The Deep State Intends To Destroy Alex Jones—Don’t Let Them
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute For Political Economy | August 6, 2018
Fabricated, unwarranted lawsuits are being used in an effort to shut down Alex Jones who raises too many issues that those who rule us do not want raised. At times Alex can be over the top, but overall he has spread a lot of awareness of events that otherwise would have received no notice.
There is no doubt whatsoever of William Binney’s expertise and integrity. This hour long interview with him is posted on Info Wars, not on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, NPR, or Fox News. It is not printed in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or the Washington Post.
William Binney developed the NSA’s spy capability and left the agency over its misuse. In this interview—https://www.infowars.com/bill-binney-in-his-own-words-a-collaborative-conspiracy-to-subvert-the-us-government/ — you will learn many things, such as the reason that it is strictly impossible that Hillary’s emails were hacked by the Russians or anyone else; they were downloaded on a thumb drive. You will learn that it is common practice for the US Department of Justice (sic), the FBI, and the so called “security agencies” to frame totally innocent people. You will learn that the entire federal intelligence and legal apparatus is corrupt beyond belief and cannot in any way be trusted.
This is the kind of information that Alex Jones brings to us, and it is the reason the deep state is determined to destroy Alex Jones, just as it attempted to destroy William Binney and still hopes to destroy Snowden and Assange.
Anti-Semitism and the suppression of truth
By Gilad Atzmon | August 5, 2018
Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to silence opposition to Jewish power. The scandal over the alleged anti-Semitism within the Labour party provides a perfect example. The Labour Party is accused of being “an existential threat to British Jews” (no more no less) because the NEC, its ruling body, defined antisemitism for the Labour party, without clearly including in its definition criticism of Israel.
In its definition for its own code, the Labour party adopted the problematic IHRA working definition of antisemitism but omitted the following ‘examples of anti-Semitism’ included with the IHRA:
§ Accusing Jewish people of being more loyal to Israel than their home country,
§ Claiming that Israel’s existence as a state is a racist endeavor,
§ Requiring higher standards of behaviour from Israel than other nations, and
§ Comparing contemporary Israeli policies to those of the Nazis.
According to Labour’s ruling body, these examples may not be treated as anti -Jewish bigotry without clear evidence of anti-Semitic intent. This treatment is the proper one according to most reasonable minds.
Since some Diaspora Jews admit to being more loyal to Israel than to their home country, it would be a bit problematic to accuse a goy of hatefulness for repeating what many Jews openly declare. Since the new racist Israeli National Bill has been duly approved by the Knesset, it would be bizarre to accuse a Labour Party member of anti-Jewish bigotry for saying that Israel is a racist endeavour.
Although such an accusation may well be accurate, it runs afoul of the omitted examples in the IHRA definition exactly because the definition is designed to suppress criticism of Israel and its politics. Last week, the Guardian published a wide range of Jewish writers and their views of the IHRA definition in the context of the current Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis. Some of the views expressed are insightful and deserve close attention.
Antisemitism, according to Stephen Sedley, a law scholar and a former judge, is “hostility towards Jews as Jews. This straightforward definition is at the disposal of any institution or organisation that needs it. It places no prior restrictions on the form antisemitism may take.”
Sedley comes to a conclusion that the IHRA definition with examples exists “to neutralise serious criticism of Israel by stigmatising it as a form of antisemitism.” Sedley’s view in this context fits nicely with the definition of Jewish power above.
Sedley points out that The UK government, which has adopted the “working definition” including the examples, was warned by the Commons home affairs select committee in October 2016 that in the interests of free speech it ought to adopt an explicit rider that it is not antisemitic to criticise the government of Israel … without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent.” Sedley emphasises that this recommendation “was ignored.”
Geoffrey Bindman, a QC, solicitor and a legal scholar agrees with Sedley’s criticism. Bindman also refers to the recommendations of the all-party Commons home affairs select committee that the IHRA definition should only be adopted if qualified by caveats making clear that it is not anti-Semitic to criticise the Israeli government without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent. “Unfortunately the caveats were omitted when the definition was approved by the UK government.”
These men make clear that the IHRA definition is a faulty definition. The British government should reconsider its use of this definition. The other bodies and institutions that were pushed to adopt this non-universalist text would do well to drop it.
Sedley’s opinion is that even though the UK has adopted the IHRA definition, Brits are not forbidden by law from telling the truth about Israel’s being a racist state. This is because Britain also has the “Human Rights Act [that] enacts article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, guaranteeing the right of free expression.” According to Sedley “whatever criticism the IHRA’s ‘examples’ may seek to suppress, both Jews and non-Jews in the UK are entitled, without being stigmatised as antisemites, to contend that a state that by law denies Palestinians any right of self-determination is a racist state, or to ask whether there is some moral equivalence between shooting down defenceless Jews in eastern Europe and unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza.”
Geoffrey Bindman argues that the IHRA definition and examples are “poorly drafted, misleading, and in practice have led to the suppression of legitimate debate and freedom of expression. Nevertheless, clumsily worded as it is, the definition does describe the essence of anti-Semitism: irrational hostility towards Jews.”
Here Bindman opens Pandora’s box. If anti-Semitism is irrational hostility toward Jews simply for being Jews, then the IHRA definition together with its clauses treats even rational and reasonable opposition to Israeli politics as ‘irrational hatred.’ This presents a dangerous precedent and an Orwellian turn for British society. It suggests that Britain is a free country no more. In Britain in 2018, those who oppose a certain type of evil, racist politics are labelled ‘irrational haters’ (anti-Semites). Clearly Labour’s NEC attempted to fix this problem by requiring a finding of hateful intent at the core of certain so-called anti-Semitic behaviour. This reasonable requirement led to an irrational reaction by Jewish institutions and an aggressive response.
It is difficult to judge whether the Guardian’s choices to defend the IHRA were made as a genuine attempt to represent the Zionist side. Perhaps the Guardian was making a desperate attempt to provide its readers with some comic relief: like the British Chief Rabbi and 68 additional British rabbis who were upset by Labour‘s slight deviation from the IHRA definition, Reform Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner also expressed her dissatisfaction with the party of the workers.
