strike was just a terrible accident, but somehow the five Israelis knew it was a terrorist attack immediately.
While in custody the Israelis admitted they were happy because the attacks would benefit Israel. One of them reportedly said, “The United States will [now] take steps to stop terrorism in the world.” Another remarked: “Israel now has hope that the world will now understand us.” How did they know the attacks would benefit Israel unless they also knew beforehand who would be blamed for them? How would they have known any of this unless Israel was directly involved in bringing about this event and having it blamed on the designated patsies? All of the Israeli suspects, including the five dancing Israelis, were eventually released back to Israel due to Zionist pressure from the highest levels of the White House and Department of Justice.
Much like the Zionist-led campaign of innuendo against Iraq in the aftermath of the attacks, the allegations of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11 are likewise built upon an edifice of falsehood. Bin Laden’s name was continuously invoked by the talking heads of the mainstream media, but no evidence was proffered to support the notion that he planned or was in any way involved in the attacks. In 2006, the FBI admitted that the Bureau had no evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11. “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11,” the FBI’s Chief of Investigative Publicity Rex Tomb told journalist Ed Haas.
Former Pakistani spy chief Hamid Gul explained that the media’s obsession with blaming bin Laden was a pre-planned deception. In a September 2001 interview Gul told the Washington Times: “Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves.” When asked who he believed sponsored the attacks, Gul replied: “Mossad and its accomplices.”
Veteran CIA officer Milt Bearden echoed a similar sentiment, telling CBS’s Dan Rather: “This was a tremendously sophisticated operation against the United States — more sophisticated than anybody would have ascribed to Osama bin Laden.” “Now I would go so far as to say that this group who was responsible for [the attacks], if they didn’t have an Osama bin Laden out there they’d invent one because he’s a terrific diversion for the rest of the world,” Bearden said.
Despite popular belief bin Laden did not “take credit” for the attacks.
The US invasion of Afghanistan, which was predicated on the unproven assertion that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda committed 9/11, was thus an illegitimate act of naked aggression. Further proof that the Bush regime had no evidence linking al-Qaeda to 9/11 was its refusal to provide the Taliban with the evidence. In October 2001, the Taliban offered the Bush regime a conditional agreement in which the Taliban would surrender bin Laden to a third party country if the US halted its bombing campaign against Afghanistan. All that the Taliban asked for was evidence that bin Laden was responsible for the crimes of 9/11 and upon receiving it they would immediately hand him over. The Bush regime angrily rejected the offer and continued its merciless offensive against the downtrodden country. “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know [bin Laden’s] guilty,” Bush said.
Niaz Naik, a former top Pakistani diplomat, revealed that the US invasion of Afghanistan was pre-arranged. Naik told the [state-run] BBC’s George Arney that US officials informed him of their war plans against Afghanistan months prior to the invasion. “The US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban even before last week’s [9/11] attacks,” he told [the state-run] BBC News. Naik asserted that the objective of the US invasion was not to capture bin Laden but rather to eliminate the Taliban. He explained that the US would not drop its war plans against Afghanistan “even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.”
NBC News confirmed Naik’s claims in a May 2002 report headlined “U.S. sought attack on al-Qaida: White House given plan days before Sept. 11.” The report detailed the contents of a formal National Security Presidential Directive, which “amounted to a game plan to remove al-Qaida from the face of the earth.” The plan is said to have “dealt with all aspects of a war against al-Qaida, ranging from diplomatic initiatives to military operations in Afghanistan.” The security directive, reported NBC News, “outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks.” The NBC report talked about the “striking parallels” between the Bush regime’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Afghanistan after 9/11 and the one laid out in the pre-9/11 security directive: “[T]he security directive included efforts to persuade Afghanistan’s Taliban government to turn al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden over to the United States, with provisions to use military force if it refused.” The NBC report concluded: “The couching of the plans as a formal security directive is significant […] because it indicates that the United States intended a full-scale assault on al-Qaida even if the Sept. 11 attacks had not occurred.” Bush was supposed to sign off on this aggressive plan two days before 9/11, but it is unlikely public opinion would have supported such a scenario prior to the attacks.
The evidence presented herein is by no means comprehensive. It is but a small fraction of the available evidence showcasing direct Israeli participation, if not orchestration, of 9/11 to bring about a “war of civilizations” between the West and Islamic world. In September of 2000 the neoconservative group called the Project for the New American Century spoke of a “new pearl harbour” that was needed to facilitate their militarist war plans. Shortly after 9/11, that same group — which was headed by Jewish neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan — called on President Bush to use the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq in order to protect Israel. Regime change in Iraq was described as an “important Israeli strategic objective” in a 1996 Israeli strategy paper written by leading Jewish neocons Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who all became high-ranking officials in the Bush administration in 2003, leading the drive for a war against Iraq alongside the Israel-first champion Paul Wolfowitz.
The neoconservative movement, which is widely held to be responsible for hijacking the Bush administration and pushing America into the disastrous wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, is at its core a Jewish-Zionist cabal. The movement was, since its inception… [was] led by Zionist inclinations. “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it,” writes Gal Beckerman in an article for the Jewish Forward newspaper. “As a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of [some] Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.”
Not shy about their central role in shaping US foreign policy towards the Middle East, several of the leading neocons boasted about their takeover of the Bush administration. In a [state-run] BBC documentary titled “The War Party,” Richard Perle acknowledged that “the President of the United States on issue after issue has reflected the thinking of neoconservatives.” “George Bush’s current foreign policy is basically a neoconservative foreign policy,” gloated PNAC founder William Kristol. Meyrav Wurmser, the wife of neocon David Wurmser, admitted that the neocons are driven by Zionist ideology: “Yes, many of us [neocons] are Jewish… Most of us, all of us in fact, are pro-Israel.” “The war in Iraq,” wrote Israeli journalist Ari Shavit in a 2003 article that appeared in Haaretz, “was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history.”
Through deception and subterfuge, Israel and its agents in the US conspired to engineer an endless civilizational conflict between the West and the Arab/Muslim world, for the benefit of Zionism and its expansionist objectives. Corrupted Americans assisted this diabolical scheme and will forever bear the shame of aiding and abetting evil.
Brandon Martinez is a freelance writer and journalist from Canada whose area of expertise is foreign policy, international affairs and 20th and 21st century history. His writing is focused on issues such as Zionism, Israel-Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. Readers can contact him at martinezperspective@hotmail.com.
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NSA, Israel, GVEs, Hasbara, and Gun Massacres in the USA and Beyond
By Michael Gillespie | Dissident Voice | January 25, 2014
Why would US leaders, lawmakers, intelligence and law enforcement agency administrators allow foreign intelligence and espionage agencies and their front companies unfettered, unexamined, long-term access to vast audiences of American children and young adults? And does not that question represent legitimate and vital concerns regarding privacy, public health, public safety, and national security?
It is a matter of public record that, through its intelligence agencies and their spin-offs and many front companies, Israel is actively and deeply involved with the NSA in collecting and organizing data on Americans. The information thus collected by the NSA is shared with Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as well as Israel, but Israel is the major threat to legitimate US interests. Israel’s equivalent of the NSA, Unit 8200, or Israel SIGINT National Unit (ISNU), is notorious for its spin-off companies that become private intelligence gathering and espionage operations under Israeli control, in much the same way that Mossad has long been known to use front companies for its operations. In 2010, the investigation of a Mossad assassination team that used fraudulently obtained and falsified European and Australian passports and funding provided via US-issued bank cards revealed that the corporation that arranged the funding of the kidon team, Payoneer, was itself funded by venture capital firms linked to Israeli intelligence organizations.
One of the firms, Greylock Partners, founded in 1965, “operates in a number of global centers of innovation, including Boston, China (Beijing), India (Bangalore), Israel (Herzliya) and Silicon Valley. … Current Greylock portfolio companies include Data Robotics, Digg, Facebook, Imperva, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, Pandora, Picarro, Redfin, Workday and ZipCar,” according to the firm’s website. Greylock’s investment activities in Israel were launched in 2002 by partner Moshe Mor, who “served six years in the Israeli Army as a Captain in the Military Intelligence branch.” Unlike the CIA, which has an unfortunate history of ineffective and failed business operation covers, Mossad- and Unit 8200-controlled business operations are known for lucrative success.
That record is not unblemished. According to numerous published reports, one of Mossad’s most important early software trap-door sales operatives, Robert Maxwell, a media magnate who owned several major Mossad-controlled media outlets, came to a rather spectacularly embarrassing bad end when a Mossad kidon team assassinated him on his yacht off the Canary Islands on October 31, 1991. More recently, one Israeli spy working on US soil, Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan, is reported to have run as many as “30 companies in 17 countries on behalf of Israel” at one point. That Milchan was actively involved in espionage and arms dealing appears to have been an open secret in Hollywood, according to his own public statements.
A 2007 NSA secret report published by the Guardian (UK) on September 11, 2013, noted NSA’s “only true Third Party [counter-terrorism] relationship being driven almost totally by the needs of the partner [Israel].” The same Guardian article reported on a 2007 NSA document quoting a senior NSA official: “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel. There are parameters on what NSA shares with them, but the exchange is so robust, we sometimes share more than we intended.”
If restrictions placed on the NSA negatively impact US counter-intelligence operations directed against foreign intelligence agencies, like Israel’s, those agencies will be quick to take advantage of any void created by those restrictions or by the withdrawal of US intelligence assets. Experienced observers and analysts have seen this happen before, and not so very long ago, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) became a front organization for Israel’s Mossad and began funneling confidential information about Americans to the Israeli government.
“After COINTELPRO, a still-controversial FBI operation to destabilize black nationalist and other groups in the ’60s and ’70s, the FBI, state and local law enforcement authorities were ordered out of the business of gathering information about legitimate political activity by American citizens. But in some major American cities, law enforcement files relating to legitimate and Constitutionally protected political activities that had been ordered destroyed instead found their way to the offices of the ADL, which quickly became a clearinghouse for such illegally obtained and illegally retained information.
“The absence of the FBI, state, and local police investigators in the field created a void the ADL rushed to fill, with remarkable success, by increasing its in-house ‘fact-finding’ assets and capabilities and developing enhanced working relationships with ‘official friends’—government officials, investigators, and intelligence officers. … The ADL favored many of its ‘official friends’ with expense-paid trips to Israel, where they met with and were entertained by friendly officers of Israel’s espionage and counter-intelligence organizations, Mossad and Shin Bet, thus creating a major conduit for the flow of sensitive and useful U.S. domestic political intelligence to Israel’s spymasters in Tel Aviv,” wrote this reporter in a Special Report published by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in December 1999.
