Western universities, publications under pressure to shun Iranian academics
Press TV | November 24, 2020
Many sources within the Iranian academia have reported a trend among Western publications and universities of rejecting submissions and applications from Iranian academics and students.
Mohammad Hazrati, PhD student at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL)’s School of Law, reported the most recent case involving himself on Monday, saying Thomson Reuters had refused to publish one of his articles that had already been accepted by an international legal journal.
‘Effrontery, discrimination’
“In March, I submitted my article to International Energy Law Review. It was accepted a couple of weeks ago,” he wrote in a tweet.
“Today, to my complete surprise and through sheer effrontery, they emailed me, saying they won’t be able to publish it because my address referred to an Iranian location,” he added.
Hazrati shared a screen grab of Reuters’ email, in which the Western media organization had said it “has a sanctions policy” and was “not allowed to publish materials from Iranian residents.” The agency had, therefore, advised that he provide it with his UK or QMUL address or have the organization’s legal department “retract” his article.
Zeinab Qassemi Tari, assistant professor of American Studies at University of Tehran, retweeted Hazrati’s comments, verifying the Iranophoic trend and shedding more light on its full aspects.
She decried the ongoing “discrimination against Iranian academics,” regretting, “I’ve heard from several colleagues that their papers are being rejected without going thru the peer review process.”
“Some western governments have instructed universities to reject applications from Iranian students,” Qassemi also announced.
Speaking to Press TV on Tuesday, she said it had been “a year and half now” that her colleagues have been having their articles rejected by the Western journals.
Qassemi reminded that after an article is submitted to a given journal, it is usually reviewed by two people and then either rejected providing reasons or the academic is told how he or she could modify his article and make it suitable for publication.
However, the Iranian academics have been having their articles rejected either “instantaneously” or without any reason. She did not rule out that the submitted articles may not qualify for publications, but said Iranian-sourced articles have been being rejected so frequently that makes one suspect existence of a pattern.
The campaign, the academic said, would lead to “gradual and systematic elimination of the Iranian voice,” especially the voice of those residing in the Islamic Republic that have a more up-close access to the country’s situation than foreign-based researchers.
Given the standing conventions that outlaw such selective attitude on the scientific arena, the selective approach towards Iranians amounts to “educational discrimination” and “violation of human rights,” Qassemi stated.
Qassemi said even prior to establishment of the trend, Iranian academics used to have a very hard time getting something published that would not conform with the “dominant discourse” that the West has been promoting.
The discriminatory activities began by the United States. Throughout the controversy-riddled tenure of President Donald Trump, many Iranian academics have been arrested on several occasions and held for draw-out detention periods that in two cases, wound down only after the Islamic Republic embarked on diplomatic efforts to secure their release.
The developments prompted Tehran to warn that the US had begun luring the academics onto its soil and place them in detention after they walked into the trap.
Many Iranian students have also been granted an initial entry into the US, but not let back into the country again.
Pfizer’s Experimental Covid-19 Vaccine—What You’re Not Being Told
By Johnny Vedmore |
Unlimited Hangout| November 18, 2020
The vaccine information war has kicked up a gear, and the mainstream media vultures are circling to descend on any content that they can easily label and dismiss as misinformation. Laws will be passed throughout legislatures globally to criminalise anyone who publicly misunderstands any part of the complex biological processes involved in many of the new experimental vaccine technologies that are being used to produce Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
Even now, intelligence agencies and intelligence-backed tech companies are set to deploy sophisticated methods to censor content and deplatform news websites that they view as promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as well as ‘vaccine misinformation’, particularly as a Covid-19 vaccine candidate lurches closer to approval.
It is expected that by month’s end the mRNA vaccine produced by the scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will be approved by the US government via an emergency-use authorization, with other countries expected to follow suit. Pfizer, in anticipation of the seemingly imminent and assured approval of their vaccine candidate, has already been manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses of its vaccine for weeks and has received praise from governments and mainstream media alike for its self-reported claims that its vaccine is 90 percent effective.
In particular, the success of the experimental mRNA mass vaccination program appears to hinge on the general population being unable to effectively articulate their concerns and objections. Whilst the mainstream media are quick to point out when somebody makes an error in how they believe the mRNA vaccine works, they don’t offer any further information than the official government line. Public distrust in vaccination programs is not the fault of those who don’t understand the way this brand-new technology works. Public distrust is all-pervasive because only one side of the argument is allowed to be heard. We do need to understand the technology involved, as there is a difference between mRNA vaccines and DNA vaccines. Having a general understanding of the reason why someone should object to being given an experimental mRNA vaccine is necessary for creating a clear and coherent argument.
We are about to examine a subject that has been one of the most censored topics in the modern era. But now, more than ever before, we are in desperate need of the information that is being systematically hidden from the public. This article will be banned and attacked by those who believe we, the general public, shouldn’t know all the information about what they want to achieve from the coming mass global vaccinations. The reason for the current establishment’s unwillingness to speak about this subject leads to perhaps unnecessary suspicion. Such suspicions will never be dismissed via the currently employed tactic of smearing anyone who questions intentions. If governments worldwide want their populations to submit to these vaccinations, then they need to stop patronising people and speak honestly. However, since that is unheard of, they will continue to employ coercive tactics, as they will be trying out a never-before-approved experimental method to boost the immune system by manipulating the process our DNA uses to signal for the creation of certain proteins, and we have little idea of what the long-term impact this brand-new therapeutic technology could have on our health. No politician, medical expert, or pharmaceutical representative is willing to accept responsibility for challenges that might be around the corner.
Many of the pharmaceutical companies researching potential coronavirus vaccines are using old methods. They take a proverbial pinch of the virus and infect your immune system at a very low and slow rate, allowing your body the time it needs to build up a natural immunological resistance to the illness. But developing those types of vaccines is a slow and arduous process, and the current leaders in the race to mass global vaccination are pharmaceutical companies using a radical new method that has never been tried before.
‘They are going to hack the cells in your body in order to make them into drug factories’, says Nathan Vardi, a staff writer for Forbes, in a video titled Why Pfizer Is Betting Big on an Unproven Treatment for Covid-19, from March 2020. ‘The problem is with this approach’, Vardi admits, ‘is there’s never been an approved mRNA product’.
The various scientific explorations into the therapeutic applications of potential mRNA treatments are still in their infancy, but the method has been lauded as a potential solution to the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases, for protein replacement, and for gene therapy.
In January 2020, the de facto leader in the mRNA field was the pharmaceutical company Moderna, but—in the wake of Covid-19—other major companies began to focus on the mRNA method. Moderna was able to pioneer that method several years ago, thanks to funding largely provided by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now, as 2020 draws to a close, the race to develop the winning Covid-19 vaccine is in full swing, and another Big Pharma company has seemingly beaten Moderna to the development of a supposedly effective mRNA vaccine, thanks to Pfizer teaming up with BioNTech, a small German company, to pip Moderna to the post. But, in this race to ‘save humanity’, there are bound to be pitfalls, especially when introducing completely new health technologies into mainstream use. Has Pfizer rung the finishing bell in this global race to end the current pandemic, or, instead, is it hurtling towards a disaster of epic proportions?
There are very informative scientific papers available from just before the pandemic began that give us an insight into this new mRNA technology. So here I’ll examine the DNA manipulating method, the vaccine, the people behind the research and development at BioNTech, but most important, I’ll examine Pfizer, and look at how the company has avoided accountability when things go wrong—and things do go wrong at Pfizer.
mRNA Vaccine Technology and How It Works
The vital interaction that mRNA has with our DNA has made selling mRNA vaccine technology extremely difficult for those who believe it’s the future of human medicine. The fact that it will alter the function of your DNA in your body has made many people suspicious of what unexpected horrors could arise through mass use of this new and experimental technique.
Unsurprisingly, the people marketing the vaccines have tried to downplay the aggressive and genetically manipulative nature of the treatment. In fairness, trying to explain the workings of such a complex new technology in plain English is exceedingly difficult. This is apparent when one listens to representatives of the mainstream media, who are often mealy mouthed when describing the biological processes that will take place when you receive the mRNA vaccine. But inability to articulate the technology isn’t surprising when you consider that part of your DNA, after breaking in two through a natural process, will then be combined with the experimental mRNA in a way that seems esoteric to many of us. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a process taking place in one’s own vulnerable biological system, in one’s DNA, the most precious building blocks of life that define your very existence.
After a preprogrammed strand of mRNA has merged with a naturally severed part of your DNA, it will request the production of a protein that should help trigger your immune system. In theory, this should boost your immune system and aid in the mass production of the proteins necessary to successfully fight the specific illness. The inserted messenger-RNA (thus, mRNA) should be relatively easy to design and programme as long as the scientists involved have the genetic coding for the infection it is to fight. In this case, the necessary data was released in January 2020 by the Chinese. Mild side effects to this process should be expected.
Although no extreme side effects were reported by Pfizer during the stage 3 testing of their mRNA vaccine, nearly every participant suffered mild symptoms, including swelling of the arm, irritation of the skin, and headaches, to name just a few. But, as we shall see, the information that Pfizer releases about its clinical trials and what happens in reality can be quite different.
I have just described the basic information you require for understanding how the coming mRNA vaccine works, but what I can’t describe to you is what happens in the long term. This form of therapeutic alternative has never been allowed or sanctioned before, aside from small clinical trials. There has never been an FDA-approved clinical trial for mRNA medicine because its usage comes with an abundance of ethical and moral questions and unknown possibilities.
At the same time, the utilisation of the mRNA method could also be one of the biggest leaps forward in technology ever recorded in human history. If we give the technology the benefit of the doubt and assume that it has no negative long-term side effects, then it is a potential treatment for almost every human illness on earth. Opening this mRNA floodgate would mean normalising regular vaccinations for nearly every imaginable ailment. In the best-case scenario, you could be vaccinated against cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and Alzheimer’s, and any other human ailment that derives from a fault in your DNA. In the worst-case scenario, you could be left dead or crippled like Pfizer’s victims in its experiments on Nigerian children during the late 1990s.
All that being said, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has a major downside to it. Pfizer and Moderna have stated that their mRNA vaccines need to be kept at -70° C and -20° C, respectively, which is a significant logistical challenge. Without these extremely cold temperatures, the mRNA and combined nanoparticles will lose their integrity. There are no studies on the effect of poorly stored mRNA vaccines on the human body. In comparison, DNA vaccines are much easier to transport and store as they are much more stable molecules.