“If the Labour party wanted to prioritise anti-Semitism by choosing a bespoke definition then it could have listened to the full diversity of the Jewish community,” Janner-Klausner wrote. But why does anyone need to follow the Rabbis or self-appointed Jewish ‘representative bodies’ for that matter? If anti-Semitism is racism, then we all ought to oppose anti-Semitism as we do any form of racism: universally. And if anti-Semitism is a piece of our universal concern with racism, then we all should be equally involved in opposing it. This is similar to the line of thought that was, I believe, at the core of the American Civil Rights Movement. It was a universal call that had a universal appeal. It aimed to protect the many not just the few. This is pretty much the opposite of the IHRA definition that is concerned with one people only.
In that regard, it is of note that Labour’s NEC was not attempting to define what anti-Semitsm means to Jews. NEC defined what anti-Semitsm means for the Labour party and in accordance with Labour values.
Keith Kahn-Harris, a London sociologist not known for his sophistication also contributed to the Guardian’s panel. He reiterated my definition of Jewish power, probably without realising it. “It’s certainly true that the IHRA definition does tightly constrain anti-Israel and anti-Zionist speech, but it doesn’t make it impossible.” I guess that Kahn-Harris is saying that IHRA definition allows support of Palestine as long as the speaker can successfully zigzag around Jewish sensitivities. Maybe you can talk about Palestinian suffering as long as you avoid mentioning Israel. “It might have been possible to see the IHRA definition as a challenge to pro-Palestinian activists to be more creative in their language: after all, whether or not you think Israel is acting just like the Nazis, saying so is predictable, lazy and cliched.” I would advise Khan Harris that living for 70 years as a stateless refugee in Lebanon or being imprisoned in Gaza by an Israeli siege is more than enough. Palestinians and their supporters do not need this ‘extra challenge.’ What they want is to make their plight known and to be able to talk truth to power. Even to describe, for instance, an equivalence between two nationalist, racist and expansionist political ideologies that were fermented around the same time and even collaborated for a while. And this is exactly what the IHRA is there to prevent.
Barred Entry of Foreign Academics Hindering Palestinian Education
IMEMC News & Agencies | August 3, 2018
The Campaign for the Right to Enter the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Thursday, expressed deep concern at the rise in Israeli denial, of work or stay visa applications, for foreign nationals seeking to enter the occupied territories, saying this measure is hurting Palestinian education.
The group said, in a press release, that, in June, seven international faculty members at Birzeit University (BZU) — one-third of the international staff at the university — were refused visa extensions by the Israeli authorities; several others have already been obliged to leave the country, according to WAFA.
This policy, it added, “has severely diminished opportunities for development of faculty, courses, and research programs at Palestinian institutes of higher education.”
The Campaign said that, while international academics seeking to enter or work in the occupied Palestinian territory have long faced obstacles, the situation has dramatically worsened, over the past year. Since 2017, foreign nationals wishing to maintain a presence in the occupied territories, whether for reasons of work or family unity, have faced an alarming escalation in the rejection of visa extension requests and in the frequency and range of arbitrary demands and conditions imposed by Israeli authorities.
“Palestinian educational institutions have been hard hit by Israeli denials or restrictions on entry and presence in the occupied Palestinian territories,” it said, explaining that this has caused serious disruption to the academic programs and administration of these institutions, and “has undermined Palestinian universities’ ability to attract further external expertise as foreign academics are deterred from accepting teaching and research posts by the arbitrary rejections and destructive restrictions imposed by the Israeli authorities.”
The Campaign called for an immediate halt to Israel’s practices and “arbitrary and abusive practice of denying entry to foreign nationals traveling to the occupied Palestinian territories to promote educational development,” urging the international community to “stand with us in protecting the Palestinian people’s right to education.”
US Paranoia Ramps Up Infowar on Russia
Strategic Culture Foundation | 03.08.2018
This week saw renewed effort by US politicians and media to ramp up the information war against Russia. The impetus came from the US-based social media network, Facebook, declaring that it had identified “coordinated political influence campaigns”.
Never mind that the internet giant admitted that it did not know the actual identify of the organizers, that did not stop US news media and senior Washington politicians jumping to conclusions that Russia was guilty (again) of interfering in US politics.
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher was quoted as saying: “At this point in our investigation, we do not have enough technical evidence to state definitively who is behind it.”
Somehow this baseless information was miraculously turned into “evidence” pointing to Russian “malign activity”.
Mark Warner, a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, reacted to the non-issue with the following categorical words: “Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation.”
It’s rather astounding that a senior US lawmaker who is running the “intelligence community” can make such a preposterous assertion based on no facts.
Even the Trump White House, which is caught up in a web of contradictions, was impelled to jump to wrong conclusions. A spokesperson said President Donald Trump “will not tolerate foreign interference in our electoral process from any nation state or other malicious actors.”
It is a clear sign of how collectively paranoid the US political and media establishment have become whenever they make such wild extrapolations based on infantile innuendo and fatuous reasoning.
In the following editorial comment in a New York Times report it was stated: “Like the 2016 Russian interference campaign, the recently detected campaign sought to amplify divisive social issues, including through organizing real-world events.”
There is no credible evidence that Russia interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. None whatsoever. Moscow has repeatedly affirmed that it had nothing to do with US internal affairs. President Vladimir Putin reiterated the position earlier this month during his summit in Helsinki with Trump. Trump even appeared to agree, only to do a U-turn under fierce pressure from political opponents back home labelling him a “traitor”.
Nevertheless, in spite of no evidence, the NY Times, like the rest of the corporate American news media and politicians in Washington, has converted fiction into fact, which is then used to provide “evidence” to substantiate further fiction as fact.
Pertinent facts are excluded, however. Such as: Facebook is a global company with a claimed membership of two billion users – more than a quarter of the world’s population. Those figures indicate that the US population (310 million) represents only about 15 per cent of Facebook’s total users. Facebook seems to be happy to make billions of dollars in advertising profits from having all its non-US foreigners. But when some of those foreigners post messages or information concerning American politics and society then that is construed as “interference” in US affairs.
