MSNBC Muslim anchors sidelined despite being Israeli apologists
By Mohammad Hashim | Press TV | October 14, 2023
In an interesting revelation, it has been reported on Saturday that three high-profile Muslim anchors of the American news television channel MSNBC, owned by NBC Universal, have been sidelined.
The Semafor report said Mehdi Hasan, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi have been “quietly taken out of the anchor’s chair” amid the Israeli regime’s no-holds-barred bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip.
The network reportedly did not air the Thursday night episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show on its streaming platform Peacock and also reversed its plan to replace Joy Reid with Mohyeldin this week for the channel’s 7 p.m. show.
The report, citing “two network sources with knowledge of the plans”, said Velshi will also be replaced by Alicia Menendez this weekend. Menendez hosts American Coices on Saturdays and Sundays.
Hasan is a British-American television journalist of Indian descent who has anchored the popular The Mehdi Hasan Show on Peacock since October 2020 and on MSNBC since February 2021.
Mohyeldin is an Egypt-born, New York-based journalist for NBC News and MSNBC who currently hosts the weekly prime-time show ‘Ayman’ on MSNBC.
Velshi is a US-based Canadian journalist, who has been reporting for NBC News since October 2016 and also serves as a news host for MSNBC channel.
NBC has termed the schedule changes as “coincidental,” refuting claims that the high-profile Muslim broadcasters are being snubbed amid the Israeli hostilities against Palestinians.
However, the Semafor report stressed that staff members at MSNBC have been “concerned by the moves”, feeling all three hosts have “some of the deepest knowledge of the conflict.”
It said the move to sideline the three anchors comes as the MSNBC network, which is aligned closely with the Democratic Party, has “swung into intense solidarity” with the Israeli regime.
“That shift has come with heated internal and external objections to anything that breaks with that solidarity, and has come with social media criticism of Hasan, Mohyeldin, and Velshi,” the report stated.
Following the Hamas operation, US politicians, including President Joe Biden, quickly jumped in defense of the occupying regime and peddled blatant lies about children beheaded and women raped.
Interestingly, the three MSNBC journalists, including Hasan, have been vocal against the operation launched by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on the occupied territories last week.
Hasan, who has a massive social media following and is known for his argumentative style of on-air debating, took to his X handle on October 8, a day after the Hamas operation, lecturing his 1.3 million followers on “morality” of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
“This conflict for me has always been about morality. Morally, you cannot justify the killing of Palestinian civilians, even if you say it’s fighting terrorism. But morally, you also cannot justify the killing of Israeli civilians, even if you say you’re fighting occupation,” he wrote.
It was a conscious and concerted attempt on the part of the British-American journalist to play both sides, to advocate the case of Palestinians, and also to be apologetic for the Israeli occupation.
He somehow tried to question the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance group to launch the Al-Aqsa Storm operation even if they were occupied, subjugated, humiliated and mercilessly killed every day.
Hasan also fell for the hoax that hundreds of people were “massacred” at a music festival.
“Israel says 260 dead at music festival attacked by Hamas. I cannot imagine how horrific a massacre this must have been. 260 people gunned down. To put that in context, that’s the equivalent of more than five Pulse nightclub shootings. Heartbreaking,” he wrote on X.
It was part of the bigger misinformation campaign against the Palestinian resistance movement, which took the music festival participants as prisoners and treated them in a dignified manner as seen in videos circulating widely online.
To put his case as a neutral journalist who cares for Israelis, the MSNBC anchor reacted strangely to a photo of a demonstration by pro-Palestine activists outside the Israeli regime’s consulate in New York.
“These people are an embarrassment and their cheering is reprehensible,” Hasan wrote.
Mohyeldin, much like his MSNBC colleague, has been very consciously trying to appease his employers by being soft on the Israeli apartheid regime and amplifying voices against the resistance.
On October 8, a day after the Hamas operation, he shared a series of posts on X that were circulated to vilify the Gaza-based resistance group and to portray Israeli soldiers and settlers as victims.
He even shared an article that claimed Iran helped in plotting the attack on the Israeli regime.
Velsh, like the other two, has also used his social media platforms, including X, to make a case for himself as someone who despises the Palestinian resistance movement.
On October 10, he shared an article about Hamas, calling it an “important read to understand what you need to know about the group behind the deadly terror attack in Israel.”
He clearly sees the Hamas operation as a “terror attack”, not a legitimate military action against the occupying regime. He also conveniently dismissed the fact that the attack targeted occupiers.
On Saturday, he posted on X that he was leaving the occupied territories, adding to speculation that he has been sidelined from his job despite extra effort to take the hypocritical position on the conflict.
All three of them – Hasan, Mohyeldin and Velshi – despite trying to present themselves as “good boys” have received a bad report card from their bosses. That’s how much Americans value free speech.