Because broadcast media news outlets in the USA seldom if ever mention Israeli espionage in their news coverage or in their ever more rare investigative reports related to matters of public interest, most Americans are unaware of and unconcerned about Israel as an espionage threat. Nevertheless, Israel has long been at or near the top of the list of nations with active and robust intelligence and espionage programs aimed at the USA and is by far the single worst offender among nations with propaganda campaigns directed at American audiences. Israel calls its public diplomacy efforts hasbara, and it is well-nigh impossible to overstate the influence of Israeli propaganda on American audiences. Likewise, because Israeli leaders and their political and media operatives exercise truly extraordinary influence over them, the vast majority of US elected officials seldom if ever mention the Israeli espionage threat or criticize Israel in any way. Rather, currying favor with Israeli leaders, media operatives, and spies is seen by many as a fast lane to success in government service and longevity of tenure in Congress. The grilling of former Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska by Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who filibustered his nomination in February 2013 is illustrative. Hagel, who “volunteered to join the United States Army during the Vietnam War, rejecting a draft board recommendation that he go to college instead,” received two Purple Hearts among other commendations during his service in Vietnam. The filibuster of a nominee for Secretary of Defense was unprecedented in American history. Hagel was eventually confirmed by a vote of 58 to 41. His nomination was controversial only because he was viewed by Israeli leaders and their political and media operatives in the USA, their lobby, as being insufficiently subservient to Israel and, on rare occasions, publicly unenthusiastic about pro-Israel US policy and legislation.
Few Americans recognize the breadth, depth, and scope of Israel’s hasbara or propaganda campaign directed at Americans through media corporations, their products, and media outlets. Newsweek‘s Jeff Stein reported in a December article titled, “Former NSA Boss Michael Hayden Can’t Stop Talking” on the close relationship between Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA (1999-2005) and former Director of the CIA (2006-2009), and former Mossad chief Maer Dagan, writing that, “They were so close when Hayden ran the CIA, a well-placed source says, that the Israelis were afforded the unique privilege of bringing cell phones and laptops into the spy agency’s headquarters. Nobody but nobody gets to do that.”
Today, reports Stein, Hayden is, “comfortable in his expansive corner office in downtown Washington, with big windows overlooking a busy intersection only a few blocks from the White House. Along with other big guns at the Chertoff Group, the consulting firm headed by another all-everything, Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary, he’s cashing in and having a ball.”
How should Americans evaluate their government’s counter-intelligence efforts against such an insidious, pervasive Israeli threat? Files released by whistle blower Edward Snowden have shed new light on a particularly troubling and under-explored aspect of that question. Among those files is an NSA document titled, “Exploiting Terrorists Use of Games and Virtual Environments” dated “20070108” but described by the Guardian (UK) as having been “written in 2008.” The document, published on December 9, 2013, limns a brave new world of espionage in the era of on-line video gaming. Taking the document at face value, it appears that seven years ago someone in or closely associated with the NSA became concerned that terrorists could exploit and were exploiting on-line video games and virtual environments (GVEs) that allow like-minded individuals to gather and communicate privately on-line. The unnamed author notes that video games offer “realistic weapons training (what weapon to use against what target, what ranges can be achieved, even aiming and firing), military operations and tactics, photorealistic land navigation and terrain familiarization, and leadership skills”; that GVE’s can “reinforce prejudices and cultural stereotypes while imparting a targeted message or a lesson,” and that, “one cannot discount the ‘fun factor’ involved – it is important to hold your target audience’s attention – and makes ingesting the message not even noticeable”.
The great danger inherent in such technologies, of course, and the aspect of these technologies that makes them so valuable to intelligence/espionage organizations, is their usefulness as means of covert messaging and manipulation of the behavior of individuals and groups of individuals who can be tracked and targeted on-line over time for espionage purposes, including the creation and direction of unwitting or Manchurian Candidate operatives and assassins. Think operant conditioning on steroids or behavior modification perverted by intelligence/espionage agency psychological operations (psy-ops) teams and taken to the deepest, darkest corners of the human psyche. This is work for which spook shop psy-ops teams once relied on short-range, low power FM radio broadcasts in order to covertly transmit programming created to manipulate their mentally unstable targets, work in which first-person-shooter video games represent a major technological advancement.
The author of the 2007 NSA paper on GVEs wrote, “We know that terrorists use many feature-rich Internet communications media for operational purposes such as email, VoIP, chat, proxies, and web forums, and it is highly likely they will be making wide use of the many communications features offered by Games and Visual Environments (GVE) by 2010,” and warned that the “NSA can’t even recognize the traffic, and therefore it is impossible to even say what percentage of the environment is GVE; let alone how targets are using the communications features of GVEs. However, GVEs offer a SIGINT/HUMINT opportunity space and more research is needed to figure out effective exploitation.”
Readers conversant with the history of video game technology will know that the technologies in use in today’s first-person-shooter video games, games that many mass murderers have used as training aids, have been in development since the 1990s. “By the late 1990s most [real time strategy] RTS games had native Internet support, allowing players from all over the globe to play with each other.” This, of course, puts the NSA document’s revelations regarding the NSA’s posture and policies regarding GVEs in a rather embarrassing light that should raise some serious questions about Gen. Michael Hayden’s leadership at the NSA. Apparently, Gen. Hayden was not much interested and perhaps not even aware of a need to be interested in GVEs while he was the Director of NSA, the primary producer and manager of signals intelligence (SIGINT) for the US government. Given that in 2007, NSA could not recognize the traffic, determine what percentage of internet traffic was devoted to GVEs, or see how [NSA] targets – terrorists or other intelligence/espionage agencies or their front companies – were utilizing the communications features of GVEs, Hayden’s and his successor Gen. Keith Alexander’s apparent indifference and ignorance with regard to these technologies prior to 2007 would appear to be well-nigh incomprehensible.
One might also ask why, today, Hayden is so popular among major broadcast and print news organizations as explainer- and defender-in-chief of the NSA. The answer, of course, is that currying favor with Israeli leaders, media operatives, and spooks in the USA is a fast track to success in the defense and security industries and associated media outlets following a career in government service – for those who view public service as a casino and retirement as an opportunity to cash in their chips and have a ball.
It is noteworthy that the NSA did not block the Guardian’s release of the GVE document, which Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman’s subsequent comments suggest it might have done on national security grounds. With regard to their government’s relationship with Israel, there is much about which their elected representatives and the vast majority of honest bureaucrats are unable to speak to the American people directly and plainly for fear of reprisal by Israeli leaders and their political and media operatives, aka the pro-Israel lobby. Those US officials who have been thoroughly corrupted by the powerful and influential pro-Israel machine, and many of those who might be described as duped and co-opted, are, of course, committed to keeping their own secrets as well as Israel’s secrets by adhering to a public narrative that is distinctly Israel-friendly.
So uncharacteristic of former CIA and NSA chiefs is Hayden’s media act that in his December Newsweek article Stein characterized Hayden’s public post-government-service defense of the NSA as, “So very un-spook-like.” Obviously, Hayden feels he has “a lot of ‘splainin to do.” Is the former NSA and CIA director worried that, should the truth become known, he might come to be widely viewed as the most feckless spy chief in American history, a figure of fun and ridicule, the Pillsbury Doughboy of espionage?
More information about on-line video games came to Americans courtesy of National Public Radio (NPR) on October 29, 2013, in an All Tech Considered segment, “How Video Games are Getting Inside Your Head – and Your Wallet,” by Steve Henn.
While the author of the 2007 NSA secret report on GVEs was concerned about terrorists who exploit video game technologies, Henn, who won an Edward R. Murrow Award for national investigative reporting on his way to becoming NPR’s technology correspondent, focuses on the effects of today’s video game technology on American children and their parents.
Henn writes, “… being connected to the internet … means that kids … can play with people spread across the globe. It also means that gaming companies can analyze how gamers play — each and every decision they make.
So when kids sit down with a game, they are actually sitting across a screen from adults who are studying them — and, in some cases, trying to influence their behavior in powerful ways.
Researchers in game companies tweak games to get players to stay on longer, or to encourage them to spend money on digital goods. They study gamers’ reactions. It’s become a science. And parents … often feel out-gunned.
In millions of families, video games are a source of intense love and intense hate because they can be so incredibly compelling. You might not believe that if you don’t play them, but you can get lost in a great game. They make you feel good.
And it’s no accident, says Ramin Shokrizade, the game economist for Wargaming America.
“The technology for this has gotten quite sophisticated,” says Shokrizade, who began his career in neuroscience and behavioral economics. “At this point, every major gaming company worldwide either has in place a fully developed business intelligence unit, or they’re in the process of building one.”
Today’s game design is dominated by research, he says. As we play games, game developers are tracking every click, running tests and analyzing data.
They are trying to find out: What can they tweak to make us play just a bit longer? What would make the game more fun? What can get us to spend some money inside a game and buy something?
“So as millions of people play, designers introduce little changes and get answers to all of these questions in real time [covertly, without the gamer’s knowledge – emphasis supplied]. And games evolve,” wrote Henn.
This reporter, who does not allow his son to play violent video games for the same reasons he would not hand any child a loaded revolver with the suggestion that he play Russian roulette, is astonished that so many American parents are apparently willing to allow their children to play violent video games widely known to have been used by gun massacre murderers for training purposes. Does not the enormous popularity of first-person-shooter video games, in and of itself, serve as compelling evidence that the flood of violent media product sluicing through screens large and small, a raging river of murder and mayhem, has desensitized large numbers of Americans to violence? Moreover, is the frantic, paranoid zealotry that so often characterizes the reactions of many American gun enthusiasts to proposals for background checks and restrictions on the sale of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines not persuasive evidence of a dangerous gun mania abroad in the land, yet another of the many negative effects of the surfeit of violent media product?
Here, one might pause to speculate that the media corporations responsible for creating and mass marketing GVEs knew in 2007 and, still today, know far more about the capabilities of their products than does the NSA. It would seem to be in the public interest for Americans and their elected officials to look closely at those corporations, take note who owns them, and to examine where their owners’ and managers’ political loyalties lie. We are, after all, talking about the most significant and alarming technological developments in the field of covert behavior modification and behavior manipulation in human history, the most lucrative — video games now generate more profits than do motion pictures — and the most dangerous of such technological developments. Are many of these companies using technologies developed by Israel’s spook shops? Might many of these companies be spin-offs of Israel’s Unit 8200 or Mossad front companies? Among the hundreds of gun massacres carried out by apparently deranged adolescents and young adult men in recent decades, is it possible to differentiate between those in which an obsession with violent media product was incidentally causal and those in which intelligence/espionage organizations covertly tracked and targeted individual gamers and influenced their behavior using GVEs for political purposes, such as inciting fear and animosity across political, social, racial, and religious dividing lines? Or instilling and maintaining in a significant number of Americans a pervasive sense of anxiety, fear, and anger? Should not every politically-related shooting by a mentally-ill individual be thoroughly scrutinized with regard to the shooter’s on-line GVE use? Why would US leaders, legislators, intelligence and law enforcement agency administrators allow foreign intelligence and espionage agencies and their front companies unfettered, unexamined, long-term access to vast audiences of American young people? And does not that question represent legitimate and vitally important concerns about privacy as well as public health, public safety, and national security?
Though few are asking publicly, these would seem to be important questions. To fail to ask and answer them would represent a grave counter-intelligence lapse, given that just one particular series of violent video games, Call of Duty, is reported by news organizations to have been used for training by at least three mass murders. Mohamed Merah, who shot dead seven people in France in March 2012; Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in August 2012; and Adam Lanza, who gunned down 20 first-graders and six educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT in December 2012, all trained for their killing sprees using Call of Duty series video games.
The casual observer might have assumed that Merah acted out of political, religious, or racial animus, given his background and his choice of targets, four of whom were Jews, including three children, but his wife told investigators that he was obsessed with violent video games rather than politics or religion.