The point is that Facebook and other US-based social media platforms are global entities. They can’t have it both ways. If their predominantly foreign members want to join in conversations, agitation or even erroneous rumors, then that’s the way it is. It seems prissy and precious for American online capitalists and politicians to go into hissy fits about “foreign meddling”. It’s all the more ludicrous to extrapolate such activity to precisely “Kremlin influence campaigns”.
Another fact is that modern US politics and society is riven with divisions and acrimony over numerous issues that stem from its own inherent problems. President Trump is at war with large sections of the Congress and news media. The claims about “Russia collusion” are just a stalking horse with which to attack him.
In the wider US society there are growing bitter disputes between, for example, conservatives and liberals, far-right nationalists and anti-fascists, anti-immigration nativists and pro-immigration advocates, religious evangelicals and secularists, pro-war and anti-war, gun rights groups and abolitionists, pro-police and anti-police, climate-change “deniers” and environmentalists. The list goes on and on.
For US media and politicians to cite “internet organizers” taking up any one of these issues as “evidence” of “sowing division” in American society, and specifically to attribute that “effort” to “Russian interference”, is a case of living in spectacular denial about the onerous challenges confronting that nation – from within.
“Sowing division” in the US is an intrinsic function of its own erosion as a monstrously unequal society under a failing corporate-finance capitalist economy, which seems to only prop itself up by waging illegal wars around the world and demonizing “foreigners”.
Blaming Russia or any other “foreign actor” for its own internal failing and floundering is a denial by those – Washington politicians and news media – who do not want to be held to account democratically.
The alarming thing is that as the US mid-term elections in November approach over the next three months we can expect an intensification of the information war against Russia as a “malign actor”. That is a dangerous slippery slope descending into hysterical claims that Russia is committing “acts of war”. Already such unhinged claims have been made by certain US politicians and media pundits. As the social divisions in the US become ever more desperate, so too will the anti-Russia rhetoric from its paranoid politicians and news media.
The Real “Fake News” From Government Media
By Scott Lazarowitz | ActivistPost | July 31, 2018
Facebook has announced its campaign against “fake news.” But, according to some workers’ own admission, conservatives are being censored.
And Google also wants to censor “fake news.” But Google also was shown to treat conservative websites, but not liberal ones, as “fake news.”
The same thing seems to be going on with Twitter. And again, conservatives are complaining.
But who is to decide what is “fake news”? Who will be Facebook and Google’s sources for real news?
In 2013 the U.S. Senate considered a new a shield law to protect journalists. In the lawmakers’ attempts to narrow the definition of a journalist, some Senators including Sen. Dianne Feinstein only wanted to include reporters with “professional qualifications.”
“Professional” publications such as the New York Times, the “Paper of Record,” would apparently be protected.
So one can conclude that the New York Times can be a source of “real” news for Facebook or Google, despite all the Times‘ errors, screw-ups, and corrections, right?
According to one NYT former reporter, the Times has been a “propaganda megaphone” for war. Also a partner with the CIA to promote Obama’s reelection bid.
Or CNN, “The Most Trusted Name in News” which wins its own “fake news” awards with its errors, screw-ups and corrections.
During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, there were collusions between then-CNN contributor and DNC operative Donna Brazile, who was outed by WikiLeaks in her giving candidate Hillary Clinton questions in advance for a CNN Town Hall.
Other emails that were leaked to WikiLeaks informed us that reporters obediently followed instructions from the Hillary Clinton campaign on how to cover the campaign. These include reporters from the New York Times such as Maggie Haberman who said the campaign would “tee up stories for us,” and Mark Leibovich, who would email Clinton flunky Jennifer Palmieri for editing recommendations.
And Politico reporter Glenn Thrush asked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta for approval of stories on Clinton. Thrush was then hired by the New York Times. After Thrush was then suspended from NYT over allegations of sexual misconduct, the Times ended the suspension, stating that while Thrush had “acted offensively,” he would be trained to behave himself. Hmm.
But all this from the 2016 campaign reminded me of the “JournoLists,” the group of news journalists who participated in a private forum online from 2007-2010. The forum was to enable news reporters to discuss news reporting and political issues in private and with candor, but also, it was revealed, to discuss ways to suppress negative news on then-2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama.
For instance, according to the Daily Caller, some members of the group discussed their criticism of a 2008 debate in which Obama was questioned on his association with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Nation‘s Richard Kim wrote that George Stephanopoulos was “being a disgusting little rat snake.” The Guardian‘s Michael Tomasky wrote that “we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy.”
Spencer Ackerman, then with the Washington Independent and now of the Daily Beast, wrote, “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
The Nation‘s Chris Hayes wrote, “Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.”
(But has Hayes criticized Obama’s assassination program, or Obama’s bombings or the blood on Obama’s hands? Just askin’)
In an open letter, according to the Daily Caller, several of the JournoList members called the ABC debate a “revolting descent into tabloid journalism,” because of the moderators’ legitimate questions on Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
So, in today’s Bizarro World, objectively questioning a candidate on a controversial issue is now “tabloid journalism,” but making things up like “Trump-Russia collusions” and repeating the propaganda over and over – that’s not “tabloid journalism.”
The JournoLists also included reporters from Time, the Baltimore Sun, the New Republic, Politico, and Huffington Post.
Now, are those the sources of “real news” that Facebook, Google and Twitter want to rely upon to combat “fake news”?
And who exactly were the “JournoLists” promoting? Obama?
Regarding Obama’s own crackdown on actual journalism, Fox News reporter James Rosen was accused by the feds of being a “co-conspirator” with State Department leaker Stephen Jin-Woo Kim in violating the Espionage Act. Rosen’s correspondences with Kim were seized by Obama’s FBI, along with Rosen’s personal email and phone records. The FBI also used records to track Rosen’s visits to the State Department.
Apparently, then-attorney general Eric Holder went “judge-shopping” to find a judge who would approve subpoenaing Rosen’s private records, after two judges rejected the request.