Mohammad Hashim is a political and media analyst with a focus on West Asia.
Reuters journalist killed in Lebanon by Israeli fire – media
RT | October 13, 2023
A Reuters videographer has been killed in southern Lebanon, the news agency said on Friday. Six other journalists were injured in the incident. The group was hit by Israeli artillery, Al Jazeera and Lebanese security sources said.
“We are deeply saddened to learn that our videographer, Issam Abdallah, has been killed,” Reuters said in a statement. Abdallah was providing a live video feed from near the Israeli border at the time of his death, the agency continued, adding that it is “urgently seeking more information” from authorities in the region.
Reuters journalists Thaier Al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh were wounded in the same incident, while Al Jazeera’s Elie Brakhya and Carmen Joukhadar and Agence France-Presse’s Christina Assi and Dylan Collins were also injured. It is unclear whether all six were hit by the same shell or by different projectiles.
A Lebanese security source told AFP that Israeli forces were responsible, and Al Jazeera blamed the incident on “Israeli bombing.”
Around the time of the incident, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that its troops were responding with tank and artillery fire to shooting from Lebanese territory.
Earlier on Friday, the IDF said that an explosion had occurred at a barrier along the border near Alma al-Shaab, a Lebanese village where the news crews were reporting from. The IDF said that its forces responded to the explosion with artillery fire.
Abdallah’s death brings the number of journalists killed since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Saturday to 11, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Of the other ten, nine died in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, while one Israeli photographer was killed by Hamas militants at Kibbutz Nahal Oz in southern Israel.
EU Opens Investigation Into X After Making Censorship Demands
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 13, 2023
Sparking serious concerns over severe censorship and free speech restrictions, the European Union has initiated a formal investigation into X, due to perceived misinformation related to the recent Hamas attack on Israel.
The potential risk of such probes is that they could lead to a world where a centralized authority determines the validity of opinions and controls information flow.
From the perspective of anti-censorship advocates, this move by the EU is a slippery slope.
The imperative question that arises is who gets to define “misinformation,” and how can it be ensured that bias or interests of the few do not influence these definitions?
This investigation marks the inaugural application of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a controversial legislative effort purportedly aimed at policing Big Tech.
However, free speech advocates argue that this aggressive stance strays dangerously close to infringing on foundational rights to free expression.
In the wake of recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas, there’s been a substantial uptick in digital content related to the conflict, some containing graphic imagery. While the EU’s initiative is purportedly to quell misinformation, it raises the age-old question: where does one draw the line between censoring misinformation and infringing upon free speech?
Elon Musk, now at the helm of X, received a letter from EU commissioner Thierry Breton, signaling unease that the platform could be a conduit for what the EU deems “illegal content and disinformation.” In response, Musk advocated for transparency, inviting the EU to make public the alleged violations, thereby allowing the public to form their opinions. “Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports. Please list the violations you allude to on X, so that that [sic] the public can see them. Merci beaucoup,” Musk wrote.
Yet, Breton’s rejoinder was less than satisfactory for proponents of free discourse. He retorted, “You are well aware of your users’ — and authorities’— reports on fake content and glorification of violence. Up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk.” This statement underscores a problematic vagueness and subjectivity in determining what constitutes a gray area that poses a potential threat to free speech.
Lawsuit Pushes Back Against California Medical Board’s “Misinformation” Censorship Power
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 12, 2023
A lawsuit has been amended in California against this US state’s medical boards’ “misinformation powers” – based on a law that is soon to be repealed, and which critics – some of them legal plaintiffs – say allowed the government to prevent them from practicing medicine, the way they were trained to do.
It was one of the rules, called Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098), introduced to keep medical professionals in check, in case they felt like speaking their minds freely as insights into Covid were developing.
And since the world has now moved on to other crises, the “forgotten pandemic” censorship laws are getting “quietly” repealed.
But not really, the plaintiffs in this case claim – because of the nature of the repeal of the short-lived AB 2098, made null-and-void on September 14 via Senate Bill 815 (SB 815). California Senator Newsom got to sign all three documents.
However, the repeal – which will not be in effect before the start of 2024 – at the same time incorporates Democrat member of California Assembly Evan Low’s provision that doctors who get accused of “misinformation” can still be punished – “held accountable” – regardless of whether the controversial law was actually applicable.
“The Medical Board of California will continue to maintain the authority to hold medical licensees accountable for deviating from the standard of care and misinforming their patients about COVID-19 treatments,” Low said.
How in the world is this political, ideological, pre-election, and legal gymnastics even supposed to work?
The lawsuit against the bill, Hoang et al. v. Bonta et al., has the plaintiffs represented by California attorney Richard Jaffe.
He had this to say: “Because of the repeal of AB 2098, and the board’s position that it can still sanction the speech targeted by the soon-to-be-repealed law, we are pivoting in our lawsuit and arguing to the judge that they can’t do it under their general statute either because the speech does not change just because the legal theory/statute changes.”