“Miriam, who was married to Merah for 17 days before his death, said: ‘We had many religious conversations, but we spent our time playing PlayStation, including ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Need for Speed,’” reported Richard Hartley-Parkinson, in an article published by the Daily Mail Online (UK) on December 15, 2012.
Breivik testified in open court at his trial that his motives were political, and he told the court that he trained for his killing spree with first-person-shooter video games.
“Breivik said he spent up to 16 hours a day playing the game in preparation for the attack. He said he became a deadly marksman by honing his gun skills on the Modern Warfare part of the [Call of Duty] series. He even bought a special gun sight used on the game, attaching it to the hunting rifle he used for his deadly rampage…” wrote Hartley-Parkinson.
Lanza’s mental health issues have been documented and widely reported along with his obsessive use of violent video games. A March 17, 2013 New York Daily News article by Mike Lupica draws heavily on an officer’s comments about a presentation by Col. Danny Stebbins of the Connecticut State Police at an April 2013 conference of International Association of Police Chiefs and Colonels in New Orleans.
Stebbins spoke for a long time about the morning of Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary. Those in the room were told of first responders in Newtown who have since quit their jobs, so shattered were they by what they found when they got to the school that morning, when they saw dead teachers with their arms wrapped around the children they had tried in vain to save.
“The man to whom I spoke, a tough career cop who did not wish to see his name in the newspaper, was in the room when the state cop from Connecticut spoke,” said the man was well into his presentation when he began to talk of the spreadsheets that had been found at “the shooter’s” home.
“They don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet,” he continued. “This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That’s what (the Connecticut police) believe.”
The man paused and said, “They believe that (Lanza) believed that it was the way to pick up the easiest points. It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.” …
The fascination (Lanza) had with this subject matter, the complete and total concentration. There really was no other subject matter inside his head. Just this: Kill, kill, kill. It really was like he was lost in one of his own sick games. That’s what we heard. That he learned something from his game that you learn in (police) school, about how if you’re moving from room to room — the way he was in that school — you have to reload before you get to the next room. Maybe he has a 30-round magazine clip, and he’s only used half of it. But he’s willing to dump 15 rounds and have a new clip before he arrives in the next room.
The career law enforcement veteran paused again, and when he started speaking again his voice was shaking, like a wind had blown through it.
They believe he learned the principles of this — the tactical reload — from his game. Reload before you’re completely out. Keep going. When the strap broke on his first weapon (the AR-15), he went to his handgun at the end. Classic police training. Or something you learn playing [first-person-shooter video] kill games.
Despite the impressions of the Connecticut officers, the voluminous final, official report identified no particular motive for Lanza’s actions, according to a November 25, 2013 article in the New York Times, a publication that has long claimed to be the nation’s newspaper of record, but one which did not find it necessary to publish a news article about revelations that the NSA shares intelligence data on Americans with Israeli spy agencies. That news was not “surprising” enough to cover, in the opinion of the editors and publisher of the New York Times.
In a September 2013 interview, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, which publishes and mass markets Call of Duty and other first-person-shooter video games, told Rob Crossley that he was pleased with a business strategy that the nation’s most accomplished consumer protection advocate, Ralph Nader, has accurately if bluntly described as electronic child molestation.
Yeah I don’t see that strategy changing, it’s been one we’ve had for a while and I think our slate has always been relatively small and narrower than most of our competitors. We’re getting good results with this strategy too, and I think that kind of focus is good for us creatively. It allows us to focus on the choices we make very carefully, and to ensure you’re working with the best development talent, and you’re making the right investments from a marketing standpoint in order to succeed.
I look at the continued momentum of Call of Duty, the explosive success of Skylanders, the potential of Destiny and I see this as the right strategy for us.
Asked by Crossley if his strategy lacked diversity and he was, perhaps, relying too heavily on first-person-shooter games, Hirshberg responded:
First-person-shooters have been stable for a number of generations now, and I don’t think that just because Destiny and Call of Duty are in the same genre that they are not diverse. I think they couldn’t be more different from one another. One is a deep, mythological sci-fi epic opera in space, the other is a gritty action movie that’s come to life. The games are very different from a pacing and design standpoint too, so I think there is diversity there, you just might not see it at face value.
Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, Hirshberg’s Activision hired a high-powered Washington, DC lobbying firm to counter a potential legislative response to its lucrative business strategy and socially-destabilizing, violence-inciting products.
There can be no doubt that gun massacres and other violence attendant upon the widespread availability and use of violent, first-person-shooter video games as entertainment represent, at the very least, a major public safety challenge, one that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies and lawmakers have failed to identify for what it is and are apparently powerless to address effectively. Whether the larger entertainment industry and its subsidiary news organizations are complicit in the continuing epidemic of gun massacres across the USA is not a question – they are. The question is, What can be done to reduce the deluge of violent media product these industries pump into American popular culture with criminal abandon?
In two countries, Venezuela and Switzerland, governments have acted to ban completely the sale and distribution of violent video games on the basis of violent content posing an unacceptable threat to public health and safety. With regard to gun violence and crime, Venezuela and Switzerland are a study in contrasts. Venezuela experiences high rates of crime and gun violence, while Switzerland, despite the Swiss owning more assault rifles per capita than, for instance, Americans, and competitive marksmanship being the national sport, enjoys remarkably low rates of both crime and gun violence. Many other countries have banned some games, most for violent content but also for a variety to other causes including pornographic content. It is noteworthy that video game industry flaks and gamer site writers typically sneer at bans on violent content and blatantly misrepresent the nature of the problem that violent video games represent.
In the USA, those who attempt to start or encourage a substantive public discussion in television news venues about the horrific effects of violent media product find themselves silenced in short order. Less than 48 hours after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge raised the issue on NBC’s Sunday morning news program, Meet the Press. Ridge, a former Secretary of Homeland Security and a member of the panel that investigated the April 16, 2007 Virginia Tech gun massacre, the nation’s worst, which left 32 victims dead and 17 wounded, is eminently well-qualified to speak on these matters. That did not prevent well-heeled corporate media operatives David Gregory and David Brooks shutting Ridge down almost immediately and dismissing his concerns. Brooks, taking on the role of propagandist for the video game industry, in defiance of decades of social science research flatly contradicted Ridge’s observation that young and impressionable viewers are put at serious risk by exposure to “the corrosive influence of a violence-oriented world, TV, video games, shoot-to-kill video games,” causative factors in gun massacres.
Attempts to restrict the manufacture, sale, and distribution of violent video games that all too frequently incite children, typically boys, young men, and mentally unstable adults to devastating acts of gun violence have been unsuccessful. In 2011, a California law was nixed by the US Supreme Court on free speech grounds [43].
“Leland Yee, a California state senator who wrote the law, said in a statement that ‘the Supreme Court once again put the interests of corporate America before the interests of our children,’ adding: ‘It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children,’” reported Adam Liptak for the New York Times on June 27, 2011.
“The video game industry, with annual domestic sales of more than $10 billion, welcomed Monday’s ruling,” wrote Liptak.
In the months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the entertainment industry fought back against a small number of news stories apparently crafted to persuade Americans that some in Hollywood recognize a sense of responsibility for the violence their products all too frequently incite. To address the potentially problematic public awareness of the entertainment industry’s causative role in gun massacres, Variety, the entertainment industry’s major trade publication since its founding in 1905, published a special edition titled Special Report: Violence & Entertainment (Winter Edition, Vol. 429, No. 10). The visually-impressive, glossy, 79-page report attempts to put an industry-friendly spin on violent media product and to place it in a larger, violent, but seemingly disconnected social context so as to effectively absolve Hollywood’s media moguls of culpability in societal violence.
Perhaps the report’s single most interesting and unintentionally revealing article is one authored by Variety’s Israel correspondent, Debra Kamin.
“Israel, well versed in terror attacks, has never had a U.S.-style mass shooting,” writes Kamin.
Apparently Kamin does not consider American-born Israeli physician and mass murderer Baruch Goldstein’s February 25, 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron to be a “U.S.-style mass shooting.” Goldstein, who used his Israeli government-issued, IMI Galil assault rifle to commit the murders, was an admirer of Rabbi Meir Kahane and active in the Israeli far-right political party founded by Kahane, Kach, a group classified by the United States and Israeli governments as a terrorist organization.
Kamin quotes an Israeli-American writer, editor, and cultural commentator, David Hazony, at some length. Hazony, too, is at pains to differentiate American and Israeli attitudes about guns, gun violence, and media violence.
“Israelis,” declares Hazony, “draw a very sharp line between cartoonish, U.S.-made TV violence and reality.”
But just who is responsible for most if not all of that “cartoonish, U.S.-made TV violence”? There is no mention in Variety’s Special Report: Violence & Entertainment that, according to a widely-respected Jewish-American author who among his many other accomplishments served as “a sharpshooter with the Israeli Border Police Civil Guard,” the industries that create, produce, market, advertise, promote, and defend lucrative, socially-destabilizing, violent US media product are heavily influenced or largely controlled by Jews.
It is true that Jews are represented in the media in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the population. … they make up one-fourth or more of the writers, editors, and producers in America’s ‘elite media,’ including network news divisions, top news weeklies and the four leading daily newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal).
In the fast-moving world of media mega-corporations, Jews are even more numerous. In an October 1994 Vanity Fair [magazine] feature profiling the kingpins of the new media elite, titled ‘The New Establishment,’ just under half of the two dozen entrepreneurs profiled were Jews. In the view of the magazine’s editors, these are America’s true power elite, ‘men and women from the entertainment, communications, and computer industries whose ambitions and influence have made America the one true superpower of the Information Age.’
“And in a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood studio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a statistical observation,” wrote JJ Goldberg, in his book, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996).
Variety is, after all, a propaganda organ for a much larger propaganda organ, an industry that year after year lavished its most prestigious awards and award nominations on 24, a long-running popular prime time American television series that ever so persistently attempted to “normalize torture in the public consciousness.” That particular effort by Hollywood producers to legitimize torture was so successful that, “in February 2007, the New Yorker magazine reported that U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan (dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point), accompanied by three of the most experienced military and FBI interrogators in the country, met with the producers of 24 to criticize the show for misrepresenting the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation technique, saying it encouraged soldiers to see torture as a useful and justified tactic in the War on Terror, and damaged the international image of the United States.”
Violent media product and its many various and well-documented pernicious effects on vast audiences, particularly young, naïve, and impressionable viewers, across human society represent an increasingly serious public health and public safety challenge. Research studies indicate that first-person-shooter video games are likely the worst offenders. There was gun violence in an American school every two weeks on average in 2013. And, on September 16, 2013, a shotgun-wielding video game addict entered the Washington Navy Yard, a restricted access military facility in the nation’s capital, where he gunned down 15 people, killing 12. This year has already seen three shootings in American schools. An eleven-year old boy firing a shotgun injured two fellow students on January 14 at Berrendo Middle School in Roswell, NM. Two students were wounded in a shooting on January 17 at Delaware Valley Charter High School in Philadelphia, PA. A teaching assistant was shot dead on January 21 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. Also on January 21, a student was shot while sitting in a car near the Widener University athletic center in Chester, PA.