Commenting on James Rosen and the FBI’s abuse of powers, Judge Andrew Napolitano observed that “this is the first time that the federal government has moved to this level of taking ordinary, reasonable, traditional, lawful reporter skills and claiming they constitute criminal behavior.”
And there was the Obama administration’s going after then-CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, possibly for her reporting on Benghazi and Fast and Furious. Attkisson finally resigned from CBS news out of frustration with the company’s alleged pro-Obama bias and with CBS’s apparently not airing her subsequent reports.
In 2013 CBS News confirmed that Attkisson’s computers had been “accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions.” In 2015 Attkisson sued the Obama administration, claiming to have evidence which proves the computer intrusions were connected to the Obama DOJ.
In Attkisson’s latest lawsuit update, after her computer was returned to her following the DOJ Inspector General’s investigation, her forensics team now believes her computer’s hard drive was replaced by a different one.
Now back to “fake news.”
After Donald Trump locked up the Republican Presidential nomination in May, 2016, there were significant events in the next two months. Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele colluded to get opposition research on behalf of Hillary Clinton, the FBI applied for a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign associates, and Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner had a possibly set-up meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower.
Also within that same period, the DNC claimed that its computers were hacked but the DNC wouldn’t let FBI investigate. The Washington Post published an article claiming, with no evidence presented, that “Russian government hackers” took DNC opposition research on Trump.
It was very shortly after the November, 2016 Presidential election that the Washington Post published an article on a “Russian propaganda effort to spread ‘fake news’ during the election.” To escalate the media’s censorship campaign perhaps?
The campaign against “fake news” coincided with Obama minions at FBI, DOJ and CIA apparently panicking over a possible Trump presidency and their allegedly abusing their powers to attempt to take down Trump.
So the news media seem to be on a crusade to fabricate “Trump-Russia collusions” and repeat it over and over, and to vilify, ignore and squash actual investigative research and reporting on what exactly the FBI and DOJ bureaucrats have been doing. Call such real investigative reporting “fake news,” “conspiracy theory,” and so forth.
In the end, Facebook, Twitter and Google might want to reconsider relying on the mainstream news media led by the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, and instead include citizen journalists and non-government-sycophant media to provide news and information.
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has noted that the Founders generally viewed the freedom of the Press to apply to every citizen to print, publish or express accounts of events. We really need to highlight that kind of old-fashioned, honest journalism.
Matthew d’Ancona and his fake news
Steel City Scriblings | July 30, 2018
Matthew d’Ancona, in yesterday’s Guardian, is concerned about the threat to democracy from fake news. He wants to see ‘social media giants’ …
… legally redefined in a new, third category that radically enhances their accountability for the content they host, without imperilling free political discourse. Striking the right balance in this jurisprudential task will not be easy. But who expected it to be?
He also wants …
… a new system of “credible annotation of standards, so that people can see, at a glance, the level of verification of a site” – essentially, kitemarking of the sort that is standard in almost every other sector of consumption.
I am less sure that the government should “initiate a working group of experts” to oversee this process. If there is one thing worse than what the committee describes as the “wild west” of today’s digital prairies, it is anything that even resembles a Ministry of Truth, or an Oftruth regulator. Better that independent charitable bodies perform this grading task – gaining the public’s trust incrementally, as the admirable Full Fact and other fact-checking organisations have done in recent years.
Matthew d’Ancona being on the liberal wing of British Conservatism, that last paragraph is to be expected. He sees the dangers, earnest democrat that he is, of state censorship but believes, credulous liberal that he is, these can be averted by a few judicious mechanisms of the classic ‘checks and balances’ sort. I’m not going to argue with him on that. With bigger fish to fry, I’ll confine myself to pointing out that his ‘admirable’ Full Fact is led by Mayborn Group CEO and Tory Party donor Michael Samuel, while so many of those ‘other fact-checking organisations’ have on closer inspection proved to be at best self righteous – and self appointed – custodians of truth; at worst risibly tainted.1
d’Ancona’s complacency is neither the inevitable nor exclusive product of a costly education and privileged lifestyle, but is nurtured and at every turn reinforced by both. How do you think the man would respond to the question put to one similarly placed, the BBC’s Andrew Marr, in a 1996 interview with Noam Chomsky?
The media are selling privileged audiences. These are big businesses, big corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Now what picture of the world would a rational person expect to come out of such a structure?
Marr had no answer and I don’t suppose d’Ancona has either. Neither man is a liar; both are the successful products of an ideological matrix upheld, confirmed and reaffirmed in those myriads of conversations and everyday acts which define – if we don’t ask about the nature of power – ‘common sense’ and what is ‘moderate’. It’s through such conversations and acts that normality is most thoroughly demarked, lines most durably drawn between ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’. But those conversations and acts do not take place in a vacuum. They arise within particular social relations of class division, their heavy ideological lifting done in the education, entertainment2 and news industries.
Specifically here, many read a superficially broad spectrum of media views on small to middling matters – Mail at one end, Guardian at the other – as proof of an ‘open’ society whose forms of democracy they take at face value. Others call that spectrum a slit-window view on the world, a painfully limited vista constrained not by Truth – though that can’t be entirely bypassed: it has in normal times to be accommodated – nor yet by blunt censorship. Liberal media do indulge in crude onslaughts of the kind directed at Corbyn, Assad and Putin. They do not, however, make a habit of telling outright lies. To do so entails risks only undertaken when the alternatives pose an unusually stubborn impediment to ruling class3 interests. In the main, liberal media lie by omission. (When did you last read a Guardian or Independent piece on how those who took the decision to invade Iraq and demolish Libya have profited from their reconstruction? When did such media last run a piece on the extent of Syria’s privatisation? Come to that, when will we get a fearless Guardian investigation of the implications, as ad revenues fall, of growing donor dependence on American liberals well to the right of Britain’s?) And they spin with scant regard for consequence, as with the demonisation of Assad and Putin by daily repetition of unproven allegations to the point where inflammatory claim4 can no longer be distinguished – ‘no smoke without fire’ – from proven fact.