The world clearly has moved to other crises – but it seems, not the California Democrats. And so the plaintiffs in the lawsuit’s amended format are also asking to add more to their ranks. One of the original ones is Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
However absurd the “standard of care” argument that supersedes a law may seem to a layperson, Jaffe is obviously taking it seriously.
The court will hear the arguments related to this new development on November 13.
Decades before Snowden, this American patriot waged war against illegal surveillance in the US
In the 1970s, US Army Captain Christopher Pyle blew the lid on government agencies’ domestic spying
Former undercover agent Christopher Pyle testifies in the Senate that the Army has spied on politicians and thousands of ordinary Americans, February 24, 1971. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
By Robert Bridge | RT | October 11, 2023
In 1970, a US Army captain went rogue after he discovered that the military was conducting surveillance on dissidents across the country, thus sparking the first effort in modern times to tame US intelligence.
In 1968, almost half a century before the world heard the name of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on a US-run global surveillance system, Christopher Pyle, an Army captain who taught law at the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Holabird, Maryland, was about to do something no less memorable.
After Pyle had concluded one of his popular lectures on civil disorder, which focused on how the military could better quell riots in those highly volatile times, a military officer directly involved in such operations approached him with the request for a meeting. Several days later, Pyle was escorted into a large warehouse facility that once had been used to assemble railroad engines. In his 2006 book, No Place to Hide, Robert O’Harrow described what happened next.
“Pyle walked into the cage, where an officer showed him books containing mug shots. He looked in the first volume and saw a familiar face. It was Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s assistant. Officers called the books the ‘black list.’”
“Outside the cage, Pyle saw more than a dozen teletype machines. The head of the CONUS [acronym for Continental United States] intelligence section told him they were spitting out reports from some fifteen hundred Army operatives about demonstrations with twenty people or more. Pyle was starting to understand how naive he’d been. He began formulating a plan. He would be getting out of the Army soon. He could tell the world about what was going on. When he joined the Army he took an oath to defend the country against all enemies, here and abroad. In his mind now, that included the Army’s intelligence operation. They turned in their security badges and left the building.”
And thus was born one of the most consequential whistleblowers of the post-World War II era.
In January 1970, Pyle, now a full-fledged private citizen, penned an article for the Washington Monthly entitled, ‘CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics.’ The explosive opening paragraph said it all: “[t]he U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States. Nearly 1,000 plainclothes investigators … keep track of political protests of all kinds – from Klan rallies in North Carolina to anti-war speeches at Harvard.”
Immediately, some US media swung into action as journalists began hounding the Department of Defense and the US Army to determine the veracity of the claims. Given Pyle’s extreme proximity to the subject matter at hand, however, it soon became clear that Uncle Sam got caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
Pyle’s revelations were enough to prompt Congress, as well as a slew of litigation lawyers, to sit up and take notice. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senator Samuel James Ervin, a self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina, worked together with Pyle to investigate and expose the clandestine domestic spying program.
Pyle and Ervin eventually spent countless hours delivering testimony before various congressional meetings over a span of several years. The first fruit of their labors came with passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on December 31, 1974, the legislation states: “No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains…” In other words, although the law didn’t actually stop the US Army or intelligence agencies from infiltrating civil action groups and public demonstrations, it did hamper the feds from disclosing the identities of the activists without their foreknowledge.
To this end, Pyle served as a consultant for three Congressional committees: the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on the Judiciary Committee (1971-1974), the Committee on Government Operations (1974), and the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975).
According to Pyle, as a result of those successful investigations, “the entire US Army Intelligence Command was abolished and all of its files were burned.” For his actions, Pyle ended up on then-President Richard Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List.”
Given the severity of their overall findings, however, the congressional investigations triggered by the US Army captain did not stop there.
1975, the ‘Year of Intelligence’
On January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4, the US Senate created the so-called Church Committee, chaired by Democrat Senator Frank Church, to further examine abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The House carried out its own set of investigations with the Pike Commission and the Rockefeller Commission, thereby prompting the media to label 1975 as the ‘Year of Intelligence,’ and not in a way that was flattering to the intelligence community.
Pyle lent his expertise to the ambitious Church Committee, headed by Iowa Senator Frank Church, which discovered a number of questionable, unethical and outright illegal activities by the CIA between 1959 and 1973. Detailed in a series of reports dubbed the ‘Family Jewels’, these activities included conducting physical surveillance on journalists, amassing files on nearly 10,000 Americans connected to the antiwar movement, funding behavior modification research on unwitting subjects, and plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban President Fidel Castro and DR Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
The most impactful discovery made by the Church Committee, however, was that of Project SHAMROCK. Started in 1940 during World War II and running into the 1970s, the NSA was given secret authority to access all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. At the peak of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages were captured and analyzed by NSA personnel in a month. The pertinent information contained in these messages was then forwarded to other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Department of Defense. This formed the basis of the so-called ‘Watch List’ of the 1970s that included thousands of American citizens, including high-ranking politicians, celebrities, academics and antiwar activists.