America’s continuing epidemic of gun violence and gun massacres, a result in part of a massive counter-intelligence failure, is but the tip of an iceberg of espionage-related-and-facilitated, socially-destabilizing gun violence, death, and destruction, violence that is attendant upon and to some extent caused by the U.S. entertainment industry’s lucrative obsession with violent media product. The entertainment industry’s deadly focus on violent media product, much of it freighted with political and social messaging crafted to further the social, economic, political, and military agendas of industry moguls and Israeli leaders, is in large part a function of Israel’s robust overt hasbara and covert psychological operations campaigns aimed directly at credulous US audiences.
Israel’s long history of espionage against the United States government on Unites States soil, Israel’s long history of spying on Americans and listening in on Americans’ private conversations – even the communications of FBI counter-intelligence units and the telephone conversations of president of the United States – is largely absent from the thus distorted but crucial public debate about the NSA’s overreaching surveillance programs only because Israel-friendly US politicians and media organizations typically cover up or down play those crimes.
As long as the Israeli political and media machine wields such wildly inordinate and inappropriate influence over US politicians, political institutions, and what passes for popular culture and a public discussion in America, it is very difficult to imagine that the NSA, CIA, FBI and other US law enforcement agencies will find the guidance and political support necessary to address effectively these increasingly problematic espionage-related-and-driven public health, public safety, and national security challenges.
The single greatest danger in restricting the ability of the National Security Administration (NSA) to collect information broadly is that no foreign intelligence agency will necessarily be similarly impacted by such restrictions. Foreign intelligence agencies, especially Israeli intelligence and espionage agencies and their front companies, may well find their ability to act against the USA and its interests, and to act with impunity, substantially enhanced by restrictions placed on US intelligence agencies.
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Michael Gillespie, in addition to his regular freelance work for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is also a contributing editor and the Des Moines, IA correspondent for The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans, published by Sami Mashney in Anaheim, CA.
Top Three Media Lies About the Syrian Peace Talks
The Propaganda War Heats Up
By Shamus Cooke | RINF | January 24, 2014
The media spin machine is again kicking into high gear, perfectly timed to accompany the “Geneva II” Syria peace talks. The lies are necessary to give the Obama administration an upper hand in the peace negotiations, which are not being used to pursue peace, but instead, to accomplish the Obama administration peace talks.
1) The removal of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was an agreed upon “precondition” for the Geneva II peace talks.
This lie has been repeated over and over by government and media alike. It has zero basis. The Obama administration claims that this precondition was expressed in the “Geneva communiqué,” which was a road map agreement meant to guide the Geneva II peace talks, agreed upon by some of the major parties of the negotiations, including Russia.
The communiqué does indeed call for a negotiated political transition, but nowhere does it state that such a transition cannot include President Assad. Such a condition would have been outright rejected by Russia.
In fact, the Geneva communiqué includes this crucial statement:
“[a transition government] could include members of the present [Syrian] government and the opposition and other groups and shall be formed on the basis of mutual consent.”
Nowhere does it specifically mention or imply President Assad.
The Los Angeles Times recently stepped out of line and exposed this lie:
“[John] Kerry regularly cites the “Geneva communiqué,” a kind of peace road map hammered out in June 2012 during a United Nations-organized summit. But the document does not explicitly call for Assad’s ouster.”
The Obama administration’s constant repeating of this lie only causes divisions in the peace process, undermining the chances that the peace process will succeed.
The Obama administration is especially adamant about this “Assad must go” pre-condition because it knows that, if free and fair elections were held tomorrow in Syria — as part of a UN-backed “transitional process”— President Assad would likely win. This is the result of the ethnic and religious minorities in Syria that have rallied behind President Assad, since they’ve witnessed the consistent religious sectarian atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed rebels (which the U.S. media loves to ignore or minimize).
Assad would probably win an election since there is also simply no one else on the government side or the opposition side with his name recognition or popularity. The U.S.-backed rebel war in Syria has vastly strengthened Assad’s political hand, but you wouldn’t know it from the Western, anti-Syrian media.
Demanding Assad’s ouster also does not reflect the situation on the ground. The U.S.-backed rebels have never controlled more than one Syrian city, namely Raqaa, which is dominated by al-Qaeda and is governed under a Taliban-style interpretation of Islamic law, which includes a strict ban on music. Thus, the rebels don’t have the ground power that would even enable them to make the demand that “Assad must go”.
2) The U.S.-backed rebel militias are “moderate” Islamic groups.
The fact that this lie can even be uttered publicly without encountering ridicule is a major success of Western media propaganda. The media narrative paints the U.S.-backed “good” rebels fighting both the Syrian government and the “bad” al-Qaeda linked rebels.
But the “good” rebels in the U.S.-backed Islamic Front share the same vision for Syria’s future as the al-Qaeda rebels: a fundamentalist version of Sharia law, where women live in virtual house arrest and where religious minorities are second class citizens (non-Sunni Muslims would simply be butchered, as they are on a regular basis in Syria, which is again minimized or ignored in the Western media.)
The “moderate rebel” lie was further exposed recently when a top leader in the most powerful militia, Ahrar al Sham, within the Islamic Front declared Ahrar al Sham to be the “real” representative of al-Qaeda in Syria, as opposed to the rival al-Qaeda faction that the Islamic Front had recently begun fighting.
Ahrar al Sham has long been known to be an al-Qaeda type Islamist extremist group; the Western media simply chose to ignore it. But when it was recently made official, the U.S. media chose to continue its ignoring stance, since actually reporting on it would destroy their “moderate rebel” lie. The Western media also continues to ignore the fact that the “moderate” U.S.-backed Islamic Front issued a joint statement that aligned itself to the extremist views of Ahrar al Sham, the “real” al-Qaeda.
3) New Evidence of Syrian government “industrial scale” torture.
The Western media recently blasted the “breaking news” of brand new evidence showing massive “NAZI-like” torture and murder by the Syrian government, released at the beginning of the Syrian peace talks. This may or may not be true, but the lie here is that the Western media promoted the “evidence” as being unquestionably true, when the story doesn’t reach first base when it comes to evidence-based journalism.
All we really know is that there are hundreds of pictures of dead people that a “trusted source” says were killed by the Syrian government. The trusted source was designated as such by pro-Western intellectuals, who have earned professional “credibility” by helping convict war criminals in the International Criminal Court [ICC]. But as author Diane Johnstone pointed out in her excellent book “Fools Crusade,” about the war against Yugoslavia — as well as in other articles — the ICC has long been used by western powers as a tool to create a pretext for war, or a tool to justify a war after the fact.
The evidence of the “NAZI-like” atrocities was written in a study paid for by the government of Qatar, which has long funneled cash, guns, and Jihadis to Syria in aid of the anti-government rebels.
Again, we don’t know if the story is true or not. But such an important investigation should be conducted by the UN or another more objective institution. The same biased dynamic occurred in relation to the infamous chemical weapons attack, where no real evidence was provided, though an unending string of “experts” were quoted in the Western media, testifying to the guilt of the Syrian Government. But when Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Seymour Hirsch reported that the Obama administration lied about the rebels not having the capacity to perform such an attack, the Western media simply ignored the legend of journalism. The wrench in the propaganda machine was simply dislodged.
How do these lies become such permanent fixtures in the Western media? An excellent article in the Guardian newspaper recently discussed in depth the principal sources the Western media has used to understand the Syrian conflict.
The article exposed the incredible bias of some of the most important Western media sources on Syria, which is why they were handpicked in the first place to be “expert” sources: they had political agendas that were aligned with the U.S. government’s foreign policy decisions. The other side of the conflict was completely ignored, except when it was targeted for ridicule. Thus, Americans and Europeans have a completely one-sided, if not fantasy-based perspective of what is happening in Syria. This has been systematic since the beginning of the conflict, as happened with the Yugoslav, Afghan, Iraq, and Libya wars.
The result of this media-led ignorance could result in yet more unnecessary deaths in a country that now has millions of refugees and over a 100,000 dead. Obama seems like he intends to exploit these peace talks with the intention of blaming the Syrian government for their failure. Having failed to defeat Assad on the battlefield in a proxy war, the Obama administration is trying to win the propaganda war. And once peace talks have failed, talk of war will resume, since “all other options have failed.”
Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com
Latest Human Rights Watch Report: 30 Lies about Venezuela
By Tamara Pearson | Venezuelanalysis | January 23, 2014
In the six pages that HRW dedicates to Venezuela in its World Report 2014, released this week, it manages to tell at least 30 serious lies, distortions, and omissions. Pointing out these lies is important, because many people believe that HRW is a neutral authority on human rights, and the mainstream press publish articles and headlines based on HRW report conclusions. Here are some of the headlines in both English and Spanish (translated to English) that have come out of the 2014 report:
Global Post – Venezuela intimidates opponents, media: HRW report , PanAm Post – Human Rights Watch: A black eye for Latin America , AFP – HRW criticises Venezuela in its annual report on human rights, El Economista – HRW: Democracy in Venezuela is fictitious, El Universal – Human Rights Watch report denounces persecution of media in Venezuela, El Siglo – Human Rights Watch: Venezuela is an example of “fictitious democracies”, El Colombiano: HRW describes Venezuela as a fictitious democracy , NTN24 – HRW warns that Venezuelan government applies “arbitrary” measures against media that is critical of its policies
The headlines which talk about a “fictitious” or “feigned” democracy, are referring to the start of the report, where HRW put Venezuela, along with other countries, under the category of “abusive majoritarianism”. There, HRW provides a very limited definition of democracy; “periodic elections, the rule of law, and respect for the human rights of all” and argues that Venezuela has adopted “the form but not the substance of democracy”. HRW cites Diosdado Cabello not letting legislators who didn’t recognise democratically elected President Maduro speak in parliament – yet the punishment seems soft, considering the crime.
Below, I’ve grouped the lies and omissions according to HRW’s own subheadings in its chapter on Venezuela. Unlike with other countries such as the US, HRW omits all of Venezuela’s human rights achievements in its assessment, and in reality a range of other subheadings would be deserving, such has right to have access to housing, people’s right to be consulted about policy, right of the poorer people to be heard in the media, right to education, the right to health care, to land, and so on. Of course, nowhere in the report does HRW mention the economic crimes committed by the business sector against Venezuelans’ right to access affordable goods (hoarding, speculation, etc).
15 lies and distortions
Introduction
1. “The Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council rejected appeals filed by the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, challenging the results [of the April 2013 presidential elections]”. – The CNE did meet with the opposition and they came to an agreement to do a manual recount of the remaining 46% of votes which hadn’t already been revised on the day of the election. The entire recount was televised live. Given how incredibly flimsy Capriles’ “evidence” was, the Supreme Court would have been ridiculing itself to do anything but reject his case.
2. “Under the leadership of President Chavez and now President Maduro, the accumulation of power in the executive branch and the erosion of human rights guarantees have enabled the government to intimidate, censor, and prosecute its critics.” – HRW offers very little evidence to substantiate such accusations. The reality is the opposite; private media makes up the vast majority of the media, and freely criticises the government on a daily basis, to the point where it invents news and blames the national government for things it isn’t even responsible for. Just last week here in Merida a few opposition students held a protest by burning tires on a main road. For a week, traffic to a key hospital was blocked, and the students had no placards stating the reason for their protest. The police closed off the roads around them to protect their right to protest.