Chomsky, with his gift for framing subtle truths and complex observations in simple but never simplistic terms, raises the issue of that ideological matrix more than once in his BBC interview with Andrew Marr. When Marr asks with incredulity if Chomsky supposes he and his colleagues profess beliefs not sincerely held but calculated to advance their careers, Chomsky responds:
No, I am sure you believe everything you say. What I am saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sat in that chair interviewing me.
Neatly put. Similarly, the owlish Mr d’Ancona wouldn’t be sat where he is but for his touching faith that the core aim of his various media employers is to pursue truth, as opposed to selling privileged audiences to other big corporations. To be a useful idiot you have to be, well, useful.
* * *
- See for instance this Spiked piece, which asks “Who exactly will judge which news is ‘real’ and what’s ‘fake’, and decide whether the world’s citizens are ‘properly informed’? While ensuring ‘those in positions of power are held accountable’ is a laudable aim, the question remains: accountable to whom? The people in a democratic system? Or our self-appointed ‘fact-checkers’ in a software package. And perhaps most pointedly – who will the fact-checkers be accountable to?”
- While education and news media are routinely and rightly decried by capitalism’s critics, I’m coming firmly to the view that the cumulative effect of decades of soft propaganda from TV and cinema is every bit as vital to its ideological underpinnings. That near infinite accumulation of subtexts, seldom intended as propaganda – rather, as Giving The Public What it Wants – is all the more effective for that ‘innocence of intent’ in its nurturing of deeply orientalist assumptions of Western and especially American beneficence. And of Arab and Slavic villainy for villainy’s sake.
- My concise definition of a ruling class is its monopoly ownership of some essential of wealth creation. Under capitalism this is the big money and production infrastructure without which wealth cannot be produced. Of course there is far more to say, but all else derives from this one central reality.
- Of all the charges to be laid at the doors of BBC, Guardian and Independent, none is graver than that their coverage of Russia, Syria and Ukraine – and mix, on Yemen, of near silence with unsubstantiated claims of Iranian backed Houthis – has the effect, regardless of intent, of promoting the high tech and highly lucrative delivery of death to the near defenceless peoples of the global south.
Zionist Inquisition in full cry
Their quarry: anti-racist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn; their weapons: anti-semitism smears; their purpose: to oust Corbyn and replace him with a compliant pro-Israel stooge
By Stuart Littlewood | Dissident Voice | July 30, 2018
The row over anti-Semitism has erupted yet again in the UK Labour Party, as predicted a few months ago by Miko Peled, the Israeli general’s son, who warned that:
… they are going to pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn…. the reason anti-Semitism is used is because they [the Israelis] have no argument….
So Israel’s pimps at Westminster, never happy unless they’re telling everyone what to think and say, are frantically insisting that the Labour Party adopts the discredited International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism in its unedited entirety and incorporates it into the party’s code of conduct. Many party members believe they have blown up the matter out of all proportion simply to settle their long-standing score – as Peled says – with the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a genuine anti-racist, champion of Palestinian rights and critic of Israel.
This is what the IHRA definiition says:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
It includes these eleven “contemporary examples of anti-semitism”:
- Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
- Making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
- Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
- Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
- Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
- Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
- Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
- Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterise Israel or Israelis.
- Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
- Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
Jewish community leaders are furious that Labour’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee, disagrees with 4 of these examples and refuses to include them in the party’s new code of conduct. The NEC, of course, is mindful that the code must be enforceable across half-a-million members with differing opinions, many of whom are tired of the constant whining. An emergency motion orchestrated by the Jewish lobby, forcing the NEC to take on board the whole IHRA package with all its examples and humiliating Corbyn in the process, was supposed to be considered yesterday but is now postponed till September.
The NEC explains its omissions by saying accusations of dual nationality are wrong rather than anti-semitic. It strikes out altogether the idea that calling the state of Israel “a racist endeavour” is anti-semitic, no doubt for the simple reason that it is racist. Israelis have for decades practised apartheid, casting their non-Jew population as second-class citizens, and now it’s enshrined in their new nationality laws, in black and white. What’s more, Israel’s illegal occupation has denied Palestinians their right to self-determination for the last 70 years. The NEC also chooses not to forbid the use of symbols and images associated with classic anti-semitism and comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis unless there’s evidence of anti-semitic intent.
Sounds reasonable, you might think. But 68 rabbis have accused the Labour leadership of acting “in the most insulting and arrogant way” by leaving out or modifying those controversial bits. In a letter to The Guardian they say it’s not the Labour Party’s place to re-write it.
The arrogance is theirs, I think. Here’s why. The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee recommended adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism subject to the inclusion of two caveats:
(1) It is not antisemitic to criticise the Government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent.
(2) It is not antisemitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli Government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent.
The Government agreed but dropped the caveats saying they weren’t necessary. Subsequently the IHRA definition has run into big trouble, being condemned by leading law experts as “too vague to be useful” and because conduct contrary to the IHRA definition is not necessarily illegal. They warn that public bodies are under no obligation to adopt or use it and, if they do, they must interpret it in a way that’s consistent with their statutory obligations and with the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is deeply flawed
Crucially, freedom of expression applies not only to information or ideas that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive, but also to those that “offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population” – unless they encourage violence, hatred or intolerance. Calling Israel an apartheid state or advocating BDS against Israel cannot properly be characterized as anti-Semitic. Furthermore, any public authority seeking to apply the IHRA definition to prohibit or punish such activities “would be acting unlawfully”.
The right of free expression, as Labour’s Zio- Inquisitors ought to know, is now part of UK domestic law by virtue of the Human Rights Act. Furthermore the 1986 Education Act established an individual right of free expression in all higher education institutions. Then there’s Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which bestows on everyone “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. As always, such rights are subject to limitations required by law and respect for the rights of others.
So the IHRA definition is a minefield. It’s not something a sane organisation would incorporate into its Code of Conduct – certainly not as it stands. It contravenes human rights and freedom of expression. But when did the Israel lobby ever care about other people’s rights?