The findings led Senator Frank Church to conclude that Project SHAMROCK was “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”
Based on the recommendations of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Under FISA, the government is required to obtain warrants to conduct electronic surveillance against individuals from a special court. Such a warrant requires “probable cause to believe” that the surveillance target is a foreign government or organization, or an agent thereof, “engaging in clandestine intelligence activities or international terrorism,” as per a Department of Justice (DOJ) clarification.
Yet, as we shall see, even this minor legislative hurdle would prove too cumbersome for the Bush administration in its war on terror.
Privacy in the age of terrorism
The tireless work of the Church Commission was put to a test in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as US lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle were prepared to sacrifice citizens’ privacy in the name of national security. Thus, less than one week after three hijacked aircraft toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people in the process, one of the most comprehensive plans for conducting surveillance on American civilians and individuals worldwide – the USA PATRIOT ACT (an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’) – was already being disseminated to members of Congress.
Arguably the most controversial part of the Patriot Act is contained in Section 215 of the 342-page document, which calls for sweeping government powers against private and public enterprises, individuals, and personal privacy. Most crucially, Section 215 did away with the requirement that the target of the records search be a non-US citizen and “an agent of a foreign power.” American citizens were now legitimate targets as well.
In the Senate, the Patriot Act passed in a 99 – 1 vote. The only senator to vote against it was Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold. “There is no doubt,” he declared on the Senate floor before the historic vote, “that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists…But that would not be a country in which we would want to live.”
Even with this widening of surveillance powers, then-US President George W. Bush, as part of the global ‘War on Terror’ that he declared following the events of 9/11, ordered the NSA to tap the communications of an untold number of people in the US, including citizens, without the warrants demanded by the FISA court – despite the fact that between 1979 and 2005, only four out of over 15,000 warrant requests were rejected by the FISA court.
Christopher Pyle, who was still committed to his cause over 30 years after he chose to become a whistleblower, labeled Bush “a criminal” for violating the FISA law and suggested that he should be impeached.
“The Constitution says he must take care that all laws be faithfully executed, not just the ones he likes,” Pyle said during an interview with Democracy Now in 2005. “The statute says … that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive law governing these international intercepts, and he violated it anyway. And the law also says that any person who violates that law is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. By the plain meaning of the law, the President is a criminal.”
More recently, Christopher Pyle, 83, who now works as Professor Emeritus of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, spoke out on behalf of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower who revealed a massive global intelligence program run by the so-called Five Eyes, a once-secretive intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“He’s just an ordinary American,” Pyle explained in 2013. “He’s trying to start a debate in this nation over something that is critically important. He should be respected for that and taken at face value and we should move on to the big issues, including the corruption of our system that is done by massive secrecy and by massive amounts of money and politics.”
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
Musk Fires Back at EU Regulator: X Content on Palestine-Israel Conflict ‘Open Source & Transparent’
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 11.10.2023
A European regulator had issued Elon Musk a warning about the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” on X amid the Mideast escalation, warning that in case of “non-compliance, penalties can be imposed.”
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk went on X (formerly Twitter) to fire back at the EU regulator’s complaint that his platform allegedly spreads “illegal content and disinformation” about the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Responding to the allegations, Musk wrote that the platform’s policy is “everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports.” He also added, “Please list the violations you allude to on 𝕏, so that that [sic] the public can see them. Merci beaucoup.”
Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, had sent a letter to the tech billionaire, claiming that his office has received “indications” that groups are spreading misinformation and “violent and terrorist” content on X, along with “repurposed old images”. Breton urged Musk to ensure “a prompt, accurate, and complete response,” and contact “relevant law enforcement agencies” within the next 24 hours. Breton reminded Musk that he needed to have “proportionate and effective mitigation measures to tackle the risks to public security and civic discourse stemming from disinformation”.
Furthermore, the commissioner alluded to the platform’s updated public interest policy that redefines which posts are ‘newsworthy.’
Screenshot of X post announcing the platform’s revamped Public Interest Policy. © Photo : Safety/X
Breton, who had shared his letter via an X post, had also included a hashtag referencing the Digital Services Act, used by the European Commission (EC) to exert pressure on online platforms under the pretext of creating “a safer digital space”.