3. “In September 2013, the Venezuelan government’s decision to withdraw from the American Convention on Human Rights took effect, leaving Venezuelans without access to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, an international tribunal that has protected their rights for decades in a wide array of cases.” – The IACHR has not protected Venezuelans’ rights. From 1969-1998, a repressive period of disappearances, political repression, and massacres such as those at Cantaura, Yumare, and the Caracazo, it only considered six cases, and of those only one was brought to the commission. In contrast, from 1999 to 2011 it ruled on and processed a total of 23 cases. It did not take any action after the coup attempt against democratically elected president Hugo Chavez in 2002.
Post-Election Violence
4. “Security forces used excessive force and arbitrary detentions to disperse anti-government demonstrations after the April elections, according to local groups”. -Though it may have varied from region to region, unlike HRW, I was at those protests, and took photos of and interviewed opposition protesters in Merida – one of their strongholds. Despite threatening to take over and destroy the CNE and the PSUV head offices, with large piles of projectiles like rocks and shrapnel and Molotov cocktails, the police merely cordoned off those areas. They were not armed, and there were no injuries or arrests observed. The threats were not empty ones either, as seen by other destruction carried out by the opposition around the country. HRW also needs to specify what it means by “security forces”, as the police system here is complicated and most police continue to be managed at a state level, but HRW implies that the national government is entirely responsible. Finally, merely attributing these claims to “local groups” is very vague. One might also say, HRW is a capitalist front, said local groups.
5. “Official sources reported that nine individuals were killed at the time, although the circumstances in which the deaths occurred remain unclear. President Maduro and other high level officials have used the threat of criminal investigations as a political tool, attributing responsibility for all acts of violence during demonstrations to Capriles”. – Does HRW want an investigation or not? The violence occurred the day after the presidential elections, and all of the victims and buildings destroyed were Chavista supporters or part of national programs. It was clearly political, why is it a problem to mention that, and why does it become a “threat” when Maduro talks about bringing murderers and those who set fire to public hospitals, to justice? A thorough investigation was conducted, and those who were responsible for the deaths were arrested.
Judicial Independence
6. “The judiciary has largely ceased to function as an independent branch of government”. – While it is true that there are serious problems in Venezuela’s court system: HRW doesn’t mention those: the delays and corruption. Instead, it argued the judiciary is not “independent” because it doesn’t always rule against the government, as HRW would like. If it is not independent, why were almost a hundred supposedly pro government workers in SAIME, SENIAT, the China-Venezuela bank, and so on, arrested last year for corruption?
Freedom of Media
7. “Over the past decade, the government has expanded and abused its powers to regulate the media… fear of government reprisals has made self-censorship a problem” – No it hasn’t. What the government has done, over the last four years or so, is pass legislation which limits media abuse: racism, extreme violence, and sensationalism that is so extreme it can be psychologically damaging. Those regulations apply equally to the private, public, and community media, but the reality is it is the private media which tends to be most abusive. Nevertheless, Conatel has emitted less than 10 fines over the last few years.
8. “The government has taken aggressive steps to reduce the availability of media outlets that engage in critical programming.” – HRW is not able to cite any examples to back up this statement. Instead, it refers to one case from years ago, RCTV, who’s license was not renewed after it played an active role in the 2002 coup.
9. “In April 2013, Globovision was sold to government supporters… since then it has significantly reduced its critical programming”. The owners of Globovision sold it to a group of Venezuelan investors headed by businessman Juan Domingo Cordero, who is not a government supporter. Since then, Globovision’s coverage is somewhat less extreme and sensationalist, but it is just as critical.
10. “The government has also targeted other media outlets for arbitrary sanction and censorship”. – The government has not censored any media. Today alone, for example, Tal Cual freely published these headlines: “The fiscal report is a time bomb”, “The government uses violence as an excuse to censor the media” , “Dance with death” (to refer to the government) and “The government tragicomedy”. El Nacional received a fine in August last year for using a three year old photo of naked corpses on its front cover, and that is it.
Human Rights Defenders
11. “The Venezuelan government has sought to marginalise the country’s human rights defenders by repeatedly accusing them of seeking to undermine Venezuelan democracy with the support of the US government”. – The lie here is “the country’s human rights defenders”. HRW is referring to a select few organisations such as itself and other individuals, who use human rights as a front for their right-wing political agenda. The government is completely within its right in pointing that out.
Abuses by Security Forces
This section is somewhat accurate, but lacks any causal analysis.
Prison Conditions
These criticisms are also somewhat legitimate, though the information is selective. For omissions, see below.
Labour Rights
12. “Political discrimination against workers in state institutions remains a problem. In April 2013, Minister of Housing Ricardo Molina called on all ministry personnel who supported the opposition to resign, saying that he would fire anyone who criticised Maduro, Chavez, or the revolution”. Though perhaps a bit extreme, HRW forgets to point out that Molina made that remark in the context of the opposition not recognising a democratically elected president. That there is political discrimination against workers is largely untrue, though may occur in isolated situations. It is no secret that most of the public education and health workers, for example, support the opposition.
13. “The National Electoral Council (CNE), a public authority, continues to play an excessive role in union elections, violating international standards that guarantee workers the right to elect their representatives in full freedom” – Actually, what the CNE provides to unions is logistical support: machinery that makes cross-country elections much easier. If there were concern about the CNE somehow influencing elections, the opposition would not have also used its logistical support for its primaries in February 2012.
Key International Actors
14. “For years, Venezuela’s government has refused to authorise UN human rights experts to conduct fact-finding visits in the country” – That’s why the UNESCO and the FAO have both recently praised Venezuela’s education and food development. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Right’s most recent report on Venezuela was made in September last year, it was about Venezuela’s elimination of racial discrimination.
15. “In June 2013, Venezuela became the pro-tempore president of Mercosur… The Asuncion Protocol…states that “full respect of democratic institutions and the respect of human rights” are essential…By not addressing the absence of an independent judiciary in Venezuela, as well as the government’s efforts to undermine human rights protections, the other Mercosur member states have failed to uphold these commitments” – See previous and subsequent comments on Venezuela’s judiciary and treatment of “human rights” protections.
15 omissions
The following very important facts on Venezuela’s human rights record were completely omitted from the report. Such omissions are as serious as lying.
Post-Election Violence
1. HRW conveniently doesn’t mention that the 15 “health centres” that were “vandalised” (ie they were set on fire on medical equipment was destroyed) were CDIs- Cuban-Venezuelan run free health centres that have come to be a symbol of the Bolivarian revolution. HRW doesn’t mention that opposition supporters attacked them, it lets readers believe that the government supported such violence.
2. HRW doesn’t criticise the extremely undemocratic move by Capriles to not recognise the president whom the majority of voters chose in the April presidential elections. Their omission to do so amounts to tacit support of Capriles. That sort of context is also necessary when HRW criticises the fact that there were arrests following the elections: it’s possible that some arrests were not justified, but given that the Bolivarian revolution has already suffered one (failed) coup, and the continent has suffered many successful and bloody ones, it is reasonable to arrest participants in that. Any other country would do the same.
3. HRW focuses on the post election violence, and blames the national government for it, rather than recognising the opposition’s role. It purposefully omits to mention that while Capriles called for a “venting of rage”, Maduro called on supporters to play music and dance in the street.
Judicial Independence
4. HRW criticises the imprisonment of “government critic” judge Afiuni, but omits to mention that she was arrested for illegally releasing a bank president who stole US$27 million from state currency body, CADIVI. Does HRW advocate such judicial corruption? In June Afiuni was awarded conditional release.
5. There are, however, other cases of court inefficiency and bribery of judges, which HRW completely ignores, perhaps because the victims are mostly Bolivarian revolution supporters. Over the last year, many rural workers, commune members, trade unionists, and indigenous activists were murdered by hired killers, and though the killers are usually easy to identify, few have been arrested and prosecuted.
6. HRW criticises Venezuela for withdrawing from the IACHR, but omits to mention that that court is totally under the thumb of the US. It then hypocritically comments on Venezuela’s so called “lack of judicial independence”.
Freedom of Media
7. While in most countries, people who aren’t rich don’t have the right to run their own media, that right is being promoted in Venezuela, with the state materially and legally supporting over 500 community and alternative radios, television stations, and newspapers. That is an important development in media freedom, but HRW completely ignored it.
8. HRW states that, “In November 2013, the broadcasting authority opened an administrative investigation against eight Internet providers for allowing web sites that published information on unofficial exchange rates”. HRW intentionally omits to point out that those sites were illegally publishing those figures, and that those figures have contributed to the three and four fold price increase of basic products. At no point does HRW criticise the role of business of deliberately making basic food and goods unaffordable for Venezuelans.
9. HRW also doesn’t mention the almost one thousand free internet centres the government has set up, its promotion of freeware, and its distribution of laptops to school children: part of the government’s efforts to make the right to information a reality.
Human Rights Defenders
10. HRW criticises the government for supposedly “marginalising” “human rights defenders” by investigating their sources of funding, but fails to mention the fact that the US does use such groups as a front for funding the undemocratic wing of the opposition. It fails to criticise this affront to Venezuela’s right to sovereignty.
11. Likewise, it doesn’t mention the important role played by the real human rights defenders in Venezuela: gender and sexuality activists and movements, indigenous and afro-descendents organisations, the Cuban doctors defending the right to free and quality health care, community activists, environmental movements, volunteer teachers, social mission workers, activist analysts who are constructively critical of the situation in the country, and so on. Many of these movements and workers receive financial, institutional, and/or legal support from the state, though there are improvements to be made there as well, such as legalising gay marriage, abortion, and so on.
Abuses by Security Forces
12. Here it is telling that HRW simply doesn’t mention Venezuela’s creation of the UNES, a university training police in human rights and preventative policing. While it is legitimate that HRW points out ongoing problems within the police forces, it doesn’t mention that such corruption has significantly decreased, nor that police political repression has been almost completely eliminated.
Prison Conditions
13. HRW rightly points out the ongoing problems of overcrowding and organised prisoner violence in prisons, but simply omits to mention anything the government is doing to improve prisoner rights, including letting those who have committed minor offences out during the day time to work or study, internal prison education and productive work programs, assistance on leaving prison, cultural workshops such as video production in prisons, and government meetings with prisoners.
Labour Rights
14. For HRW it seems labour rights are limited to the right of opposition supporters to work in governmental programs that they don’t agree with (a right they have). HRW omits to mention the Labour Law which came into effect in May last year, which beats most of the world in providing workers with rights to permanent work (contract labour is made illegal), to childcare in the workplace, to maternity leave and to paternity leave, shorter working hours, retirement pensions, and much much more.
15. HRW alleges that opposition workers were “threatened” with losing their jobs if they supported Capriles, but provides no evidence of that, nor mentions that of course voting is anonymous and such a threat could not be carried out, and neglects to mention that governor Capriles fired fire fighters in May last year for demanding pay they were owed, uniforms, and infrastructure improvements.
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Independent review board: NSA phone data collection ‘illegal’
Press TV – January 23, 2014
An independent review board working to protect Americans’ civil liberties and privacy has concluded that the US National Security Agency’s phone data collection program is illegal and should be stopped.