As we have seen, the potential for mRNA technology is boundless. If the vaccine is successful in normalising the process of gene editing for medicinal benefit, there will be pressure to continue editing genes in other ways. It isn’t hard to see that the technology could have cosmetic, medical, and military applications that could range from phosphorescent skin to military bioweapons beyond our imagination. That is the reason why the people behind this technology are reluctant to speak about its potential game-changing mRNA method, for it represents our first real steps into transhumanism.
Pfizer’s Profitable Partnership with Germany’s BioNTech
As we have seen, Pfizer wasn’t the primary company in the mRNA business at the turn of 2020, but its immediate partnership with BioNTech saw it beat its main competitor, Moderna, to the finish line. BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, is led by a husband and wife team and, prior to the partnership with Pfizer, was dedicated to mRNA-related cancer-treatment research.
Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the couple leading BioNTech, are of Turkish descent. Şahin’s family were from southern Turkey, and he studied for his doctorate in Cologne, whilst Türeci’s family came from Istanbul. The two met at the University of Hamburg.
BioNTech already had a collaboration agreement to develop mRNA‐based vaccines for prevention of influenza with Pfizer as far back as February 2019, and their commercial strategy of collaborating with selected partners paid off when the race to the coronavirus vaccine began. Since then, there has been global media interest in BioNTech, mainly in the form of puff pieces focussing on Şahin and Türeci’s romantic life. But BioNTech also has many links to other Big Pharma giants and some of the well-known movers and shakers in the medical world. As well as its partnership with Pfizer, in 2019 BioNTech also had partnership deals with Bayer, Genentech, Sanofi, Genmab, Eli Lilly, Roche, and of course they received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In September 2019, just before the first people were infected with the new strain of SARS-CoV-2, the German news outlet Handelsblatt reported that ‘the Gates Foundation is investing around 50 million euros in the Mainz biotech company BioNTech. The money will be used to research HIV and tuberculosis vaccines’.
BioNTech has a small five-person management team and a four-person supervisory board. Şahin is the CEO of the company; he was also the head of the scientific advisory board of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG from 2008 until 2016, when the company was acquired by Astellas Pharma. BioNTech’s chief business officer, Sean Marett, previously worked in global strategic and regional marketing, and in sales at GlaxoSmithKline in the United States and at Pfizer Europe, as well as for Evotec and Lorantis. The company’s chief operating officer and CFO, Dr Sierk Poetting, joined BioNTech in September 2014 from Novartis. The chief strategy officer at BioNTech is Ryan Richardson, who had previously been an executive director of the global health-care investment-banking team at J. P. Morgan in London, where he advised companies in the biotech and life sciences industry on mergers and acquisitions, equity, and debt capital finances. The German BioNTech’s four-man supervisory board includes Ulrich Wandschneider, who is also a member of Trilantic Europe.
Pfizer: A Company Never Held to Account
If it were only BioNTech that was responsible for the creation of this futuristic vaccine technology, then maybe people would have more faith in the product. But Pfizer casts a dark shadow of conspiracy wherever it does business. Pfizer’s previous use of experimental drugs in secretive and scandalous studies has inspired Hollywood movies and court cases lasting over a decade, as it resulted in the deaths of many children. Yet, the media organisations touting its coronavirus vaccine as a heaven-sent miracle have provided little to no coverage of Pfizer’s previous experimental disasters.
Pfizer entered into the vaccine business in late 2006 by acquiring the British influenza-vaccine company PowderMed for an undisclosed fee. Pfizer was admittedly excited about the deal, stating that ‘PowderMed’s unique DNA vaccine technology is particularly promising’ and that ‘its pipeline of vaccine candidates for influenza and chronic viral diseases could have major potential’. In fact, beginning in autumn 2005, many Big Pharma companies had taken their first steps into the vaccine industry. Novartis entered the vaccine business by acquiring 56 percent of Chiron, whilst GlaxoSmithKline expanded its vaccine base by acquiring ID Biomedical of Canada. Competition was heating up among the big players, and the vaccine industry was seen as a safe bet, with reports of new vaccines selling for hundreds of dollars. But Pfizer’s reputation over the preceding decade had taken a severe knock due to the company’s disastrous experimental trials in Africa.
In 1996, an experimental trial took place in Nigeria. Under the cover of severe outbreaks of cholera, measles, and meningitis in northern Nigeria, Pfizer set up the secretive trials in Kano, the second largest city in Nigeria, to test its experimental antibiotic, Trovan (trovafloxacin). It tested the experimental drug on two hundred children. The children’s parents assumed that the children would receive the standard meningitis jab, but Pfizer staff instead set up two control groups. Half of the children were given the experimental Trovan, and the other hundred were given a reduced dosage of the leading meningitis equivalent. The lower dose was to help artificially skew the results in the favour of Trovan for marketing and competitive purposes.
In 2002, a group of Nigerian children and their legal guardians sued Pfizer in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. In court documents, the plaintiffs alleged that five children who received Trovan and six children whom Pfizer had ‘low-dosed’ had died as a result, whilst others suffered paralysis, deafness and blindness. The alleged actual number of those who died due to their involvement in the trial, per Nigerian sources, is over fifty.
Pfizer was supposed to check the children’s blood samples five days into the trials to look for any abnormalities and then change their treatment to the full-strength leading meningitis drug if there were any problems. However, they failed to do so. Instead, the Pfizer team waited for the irreversible symptoms to manifest physically before switching the treatment for the study’s unwitting participants. After realising that they had just murdered and crippled these children, Pfizer, like any giant pharmaceutical corporation would, left the scene of the crime in a hurry, failing to do any further evaluation of the patients.
Pfizer spent the next ten years denying any responsibility for the disaster, eventually releasing a statement entitled ‘Trovan, Kano State Civil Case—Statement of Defense’, in which the pharmaceutical bigwig stated among other things ‘that mortality in the patients treated by Pfizer was lower than that observed historically in African meningitis epidemics, and that no unusual side effects, unrelated to meningitis, were observed after 4 weeks’.
Pfizer eventually settled the case for $75 million on condition that it would not be held responsible for its actions. The Guardian newspaper reported in 2011 that the first four settlements in the lengthy court battle had been given to the families of four of the children who were killed during the trial. In an unabashed attempt to make the court settlement of $175,000 harder for each of the surviving families to claim, the victims’ families were forced to provide DNA samples to prove they were actually related to the deceased. This tactic turned out to be very effective from the company’s perspective, as many of the families didn’t trust Pfizer, which led some to pull out and refuse the settlement because they thought the DNA samples were a ploy by Pfizer to commit further illegal secret experiments upon them, or worse.
The Nigerians were represented by two brave lawyers, a Nigerian lawyer named Etigwe Uwo and a Connecticut-based lawyer, Richard Altschuler. According to Altschuler, it was the story of Pfizer’s Kano coverup that prompted John le Carré to write the novel The Constant Gardener that was adapted in the feature film. Like the situation depicted in the movie, Pfizer used scare tactics and smear campaigns to try and hinder any investigation into the Kano incident.
In 2006, Pfizer cut its workforce by 20 percent, reducing the number of its US employees by 2,200 people. The Financial Times reported on 29 November 2020 that this was something that was happening in all of the major pharmaceutical firms stating, ‘Big pharma is rushing to restructure across its business from manufacturing to how it markets and sells its drugs’. But Pfizer was mainly concentrating on radical change to its drugs sales force.
Pfizer was hit by further major scandals over the following year. One included the illegal premarketing of the HIV drug Maraviroc, which initially stalled the drug’s approval by the FDA. The scandal saw Pfizer publicly fire three of its top executives, including its assistant sales manager, Kelly Fitzgerald, (who returned to work for Pfizer and is currently their assistant sales director), HIV sales director, Art Rodriguez, now working for California’s Valued Trust, and the Mid-Atlantic director, Bob Mumford.
Get Your Facts Straight and Another Way Out
Whilst a DNA vaccine will change your DNA permanently, an mRNA vaccine will not permanently change your DNA. It takes one sentence to clear up that misunderstanding of the technology, and people should not be criminalised for such a simple misunderstanding. However, the mRNA vaccine does bind with part of your DNA to alter the proteins being produced. This is the very place where companies wish to trap opponents of their experimental vaccine campaigns. Just because someone doesn’t fully understand the process involved shouldn’t mean they should be demonised and forced into taking this experimental combination of nanoparticles. In fact, individuals should reject the vaccine until companies explain how it works and if there are any long-term side effects. You shouldn’t let anybody put anything into your body until they can tell you if any long-term consequences could occur. This is a basic principle of self-preservation that trumps any risk of a virus, especially a virus that has proven to be just a little bit more deadly than the common flu.
Our bodies should be the most important concern for us all. Fundamentally speaking, all our liberties and freedoms are of little concern if we’re dead or crippled. Don’t let them shame you into giving over your precious and delicate shell to medical scientific experimentation by companies that are incapable of taking accountability for their actions. This is the core argument that you need to keep at the forefront of any debate, rather than whether your DNA is permanently changed or whether its functions are just altered. If you’re going to get into the gutter to battle out the science then you must get your facts straight. They will use any potential misunderstanding you have to wipe your voice from the debate. It is they who bear the burden of articulating clearly why we should take the vaccine; it is your right to refuse.
However, there is something no one has mentioned so far about this new mRNA technology that could give those who oppose the vaccine another way out. Normally, to be effective, a vaccine must be given to as much of the population as possible. Mass vaccination has been used historically as a synthetic herd immunity to stop the spread of a virus to the vulnerable people in our society. But this technology is different, and its method of working means it is no longer necessary to use mass vaccination.
The whole point of why mRNA vaccines are more effective than our current vaccine technologies, per its proponents, is that it precisely targets the protein-production part of your DNA’s normal life cycle. This improves the response that an individual’s immune system will have when fighting a virus. It can be targeted socially in a similar way. If the majority of people who catch Covid-19 are asymptomatic, then it’s ridiculous to give them a vaccine. Because this vaccine protects individuals in their response, there is no good reason why everybody in our society should be forced to take it. It is used to increase specific protein production in someone who’s at severe risk—that’s how a medicine works normally. You don’t take HIV medication if you don’t have HIV. You shouldn’t be taking cancer drugs unless you have cancer. And you shouldn’t need to change your DNA’s production of specific proteins unless it’s personally necessary to do so.
The biggest lie being told to the people of the world is that everybody needs to take this vaccine. And ironically, the experimental mRNA technology that they’re desperate to use makes mass vaccination unnecessary.
Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com
France’s new law limits press freedom
By Chris Den Hond | Press TV | November 22, 2020
Paris – Thousands in Paris, tens of thousands all over France are protesting for the second time in a week against the Global Security Law.