The tech guru also responded on his social media platform to an X post by Glenn Greenwald. The American journalist and lawyer had tagged the news about the EU commissioner’s warning to Elon Musk, saying that the EU intended to wield its new censorship law to “punish” X. Greenwald referenced the firm “Reset” that the EU had hired as ostensibly “disinformation experts”. Reset is an initiative run by UK-based Luminate Projects Limited, a company owned by Luminate, an organization founded by the Omidyar Group. A study by “Reset”, the American journalist reminded, had accused X of failing to censor “pro-Russia propaganda.”
Replying to Greenwald’s post, Musk wrote that not only must the public “hear exactly what this disinformation consists of and decide for themselves,” but that, “many times, we have found the ‘official fact-checker’ to be the very individual making false statements.”
This May, the social media giant owned by Elon Musk exited the voluntary European Union Code of Practice of Disinformation, launched last June, which presupposes obligations to increase transparency, cooperate with fact-checkers, and track political advertising. Elon Musk insisted there is now “less misinformation rather than more” since he took over the platform in October, 2022. However, Thierry Breton had warned Musk that. “You can run but you can’t hide,” in a nod at the platform’s obligations as a so-called Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
“Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under #DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement,” Breton had tweeted.
Under the pretext of shielding Europeans from ‘undesired information,’ the European Commission (EC) conceived the Digital Services Act (DSA), which was signed into law and came into effect in November 2022. With the touted aim of creating “a safer and more accountable online environment”, the new legislation elevated the European bureaucrats to the position of a supervisor of the media sphere on the continent. After DSA entered into law, online platforms and search engines have been required to improve accountability and oversight by, for example, introducing a new flagging mechanism for what the authors of the law deem “illegal content.” Under the rules, digital platforms are obligated to, “increase the protection of minors”, and “give users more choice and better information.” Firms breaching the DSA will face a fine equating to 6% of global turnover. Those who continue to break the EU’s new digital rules may be prohibited from operating in Europe.
However, as part of the EU’s so-called “disinformation crusade,” the bloc stooped to outright censorship of Russian media, banning Sputnik, RT, and their subsidiaries, along with individual media channels of Russian bloggers amid Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine. The ban was met with condemnation from members of the European Federation of Journalists and the Dutch Association of Journalists (NVJ) at the time, who decried the fact that Europeans were being deprived of alternative viewpoints.
How Western media, social media influencers peddle lies to vilify Palestinians
By Shabbir Rizvi | Press TV | October 11, 2023
Since the Hamas-led Palestinian resistance operation “Al Aqsa Storm” on Saturday, mainstream Western media and social media influencers have been aggressively pushing Zionist narratives as part of a murky disinformation campaign against the resistance.
The multi-front information war is designed to control the narrative around anything surrounding the Palestinian issue and the latest military operation that has shaken the foundation of the regime.
Now more than ever, it is becoming clear that Western governments and their ruling class, which have a tight grip on media and information control, are losing the battle of ideas.
Palestinian support in the West is at an all-time high, despite Western leaders coming out in the open in defense of the Zionist regime and its relentless and indiscriminate aggression against Palestinians.
Western leaders came out in unison on Saturday to tow the same false narrative: That the Hamas operation is “unprovoked,” that the Israeli regime is “just” in its decades-long ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and that the Palestinian resistance is “terrorism.”
However, the world saw past these imperialist lies. Millions of people in the West, from New York to London to Paris, poured into the streets to pledge their support to Palestine and the Palestinian resistance, despite their own governments denouncing the Palestinian cause.
In fact, the rallies themselves began to be denounced by Western officials, who despite their aggressive rhetoric against the Palestinian cause saw no end to the outpouring of support for Al Aqsa Storm.
Now, the West and its media apparatuses have turned to their usual assortment of disinformation campaigns to muddy the line between fact and reality.
Perhaps the most egregious claim came from Zionist outlet “i24 News.” Nicole Zedeck, a reporter, falsely claimed that “40 Israeli babies” were killed, and that some were “decapitated.”
Obviously a jarring claim, many netizens pushed back asking for more details or any source that could corroborate this claim, which is part of the disinformation campaign.
Zedeck walked back the claim, saying Zionist soldiers told her this was happening – but the post, which still has not been deleted – or retracted – has been proven categorically false by media outlets.
The multiple high-profile accounts on X (formerly Twitter) shared Zedeck’s baseless claim, disseminating the proven lie to millions of people across the world.
Perhaps most frustrating of all is that while this claim of Israeli babies being killed was spread with no source or proof, very real footage of martyred Palestinian babies being pulled from the Gaza rubble was also being shared – but without the solidarity of any Western influencer accounts.
Another similar example was shared of a woman, Shani Louk, allegedly being held hostage by Hamas.
Zionist influencers claimed she was sexually assaulted and murdered. Later, the woman’s own mother confirmed she was safe and that Hamas had taken her to a hospital in the Gaza Strip – the same hospital targeted multiple times by Israeli warplanes.