The whole fuss borders on the farcical when you ask what anti-Semitism means. Who are the Semites anyway? Everyone avoids this question like the plague. Why? It’s embarrassing. DNA research shows that most of those living today who claim to be Jews are not descended from the ancient Israelites at all and the Palestinians have more Israelite blood. So they are the real Semites. Research by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, published by the Oxford University Press in 2012 on behalf of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, found that the Khazarian Hypothesis is scientifically correct, meaning that most Jews are Khazars. The Khazarians converted to Talmudic Judaism in the 8th Century and were never in ancient Israel.
Probably no more than 2% of Jews in Israel are actually Israelites. So even if you believe the propaganda myth that God gave the land to the Israelites, He certainly didn’t give it to Netanyahu, Lieberman and the other East European thugs who rule the apartheid state.
As former Israeli Director of Military Intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote: “It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world.”
Well, that tragic irony has come to pass. As has been suggested before, so-called anti-Semitism is a matter best resolved by the Jewish ‘family’ itself. There’s no reason to bother Corbyn or the Labour Party with it.
Palestinian student Ola Marshoud sentenced to 7 months in Israeli prison; female students receive arrest threats

Photo: Ola Marshoud, via Asra Media
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – July 30, 2018
Palestinian student Ola Marshoud, 21, from the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, was sentenced to seven months in Israeli prison by the Salem military court on Monday, 30 July, for her involvement in student activism on the An-Najah University campus. Marshoud has been detained since March, when she was summoned to interrogation at the military base near Huwwara. When she arrived, she was transferred the interrogation center at Petah Tikva.
She was accused in the military court of involvement in student organizing at An-Najah University. Active Palestinians involved in the student movement are repeatedly targeted for Israeli arrest, imprisonment and persecution, including Omar Kiswani, the student body president at Bir Zeit University. Statistics indicate that there are over 300 Palestinian university students imprisoned in Israeli jails.
This policy of colonial military repression of student activism is continuing; in the pre-dawn hours of Monday, 30 July, a number of families in al-Khalil reported that armed occupation forces posted notices on the walls of the area, particularly the homes of female students, threatening them against participating in student elections and activism with the Islamic Bloc on their campuses. Several young women’s family homes were raided and letters presented to their parents by occupation soldiers accusing them of participating in “illegal activities” through student activism.
One such letter, directed at students’ parents from Israeli occupation intelligence, said: “If you get this message, it means that you are the parents of one of the activists of the Islamic bloc, which is an illegal activity. We alert you that any such involvement may lead to the arrest of your daughter, damaging her academic life and future, wasting your money and causing concern and indignation in the hearts of your family. We turn to you to follow up on the activities of your daughter and lead her away from such actions. You have been warned of the consequences.”
Four journalists among 28 Palestinians seized by Israeli occupation forces

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – July 30, 2018
Israeli occupation forces seized 28 Palestinians on Monday morning, 30 July, including four Palestinian journalists who work for al-Quds TV: Alaa al-Rimawi, Mohammed Sami Alwan, Qutaiba Hamdan and Hassani al-Najas. Rimawi directs the al-Quds TV Ramallah bureau and his home in the al-Masayef neighborhood in Ramallah was raided by occupation forces, while Mohammed Alwan was also seized from his home.
Qutaiba Hamdan was seized from Beitunia and Husni Anjas from Kharbata Bani Harith, and his vehicle and work equipment were seized by the Israeli occupation. Quds News reported that Israeli occupation forces accused the four journalists of “incitement,” based on their reporting about the realities of Israeli colonization in Palestine. Just days ago, Palestinian writer Lama Khater was seized from her home in al-Khalil. Khater and the four journalists seized today make up some of the 29 Palestinian journalists imprisoned by Israel. These imprisoned journalists include student Istabraq Tamimi and a number of journalists detained without charge or trial, including Hammam Hantash, Abdullah Shatat and Abdel-Mohsen Shalaldeh., noted the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Commission.
The Palestinians seized on Monday included the freed prisoners Mohsen Hardan Shreim, Bilal Maskawi, Nidal Nofal, Fadi Hourani, Khaled Wajih Sabri, Mohammed Wajih Sabri, Nour Daoud and Hussam Hatem Abu Libdeh in Qalqilya. In Bethlehem, occupation forces seized former prisoners Fahad As’ad and Atta al-Hreimi as well as Mohammed Ali al-Muti. In addition to the four journalists, they also seized Wassim Jadallah and Moataz Abu Rahmah from the Ramallah and el-Bireh area; Khaled Sidqi Daraghmeh and Nasr Mohammed Nasrallah Daraghmeh from Tubas; and Shadi Riyad al-Harb from Dura village in al-Khalil.
In addition, occupation forces raided a number of homes in al-Khalil, including the home of Nada Dweik, the daughter of Palestinian Legislative Council speaker and former prisoner Abdel-Aziz Dweik, ransacking it. They posted on the walls of houses in the city warning students against activism with the Islamic bloc on campuses.
How Israel Silences Palestine in EU Circles
![]()
By Issam Aruri | IMEMC | July 18, 2018
The Israeli propaganda machine works internationally to undermine the role of Palestinian NGOs which disclose Israeli violations of international law, and maintain the well-being of Palestinian people.
Imagine the following: a toxic op-ed is published that defames your organisation. You contact the website on which it features and are invited to publish a rebuttal.
The next day, you submit your article. As the editors are about to put it online, they are targeted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign.
More than a dozen people call the editors, seemingly on your behalf, and apply heavy pressure to publish the article. One of the callers even tries to bribe them to get it published.
This confuses and intimidates the editors, who have never experienced anything like it.
They fear that publishing under pressure may damage the independence and reputation of their website, which is a news magazine for the European Parliament.
The editors contact you and you clarify right away that none of these calls originated from your organisation. You urge them to publish your article, as they had promised. But despite your repeated requests, they don’t do so. They don’t even respond anymore to your phone calls and emails.
This is what recently happened to the Palestinian NGO network PNGO, which is an umbrella of 134 civil society organisations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The op-ed in question was mine, which I had submitted to a Brussels-based website called EP Today.