This new law has been voted in the French parliament and makes it illegal to film and publish images of police officers. For these demonstrators this new law is a violation of the right to inform. Earlier this week, the police used tear gas and water cannon when protesters took the street in front of the French parliament. With the new law, it will become illegal to film this kind of police intervention.
During the yellow vest movement, videos have been used in judicial investigation concerning police violence. With this law, the French state can more easily hide illegal actions, committed by police officers. It can also more easily hide scandals which opens the door for abuse of power.
The French government says they want a better protection for their police force, but the new French law is seriously criticized by the Human rights Council of the United Nations as well as by a large spectrum of the French civil society, journalist associations, trade unions, political parties and human rights defenders.
One year of prison and 45,000 Euros of penalty: that’s what someone risks for publishing the face of a police officer. Many people here say that the French government is using the coronavirus crisis to limit personal and public liberties.
YouTube removes lockdown-sceptical interview with renowned immunologist Dr Mike Yeadon for ‘violating terms of service’
RT | November 20, 2020
Dr Mike Yeadon has argued that the British government is using “lethally incompetent” scientific advice in its Covid-19 response. YouTube has mysteriously taken down a video in which the immunologist explains his point.
The UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has got many things about the Covid-19 pandemic wrong, says Dr Mike Yeadon. He is an expert in allergy, immunology, and respiratory diseases, with over three decades of experience, including working as Pfizer’s vice president and chief scientific officer. Apparently his credentials amounted to nothing, though, when digital ‘censors’ at YouTube noticed that he was criticizing the prevailing narrative on the necessity of lockdowns.
For its modelling, SAGE assumed that the entire population was susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 when it first emerged in China last year. And it now considers that only a fraction of the public has been infected so far, based on the detectable presence of antibodies in their blood. These premises are behind the harsh restrictions currently in place in the UK, which are designed to prevent a massive and deadly outbreak of Covid-19.
According to Dr Yeadon, the assumptions are totally wrong, and the worst of the disease is over, with Covid-19 falling into the background as a relatively nasty but otherwise ordinary seasonal respiratory disease. A significant part of the population was actually not susceptible to the virus, thanks in large part to cross-immunity from previously being exposed to other kinds of coronaviruses. Those range from the relatively exotic but closely related SARS-CoV-1, the pathogen behind the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, to human coronaviruses causing the common cold.
The large number of positive Covid-19 tests is not indicative of the number of active cases, Dr Yeadon believes. The common PCR test detects RNA remnants of the coronavirus, but it cannot tell if they came from live viruses or those long conquered by the immune system. There are also false positives. Mass testing causes an increase in those, he says, as people less experienced in how to properly conduct tests are recruited to run them.
On the other hand, the percentage of people currently immune to Covid-19 is seriously underestimated because it is measured by the presence of antibodies in people’s blood, Dr Yeadon argues. Antibody levels rise when an organism reacts to an active infection, but immune response memory – which determines whether the immune system is trained to beat a disease – is stored in T-cells. So, a person perfectly capable of standing up to Covid-19 may test negative for antibodies, he concludes.
Dr Yeadon has made his case and explained why he believes SAGE’s advice to be “lethally incompetent” in a number of interviews, including a 30-minute sit in with Unlock UK, a lockdown-sceptical media outlet. The video was published on Friday and is available on Facebook, but for some reason it was banned by YouTube, which says it violated its terms of service.
Western tech giants have been relentlessly pressured by politicians and legacy media to fight against misinformation on their platforms. Their idea of what constitutes misinformation seems to be closely aligned with prevailing narratives, while complaints about censorship mount from those challenging the mainstream narrative.
This seems especially true for Covid-19 response coverage, as many people find restrictions at best controversial and at worst a government assault on liberties. Just this week, the UK’s top counter-terrorism police officer, Met Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, advocated punishing those who spread “misinformation that could cost people’s lives,” like anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.
Dr Yeadon, incidentally, argues that mass vaccination against Covid-19 would be unnecessary, because the outbreak has almost run its natural course before an efficient vaccine was even available.
View the video.
We need to protect the free speech of dissident doctors
By The Covid Physician | The Critic | November 18, 2020
Liberty. The right to be free from torture, inhumane and ill treatment; the prohibition of servitude; the right to liberty and security of person; the right to a fair trial; freedom of expression; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; the right to privacy and a family life; freedom of association; freedom from discrimination; and policing by consent are all so pre-Covid-19. The governmental response to the coronavirus pandemic has massacred these fundamental human rights.
Weaselly Covid marshals in hi-vis vests now bark aggressively at me, telling me to “stand back!” and “cover your nose!”. I have stopped resisting or trying to placate them with reason. I have stopped trying to reassure them that I am a doctor. Their brows furrow: a dissident doctor is either not really a doctor, or is the worst kind of scum.
We live in a strange world where minority activists campaign for commercial euthanasia: a world in which a select number of elected and unelected individuals dictate that 100 per cent of us are not allowed the liberty of taking the 0.06 per cent risk of a cost-free, natural death from a respiratory illness (a very common terminal event) at an average age of 82 years old. This is utter insanity while younger, fitter people commit suicide at rising rates under repressive lockdown restrictions, economies collapse, and other debilitating diseases continue to crush, kill and incapacitate the other 99.94 per cent.
Matt Hancock currently champions the right of a small minority of the terminally ill to travel abroad for a Dignitas death, while denying everyone else the right to face the small risk of death by Covid-19 in order to live with dignity and freedom in the UK. How does this make any sense?
Two Elephants in the Room
(1) How did we get here?
(2) How to prevent it happening again?
These are the two questions that surviving mainstream investigative journalists and parliament seem unable to address. Our masters have consistently turned focus to a question that has preoccupied us for months: How do we get out? With this emphasis, they made haste to our perpetual imprisonment. How can we be certain that the question being asked in private is not, rather, how can we capitalise on this situation?
How did we get here?
First it is worth asking from where did the virus originate? Evidence from the scientific community supports the hypothesis it may have been genetically engineered in a laboratory. In May 2020 Professor Luc Montagnier, the virologist who won the Nobel prize for discovering the HIV virus, has corroborated Indian scientists’ concerns from January 2020 that there are four distinct regions of the SARS-CoV-2 genome which appear to have been spliced in from HIV genomes.
Dr Limeng Yan goes further to say that Covid-19 was intentionally developed as a bioweapon. What further intrigues is Dr. Robert Gallo, an Anthony Fauci contemporary at the National Institute of Health (NIH) and another heavyweight from the 1980s race to isolate the HIV virus, appears to have briefly weighed in against Limeng’s previous September 2020 paper on a lab chimaera theory. So, who are we meant to believe in this tangled web?
Did you know that following serious scientific concern, there was a US government moratorium on the NIH conducting dangerous and unethical virus “gain of function” (GOF) research inside the US? However, the US continued to fund coronavirus research at the Wuhan BSL-4 lab in that moratorium period of 2014 to 2017. GOF research increases the danger of – and weaponises – viruses. Were you aware that funding for this comes from Professor Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease? Are you aware that the US has funded and supported virological research with inter alia China for over 15 years? Indeed, Sino-American GOF research sponsored by Fauci’s NIH and NIAID, involving Wuhan BSL-4 lab’s “bat-woman”, Zhengli-Li Shi, was allowed to continue during this moratorium.
How toprevent it happening again?
To answer the second question of prevention, one must to again ask how we got to this point of global paralysis where the WHO, a largely unaccountable, undemocratic, sprawling supranational entity under the private influence of the Gates Foundation and Pharma calls the shots, strips us of our human rights and God-given liberty. In this brave new world, the technological knowledge of biological weapons and their antidotes is in the select hands of a few private individuals, corporations and military facilities.
How is it that civilian, state-owned scientific apparatuses to protect the population are either non-existent or wholly inadequate? So much so that our governments must jump into the lap of the profiteering pharma-cartels and their sponsored universities. Why do our chief scientific advisor, chief medical advisor, and chief mathematic remodeller seem to have cartel tattoos on their CVs? Would you trust Big Pharma hitmen to advise and cure you?
Wouldn’t it be better to have independent, accountable state-funded experts who would be less prone to the politicisation and profit motives that are destroying our way of life? Is this not preferable to the collusive, corrupt, and clandestine public-private partnerships such as SAGE? Even the establishment BMJ’s Executive Editor has belatedly come round to express serious concern about the “politicisation, corruption, and suppression of science.” As Michael Gove said (and subsequently retracted), “I think the people are fed up of experts in organisations with acronyms, saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
As for pandemic preparedness, the government (presumably in conjunction with the same global non-state actors) is said to have organised for a public health crisis such as the one we currently find ourselves in, yet it seems to want to keep the findings of the Operation Cygnus report under lock and key. Why?
What did Sir Simon Stevens, CEO of NHSE say at a press conference on 5 May 2020? This shifty, career pen-pusher said he was quoting from ICU consultant, Dr Alison Pittard. This, in practice, means he was absolving himself of all accountability and responsibility for the statement. He said he had spoken to her the day before and she had said, “In the here and now we cannot stop cancer developing, in the here and now we can’t immediately prevent heart attacks or strokes … but we can reduce the spread of coronavirus in the community.”
This is a problematic and fatally misleading statement. Stevens should be ashamed of himself for making a political soundbite out of Dr Pittard’s words; particularly when citing her name for added authenticity and protection. First of all, if my colleague said this, please understand she operates in a very compartmentalised, specialist ICU cocoon, at the sharpest end of a chronically under-resourced and stymied NHS service. She will be traumatised, sensitised and conditioned by Simon Stevens’ under-funding of her service and the clear excess deaths of March and April.
Second, know that we can prevent cancer developing, and stop heart attacks and strokes. This is called screening, early diagnosis, early intervention and timely surgery; such things were normal daily phenomena before March. Drug companies devoted billions to tell us it was possible. Now, Simon Stevens, Dr Alison Pittard and Pharma tell us it is not possible and squander 2.4 billion pounds daily to a National Covid Service which is six times the daily budget of the entire NHS.
Third, how can an ICU consultant’s well-meaning soundbite be the final word in community medicine? Is lockdown actually an effective way to stop the spread of this disease? That’s debatable, and not absolute. I agree we could suppress it and keep kicking the can down the road, culminating in higher periodic and seasonal spikes. But how and when (if ever) do we exit from her strategy – a snake oil vaccine? Alternatively, we could have been like Sweden and got it over and done with. I doubt the lay fact-checkers will bother analysing Simon Stevens’ parroted wisdom.
A few days later in The Sunday Times, Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, aped mindlessly:
You can’t stop someone having a heart attack or a stroke, but you can control the volume of Covid-19 patients by using lockdowns to reduce the infection rate… the NHS will certainly be arguing that the Government should be very cautious about coming out of lockdown.