This is a very intentional strategy of the Zionist regime, and the West – when their narrative is being challenged by reality itself, they will not be above spreading lies and refusing to apologize or issue a real retraction when they are caught.
The claims are instead echoed by official Zionist accounts as reality without citation, leading media outlets in the West to print the story verbatim.
Even the celebrity apparatus of the West plays a significant role in disseminating false claims – and then quietly walking them back after millions of people were exposed to flagrant lies.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis published a photo on Instagram of terrified children looking at the sky, with a caption expressing solidarity with the Zionist State. When netizens correctly identified the children in the photo as children of Gaza, fleeing from a Zionist airstrike, she quickly deleted the photo.
The strategy of publishing lies and issuing a whimper of a retraction (if any at all) has been an imperialist strategy for decades.
The US entry into Vietnam was sparked by a false report of an attack on a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The US illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 was due to a made-up claim of weapons of mass destruction. The invasion of Afghanistan before that was also based on false assumptions.
Iran’s foreign-plotted riots were caused by a categorical lie peddled by accounts known to be on the payroll of the United States intelligence agencies – then were spread using a vast network of online bots and influencer accounts.
Western celebrities and influencers then picked up the story to smear the Islamic Republic, despite multiple witnesses and CCTV footage proving the tragic death of Mahsa Amini was of natural causes.
More recently, after a 16-year-old Iranian girl Armita Geravand fell unconscious at the Tehran subway, social media accounts and news media in the West jumped on the bandwagon, claiming “torture.”
Western media apparatus and celebrity apparatus are intertwined. They are part of a sophisticated system that is forced into place by the US ruling class and further strengthened by the Zionist lobby.
Any deviation – meaning support for Palestine – is met with categorically false claims of anti-semitism, racism, or outlandish smear campaigns.
Western outlets will never publish about the true carnage unleashed upon the people of Gaza – the women and children who were martyred.
They will never publish, for example, the video of Israeli soldiers shutting off the water to Gaza – already contaminated – despite it being a human rights violation and a war crime. The imperialist media will never document reality, because reality would condemn the West for its barbarism.
Furthermore, if the West cannot win a war of information, then it seeks to outright ban inconvenient facts altogether. Take for example the shutdown of Press TV in the United States – or the deplatforming of Russia Today or Sputnik after the February 2022 Russian military operation in Ukraine.
Lebanon’s Al-Maydeen was also briefly banned on Meta platforms for its coverage of Al Aqsa Storm. According to the network, no reason was provided for it, nor was any prior notice given.
The fact of the matter is the imperialist media does not shy away from playing dirty to ensure only its pro-imperialist outlets and narratives dominate public perception.
It understands it is in a losing battle against the truth and is aggressively conducting widespread disinformation and information stifling in a final bid to control its narratives.
An age-old saying is that in war, the first casualty is truth. The imperialist West has been imposing war on the entire globe for over a century. The truth has been “killed” in this sense many times – leading to racism, Islamophobia, and more rot within society – but it can also be salvaged.
As growing contradictions sharpen within our world, the imperialist West will intensify its disinformation campaigns. Based on what we already know about its unethical conduct, the world cannot look to the West for the truth.
The West’s truth is a false reality based on the vision created by the US ruling class and its partners, who are committed to defiling the world for their own greed.
If the West fears the narrative of the Palestinians so much then it must know that the truth is with Palestine – and that Palestine is the truth.
Israel-Hamas “war” – another excuse to shut down free speech
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 11, 2023
As a brand new war-narrative unfolds, there’s already efforts underway to parlay the conflict into tighter controls on free speech and freedom of expression, both in person and on the internet.
The headlines have been filled with nothing but Israel and Hamas since the “surprise attack” on Saturday, with the predictable back and forth of historical grievances and accusations of racism, punctuated by unsubstantiated claims of atrocities.
“Atrocity Propaganda” is nothing new. It is the opening salvo of every war as state combatants try to win the public to their side.
For example, the totally unsubstantiated claim that Hamas “threw forty Jewish babies out of their cribs and beheaded them”, which was doing the rounds yesterday. As far as atrocity propaganda goes the claim is startling in its unoriginality (Nayirah anyone?)
There’s a lot of that right now, lurid claims of graphic and pointless violence directed against the innocent, most of which survives just long enough to cause some outrage before being “debunked” or walked-back.
Part of that is the general “fog of war”, heightened by the advent of social media. When a lot of people can talk a lot more is said (good and bad).
But there’s another interpretation: That fake war stories are being intentionally seeded onto social media and then “debunked” to discredit platforms and appear to justify digital censorship.
Within the past twenty-four hours Reuters, NBC, YahooNews, The Guardian and the AP have run stories criticising the proliferation of “fake war news” on social media. Al Jazeera joined in too.
Almost all of those accusations have been directed solely at Twitter/X – increasingly the media’s anti-free speech strawman.