In a 238-page report to be issued on Thursday, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has said that a law known as Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act “does not provide an adequate basis to support” the NSA’s program for collecting billions of Americans’ phone records on a daily basis.
The report, which was obtained by The Washington Post and The New York Times, also says that there has been no single instance in which the US government’s spying program contributed to the discovery of a terrorist threat to the United States.
“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” the report said.
“Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack,” it added.
While the board had shared its conclusions with US President Barack Obama prior to his speech on Friday, the report is in contrast to Obama’s speech which portrayed the program as useful and lawful.
During his speech on Friday in which Obama promised some modest changes to the NSA’s spying programs, the US President did not indicate that the phone data collection program should be stopped. He said the NSA’s database of phone records should be moved out of government hands and be kept by private phone companies.
However, the PCLOB says the program should be shut down.
“Cessation of the program would eliminate the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection,” said the board in its report.
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Ashton continues to support Egyptian regime and expresses satisfaction about the referendum
MEMO | January 21, 2014
The European Union High Representative for Foreign Policy Catherine Ashton has said that the EU is pleased with the results of last week’s constitutional referendum in Egypt.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera English, Ashton suggested that the referendum was an important step towards returning to the path of democracy.
The referendum was boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood and other political forces opposed to the military coup that ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected government on 3 July 2013. In the lead up to the referendum, activists campaigning for a “no” vote were harassed and arrested, and during the two-day election several protesters were even killed.
While Ashton noted that the democratic transition must include everyone, she made an exception for those who support “violence” or “terrorism”.
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America’s most popular prescription sleep medication linked to mass shootings
RT | January 20, 2014
A new report describing the bizarre and dangerous side effects of the sleep aid Ambien has once again raised questions about one of the United States’ most popular prescription drugs.
In a story by the Fix, Allison McCabe chronicled the numerous cases in which Ambien has caused individuals to commit unsafe, and sometimes deadly acts.
In 2009, 45-year-old Robert Stewart was convicted on eight charges of second-degree murder after he killed eight people in a nursing home. He was originally charged with first-degree murder, but by claiming his tirade was Ambien-induced he was able to have the charges lessened and sentenced to 142-179 years in prison.
In a similar case, Thomas Chester Page of South Carolina was sentenced on five counts of attempted murder despite his claims that Ambien was the cause of a shootout with officers. He received 30 years of prison on each count, to be served concurrently.
Although the Food and Drug Administration approved Ambien in 1992, its warning labels have changed significantly over the last two decades as evidence mounted documenting the drug’s ability to induce dangerous behavior.
“After taking AMBIEN, you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing,” the label currently reads. “The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night… Reported activities include: driving a car (“sleep-driving”), making and eating food, talking on the phone, having sex, sleep-walking.”
In the courtroom, cases related to Ambien use have ranged from shootings to child molestation charges to car accidents. In one such case, flight attendant Julie Ann Bronson from Texas ran over three people – including an 18-month old who suffered from brain damage as a result. When Bronson woke up in jail the next morning, she could barely comprehend what she had done.
“It was surreal. It was like a bad dream,” she said in May 2012. “I did the crime but I never intended to do it. I wouldn’t hurt a flea. And if I would have hit somebody, I would have stopped and helped. We’re trained in CPR.” Bronson pleaded guilty to the felony charges, but also received lesser charges by citing Ambien as the reason for her actions.
While some drug companies work on sleep aids that do not induce the kind of unpredictable and risky behavior Ambien does, the popularity of the medication raises concern over America’s prescription drug culture. The market for sleeping pills is a billion-dollar industry, yet dangerous side effects continue to be reported.
Last year, a report by the Department of Health and Human Services highlighted about 2,200 doctors for suspicious activities such as over-prescribing drugs. More than 700 Medicare doctors were also flagged for issuing what could be seen as “extreme” and potentially harmful prescriptions.
Although the report noted that some prescriptions could have been effective, it added, “prescribing high amounts on any of these measures may indicate that a physician is prescribing drugs which are not medically necessary or that he or she has an inappropriate incentive, such as a kickback, to order certain drugs.”
Soon after that report was issued, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that roughly 18 women a day are dying in the United States due to prescription drug overdose, namely from painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin. With women making up 40 percent of all overdose deaths in 2010, these numbers marked a 400 percent increase compared to data from 1999.
The benefits of medication have also been placed under heavy scrutiny when it comes to other health issues, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In December 2013, RT reported that the authors of the primary study promoting medication over behavioral therapy in order to treat ADHD now have serious concerns over their original results.
“I hope it didn’t do irreparable damage,” said one of the stud’s co-authors, Dr. Lilly Hechtman of Montreal’s McGill University. “The people who pay the price in the end is the kids. That’s the biggest tragedy in all of this.”
Call It Genocide, not Apartheid
By Nahida Izzat | January 20, 2014
Words, in the battle of Liberation are of prime importance, but in the age of Internet, where Cyber Battles are waged, between truth and falsehood, the use of the right word becomes more vital than ever.
We have observed how the word, “apartheid” has crept in and has been intensely used by many Palestinians and their supporters without much reflection upon the meaning, implications or outcome of such use.
The definition of “Apartheid”
1. An official policy of racial segregation formerly practiced in the Republic of South Africa, involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against nonwhites.
2. A policy or practice of separating or segregating groups.
3. The condition of being separated from others; segregation.
Thus, the use of apartheid to describe “Israel”, the entity which was established by terror, planned ethnic cleansing and continues to practice slow genocide is extremely inappropriate, insufficient and falls very short from giving a complete and accurate portrait.
Calling “Israel” an Apartheid is a CONCEALMENT of Genocide
Calling the Zionist entity mere “apartheid”, i.e “separation”, would only serve in concealing the true genocidal nature of the Jewish state, and present it as a “normal” and “legitimate” political system with only few holes, some racist laws, and wrong policies which can be easily changed. Such use would promote the legitimization of this entity. From a legal aspect, crimes of apartheid does not carry the same weight in International Law as Crimes against Humanity, thus it may be harder to prosecute.
Campaigning to demand that the existing Jewish state, would change some of its policies (rather than to call for its dismantling and delegitimisation, to end this entity, once and for all) would simply enable the usurpation of historic Palestine.
Calling for ODS (one democratic state, as a continuation of “Israel”), while ignoring the right of Palestinians to FULL LIBERATION, would enable the Zionist entity to expand and enlarge its boundaries, to encompass the ENTIRE land of Palestine, by annexing what remains of Palestine.
Calling for “equal rights” between mass-murderers and their victims, means willful participation in wiping out the Palestinian Identity, under “Israeli” authority thus promoting giving Palestinians “Israeli” citizenship, which means unwittingly promoting the “Israelization” of what remains of Palestinians, i.e upgrading their state from “occupied Palestinians” to “Israeli slaves”.
I call upon our people and our supporters to be alert and not to participate in whitewashing the crimes of the Jewish state, by calling it an “apartheid” rather than what it really is, a genocidal, supremacist, expansionist, ethnic-cleansing entity.
The Genocide Convention
Article 2 of the United Nations issued Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states:
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
1. Killing members of the group; [Israel …guilty]
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; [Israel …guilty]
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; [Israel …guilty]
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [Israel …guilty]
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Article 4 states:
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
Nuremberg Principles,
Principle VI. states,
“The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
(b) War crimes:
Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.”
In Contrast:
In contrast:
The Sanhedrin Principles:
- Wars of aggression . . . NO PROBLEM
Mishneh Torah, Chapter 5, Halacha 1
“A king should not wage other wars before a milchemet mitzvah. What is considered as milchemet mitzvah? The war against the seven nations who occupied Eretz Yisrael, the war against Amalek, and a war fought to assist Israel from an enemy which attacks them.
Afterwards, he may wage a milchemet hareshut, (war of aggression) i.e. a war fought with other nations in order to expand the borders of Israel or magnify its greatness and reputation.“
- Extermination . . . NO PROBLEM
Mishneh Torah, Chapter 1, Halacha 2:
“Amalek’s seed should be annihilated before the construction of the Temple”
THE LAWS OF KINGS AND THEIR WARS
6) The obligation to destroy the seven nations living in the Land of Canaan;
7) The prohibition against allowing any one of them to remain alive;
8) The obligation to destroy the descendents of Amalek;
9) The obligation to remember what Amalek did;
- Subjugation and Enslavement . . . NO PROBLEM
Mishneh Torah, Chapter 6, Halacha 1
“If the enemy accepts the offer of peace and commits itself to the fulfillment of the seven mitzvot that were commanded to Noah’s descendents, none of them should be killed. Rather, they should be subjugated as ibid.:11 states: ‘They shall be your subjects and serve you.’
If they agree to tribute, but do not accept subjugation or if they accept subjugation, but do not agree to tribute, their offer should not be heeded. They must accept both.
The subjugation they must accept consists of being on a lower level, scorned and humble. They must never raise their heads against Israel, but must remain subjugated under their rule. They may never be appointed over a Jew in any matter whatsoever.”
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Your Rights Aren’t Worth Crap
Locking The Public Out Of Public Trials In Chicago
By CHRIS GEOVANIS | CounterPunch | January 21, 2014
Public trials are one of the fundamental tenets of American democracy. And they’ve been cancelled in Chicago, at least for the trial of the NATO 3 — three defendants battling terrorism charges for alleged ‘crimes’ wholly instigated, manufactured and advanced by undercover cops in a blatant case of entrapment. But you’ll be hard pressed to determine this for yourself, since you’re essentially banned from the courtroom unless you’re willing to surrender your right to privacy, your right to even a glimmer of free expression, or your right as a non-corporate reporter to cover the case in real time like your corporate colleagues can.
Government officials are forcing every member of the public seeking to observe the NATO 3 trial to ‘pre-register’, produce a government-issued ID, submit to a criminal background check — and, of course, trust them with your data.
This last bit is spectacularly hard to swallow, as news continues to come out about the extent of government spying and data-mining on perfectly lawful activity like talking on the phone. Government agencies have surveilled and disrupted the Occupy movement, to which the defendants had a loose affiliation, simply for existing, and we’ve barely begun to plumb the depths of cop spying in the run-up to Chicago’s NATO protest — and beyond. For Chicagoans, this comes in the wake of the Chicago cops’ notorious history of political spying, disruption and assassination going back to the days of the infamous COINTELPRO Red Squad.
In fact, there would be no criminal case against the three defendants if the city’s autocratic former mayor, Richard M. Daley, hadn’t finally succeeded in convincing the federal court in 2001 to effectively gut the Red Squad Consent Decree banning police spying, infiltration, harassment, intimidation and undercover disruption of political activity. The hollowed out decree was ultimately dissolved in 2009.
Attorneys for the NATO defendants have argued in a court finding that the ‘terrorism’ scheme they’re charged with is based on “idle chatter, laced with bravado and abetted, encouraged and egged on by the undercover police agents.” There was no actual act of vandalism committed, and there certainly was no act of ‘terror’ committed — unless you’re feeling terrorized by the prospect of undercover cops inciting thought crimes to dirty up your political beliefs. But there was, essentially, a law enforcement scheme to incite crime where no crime had been committed, wholly fomented by undercover cops engaged in manufacturing criminality — cop behavior that would have been illegal under the Red Squad consent decree.