Covid-19 and Chicken Pox
Now, imagine if a novel Chicken Pox descended on earth as if from nowhere, for that is how SARS-CoV-2 appears to have arrived. This parallel may help facilitate a common perspective. It could well have been far more damaging and certainly more terrifying than SARS-CoV-2. Imagine: no prior immunity, no prior sharing a lollipop at a pox party with a friend’s child to ensure broad, safe, and natural immunity before adulthood. Young adults, adults and the elderly would be dying en masse of multi-system pathologies. The pox marks would strike psychological terror; there would be no cure, no vaccine. Gradually, we would learn to cope with it, embrace it as a child, a rite of passage that you would rather have.
As for me, I had unknowingly acquired immunity at some point in my life. I discovered this because I required serological proof to work on a hospital paediatric ward in my thirties. So, I am relieved my child has possibly had Covid-19 as probably have I. To see hundreds of schools and their young teachers refuse the low risk of opening shop and returning to work seemed to me a dangerous folly: no immunity, no education, no jobs, no future, no life. We desperately need a reservoir of resilient, naturally immune people to shield the non-immune, vulnerable and elderly. More chance of suppressing the virus this way than with a rushed vaccine. I may as well say it now before it becomes criminal to do so. The world has lost its mind.
Dissident doctors, Thought Crimes & Arbitrary Injustice
Many have asked why more doctors and nurses are not coming forward with an alternative truth, and why they are not openly doing so. First, understand the state apparatus (including the regulatory body for doctors, the GMC) which has set its immovable stall: Catastrophic Pandemic (no such thing), Philanthropic Lockdown, Wonder Vaccine.
Then, take the extraordinary GMC assault on senior consultant surgeon’s right to free speech. Dr. Mohammed Adil was metaphorically lynched; swinging ominously off the GMC entrance from his redundant stethoscope – a gangland warning from the drug cabal to the rest of us. Then, recall what happens to an NHS whistle-blower, in spite of so-called whistle blowing protection laws, by familiarising oneself with the unbelievable scapegoating, cover-up, injustice and judicial “incompetence” doled out to Dr. Chris Day over 6 years and counting.
Now appreciate that in 2016, for the first time since at least 2006 according to cases compiled by the GMC, a doctor, consultant eye surgeon John Brookes walked scot free from his disciplinary tribunal without any sanction at all, even though the tribunal found he was guilty of misconduct. His offence? A 15-month sexual affair with a current patient. Not even a one-month nominal suspension was suitable: he was deemed too “unique” in his surgical talents and too valuable to his patients. The GMC tribunal made an “exceptional circumstance” of his case. The tribunal went further in its sympathies and commented that this was a consensual and mutually supportive sexual affair – that was until the jilted patient tweeted his affront to Brookes’ hospital CEO.
The GMC doesn’t do human rights for all, nor morals, ethics and Hippocrates per se anymore. It does duties. Duties are done for employers. No more egregious example of this was the GMC case of Dr. John Brookes. His case is paradigmatic of the damage, demoralisation and destabilisation of the medical profession. Ten years ago, it is likely he would have been removed from the GMC register for such an offence.
But, what of Dr. Adil, chairman of the World Doctors Alliance? He is a colleague of Dr Heiko Schöning, the German medic arrested at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park on 26 September 2020. What did Adil do to warrant his arrest? After several months of witnessing global and local healthcare go down the chute and members of the public suffer, he courageously (some would say extremely inexpediently) spoke out on YouTube with admirable passion about the global assault on civil liberties, public health, the NHS and his own patients’ health by disproportionate government measures. He referred to the pandemic as a hoax. You may find the video here.
Dr. Heiko Schöning being arrested for speaking at Speakers Corner, Hyde Park, 26 September 2020.
The GMC didn’t like it. It suspended him from his patients and his 30-year-long NHS career for 12 months, pending tribunal. No unique attributes, no “magic fingers”, no “consensual and mutually supportive” sexual relationship with a patient to help him avoid interim suspension nor the charge of exercising his legal right to free speech.
I am not saying I agree with him. “Hoax” may not be the most appropriate word to use in this situation. Dr Limeng Yan uses “fraud”. But how do we know for sure? Perhaps it is a hoax in the sense that in our collective hysteria we are leading ourselves to fatal self-deception? How does the GMC know? It does not. It has blind faith in the state-pharma-media sponsored narrative. Remember, lone voices have spoken out before when Tony Blair asserted to the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. History proved those lone, renegade voices to be right. Look at what then became of the middle east, then Europe and now the world. We believed in our politicians and not the experts. Recall the strange, horrid fate that befell principled weapons inspector, Dr. David Kelly.
The GMC seems not to care if Dr. Adil is correct. Might is right. He stepped out of line and spoke his truth. He must be silenced and professionally ruined before another doctor speaks. His was not speech riddled with hate, but by an honest concern that the government’s response to this pandemic is not medically or scientifically sound.
The GMC’s primary concern is its statutory responsibility and overarching objective as set out in the Medical Act 1983 (as amended), in particular the need:
- To protect, promote and maintain the health, safety and wellbeing of the public;
- To maintain public confidence in the profession;
- To promote and maintain proper professional standards and conduct for members of the profession.
As the BMJ reported:
A GMC spokesperson said: ‘The interim orders tribunal imposed an interim suspension on Dr Adil’s registration, following our referral, to protect patients and public confidence. This interim suspension remains in place while we consider concerns about Dr Adil’s fitness to practise.’
Well, who says it protects patients and maintains public confidence to see the GMC violate the lawful free speech of a senior doctor? Thousands of the people have turned out to support him. He is only one among a quarter of a million registered doctors. Why is there so much concern over his influence? Let him speak and be heard. Surely, he must have something important to say to risk his life’s calling? However, that is why the GMC is concerned, he speaks with repute and authority, and therefore the GMC must undermine him.
By denying him his democratic right to political, personal and professional expression, the GMC colludes to deny his right to be heard, and the right of the public to hear him. It denies him the right to seek the truth in open, democratic discourse, and the right to scrutinise the government and hold it to account. It denies diversity and equality of opinion. It denies him his livelihood, and needlessly detaches him from his life’s work and patients who rely on him.
Orwell once said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. Well, welcome to a very veterinary Animal Farm.
Violation and criminalisation of human rights is becoming quite the corona-craze for official and charitable bodies. The British Academy, the Royal Society, the GMC, the government, the police… who next? Jonathan Sumption in retirement from judicial office is now able to speak with an impunity and candour not afforded to Dr Adil. Like Adil, he is a lone renegade. He pointedly called out the indifference of so-called civil rights organisations such as Liberty – which has a history of intervening for the partisan rights of Remainers – when it comes to defending everyone else’s human rights.
We now have the Labour party wishing to criminalise and censor our free speech. This time their leverage is “anti-vaxxers”, but even that term is problematic. I would imagine it is a defamatory slur designed by the corporate mandatory vaccine pushers who wish to smokescreen the fact that most objectors are manifestly not anti-vax. They are simply and reasonably against useless, unsafe, rushed and unproven pharmaceuticals where the profit-centric corporations are given state immunity from civil and criminal prosecution should the pharmaceutical be dangerous.
This is aside from the very serious issues of common assault, treatment without consent, and the violation of patient choice. In the context of what we know about the risks of the virus, none of this is appropriate, nor proportionate. What we now have is a mainstream principal of discretionary free speech at the behest of one ideological blob. If you do not worship at that altar, your god does not necessarily get to be heard, and may as well not exist.
Dr. Adil is not the first nor only doctor to accuse the WHO, Pharma and governments of a hoax pandemic. Did you know we had a relatively dry practice run of the orchestration of the apparatus to inflict terror on the world and fill the coffers of Big Pharma in 2009-2010 with swine flu? A German doctor and politician, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, accused the WHO of conspiring with Pharma to redefine and lower the threshold of declaring a pandemic.
That brings me to another doctor who might equally be accused of “over-valued ideas” and occupying the other end of the so-called pandemic hoax spectrum. She argues for the embattled corporate propagandists Whitty, Vallance, Ferguson and Johnson. She is Dame Clare Marx, Chair of the GMC. This is what she wrote a week before Lockdown 2.0: [emphases in italics are mine].
A GMC Love Letter
27.10.20
Your wellbeing matters – a message from Dame Clare Marx
Experiences of this pandemic will not be uniform, but for sure, none of us will be left unchanged.
Doctors have found themselves working at the edge of their comfort zone. Some of you have confronted harrowing situations. Some have made difficult decisions against a backdrop of uncertainty and fear. Some have been unable to give the care you wanted to give.
Now, on top of managing rising demand, a weighty backlog of elective work and the second wave of the pandemic, doctors are bracing themselves for the much-anticipated winter storm.
We know that you and your teams are already weary. With barely time to process the events of recent months, many of you are now steeling yourselves for the inevitable challenges to come.
That commitment and resolve requires a huge physical and emotional effort, some would say it’s an act of courage.
We went into medicine to help people and to make things better. But we can’t do that without caring for ourselves too. Your wellbeing matters – to you, your patients and to us as your regulator.
We want to support you so you can keep delivering the best possible care to patients. We’ve compiled helpful resources here to help you survive and thrive over the coming months.
We all know that this will be a marathon, not a sprint.
The nature of being a doctor is to go above and beyond to deliver the care our patients require. But doing that requires doctors to take their own wellbeing seriously.
On behalf of the GMC, and as a doctor myself, I am immensely proud of the profession’s response to this crisis.
Thank you for your continued dedication and professionalism. Please look after yourselves, and each other.
Dame Clare Marx
Chair of the General Medical Council
When I received this call to arms, I had to step back in some amazement. I found it unrepresentative, patronising and inappropriate in many parts. This letter was innuendo and euphemism, wrapped up in a tissue of concern for our well-being. The problem was ill-defined – is doctors’ mental health failing due to an apocalyptic pandemic or due to the government’s lockdown and suspension of the usual NHS? Or is it the huge backlog she at least acknowledges?
Non-dissident Doctors
However, some doctors do seem immune from GMC scrutiny. Have the two doctors (Drs. Martin Landry and Peter Horby) involved in the Oxford Recovery trial been properly held to account for unusually high doses of hydroxychloroquine given to presumably vulnerable hospitalised patients with advanced Covid-19? This may have killed cheap, generic hydroxychloroquine’s early promise as a community prophylactic and early treatment in Covid-19 at low and normal doses, leaving the market wide open for expensive, novel, commercially exploitable vaccines and therapies. In fact, it may well have: watch Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty reject hydroxychloroquine as a result of Recovery.