Governments have not been quiet on the issue either, with the European Union reportedly “warning” Elon Musk there would be “penalties” for the spread of war-related “misinformation” on his platform.
It’s not just “misinformation” either, but also “hate”. In an unusually subtle headline, NBCNews warns of the “increasingly fraught nature of online speech”. USA Today is more on the nose, claiming “online hate” is “surging”.
Oh, and there are the “unregulated” sites to worry about, where terrorists allegedly upload violent videos, at least so the New York Times says:
“Hamas Seeds Violent Videos on Sites With Little Moderation”
It’s not hard to see where this leads.
And while “misinformation” is used to justify social media censorship, “safety” is used to justify shutting down freedom of assembly.
In the UK and US pro-Palestinian rallies were met with calls for the police to get involved, citing laws that outlaw the public support of “listed terrorist organizations”.
UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman has told the police that waving a Palestinian flag could be considered a crime. Metropolitan police are engaging in “reassurance patrols”.
In France the police are already more directly involved, shutting down a pro-Palestine demonstration.
… and people applauded.
Many of them the same voices who railed against tyranny in defending the Canadian truckers or anti-lockdown protests. It is disheartening to see.
In short, the “war” is four days old and is already being used to suppress dissent on the streets and argue against free-speech on the internet.
However the war narrative evolves over there, over here it’s just more of the same.
BANNED: Book by Dr. Peter McCullough & John Leake
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | OCTOBER 9, 2023
I would like to open this column by stating that I have long had a great relationship with Amazon, which has sold far more of my books than have ever been sold in bookstores. I have also been extremely grateful to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program for empowering me to publish whatever nonfiction books I please, quickly and efficiently, while retaining the rights and earning the best royalty in the business.
In May 2022, Dr. McCullough and I published our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, directly on Amazon. Quickly the book became a hit and within a year it had earned over 1000 5-Star Reviews. For almost 3 weeks in July 2022 it was a top 100 seller.
In the autumn of last year, Tony Lyons, President and Publisher of SKYHORSE in New York, graciously offered to bring out a special, handsome hardcover edition with a preface by U.S. presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who warmly endorsed our work.
A bit of Covid fatigue this year caused sales to decline, but in September the book got a second wind as more and more Americans seem to be recognize that Dr. McCullough has been right all along.
To my gratitude and delight, Amazon actually supported the effort by running a deep discount promotion while still paying the same royalty to us—an act of generosity to authors that is unheard of in traditional publishing.
And then, on September 29, seemingly out of nowhere, Amazon Account Review sent me the following notice:
We have temporarily suspended your KDP account because we found offensive content that violates our Content Guidelines in the title(s) listed below:
ASIN: B09ZLVWMD9 –
Title: THE COURAGE TO FACE COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex – Author: John Leake
Upon receiving this message, I humbly beseeched Account Review to restore my account and to let me know what “offensive content” was found in our book. Amazon restored my account and published my latest book—a conventional work of true crime—but refused to reinstate The Courage to Face COVID-19. Yesterday my third appeal was turned down without answering my query about what in our book is offensive.
My question seemed especially pertinent, given that Account Review provided me with a link to its Content Guidelines, which include a section on Offensive Content.
Offensive content
We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.
Obviously, nothing in our book even remotely touches on any of these subjects. Upon reading this description, it occurred to me that it was a perfection description of 120 Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade, which contains hundreds of pages that glorify the abuse and sexual exploitation of children, violent pornography, and glorifications of rape and pedophilia. I did a quick search for the title, and voila, there it is, for sale on Amazon in three formats.
None of my polite entreaties to Content Review was answered with an explanation of what, in our book, is offensive or in violation of any other published guideline. This strengthened my suspicion that the decision was the result of a sudden imposition of power for which the Content Review staff was not prepared.
Even more stunning than banning my softcover edition was Amazon’s decision to ban Tony Lyons’s SKYHORSE hardcover edition from the site without even sending the publisher notice. He learned of his edition’s demise from me.
This is a developing story about arbitrary censorship and book banning. Generally speaking, Amazon has a robust history of resisting pressure to ban books. Even during the COVID Pandemic, Amazon bucked the censorship regime that was established at Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
I believe it is no exaggeration to state that Amazon’s decision to ban our work of medical and historical scholarship, carefully vetted by Dr. Peter McCullough—who has published over 600 peer-reviewed papers in top academic medical journals—is the most egregious act of arbitrary censorship in the history of American publishing.
Many works of literature have been banned from public school systems and libraries and censured by religious organizations. However, I cannot find a single example of a banned nonfiction book that contains zero sex, zero violence, zero expletives, zero harshly expressed opinions, and zero assertions that aren’t grounded on rock solid scholarship.