Meanwhile, public officials continue to invoke the ‘terrorism’ meme in the NATO trial as part of a criminal prosecution that has consistently conflated dissent with criminality. And they’re taking no chances on uncontrolled spin in the case.
Besides making members of the public surrender their privacy rights to attend the trial, they’re enforcing the courts’ recently imposed ban on cell phones, lest people who CAN get in report from the ground, and have told those who are willing to ‘pre-register’ that officials are giving priority seating to those who then RE-register to attend a day before each trial date. You don’t re-register? You take your chances at getting a seat the following day. At one point, the judge even considered banning pencils and paper from the courtroom.
New rules for non-corporate reporters are equally extreme. Officials are imposing restrictions that effectively ban freelance reporters and reporters with non-corporate and non-traditional media from the kind of access and privileges — including the right to carry their cell phones — that corporate reporters will be afforded.
“It is my sense going into this trial that the Cook County Sheriff’s Office will be putting on a trial that undermines the public’s right to access much more than the US military did during Manning’s court martial,” writes Firedoglake reporter Kevin Gosztola. He should know, since he covered the Manning trial daily — and his most recent piece on the NATO 3 trial is a compelling and disturbing summary of the state’s dubious basis for its terrorism allegations.
The state’s scheme to effectively ban the public from a public — and publicly funded — trial is part of a long-standing official pattern to harass, arrest and undermine those who dissent in Chicago. For years, activists in Chicago had to fight in court for permission to rally and march against the Iraq war, and protesters have routinely been subject to arrest simply for attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights. More broadly, the restrictions that local government overlords have imposed on public access and public oversight in the NATO trial are part of a national effort to re-brand dissent as inherently dangerous.
The judge in the NATO 3 case, Thaddeus Wilson, prominently displays a picture of Martin Luther King behind his bench. If he were able, King would be spinning in his grave at some of the rulings Wilson has issued in the case. Wilson refused, for example, to dismiss a juror for cause, even though she routinely teaches at the Chicago police academy, and is married to the law enforcement officer who supervised the undercover operations of state police during the NATO protests. Despite the fact that police spying and its abuses lie at the heart of the NATO 3 case — and that this prospective juror’s very livelihood and family economy is grounded in police collaboration — Wilson ruled that there was no reason to doubt her ability to serve objectively.
That’s like saying that the chairman of BP is perfectly fit to serve on a jury weighing criminal negligence in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Defense attorneys were forced to exercise a peremptory challenge to keep her off the jury.
Judge Wilson has also issued a disingenuously named ‘decorum’ order that sets the stage for massive courtroom repression. The edict is so sweeping that one could conceivably be ejected from the courtroom and cited for criminal contempt for the ‘crime’ of raising your eyebrows or shaking your head at testimony — or even smiling at a defendant. The order also bans political buttons, t-shirts, armbands and perhaps even particular colors — we won’t know until we show up wearing red or black or both. If you get up to take a leak, you can’t get back into the courtroom until the judge calls a recess — and in the jury selection of the phase, court sometimes ran past 9PM, so empty your bladder early.
Wilson has also consistently ruled in the prosecution’s favor in terms of what evidence will and will not be admissible. And in one of the judge’s worst rulings, Wilson has asserted that police are included under the terrorism definition of the state statute under which the defendants are being tried, which defines terrorism as “intent to coerce a significant portion of the civilian population.”
In short, the testimony of the undercover cops who manufactured the conditions for a ‘crime’ to be alleged should be treated like any testimony from any ‘civilian’. Jurors could essentially be asked to embrace the legal fiction that these undercover cops felt ‘coerced’ into the self-same crime they themselves were attempting to create and incite. This ruling essentially privileges testimony from cops in a police department whose officers routinely tell flat-out lies with impunity to bolster their cases.
It bears emphasizing that the undercover cops at the heart of this case are not civilians. They’re the undercover cops who told court officials they ‘lost’ a shitload of text messages that could have been exculpatory for the NATO 3 defense team — this in an age when virtually any electronic traffic anywhere lives somewhere, including in the NSA’s vast databases. Except when the NSA’s pals in the Chicago police department lose that electronic traffic. They’re the undercover cops who actually manufactured the conditions in which they could allege a crime under the notoriously vague and little used state terrorism statute under which the NATO 3 are charged.
This is just as dunderheaded as the only other instance in which this state terrorism statute has been used to charge someone. In that case, the state convicted a college student for making a terrorist threat — even though he actually did no such thing — after cops searched his unoccupied car and found some crappy and inflammatory rap lyrics scribbled on a piece of paper. The state circuit court in that case sentenced the student — a Black man in a largely white community — to five years in prison. An appellate court later tossed out that conviction. Blacks, dissidents — hey, this state terrorism statute is perfect for Illinois’ law enforcement community!
Secret trials are abhorrent. That’s why the nation’s founders, whatever their other manifest flaws, banned them. Secret trials built on the testimony of undercover cops given broad license to manufacture and incite criminal activity to entrap defendants is particularly revolting and deeply dangerous to all of us.
“The NATO 3 trial is not about terrorism,” says Andy Thayer, who helped organize 2012’s protests against the NATO meeting. “This trial is about the government using hype ABOUT terrorism to pursue a political agenda, and as such represents a fundamental mis-use of the justice system, if we are to believe the words of the U.S. Constitution.”
The political agenda of the Cook County States Attorneys Office — the prosecutors of record of the NATO 3 and others criminally charged around the 2012 NATO protests — has included a stubborn commitment to defend its own most egregious miscarriages of justice. Cook County States Attorney and career Chicago prosecutor Anita Alvarez, who’s not been shy about chasing media face time in the NATO cases, has historically embraced the worst sorts of police excess and abuse — including cops who torture, lie and murder.
Alvarez’ local prosecutorial agenda dovetails with allied schemes in national and local government to support increasingly militarized police forces which hustle funding for their agencies on the public dime, and promote the careers of “security” industry professionals — many of whom are former members of these self-same militarized police forces.
Those self-same law enforcement agencies are also perfectly happy to collude with corporations to suppress dissent that those corporations deem unhelpful — what journalist Naomi Wolf has described as “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent.”
To support this agenda in Chicago, authorities are using the tried and true tactic of terrifying people into signing off on their most fundamental civil liberties — including any vestiges of privacy rights — for the ‘privilege’ of attending a public criminal trial rooted in police misdeeds. More than a few activists who assembled in Chicago in May 2012 to oppose the murderous war agenda of NATO have said they simply will not submit to the state’s draconian terms to attend the NATO 3 trial. And in that respect, the state has succeeded in locking out some of the people with the most at stake in a ‘public’ trial in which defense attorneys have been consistently thwarted in their effort to expose law enforcement’s schemes to derail dissent and manufacture crime.
The Chicago police and their overlord, Rahm “Mayor 1%” Emanuel, worked mightily to make the city safe during the NATO protests for the worst sorts of corporate criminals and their military backers. Emanuel and Alvarez remain strong allies in a shared dystopian vision of civic life in a city that routinely criminalizes people of color and undermines the fundamental tenets of economic and social justice. It’s no accident that Mayor 1% backs privatization schemes in critical public endeavors that range from education to health — just as States’ Attorney Anita Alvarez backs privatizing this critically important public trial.
So, who are the real terrorists?
Chris Geovanis is a Chicago media activist, advocacy journalist and member of the HammerHard MediaWorks collective. You can reach her via Twitter @heavyseas, via her Facebook page or at chrisgeovanis(at)gmail.com
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Algeriepatriotique interviews Gilad Atzmon: “Dieudonné has proved to be resilient to Jewish nationalist terror”
Interview by Mohamed El-Ghazi, M. Ait Amara | January 18, 2014
Your fight against Zionism provokes critics against you in Israel and in the West. Your detractors conflate consciously between “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Semitism.” What is the difference between these two concepts?
Gilad Atzmon: “anti-Semitism” is a misleading notion that refers generally to criticism of Jews as ‘people’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race.’ Such criticism that is biologically driven hardly exists nowadays.
Anti-Zionism, is a different kind of fish — it refers broadly to criticism of the Jewish state, its politics, policies and ideology.
But the truth is that I do not fit in any of those categories. Although I criticize Israel harshly and more than often, I am actually interested in the true meaning of Jewish identity, culture, politics and ideology. I believe that as long as people operate politically under the Jewish banner we are entitled to question their motives, politics and philosophy. Israel defines itself as “The Jewish state,” hence, its Jewishness must be examined.
I am indeed critical of the Jewish state, but I am often also critical of Jewish Left and even the Jewish so-called ‘anti’-Zionists. I basically disapprove of all ‘Jews-only’ clubs, whether they are on the Left or the Right. I would argue that like Zionism and Israel, Jewish anti-Zionism is racially driven and Judeo-centric to the bone. It is primarily committed to Jewish tribal interests rather than to the Palestinian cause. In my book The Wandering Who I obviously produce enough evidence to support this claim.
Do You consider Zionists as the main cause behind the global financial crisis? How?
Not exactly, in The Wandering Who I contend that a financial bubble was created in the USA by the Federal Reserve in order to divert the attention from a military blunder in Iraq (a neocon Zionist war). But I actually argue that rather than a ‘conspiracy,’ the credit crunch was, in fact, an accident. The bubble burst unexpectedly…
We tend to believe that Zionism is limited to the colonization of Palestine in order to create a state there. Now, you say that it is “a global movement fed by a unique tribal solidarity”. What do you mean by “tribal solidarity”?
To start with, your terminology is slightly inaccurate. Zionism is not a colonial movement, in spite of the fact that many of us are using the term. Colonialism is defined as a material exchange between a mother state and a settler state. In the case of Zionism we can easily identify the ‘settler state’ but it is far more difficult to find or identify who is the ‘mummy’. Also the Jewish re-settlement in Palestine was spiritually and ideologically driven rather than being economically motivated.
However, with Jewish lobbies operating aggressively in most Western capitals (AIPAC, CFI, CRIF etc’), promoting global Zionist interests and advocating global wars against Iran and Syria, it is really impossible to avoid the fact that Zionism is now a global movement with global interests.
Tribal solidarity, in that respect, is also very easy to grasp. It refers to the vast support world Jewry lends to their national movement and tribally driven campaigns.
Could Zionism prevail creating “global conflicts,” as you say? In other words, why can’t Zionism pursue peace?
Because Jewish secular identity is defined by negation. The Godless political Jew (as opposed to the orthodox one) is defined by the animosity evoked in others. Jews need enemies and thus the continued existence of the Jewish state in the Middle East may lead to many more sectarian wars in the region in the future. But again it isn’t just Israel or Zionist politics. The Judification of the Palestinian ‘solidarity’ movement introduced us to vile witch-hunts consistent with the vile Jewish herem (excommunication) culture. In the last few years we have seen the UK PSC expelling activists and even Palestinians from its ranks. As I say above, Jewish politics is defined by negation, as such, it can only promote wars.
If Israel was created by the British capitalists to control oil production and transportation in the Middle East in the early twentieth century, how could Zionism take the West hostage several decades later? What led to this reversal of roles?