It could be argued that Recovery might have hastened the demise of some of its participants. But, still, it is Dr. Adil who remains the GMC’s prime target and public enemy number one of our dysfunctional state.
How did Recovery receive ethical approval to give excessive doses to vulnerable patients in an advanced Covid-19 state with hydroxychloroquine when mainstream media was telling us hydroxychloroquine was dangerous and toxic at normal doses? The Recovery trial gave a massive 2400mg hydroxychloroquine in the first 24 hrs, and 800mg every subsequent 24 hrs for the next 9 days. Who proposed and approved these doses? The normal daily dose is 200-400mg, and it is a general pharmaceutical principle that patients with organ failure are sometimes given lower doses to avoid toxicity.
Recovery concluded hydroxychloroquine had no effect on survival, but what if it did and this was masked by its potential toxicity? Emerging data from other studies tells us that hydroxychloroquine may have an effective role to in early stage Covid-19 at low/normal doses.
Something doesn’t add up. It seems as if the Recovery trial result has caused a character assassination on hydroxychloroquine. Are none of my colleagues concerned about this? Surely, there is a case to answer for these doctors.
What would GMC scrutiny make of Drs. Pittard, Whitty, Landry, Horby and Marx? Are they merely GMC-compliant, dutiful doctors; are they ethical and competent professionals; have their actions protected patients and public confidence or caused harm and grossly negligent deaths? What about their “fitness to practise”? These are the complex and challenging questions for the GMC that only a few lone renegades are willing to ask.
What can we do? I would urge the public to make their views known to their MPs and copy in the GMC and the Free Speech Union. Submit FOIA requests to the GMC, hold it to account – it acts for you. Support the Free Speech Union, and protect yourself and others by joining it and donating to it. We live in interesting times, and I fear they are about to become more interesting.
The Covid Physician is an unheroic NHS doctor. This article is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the views of the NHS. Dr. TCP tweets at @tcp_dr
Copyright © Locomotive 6960 Limited 2020
German Doctor Raided By Armed Police During Live YouTube Stream
By Paul Joseph Watson – Summit News – November 19, 2020
Shocking footage out of Germany shows Doctor Andreas Noack being raided by armed police in the middle of a YouTube stream for apparently violating coronavirus laws.
The clip shows Noack in conversation with someone during the live stream before he is distracted by noises outside his door.
Banging is then heard along with screams of “Polizei!” before armed cops are seen entering and ordering Noack to get on the floor, as he is treated like some kind of violent terrorist.
As Noack is handcuffed, a police officer in a mask then appears to try to shut down the live stream but only succeeds in diverting the camera.
Speculation raged on Twitter as to the reason for the raid, with some suggesting Noack had been active in treating injured protesters at anti-lockdown demonstrations.
Others suggested the reason was that Noack had welcomed too many people into his house, violating COVID-19 restrictions on gatherings.
“I think the guy is guilty of expressing his opinions,” said another respondent.
“They’ve turned back the clock to the 1930’s,” remarked another.
“Insanity!” commented another.
Germany has seen numerous massive anti-lockdown protests, including one yesterday in Berlin during which police hit protesters with water cannons.
As we previously highlighted, a pregnant mother in Australia received a home visit and was arrested by police for the crime of helping to organize an anti-lockdown protest on Facebook.
This is happened to doctor Andreas Noack in Germany. After the unconstitutional approval of the infection law, police broke into his house while he was having a live transmission on YouTube. Those who cried against “fascism” have created the most criminal dictatorship in history. pic.twitter.com/fLgl5JTF0i
— Cesare Sacchetti (@CesareSacchetti) November 19, 2020
UK’s Labour Party suspends critic of Israel
![Left-wing Labour newly elected NEC member Gemma Bolton who was suspended for calling Israel an apartheid state [screenshot]](https://i2.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-17-at-12.00.53-e1605614513700.png?resize=505%2C336&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
Labour newly elected NEC member Gemma Bolton was suspended for calling Israel an apartheid state
MEMO | November 17, 2020
A left-wing member of the governing body of Britain’s Labour Party is under investigation for saying that Israel is an apartheid state.
Newly-elected National Executive Committee member Gemma Bolton, who was backed by left wing group Momentum, has been placed under investigation by the party for tweeting in 2018: “If I run the risk of getting suspended for calling Israel an apartheid state then so be it. Suspend me. Because that comrades, is a hill I am perfectly happy to die on.”
An article in the Jewish Chronicle article referred to Bolton’s views on Israel as “hard line” and attempted to shame her for previous posts completely unrelated to the issue. She was accused of being fond of “sexually explicit humour”; the pro-Israel community newspaper cited a social media post from 2015 in which she said, “I’m torn between wanting to be a high class Westminster politician or a porn star.”
In 2017, a UN report said that, “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.” UN Under-Secretary-General Rima Khalaf said at the time that the report “clearly and frankly concludes that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.” Israel immediately expressed its outrage and dismissed the report as “anti-Semitic”.
The latest Labour suspension follows that of former leader Jeremy Corbyn MP, who was suspended after the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report into alleged anti-Semitism in the party. Those opposed to such moves point out that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not the same thing, and that legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’s policies is not anti-Semitic per se.
Labour leader Keir Starmer sacked left wing Rebecca Long-Bailey from the shadow cabinet earlier this year for sharing an interview with actress Maxine Peake speaking out about police brutality in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Peake mentioned that US police forces receive training from their Israeli counterparts.
Starmer also reportedly gave backbench MP Stephen Kinnock a “dressing down” for suggesting that the government should stop buying goods from illegal Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land. Again, the reality is that such settlements and the movement of people to live on occupied land are illegal in the eyes of international law.
UK Labour Party demands online crackdown on ‘anti-vax disinformation’ ahead of Covid-19 vaccine rollout
RT | November 15, 2020
With the UK preparing for a Covid-19 vaccine rollout, the Labour Party is calling for emergency censorship legislation to punish social-media companies if they allow posting of what it considers to be “anti-vax disinformation.”
“Social-media companies have a pitiful record of tackling disinformation,” shadow culture secretary Jo Stevens said Sunday on Twitter.
“The government needs to stop dragging its heels and force companies to remove this dangerous content ahead of the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine.”
Stevens and Labour’s shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, have co-authored a letter demanding that the government impose financial and criminal penalties on social-media platforms that fail to censor anti-vaccine posts.
The government must “deal with some of the dangerous nonsense, nonsensical anti-vax stuff that we’ve seen spreading on social media, which erodes trust in the vaccine,” Ashworth said. He added that the government will need “strong public-health messaging” to ensure that legitimate questions are answered and fears are allayed.
Facebook, Twitter and Google agreed last week to help the UK’s government blunt the spread of vaccine misinformation and disinformation. The companies promised to help spread government-promoted messaging about vaccine safety and to ensure quick response to content that has been flagged by health officials. They also agreed to block people from profiting on anti-vaccine content. But Stevens and Ashworth said that anti-vax groups that were flagged months ago to social-media platforms remain active.
The UK has ordered 40 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, and it aims to get emergency approval to start distribution by next month. But Labour’s push to censor discussion that it deems false is raising concern that proper scrutiny of the vaccine won’t be allowed in a country that was forced to pay settlements to patients who suffered brain damage resulting from the H1N1 vaccine in 2009.
“This is scary,” writer Sue Cook tweeted. “Censorship? If we objectively want to investigate issues around the safety of a particular vaccination before rolling it out, surely that’s good. It is not a matter of being ‘anti-vax.’”
Former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, who now heads a free-speech group called the Index on Censorship, argued that “rational argument will be lost” if anti-vaccine discussion is pushed underground. “Surely the answer isn’t to ban the anti-vaxxers but to explain why they are wrong on every available platform,” she said.
More on the Strange Demise of The American Herald Tribune
By Tony Hall • Unz Review • November 13, 2020
In recent days many news sites, including Unz Review, have highlighted the role of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI and the CIA in removing web sites from the Internet. For five years I have worked as Editor in Chief of one of the targeted sites that was killed as a result of specious claims concocted by the US intelligence agencies and their media extensions. American Herald Tribune is a victim of a drive-by shooting inflicted by many of the same people seeking to impose the outcome of this presidential election. AHT is now a fallen soldier in the increasingly contentious Battle for Reality.
Initiated in 2015, AHT was made to disappear through the destructiveness of those presently vandalizing the Internet and much else besides. This modern-day version of book burning is based on a closed process where imperatives of the Empire of Deception are expressed. The imperatives of deception must be made to prevail no matter what; no matter who gets hurt or killed in the process
The destruction of the web site that I worked on with others was destroyed on the basis of a ridiculous claim from on high. American Herald Tribune was grouped together with dozens of other web sites said to form what was described as a worldwide propaganda scheme directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The IRGC is well integrated into the larger structures of the Iranian Armed Forces.
Based on a directive given in 2019 by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to US President Donald Trump, IRGC was added to the US list of terror organizations. Netanyahu thanked Trump for “responding to another important request of mine.” For one country to designate the Armed Forces of another country as “terrorists” is pretty much the same as a Declaration of War. It creates something new with no precedent or formal place in the constitutional inheritance of international law.
While it can be dangerous to say so out loud, it is well known among the attentive that the government of Israel holds seemingly unlimited sway over many aspects of US lives and US governance. The areas of Israeli and Jewish dominance include strategic communications and foreign policy.
Within this framework of power relations the dominant unfulfilled action sought by Israel First partisans is to maneuver the US Armed Forces into invading and destroying Iran. Sheldon Adelson has specifically called for the use of nukes to bomb Iran “half way into the stone age.”
The prospect of such a war, one that came very close to happening in the opening days of 2020, is one of the most destabilizing factors in global geopolitics. At its strategic nexus in the heart of Eurasia, the Islamic Republic of Iran is allied with China and Russia. Moreover Iran has its own highly sophisticated military apparatus. Many of its senior soldiers and commanders are battle hardened especially from the legacy of decade-long war with US-backed Iraq. Iran is the home of a well-educated population of Persians with a great sense of rootedness in one of the world’s most ancient and accomplished civilizations.
The assault on American Herald Tribune and other web sites was justified as a step along the lethal trajectory meant to lead to a military invasion on Iran. The US attack on web sites is better understood as part of a well orchestrated domestic attack not only on the free speech rights codified in the First Amendment but on the whole underlying essence of Constitutional governance in the beleaguered United States..
The very parties engaged in censoring the Internet and shaping it to advance their own self-interested agendas are themselves deeply implicated in perpetrating major international and domestic crimes. The pre-emptive disappearance of the American Herald Tribune is one small but telling example of a ritual of exorcism. Its dynamic includes an effort to protect the guilty from the incursions that can arise from genuine investigative journalism.