Indeed, the book is a strictly factual narrative based on hundreds of published sources ranging from academic papers to standard works of medical history to documents published by U.S. federal agencies. The longest chapter in the book recounts Dr. McCullough’s U.S. Senate testimony on November 19, 2020.
This is a developing story about a gross infringement of the freedom of speech that is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution. Coincidentally, tomorrow (October 10) I have been invited to address the Republican Women of Greater North Texas about the critical importance of maintaining free speech for the maintenance our Constitutional Republic. I can now speak from very personal experience.
I would like to conclude by stating that I believe this decision is almost certainly the result of outside pressure being brought to bear on Amazon—the sort of outside pressure from the U.S. Executive Branch that was revealed in discovery in Missouri v. Biden.
As Jacob Siegel recently remarked in a brilliant piece in Tablet magazine titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century:”
At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together.
I strongly suspect that the banning of our book from Amazon has the fingerprints of Biden administration or intelligence agency goons all over it.
For those who would still like to purchase our book, please visit our website by clicking on the image below.
Doctor Persecuted For “Misinformation” Wins Appeal
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 8, 2023
Subverting the tightening noose of censorship, the judicial system has risen, this time at least, as a defender of free expression and professional discourse in Washington State. The Court of Appeals has recently extended a lifeline to Dr. Richard Eggleston, a retired ophthalmologist, in his battle against the Washington Medical Commission’s (WMC) accusations of spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19. This pivotal ruling not only resonates as a triumph for Dr. Eggleston but also echoes across the medical community, bolstering the principle that the crucible of critical discourse should not be chilled by punitive actions.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
Dr. Eggleston, from Clarkston, Washington, had penned a sequence of critiques last year in the Lewiston Morning Tribune, challenging the prevailing narratives around COVID-19, specifically deliberating on the safety and veracity of the vaccines. His audacity led to an avalanche of disciplinary actions spearheaded by the WMC in August 2022. Accused of unprofessional conduct and “willful misrepresentation of facts,” the retired eye doctor found himself thrust into the cauldron of a legal and professional maelstrom.
As the waves of allegations crashed down, Eggleston invoked his First Amendment right to free speech, refuting the charges with a motion to dismiss. The WMC’s refusal to honor his motion nudged him to escalate the matter to the courts. His quest for justice first encountered a roadblock when the Washington State Superior Court denied his appeal for an injunction. Undeterred, Eggleston propelled his case to the Court of Appeals, which in a moment of judicial prudence, awarded him an emergency injunction in May, halting the impending court proceedings.
The saga witnessed a fresh chapter last week when Court of Appeals Commissioner Hailey L. Landrus sanctioned Eggleston’s motion for a discretionary review of the previous court’s verdict. Attorney Richard Jaffe, representing Eggleston, lauded the decision as “very good news for all who believe that doctors should be able to publicly criticize” what he termed as COVID-19 “propaganda.” This sentiment was echoed by another counsel for Eggleston, Todd Richardson, who expressed both gratitude and relief at the verdict.
Hundreds of Canadians Have Been Debanked In The Last Five Years, Report Shows
An opaque and growing form of censorship
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 8, 2023
A sweeping de-banking wave has swept across Canada, affecting over 800 citizens in its tide since 2018, a number which includes hundreds who rallied behind the banner of the Freedom Convoy. Data unearthed through an access-to-information request by Blacklock’s Reporter unveiled a disturbing pattern where 837 individuals found the doors of their banks slammed shut on them over a span of five years.
The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada was brought into the loop through grievances lodged with regulatory bodies, shedding light on financial strangulation that bypassed cases of validated terrorism and money laundering.
In a deeper dive into the numbers, it’s revealed that the financial shackles tightened around 267 bank accounts and 170 Bitcoin wallets belonging to Freedom Convoy supporters, ensnaring an estimated $7.8 million. This exercise in financial censorship spun a web of scrutiny during a hearing on March 7, 2022, where Angelina Mason, representing the Bankers Association, testified. Mason outlined that while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) supplied a list of names, banks were also mandated by separate orders to exercise their judgment in identifying account holders for de-banking.
The narrative grew murkier when New Democrat MP Daniel Blaikie queried about the fate of individuals who were debunked but never featured on the list provided to the RCMP, to which Mason’s one-word response was a stark “Yes.”
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From the Archives
“Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked:” A confession from John Ioannidis
Retraction Watch – March 16, 2016
John Ioannidis is perhaps best known for a 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” One of the most highly cited researchers in the world, Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford, has built a career in the field of meta-research. Earlier this month, he published a heartfelt and provocative essay in the the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology titled “Evidence-Based Medicine Has Been Hijacked: A Report to David Sackett.” In it, he carries on a conversation begun in 2004 with Sackett, who died last May and was widely considered the father of evidence-based medicine. We asked Ioannidis to expand on his comments in the essay, including why he believes he is a “failure.” … continue
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