I don’t agree. Israel wasn’t created by the British Empire and oil wasn’t at all the logos behind the Balfour Declaration. This is a popular banal materialist Marxist fantasy that doesn’t hold water and is set to deceive.
Zionist lobbies managed to squeeze the Balfour declaration out of the British Empire at the peak of WWI promising to bring the USA into the war in return. Britain needed the USA to join the war effort in order to break the stalemate on the Western front. Promising Palestine to the Jews seemed a little price to pay. The Balfour Declaration in that regard was there to appease the American Germanic patriotic Jewish financial elite who were quick change their allegiance from Germany to Britain. The message is clear, the Jewish lobby in the USA was already amongst the most influential political bodies in the USA and Britain as early as 1917.
The Western media is resistant to any criticism of Zionism. Currently, Dieudonné is attacked from every possible side in France. How do you explain this relentlessness media and political onslaught against this comedian?
Dieudonné has proved to be resilient to Jewish nationalist terror. All attempts to destroy him achieved the opposite, it only helped him to refine his humour and criticism of Jewish power. By now Dieudonné has managed to expose the lethal continuum between the Jewish Lobby, the so-called Palestinian solidarity movement and the French imaginary ‘Left’ establishment. Is it really a surprise that the ‘socialist’ government that just a few weeks ago shamelessly attempted to jeopardize the negotiation with Iran in a desperate attempt to appease the Israeli government is now chasing a black comedian who refuses to subscribe to the primacy of Jewish suffering?
Unlike welded and well-organized Zionists, the anti-Zionist movements seem scattered. Why don’t the latter have a strong organization to fight this sprawling group that “kills in the name of Jewish suffering,” as you say?
The Zionification of the Palestinian solidarity movement, which I have been monitoring for more than a decade, is pretty much completed. It located Jewish tribal interests at the centre of the Palestinian struggle. Instead of caring for Palestine, solidarity organisations are now primarily concerned with the fight against ‘anti-semitism’. The Palestine solidarity movement is now operating as a controlled opposition. It is funded largely by liberal Zionists, such as George Soros and his Open Society Institute, who also funds the pro-Israeli Jstreet. The same Soros funds most Palestinian NGOs and even the BDS Movement. We are seeing the emergence of a little Palestine solidarity industry that is set to achieve nothing and is actually very good at it (achieving nothing).
But on the other hand, there are some very positive developments:
More and more people out there see the real picture. And I actually take some credit for it. More and more people are becoming sensitive to Jewish lobby activity and Zionist advocacy of global conflicts. More and more people grasp the role of the Left. They see the Guardian’s attempt to vindicate war criminal Sharon. In short, more and more people grasp that Palestine is here, in Paris, in London, in Athens and in Detroit.
As it stands, we are all Palestinians. The vast popular support of Dieudonne is a clear message to AIPAC, CRIF and CFI – beware, the party comes to an end. Enough is enough.
I would be very happy to see the Jewish lobby, both Zionist and the so-called ‘anti-’, coming to terms with the current change, but I doubt it. Being an avid reader of Jewish history and Left’s impotence, I predict that the Lobby will become more aggressive and I am really concerned with the inevitable consequences to Jews and the rest of us.
http://www.algeriepatriotique.com/
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US, Israel aim to divide and conquer Middle East
By Brandon Martinez | Press TV | January 20, 2014
In a recent broadcast, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes denounced the sordid attempts of 16 leading Democratic lawmakers who, under the influence of the Israeli lobby, are pushing to impose new economic sanctions on Iran, which is designed to sabotage Obama’s rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.
Although this condemnation of the Zionist lobby’s implacable warmongering is admirable, in the strictly confined discourse we see on the mainstream media presenters of this caliber refuse to state the obvious, which is that the United States has no right whatsoever to tell any country what to do on any matter, either foreign or domestic. Economic sanctions are an act of war, yet the US has imposed crippling economic sanctions on dozens of countries around the world, strangling the life out of them like a deadly python suffocating its victims.
The US has utilized sanctions to neuter nations that are not compliant with Washington’s hegemonic agenda. In turn, Washington is driven by Israel’s imperial desire to subjugate its foes, keeping them weak and divided. Using America as its proxy, Israel aims to fragment and destabilize the Arab/Muslim world.
In 1980 the US backed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. They provided him with material and diplomatic support. They gave him weapons and intelligence assistance. When it became apparent that Iran was going to win that war, the US dispatched a war ship off the coast of Iran called the USS Vincennes. On July 3, 1988, the Vincennes deliberately shot down an Iranian civilian airplane, killing all 290 passengers, including 66 children. This act of state-sponsored terrorism was a “message” from Washington designed to intimidate the Iranians into entering peace talks with a nearly defeated Saddam, instead of seeing the war out to the bitter end. The US has never apologized for this act of barbarism.
The Iran-Iraq war was part and parcel of the US-Israeli divide and conquer strategy in the Middle East. In 1982 an Israeli geo-political thinker named Oded Yinon penned a report entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.” In the document Yinon outlined a diabolical scheme whereby Israel would neutralize its adversaries by instigating internal ethnic and religious conflicts in the Arab/Muslim world. Yinon called for the dissolution of the Arab states surrounding Israel. He envisioned the break up of countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan into smaller, weaker statelets, thereby undermining their ability to resist Israeli domination.
“In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us,” Yinon wrote. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation,” he continued, “will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon.”
Skipping ahead to 1991, Iraq entered into another conflict, this time with Kuwait. The US gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait, and then stabbed its ally in the back. America’s entry into that conflict was predicated on a monstrous lie. Tom Lantos, a Jewish-American congressman from California, spearheaded the effort to galvanize public opinion behind an American intervention in the Iraqi-Kuwaiti territorial dispute. He set up a “human rights” front group called the “Congressional Human Rights Foundation.” Working in cahoots with the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, Lantos put on a televised hearing where several people claiming to be “witnesses” to Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait gave testimony.
The star witness was a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who appeared at the hearing under the assumed name “Nayirah.” She gave a tearful testimony about how she saw Iraqi troops enter a hospital in Kuwait City, whereupon they removed hundreds of babies from their incubators, leaving them to die on the cold floor. “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor,” she said.
The story spread like wildfire across the mass media and President George H. W. Bush trumpeted it from the Oval Office pulpit. Soon after the atrocity story reached critical mass, the US deployed warplanes and ground troops to “punish” Saddam. American forces killed tens of thousands of Iraqis in the war.
Some time after that war, the incubator babies atrocity story was exposed as an out-and-out hoax. “Nayirah” and her compatriots posing as downtrodden victims of Iraqi aggression were all actors reading from a script prepared for them by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the US, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, and she had lived in the US most of her life. She was never even in Kuwait when Saddam invaded.
Tom Lantos’ propaganda production helped push America into a war for Israel’s interests. The second US war against Iraq in 2003, which was also based upon malicious lies about Saddam’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction,” was similarly engineered by Zionists to facilitate the removal of the Iraqi “threat” to Israeli power. “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel,” said Philip Zelikow, a former Bush administration insider.
In 1996 several leading neoconservatives wrote a strategy paper for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud regime entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” In the report they talked about “rolling back Syria” and argued that deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq was “an important Israeli strategic objective.” Among the authors of the dastardly document were the Israel-first partisans Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, all of whom became high-ranking members of the Bush administration in 2003, leading the drive for a war against Iraq.
Shortly before the 2003 invasion, the Israel-first champion Tom Lantos assured his Israeli counterparts that Saddam Hussein would soon be ousted and an US/Israeli-backed puppet dictator would be installed in his place. “You won’t have any problem with Saddam,” the Jewish congressman told MK Colette Avital of Israel’s Labour Party. “We’ll be rid of the bastard soon enough. And in his place we’ll install a pro-Western dictator, who will be good for us and for you.”
In 1996 Madeline Albright, the former secretary of state under Bill Clinton, unveiled her utter inhumanity on a CBS News 60 Minutes broadcast. When informed that the genocidal US economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 [Persian] Gulf War caused the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Albright remarked that it was “worth the price.” In that twelve-year period from 1991 to 2003 more than a million Iraqi children as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men and women died as a result of US sanctions.
Alongside Israel’s political leaders, Israeli religious leaders were jubilant at the prospect of Iraq’s demise. Yona Metzger, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, thanked President Bush for invading Iraq and killing millions of Iraqis. “I want to thank you for your support of Israel and in particular for waging a war against Iraq,” the rabbi told President Bush in a brief verbal exchange at Ben-Gurion airport.
Believing their war of annihilation against the Arab/Muslim world is sanctioned by god, the Jewish-Zionist elite of Israel and the United States will stop at nothing to bring doom upon millions of innocent people who stand in the way of their grandiose dream of a “Greater Israel.” In 1962 Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made a striking prediction. He candidly outlined his vision of the future, forecasting that the nations of the world would become “united in a world alliance, at whose disposal will be an international police force. All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars.”
He further declared that in Jerusalem “the United Nations … will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.” Ben-Gurion also once remarked that the ideals of the United Nations are consistent with Jewish ideals. “We consider that the United Nations’ ideal is a Jewish ideal,” he said.
In his eerie presage Ben-Gurion referenced the Jewish prophet Isaiah. The book of Isaiah in the Old Testament of the Bible contains some interesting passages that illuminate the supremacist mindset of Ben-Gurion and his co-religionists. Isaiah 60:5 says, “Ye shalt also suck the milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck the breast of kings.” Isaiah 61:5 speaks of how “Strangers will shepherd your flocks; foreigners will work your fields and vineyards.” Isaiah 60:5 explains how “The wealth on the seas will be brought to you, to you the riches of the nations will come.” “And you will be called priests of the LORD, you will be named ministers of our God. You will feed on the wealth of nations, and in their riches you will boast,” it says in Isaiah 61:6.
Isaiah 60:12 decrees the destruction of nations not subservient to the chosen people: “For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly ruined.” Isaiah 49:23 foresees kings and queens becoming slaves of the chosenites: “Kings will be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers. They will bow down before you with their faces to the ground; they will lick the dust at your feet.”
“For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth,” it says in the book of Deuteronomy (7:6). Driven by religious fanaticism and ethnic chauvinism, the Jewish Zionists and their puppets are pursuing mad policies that will only cause bloodshed and misery.
It is now up to people with a conscience, however many there are left in the world, to recognize this evil for what it is and confront it with the truth.
Brandon Martinez is a freelance writer in Canada with a specialty in foreign policy and international affairs.
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Calling of an Angel: The True Story of Rene Caisse and an Indian Herbal Medicine Called Essiac (1988)
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Lies are Unbekoming | October 17, 2026
On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, wrote to a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The sentence sat in a letter from one of the world’s largest private cancer research centers, concerning an herbal tea an elderly English woman had learned from an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp in the 1890s. The tests were terminated the following year after Sloan-Kettering admitted, in sworn affidavit three years later, that they had prepared the injectable solution improperly from the dried material supplied — freezing and thawing the herb rather than boiling it as Rene had instructed. By the time Calling of an Angel was published in 1988, Rene Caisse had been dead for a decade, having treated thousands of cancer patients across fifty-six years in her Bracebridge, Ontario kitchen, never charging a fee, and refusing every offer — from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations dangling contracts up to $1 million — to release her formula before the medical establishment admitted her remedy had merit. … continue
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