The crimes being pressed from within the US intelligence agencies are extensive, elaborate and devastating in their consequence. The role of the FBI in perpetrating and covering up crime is especially obvious. As Gareth Porter has demonstrated, the FBI was engaged at all stages in a process that disabled and eventually destroyed AHT. The destruction began with the FBI ordering the disabling of AHT first on the strategic platforms of Facebook, Instagram Twitter and Google.
On Nov. 4, just as the tsunami of dirty tricks entailed in election fraud began rolling into the American heartland, American Herald Tribune was removed altogether from the Internet. The site itself along with its archives were plunged into oblivion
It seemed that CIA skills in rigging many elections around the world are now being deployed domestically. The imperial chickens were coming home to roost. The USA is itself now the site of a George Soros-backed Color Revolution. The residue of democracy still barely alive in United Sates is thereby being flattened and killed as the media pushes aside due process to anoint “President Elect Joe Biden.”
US Department of Justice (DOJ) took the lead in justifying the purge that eliminated AHT from the mix of Internet offering. This assault on a small but symbolically significant vehicle of investigative journalism speaks of the rapid ascent of authoritarian milieu where the law-defying media cartels appointed themselves top government deciders.
The Post-Mafia Character of Organized Crime
Many of the agencies engaged in the ritual assassination of AHT are engaged in a range of operations that are taking place far outside the gamut of the rule of law. Organizations charged to counter high-level crimes are instead engaged in committing and covering up organized crime. Some of the crimes that the big US intelligence agencies are promoting rather than prohibiting include, for starters, aggressive warfare as well as drug dealing, money laundering, stock market manipulation, bribery, blackmail and fraud. This list is far from complete.
The inability of the US Justice Department to keep an incarcerated Jeffrey Epstein alive long enough to face his accusers in a trial is suggestive of many things to come. The demise of the Epstein case on the issues Mr. Epstein had come to embody points to the great power of those that traffic in the exploitation of sex slaves, including children.
It seems that one of the big payoffs in this gruesome category of crime involves the filming of influential figures having sex with children. Apparently the threat of exposing these films to public view forms one of the most reliable means for the intelligence agencies to blackmail trendsetters, opinion makers, financiers and deciders into compliance.
The systemic involvement of the big intelligence agencies in organized crime extends to the massive deceptions pressed on the public through the 24/7 dissemination of disinformation by agglomerated media cartels. These cartels have been working in concert with the tax-free and indemnified corporate monopolies presently engaged in seizing illicit control of the Internet.
The scope of the media Mafioso’s power grab is epitomized by its attempt to install Joe Biden as US President by ignoring or downplaying massive and growing evidence of widespread election fraud.
In the days leading up to the US election, Rudy Giuliani, former NY City mayor and one of the most successful prosecutors in US history, was pictured in the media busily marshalling evidence. The evidence he was amassing should be more than enough to trigger a full-fledged FBI investigation into the well-documented case swirling around the possible criminal conduct of Joe Biden’s and much of his family. A considerable amount of evidence is already on the public record. It illuminates the nature of a political career that seems deeply bound up, at the very least, with illicit influence peddling conducted by Joe Biden’s son and his brothers.
The findings of Rudolf Giuliani cannot be easily dismissed. As a federal prosecutor Giuliani succeeded in winning convictions of America’s leading mafia families. It is hard to counter Giuliani’s insistence concerning the broader implications of Hunter Biden’s escapades. Hunter’s conduct was especially significant when he was for all intents and purposes a foreign affairs emissary of the Obama-Biden White House.
Giuliani effectively makes the case that he, together with a small coterie of other experienced investigators, have already identified the broad outlines of a crime spree and a national security scandal involving the many-faceted infractions committed collectively by the racketeering members of the Biden Crime Family.
The publicity attending reports of the Laptop from Hell have helped draw attention to the Biden scandal as articulated by Giuliani and also by Steve Bannon, Senator Ron Johnson, Peter Scweitzer, Maria Bartiromo, and, for a time, by reporters at the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. The FBI is apparently holding the original hard drive of the Hunter Biden’s discarded Laptop from Hell.
Hence the receptacle of a significant part of the smoking-gun-evidence in the Biden scandal has apparently been gathering dust throughout 2020 in the office of FBI Director, Christopher Wray. This revelation has particular significance for me especially in light of the FBI cavalier removal of Internet content containing some of my best investigative work developed over a period of five years. Christopher Wray sat on the Biden laptop during the very months when his office was showering attention on the process leading to AHT’s removal from cyberspace .
Who thinks that the FBI Director Wray got his priorities wrong? Who is willing to take on a federal police force possessing, no doubt, abundant surveillance files on every individual of consequence? This intrusive approach to federal policing was pioneered by J. Edgar Hoover. For almost half a century Hoover was the FBI’s notorious Director. No doubt the data-collecting capacities during Hoover’s time pale in comparison with government spying activities carried out by the post-9/11 surveillance state.
When I think of the FBI a flood of images of government malfeasance come to mind. I think, for instance, of the FBI’s involvement in the murders of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. I think of J. Edgar Hoover. I think of the farce of the FBI’s fake investigation into the 9/11 fiasco under the auspices of FBI Director Robert Mueller.
In 2017 Mueller returned to his role as a master of the FBI propensity to cover the tracks of high-ranking criminals. Mueller was brought in to clean up the mess created by the Clinton-Obama losers after they handed over the keys to the White House to the new Donald Trump administration.
The departing oligarchs acted on the principle that the best defence is a good offence. Donald Trump, it turned out, did not dare as he had promised to set in motion the jailing of Hillary Clinton. Instead Donald Trump was subjected to the Russiagate deception, a prelude to the current Irangate deception. A telling symbol of the Irangate deception is the FBI’s knife in the back of AHT.
When I think of the effort to undermine all possible platforms for aggressive investigative journalism, I am reminded of probable FBI-CIA collaboration in the murder of perennial truth teller, John Lennon. I think of the FBI’s role in the police killing in 1969 of the Black Panther activist Fred Hampton and of the FBI’s direct assassination of Lavoy Finicum in 2016.
Finicum was a rancher and an outspoken critic of the federal role in land management in the western US. Like Hampton, Finicum was a gifted speaker with a talent for widening the discussion from the grievances of particular groups to the grievances shared by people in general. Both Hampton and Finicum were victims of governmental homicide aimed at killing the messengers of popular discontent.
During the university winter break in 2016 I drove from my home in Lethbridge Alberta to investigate in Oregon the murder of Finicum as well as popular responses to it. In the course of my research I tried to visit the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, federal land that had been occupied in the protest movement led by Finicum, the Bundies and other members of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedoms.
As I approached the site of the Malheur protest I was stopped at a roadblock. I was suddenly confronted by about 6 machinegun-wielding officials all wearing overalls with the FBI crests. I was patted down and threatened and instructed in no uncertain terms to turn around and head back to where I had come from.
I wrote about the whole experience at some length as part of the process of taking on my new responsibilities as Editor in Chief of American Herald Tribune. Because of the FBI’s recent assault on AHT, the articles explaining my encounter in 2016 with FBI officials are no longer readily accessible. Some digital fragments of my writing on the Finicum affair survive here and there.
My point is not that the FBI helped to assassinate AHT in order to hide the FBI’s own crimes and misdemeanors. My point is that this federal police force has a history of committing crimes and covering up crimes so that the FBI is no longer a credible instrument of law enforcement. The history of FBI crimes via COINTELPRO that have been directed at, for instance, the peace movement, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, the civil rights movement, the environment movement, and the Nation of Islam.
There are some very dark sides to the history of undercover assaults by the FBI and its accomplices on people and organizations pressing for needed changes to existing social, economic and political orders. The protesters in Black Lives Matter need to take seriously the politics of their siding with some of the primary opponents of the very principles they claim to be advancing in 2020. As always, its important to follow the large sums of money that are helping to fuel the sometimes violent BLM and Antifa actions.
The attack on AHT is quite well aligned with the FBI’s history of seeking the repression of progressive movements. The FBI is a failing federal police agency that should indeed be defunded. The FBI should be replaced with another entity designed to reflect the findings of an investigation into federal policing, an investigation that is long past due.
The Seeds of American Herald Tribune
I have never made any secret of the fact that I have visited Iran several times in the last six years. One of these visits arose from my agreement to deliver an invited paper at a history conference at the University of Tehran. I also attended an event in the Iranian Parliament where Muslim solidarity was expressed by many delegations including many that represented national governments. The shared cause that brought us together was justice for the Palestinians. My other visits involved attendance at New Horizon Conferences.
The most recent New Horizon conference took place in Beirut in the autumn of 2019. Invited US delegates including Dr. Philip Giraldi and Dr. Kevin Barrett. They were threatened by FBI officers promising harsh consequences if they attended the Beirut gathering.
My initial participation in a New Horizon conference took place in 2014. I was one of about 60 foreign delegates invited from throughout North America and Europe. The delegates included Pepe Escobar, Medea Benjamin, Ken O’Keefe, Imran Hussein, Thierry Meyssan, and Wayne Madsen.
One of the featured speakers was Gareth Porter. Dr. Porter introduced his book, Manufactured Crisis, where he exposed the errors in much US and Israeli alarmism concerning Iran’s nuclear energy program.
As I would later realize, the New Horizon conference of 2014 can be seen as a part of the political negotiations that would culminate in 2015 in the agreement of Iran with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. The aim of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was intended to enable the Iranian government to continue with its nuclear energy program with international monitoring.
Another aspect of the deal involved some reduction in economic sanctions imposed on the basis of the international power derived from the Federal Reserve banking system headquartered on Wall Street. To get a deal, US President Barak Obama had to invest considerable political capital in what could be seen as a move aimed at normalizing relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
When President Donald J. Trump came to power he very publicly renounced the deal on behalf of the US government. Much to the pleasure of the Israeli government, the resulting deterioration in US-Iran relations has become more and more severe right up to the present.
The whole experience of being part of a very significant event in Tehran was for me something of a revelation with many layers of meaning. As my time in Tehran passed I could see in my mind’s eye a melting away of media-generated caricatures embodied in popular stereotypes of the most demonized country on earth.
The agenda of the 2014 New Horizon conference included some very lively academic sessions. The exchanges among colleagues caused me to become more aware of subtle prohibitions on free speech in North America. I witnessed how the delegates in Tehran were able to converse on some contentious issues in a relaxed and poised way. I reflected on the irony of how difficult it would be to replicate this quality of open debate in academic conferences in North America.