According to its own information, EP Today is “designed only” for policy opinions by members of the European Parliament. On 26 February, however, it published a slanderous op-ed by NGO Monitor that targeted PNGO.
NGO Monitor is an Israeli right-wing organisation that cooperates with the Israeli government in undermining NGOs that criticise Israel’s violations of human rights and international law.
It constantly attacks Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and dozens of other human rights and civil society organisations, including Israeli NGOs. PNGO is high on its target list.
In its article, NGO Monitor provided false and misleading information about PNGO’s mission and conduct.
While PNGO is a catalyst for a vibrant civil society in Palestine, NGO Monitor framed PNGO as a “ring leader” of a “gang” of NGOs that shrink Palestinian civil space.
Can’t be ignored
For a long time, we ignored organisations like NGO Monitor that provide cover for the Israeli occupation. But this time, we decided to submit a rebuttal to this toxic propaganda.
As mentioned above, EP Today violated its promise and didn’t publish our rebuttal. To make things worse, our article was apparently forwarded to NGO Monitor, which allegedly tried to prevent its publication.
An editor we spoke to implied this, with reference to one member of EP Today’s board of directors, who seems to have ties to NGO Monitor. This would constitute grave professional misconduct, calling into question EP Today’s independence and integrity.
In any case, we won’t be silenced. Our rebuttal of NGO Monitor’s propaganda, titled “What Europe can do to defend civil space: a response by the Palestinian NGO Network”, is now available for everyone, after we published it on our website.
Meanwhile, our real concern is not the article.
What troubles and burdens us is the big picture: the all-out attack that the Israeli government and its affiliated organisations such as NGO Monitor have launched against Palestinian human rights defenders.
Shrinking space for civil society is a global phenomenon. However, the threat it poses in Palestine has an extra dimension: Israel’s strangling military occupation, which began more than 51 years ago.
As a result of the occupation, Palestinians live without a sovereign government, without basic protection and in a fragile economy that heavily relies on international aid.
In this context, PNGO’s member organisations play a crucial and indispensable role in providing services and in preserving social cohesion.
Israel’s attack on us aims to neutralise NGOs that expose its violations of international law and to break the backbone of Palestinian society at large. The attack is meant to sustain and entrench the occupation.
Our reality
The reality in which we live is this: We face draconian digital surveillance and interference by Israel, which violates our fundamental privacy and obstructs our work.
I suspect this triggered the disinformation campaign described above (see AP’s article for more: “Covertly, Israel prepares to fight boycott activists online”).
Like NGO Monitor, the Israeli government engages in smear campaigns against Palestinian NGOs.
For example, on 1 July 2017, Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon branded our members Al-Haq and Al-Mezan as “supporters of terror”, based on false allegations that they have ties to Hamas and the PFLP.
Al-Haq and Al-Mezan are internationally renowned human rights organisations.
Most recently, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs published a slanderous report that contains similar allegations and aggressively accuses the EU of funding Palestinian and European NGOs that sponsor terror and promote Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS – the Palestinian-led global campaign putting pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law).
Indeed, blocking EU funding to Palestinian NGOs is Israel’s declared goal.
In 2015 and 2016, the director and a staff member of Al-Haq received ongoing death threats.
In response to the threats against the staff member, who is based in The Netherlands and Al-Haq’s representative to the International Criminal Court, the Dutch authorities opened a criminal investigation.
While official results are pending, all indications point in Israel’s direction.
PNGO and the Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council (PHROC) have compiled their concerns about the escalating campaign to silence, delegitimise and defund Palestinian civil society organisations and human rights defenders in a joint position paper, including recommendations to the EU.
For decades, the EU has invested into civil society organisations in Israel and Palestine that promote its core values “on the ground”. The support and protection of human rights defenders is a declared priority of the EU, as also displayed by the guidelines it adopted in 2008 to that end.
On 3 October 2017, in a comprehensive resolution, the European Parliament sounded alarm about the shrinking space for civil society and called “for continued and increased EU support and funding in creating a free and enabling environment for civil society.”
This is the time to act on these commitments.
We rely on the EU to shield us from Israel’s campaign to destroy Palestinian civil society, which has spread to Europe and is reinforced by organisations like NGO Monitor that are designed to shrink our space.
~EU Observer/Days of Palestine
Issam Aruri is the chair of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organisations Network (PNGO), an umbrella of 134 civil society organisations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that promote the rights and well-being of the Palestinian people.
Twitter Disavows Shadow Banning, But Facts Say Otherwise
Sputnik – July 28, 2018
A Vice exclusive story on Wednesday caught Twitter red-handed engaging in the practice of shadow banning prominent GOP politicians, removing their profiles from drop-down searches. Since then, the social media platform has struggled to provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenon.
“We do not shadowban,” a Twitter spokesperson told Sputnik Wednesday. However, Twitter employees were secretly filmed earlier this year explicitly bragging about doing just that.
Vice’s expose, complete with screenshots forwarded to Twitter, showed prominent Republican Party politicians such as party chair Ronna McDaniel; Republican Congressmen Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz; or Donald Trump Jr’s spokesperson Andrew Surabian being absent from drop-down searches on the site’s main interface. They could still be found through a “full search,” although it’s unclear if Vice meant a TweetDeck search or something else.
This is a bizarre and incredibly disingenuous statement from @Twitter. What’s the point of following someone if Twitter blocks their tweets from appearing in your time-line? Maybe that’s not technically “shadow-banning” but it’s heavy-handed manipulation https://t.co/OaHf6qQplF pic.twitter.com/QzyJSajY5S
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 27, 2018
The following day, Twitter Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead Vijaya Gaffe and Product Lead (and co-founder) Kayvon Beykpour posted on Twitter’s blog to try and clear up some of the confusion about what happened. However, their explanation left us with more questions than answers. They simply denied that any bias was behind the selective invisibility and palmed the blame off with vague language and insinuations and insulting leaps of logic.
Because of the baffling nature of their explanation, we will address its parts piecemeal.
Gaffe and Beykpour began by setting the terms of the discussion with an attempt at a definition of the phenomenon in question: shadow banning.