As I ingested the basics of what was to me a new discourse, it seemed I had entered the vortex of very profound antagonisms between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. I could sense that these antagonisms were reverberating far beyond the region. Prototypes and patterns were being set that help shape many facets of international relations.
In the process of returning from Tehran to Lethbridge I saw from computer searches conducted in airports various versions of a much-mirrored report conveying unflattering things about the New Horizon conference. The same story was replicated across many influential venues.
The highlighted story featured angry condemnations hurled aggressively by Abe Foxman, then National Director of Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Foxman described the whole conference as a hate fest of anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers and 9/11 truthers.
Seeing this combination of weaponized phrases alerted me to how such terms can be combined to compound the harshness of defamatory smears. To be accused of any one of the ADL’s condemnations implied that the whole set of accusations applied to the entire conference and to every delegate who took part.
This crash course in the techniques of Israel First propaganda extended to shocking illustrations meant to indicate what the conference was supposedly all about. Accompanying text presenting hostile commentary on the New Horizon event I saw published images of angry demonstrators burning the Israeli flag. No such demonstration took place. But adherence to the truth of what did or didn’t happen has not been a priority for the authors of a smear campaign the likes of which I had never seen, let alone experienced up until that point
As I settled back into my usual routine in Canada I resolved to look more deeply into a research problem that had come into greater focus during my time in Iran. Since 1982 the academic focus of my research, publication, and teaching was centered on studying encounters between Indigenous peoples and the societies of the colonizing newcomers they encountered.
Over time I worked on expanding this study from Canada to North America and then to the Western Hemisphere. A reasonable extension of this approach, I determined, would be to expand this trajectory of study to the treatment of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine by the Zionist founders and builders of Israel.
A major thread of continuity in this study linking US and Israeli history was the Calvinist views of New England founder’s who saw themselves as God’s Chosen people, as Israelites seeking to establish a New Jerusalem. This vision of Manifest Destiny runs from the creation of New England to the transcontinental expansion of the United States to the US-backed expansion of Israeli settlements eastward to the West Bank and beyond.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky is the founder of revisionist Zionism, the version of imperial Zionism that today dominates the Israeli Knesset. In developing his vision of Greater Israel, or Eretz Israel, Jabotinsky drew heavily on his reading of US expansion into Indian Country. He provided the essential metaphor of the “Iron Wall” as the essential condition for Israeli security and for the Jewish state’s acquisition of new territory. Military force, not compromises and reciprocity with Indigenous peoples, was to provide the basis of the Iron Wall on the moving frontiers of the Jewish state.
The Life and Times of American Herald Tribune
In the months following my return to Canada I engaged in E-mail exchanges with a thoughtful Iranian graduate student who reached out to me based on what he saw at the New Horizon conference. Out of that exchange emerged the idea of the American Herald Tribune, a project we worked on together over a five-year period. During most of those years Donald Trump has been US President who adopted the specious 9/11 narrative and as well as the caricature of Iran as a country of ruthless terrorists.
The Zionist design to poison the minds of Westerners against the government and people of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been unrelenting especially since 2001. In the days following the 9/11 debacle, recall that George W. Bush characterized Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as members of“the axis of evil.”
After 9/11 the Israel First architects of the Global War on Terror were especially fast and zealous to pin the label of “terrorist” on the Palestinians and Iranians. After the New Horizon conference in Beirut in 2019 I addressed the meme of Israeliocentric allegation that Iran is the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism.
The misrepresentation of of 9/11 and many subsequent false flag terror events was systematically deployed to pave the way for the invasion of several Muslim-majority countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
These invasions were deemed acceptable in the West because of the toxification of the mental environment with poisonous inducements in popular culture to fear all Arabs and Muslims as potential jihadists. The result has been elevated levels of Arabophobia and Islamophobia. The Zionist Lobby worked especially hard, however, to stimulate attitudes of Iranophobia,
Iranophobia can flourish in societies where most people have very little knowledge of Iran and its deep Persian heritage. This ignorance of Iran is not inadvertent. Only very rarely do we see Iranians loyal to Iran’s present government invited to represent their country in the Western media. Increasingly the rule seems to be that Iran can only be spoken about by lobbyists actively promoting aggressive war against the Islamic Republic. There seems to be no room in the media for Iranians to represent their own country on their own terms. Nor is there room for proponents of peace with Iran to counter the messages of the war hawks.
My Iranian colleague and I have since 2015 worked together to build up American Herald Tribune. I was surprised myself by the growth of a large constituency of authors from around the world who became enthusiastic to contribute on a wide array of subjects. Initially some of the authors were paid small amounts and many contributors receive no recompense at all.
Some of the published pieces were contributions written especially for AHT and some of the items were mirrored from other sites. Some of the authors are experienced and well known and some of the authors were neophytes submitting their first attempts at journalism. All in all AHT became very multinational and international in character with a fairly frequent focus on West Asia and Eurasia.
In recent years whatever amounts of money were originally available apparently dried up. Like many Internet initiatives, the AHT project was by and large a labor of love, not a money-making enterprise. I made a point of contributing my modest talents and services for free. I did not seek and I was not offered any material gain. In my role as Editor in Chief I would intervene from time to time to sort out various contentions.
The subject of homosexuality, for instance, generated contrasting treatments by AHT contributors Miko Peled and Gearoid O’Colmain. My advice was not to pick sides but to publish the different perspectives of both commentators. The decision was not well received by some. AHT’s then-regular columnist, George Galloway, for instance, chose to withdraw from AHT because of how we handled this matter.
While AHT had developed over time a genuinely international personality, the project continued to hold my interest largely because of my desire to promote the ideals of peace over the contentions of war. As part of this commitment I have become an advocate in Canada of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Israel First sycophant, Canadian PM Stephen Harper, had unilaterally severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 2012. Justin Trudeau has promised to restore diplomatic relations but has failed to do so.
I have intervened against interventions by B’nai Brith Canada and its MEK partners to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, the IRGC, as a terrorist organization. I my view, President Trump made a big mistake when he gave into Netanyahu’s demand to designate the Armed Forces of a sovereign government as a terrorist organization. If that approach was to catch on, how many peoples in the world would have good reason to designate the US Armed Forces as a terrorist organization?
I completely reject as absurd any notion that AHT is a venue somehow operated by the IRGC as part of a worldwide Iranian influence network. That hallucination is the product of the kind of twisted thinking that tends to develop in those whose perceptions have been distorted by too much war game strategizing. As for me, I am comfortable in my skin as an advocate of peace who makes a point of getting in the way of the intrigues of war mongers.
I took on the war mongers, for instance, at CNN and the Washington Post when earlier this years they both published articles aimed at stigmatizing AHT as a crude instrument of Iranian propaganda. My two responses originally published at AHT have been made to disappear. The articles, however, were picked up by other sources where they can still be found.
As I wrote in AHT’s response to the Washington Post’s smear of the targeted venue,
I proudly affirm that AHT is opposed to any US-led war with Iran. For those seeking to avoid the scourge of war, the pursuit of peace obviously favors dialogue and exchange rather than animosity and sword-rattling. AHT intends to continue favoring dialogue and exchange.
In answering the criticisms of CNN and WaPo, I was very much aware that I was responding to two media venues well known for their close relations with the US intelligence establishment but especially the CIA. While CNN was not established until 1980, both venues extend into contemporary times the older heritage of Operation Mockingbird, the mother lode of CIA-engineered propaganda establishing much of the narrative of the US-led side in the Cold War. CIA operatives and assets continue to be well represented within the staffs of many big media venues.
The Washington Post’s essay on AHT was written as an account of the decision of the newspaper’s Iranophobic Editorial Board. I accused this Board of
… rattling off jargon paraphrasing a deeply flawed study that provides no evidence whatsoever for the extravagant claims being irresponsibly asserted.
The basis for the Washington Post’s claim goes back to a glossy document put together in Milpitas California by an organization named Fire Eye. Fire Eye’s CEO is Kevin Mandia who cryptically describes his company’s specialty as the defense against “cyberattacks.”
The title of the Fire Eye report is Suspected Iranian Influence Operation: Leveraging Inauthentic News Sites and Social Media Aimed at U.S., U.K., Other Audiences. No specific individuals have permitted their names to appear as authors. Thus no one takes specific responsibility for the report’s contents, an understandable absence given the shoddy quality of the study.
There is absolutely no information given about the funders of the report. Why? What is there to hide? Did CNN or the Washington Post or a subsidiary company help fund the study? Did the Israeli or US government pay the piper? The question of the sponsorship of such an investigation is crucial to an assessment of its credibility. Everything points to the fact that there is apparently much about the origins and genesis of this mysterious study that is being kept under lock and key.
There is no clear explanation or justification of the methodology used. There are no specific references to other studies of a similar nature except for vague references to the Democratic Party’s hunt for Russian influences on US politics. There are no scholarly references nor is there a bibliography.
I did not see anywhere in the anonymously authored document a single reference to American Herald Tribune. Not one. Instead the report is organized as individual studies devoting a few pages including screen shots to several sites. These sites are Liberty Front Press, US Journal, Real Progressive Front, British Left, Critics Chronicle and Instituto Manquehue. Before doing research for this essay I had not heard of any of these sites. When I looked them up on Internet search engines, I found in several places adjacent to the named sites results linking to the Fire Eye document.
Propaganda Directed at Iran and Iranians: Prof. Marandi Speaks
The allegations from the US intelligence agencies and their extensions in mainstream media devote enormous attention to what they see as inward-flowing propaganda from Russia and Iran. Those that make this case, however, fail to consider the reverse of what they are arguing. Very concerted efforts are being mounted to bring via media venues foreign influences into the formulation of the attitudes and behaviour of Iranians in Iran. Double standards are in effect. Iranians are being flooded with alien propaganda while any Iranian influence in US media is treated as necessarily evil and illegitimate.
Earlier this year by Professor Seyed Mohammed Marandi provided a very telling account of this inundation of Iran with hostile propaganda from the United States and Britain. Prof. Marandi was interviewed by Anya Parampilaya on Max Blumenthall’s social media operation, the Grayzone. Prof. Marandi did his Ph.D at the University of Birmingham. He is currently Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran.
Prof. Marandi explained that tens of TV networks including BBC Persia broadcast into his country programming that often is rife with hostile depictions of Iranian society and government. With significant backing from US, Israeli and European sources, some of this propaganda is produced by MEK, an organization that joined with the Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq’s war with Iran during the 1980s.
MEK is known to have assassinated Iranian scientists. The MEK organization is widely perceived within Iran as a terrorist group supported by some Iranians who wish for a return to a regime similar to that of the Shah of Iran.
Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Shah was an instrument of Iran’s friendly integration with the West. Many saw the Shah as a puppet of US, British and Israeli interests.
As the primary source of oil for Royal Navy, Iran had played a crucial role in the history of the British empire throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The cycles of history that have made Iran a site of contention in global affairs gained momentum in 1953. The CIA and British intelligence interests organized a coup to fend off a bid to nationalize Iranian oil supplies. That hostile intervention by the West continues to reverberate across generations right up to present times.
Prof. Marandi explained that much of Farsi (Persian) language propaganda material emanating from foreign sources is engineered to instigate anti-Arab prejudices. Alternatively, much of the Arab-language propaganda generated by the Western-aligned monarchies in the Persian Gulf region is directed at engendering anti-Iranian, anti-Persian prejudices.
The interview with Prof. Marandi took place in the wake of the decision of Facebook and other social media to deplatform him. Prior to 2020 this Iranian academic was a frequent guest on many mainstream media outlets in the US, Great Britain and Australia. The effort to block Iranian perspectives in Western media hardened, however, after an unprovoked and lethal US drone attack in Baghdad that started the process of making 2020 a year like no other.
Biden transition team’s media leader sees ‘DESIGN FLAW’ in First Amendment, advocates law against ‘hate speech’
© Reuters / Jim Urquhart
RT | November 14, 2020
Richard Stengel, the point man on state-owned media for Joe Biden’s transition team, has said protection of hateful speech that can provoke violence is a “design flaw” in the Constitution and should be fixed with “new guardrails.”
Stengel, a former MSNBC contributor, is transition team leader for the US agency for Global Media, which includes broadcasters Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. He’s likely to head the agency if Biden becomes president in January. Ironically, that means Washington’s foreign propaganda outlets, which traditionally have promoted America’s founding principles, would be overseen by a man with restrictive views on the most fundamental of those tenets – freedom of speech.
“All speech is not equal,” Stengel wrote last year in an op-ed published by the Washington Post. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting thought that we hate, but not speech that incites hate.”
Stengel gave the example of “sophisticated Arab diplomats” who had questioned why constitutional rights would allow a US citizen to burn a copy of the Koran. “It’s a fair question,” he said. “Yes, the First Amendment protects the thought that we hate, but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.”
Another example that Stengel cited was alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Our foremost liberty protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society,” he wrote. “Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook – all protected by the First Amendment.”
Stengel added that it’s time to consider hate-speech laws, like those enacted by other countries to discourage incitement of racial and religious tensions after World War II. He argued that mass shooters Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen were consumers of hate speech, which created a climate that made their heinous crimes more likely.
Stengel, formerly editor of Time magazine, was a US State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Obama-Biden administration. He referred to his former State Department role as “chief propagandist.”
“I’m not against propaganda,” Stengel reportedly told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think that’s awful.”
The Canadian Military Declares War on Canadians – #PropagandaWatch
Corbett • 11/13/2020
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Dan Dicks of PressForTruth.ca joins us to delve deeper into the insane story of the Canadian military fake wolves psyop. We go beyond the ludicrous story of the government using fake wolves to scare the public to discover that the Canadian military is now openly announcing that they are targeting the Canadian public themselves with their newly-weaponized public affairs department. The Canadian military has declared war on Canada. Will Canadians even notice?
Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4
SHOW NOTES
PressForTruth.ca
THIS Is How You CONDITION The Masses For The MILITARIZATION OF COVID-19(84)!!!
Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and ‘rethinking’ First Amendment
By Ben Norton · The Grayzone · November 11, 2020
Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.
“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
Richard “Rick” Stengel was the longest serving under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in US history.
At the State Department under President Barack Obama, Stengel boasted that he “started the only entity in government, non-classified entity, that combated Russian disinformation.” That institution was known as the Global Engagement Center, and it amounted to a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.
A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global “information war,” Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the careful management of the public’s access to information.
Stengel outlined his worldview in a book he published this June, entitled “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”
Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.”
The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.
As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change.
Stengel’s appointment appears to be the clearest signal of a coming escalation by the Biden administration of the censorship and suppression of online media that is seen to threaten US imperatives abroad.
From Obama admin’s “chief propagandist” to Russiagate-peddling MSNBC pundit
Before being appointed as the US State Department’s “chief propagandist” in 2013, Richard Stengel was a managing editor of TIME Magazine.
In the Obama administration, Stengel not only created the Global Engagement Center propaganda vehicle; he also boasted that he “led the creation of English for All, a government-wide effort to promote the teaching of English around the world.”
After leaving the State Department in 2016, Stengel became a strategic advisor to Snap Inc., the company that runs the social media apps Snapchat and Bitmoji.
Stengel also found time for a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a think tank closely linked to NATO and the Biden camp which has received funding from the US government, Britain, the European Union, and NATO itself, along with a host of Western weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel corporations, Gulf monarchies, and Big Tech juggernauts.
Stengel worked closely with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a dubious organization that has fueled efforts to censor independent media outlets in the name of fighting “disinformation.”
But Stengel is perhaps most well known as a regular political analyst on MSNBC in the Donald Trump era. On the network, he fueled Russiagate conspiracy theories, portraying the Republican president as a useful idiot of Russia and claiming Trump had a “one-sided bromance” with Vladimir Putin.
Stengel left MSNBC this November to join Biden’s presidential transition. The campaign announced that he was tapped to lead the Biden-Harris agency review team for the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
Agency review teams are an integral part of the transition process, responsible for evaluating the operations of federal agencies.
Our teams are composed of diverse experts with deep policy expertise, ready to ensure we’re prepared to lead on Day One.https://t.co/2gY1E0Ey5k
— Biden-Harris Presidential Transition (@Transition46) November 10, 2020
USAGM is a state media propaganda organization that has its origins in a Cold War vehicle created by the CIA to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union and communist China. (The agency was previously called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, until it rebranded in 2018.)
USAGM states on its website that its most important mission is to “Be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”
An agency shakeup this year produced revelations that USAGM provided clandestine assistance to separatist activists during the protests that consumed Hong Kong in 2019. The program earmarked secure communications assistance for protesters and $2 million in “rapid response” payouts for anti-China activists.
Richard Stengel’s “obsessive” crusade against Russian “disinformation”
When Richard Stengel referred to himself as the State Department’s “chief propagandist,” advocated the use of propaganda against the American people, and proposed to “rethink” the First Amendment, he was participating in a May 3, 2018 panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
During the CFR event, titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News,” Stengel hyped up the threat of supposed “Russian disinformation,” a vague term that is increasingly used as an empty signifier for any narrative that offends the sensibilities of Washington’s foreign policy establishment.
Stengel stated that he was “obsessed with” fighting “disinformation,” and made it clear he has a particular obsession with Moscow, accusing “the Russians” of engaging in “full spectrum” disinformation.
Joining him on stage was political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill, who mourned that alternative media platforms publish “things that seem like they could be true… that’s the sphere where it’s particularly difficult to debunk them… it’s this gray region, this gray zone, where it’s not traditional disinformation, but a combination of misinformation and play on rumors, conspiracy theories, sort of gray propaganda, that’s where I think the nub or the crux of the problem lies.”
Stengel approved, adding, “By the way those terms, the gray zone, are all from Russian active measures, that they’ve been doing for a million years.”
The panelists made no effort to hide their disdain for independent and foreign media outlets. Stengel stated clearly that a “news cartel” of mainstream corporate media outlets had long dominated US society, but he bemoaned that those “cartels don’t have hegemony like they used to.”
Stengel made it clear that his mission is to counter the alternative perspectives given a voice by foreign media platforms that challenge the US-dominated media landscape.
“The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us. And the Russians in particular are smart about this,” Stengel grumbled.
He singled out Russia’s state-funded media network, RT, lamenting that “Vladimir Putin, when they launched Russia Today, said it was an antidote to the American English hegemony over the world media system. That’s how people saw it.”
Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Misinformation Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, lamented that “RT is invading every weekly finance media space.”
But Decker was cheered by the proliferation of US oligarchs committed to retaking control of the narrative. “In America and across the world,” he stated, “the donor community is very eager to address this problem, and very eager to work with communities of researchers, academics, journalists, etc. to target this problem.”
“I think that there is an appetite to solve this from the top down,” he continued, urging the many academics in the audience “to apply for grant money” in order to fight this Russian “disinformation.”
The CFR panel culminated with an African audience member rising from the crowd and confronting Stengel: “Because what is happening in America is what the United States flipped on the Global South and in the Third World, which we lived with, for many, many years, in terms of a master narrative that was and still is propaganda,” the man declared.
Rather than respond, Stengel rudely ignored the question and made his way hurriedly for the exit: “You know what, I hate last questions. Don’t you? I never, I usually just want to end something before the last question.”
The video of the revealing confrontation caused such a furor that CFR’s YouTube account disabled comments and made the video unlisted. It cannot be found in a search on Google or YouTube; it can only be found with the direct link.
The video of the full discussion is embedded below:
Featured Video
“Trump’s presidency is at risk of being destroyed” Col Douglas Macgregor
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- No More Bombs for Iran, Economic War Instead?
- “Trump’s presidency is at risk of being destroyed” Col Douglas Macgregor
- Iran has legal right to act in Hormuz, holds US responsible for disruptions: UN mission
- Sudan’s RSF leaders build Dubai property empire with UAE backing: Investigative group
- West losing leadership position to Global South: Russia’s president
- How Cognitive Science Explains Our Looming Nuclear Crisis
- Have the US and Israel killed non-proliferation?
- Moscow, Tehran to support each other amid US aggression: Russia’s defense minister
- Iran says EU’s insistence on sanctions hastens its ‘embarrassing descent into irrelevance’
- Argentina’s Javier Milei sells out his country for Israel
- If Americans Knew
- By Week’s End, Trump’s War Will Be Plainly Illegal
- CBS News Reportedly Ousts London Bureau Chief Over Differences With Bari Weiss Over Gaza Coverage
- State Department Says US Is in Conflict With Iran ‘At the Request’ of Israel
- What ceasefire? Israel won’t stop killing in Gaza, Lebanon – Daily Update
- Palestinians in Gaza Want to Rebuild Food Systems. Israel Isn’t Letting Them.
- Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel
- Sheep Theft Sent Shockwaves Through a Palestinian Village. Then, a 12-year-old Boy Was Shot Dead
- Trump alum helps Israel mount AI influence campaign
- Dispatches From Catastrophe
- Despite Denials, AIPAC Is Now Funding Campaign of Ala Stanford In Philadelphia
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
Aletho News 