“People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not. But let’s start with, ‘what is shadow banning?’ The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.”
This definition is worded in such a way that it isolates only the specific act of shadow banning and ignores the larger context and purpose behind the shadow banning, which is to decrease the visibility of unwanted behavior by a person in ways that are difficult to detect by the person in question.
This article from Wired in 2009 explains shadow banning as a variety of practices designed to decrease the prominence and visibility of trolls and problematic posters, one of which is, indeed, to render a user’s content invisible to everyone except the user themselves; but also crowdsourced post ranking and allowing the filtering of posts by rank; the removal of vowels in offending language to neutralize it; and other tactics.
“The world’s top discussion moderators have developed successful tools for keeping online miscreants from disrupting conversation. All are rooted in one psychological insight: If you simply ban trolls — kicking them off your board — you nurture their curdled sense of being an oppressed truth-speaker. Instead, the moderators rely on making the comments less prominent,” the Wired article reads. A far cry from Twitter’s selective definition.
“We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).”
Let’s take a moment to take this statement apart. When a user follows someone on Twitter, they do so explicitly for the purposes of seeing that person or organization’s posts appear in their feed. That’s literally the only reason. If that wasn’t how the “follow” feature worked, we would all have to search for and visit the pages of each page we wanted to see the posts of each time we wanted to read them. But you can do that without following a person; you can search for anybody and see their posts so long as they aren’t set to private and they haven’t blocked you, in which case you couldn’t see their posts even if you followed them.
So Twitter is here admitting to disabling the primary functional feature of its platform for select users, a feature designed to make users’ content visible, and then swearing that this isn’t shadow banning.
Imagine if we did this in the real world and unplugged someone’s phone line to their house, then told people trying to call that person that their phone hadn’t been unplugged and if you wanted to speak to the person you would have to “do more work to find them,” like go directly to their house and speak with them. Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the phone line? Wouldn’t we call that censorship?
“And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
This is simply a denial of the evidence. Vice and numerous other publications have provided concrete proof that whatever was happening was only affecting politicians of a certain political party and not politicians of another certain political party, along with a scattering of other figures, too. Denial isn’t disproving, and it isn’t an explanation.
“We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.”
Again, what is a “healthy conversation?” What is “manipulation?” What is in bad faith? Some might find those questions begging or distracting, but there’s a real question when it comes to interpretation of someone’s facts or their presentation of those facts that leans heavily on the normative bias of the reader. What everyone considers to be useful, relevant or appropriate is not the same, and Twitter has never made clear exactly how they define those terms or judge particular posts or posters against those definitions.
The author of this Sputnik article is a transgender person. Some people might consider speech in the defense of their rights “hate speech” and some people might consider discussions of transgender issues not to be relevant. They might consider the presentation of alternative studies to those that say that gender is determined by genetics or by genitals as being manipulative or detracting from healthy conversation. Does that make them these things? Taking a stance on an issue like that necessarily requires making a political statement.
Further, the very act of discussion necessarily involves manipulation to some extent, does it not? One party seeks to convince the other party that it is right, by undermining its arguments and by casting doubt upon the facts and narratives presented by the other side. As before, the question of who decides which topics and which discussions are fair game and which are not is all-important: it requires making a political statement about what is and is not correct and what is and is not justified discussion.
So if a platform is pruning its content according to political standards, doesn’t that make it a publication and not a neutral social forum?
Gadde and Beykpour went on to address certain specific aspects of Wednesday’s snafu.
“‘It looks like this only affected Republican politicians. Were Democratic politicians also impacted?’ Yes, some Democratic politicians were not properly showing up within search auto-suggestions as result of this issue. As mentioned above, the issue was broad-ranging and not limited to political accounts or specific geographies. And most accounts affected had nothing to do with politics at all.”
Which Democratic politicians? Certainly not the equivalents of those GOP leaders affected. A city government official with a D next to their name being shadow banned is still an infraction of political discourse, to be sure (although again, we don’t know which Democratic politicians were affected), but it’s also not fair to say that a phenomenon that affected key leaders of a major political party, which controls two-thirds of the US government, but no major figures in the opposition party, is simply a glitch or programming error. There is clearly a problem of bias in how legitimate subjects of searches appear in the system, whether it was specifically designed or not.
“‘OK, so there was a search auto-suggest issue. But what caused these Republican representatives to be impacted?’ For the most part, we believe the issue had more to do with how other people were interacting with these representatives’ accounts than the accounts themselves (see bullet #3 above). There are communities that try to boost each other’s presence on the platform through coordinated engagement. We believe these types of actors engaged with the representatives’ accounts — the impact of this coordinated behavior, in combination with our implementation of search auto-suggestions, caused the representatives’ accounts to not show up in auto-suggestions. In addition to fixing search yesterday, we’re continuing to improve our system so it can better detect these situations and correct for them.”
So in other words, it was a problem that too many people liked certain politicians’ content they post on Twitter, or “boosted” their presence. That sort of goes against Twitter’s own stated goal of “serving healthy public conversation.” Indeed, the statement that Twitter is “serving healthy public conversation” all while selectively trimming that conversation based on some parts of it being too-well-liked, all the while claiming impartiality, insults the reader’s intelligence.
And isn’t the excuse that it was simply a problem with the algorithm basically a version of the “banality of evil” defense? It shoves responsibility for effects caused by a system created by humans for a specific purpose away from the actors that created that system or helped it function and onto an abstract, faceless, nonliving entity: a bureaucracy or, in this case, a computer program.
Twitter hasn’t disproven anything; all it’s proven is how callously it performs its task of being an extended mouthpiece for The Resistance.
Read also:
Twitter Bows to McCarthyist Witch Hunt, Bans RT and Sputnik Ads
Twitter Ascribes Alleged Shadow Banning of Prominent Republicans to Glitch
Rep. Congressman Threatens Twitter With Complaint Over ‘Shadow Banning’
Project Veritas Claims Twitter is Suppressing Pro-Trump, Right-Wing Tweets








