Virgin pulls Palestinian salad name from in-flight menu after complaints from Israel supporters
RT | February 13, 2018
Virgin Atlantic faces an ongoing backlash over a salad on its in-flight menu after the meal’s ‘Palestinian’ name was shared on a pro-Israel Facebook page.
The ‘Palestinian couscous salad’ – which includes a mix of Maftoul and other couscous, along with tomatoes, cucumber, parsley, mint and lemon vinaigrette – sparked a backlash after passengers posted it on social media.
An image of the in-flight menu was posted on the Israel Advocacy Movement Facebook page by passenger David Garnelas, who said: “I thought this was an Israeli salad… obviously [airline founder Richard] Branson showing his true colours… Israelis must boycott Virgin and Israel must ask for an explanation. When I complained the stewardess tried to take back the menu from me.”
The negative reaction to the meal’s name saw it changed on the airline’s menu.
“We were aware that Maftoul is not a widely known ingredient – so the dish was listed as a ‘Palestinian couscous salad’, and later as a ‘Couscous salad’,” the airline said in a statement to RT.com.
“We’d like to reassure all customers that our sole intention was to bring new flavors onboard, and never to cause offense through the naming or renaming of the dish.”
However, despite the effort to appease passengers, changing the name of the meal sparked a counter backlash from pro-Palestine groups.
“After an orchestrated campaign by Zionist groups, Virgin Atlantic airlines decides that Palestinian food is offensive. Removes the word ‘Palestinian’, but keeps the food. Shameful,” the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign said of the change.
Twitter user Bassam Mansour said that maftoul is the national dish of Palestine and Virgin should not have caved to the demands of “twisted and hate-filled passengers.”
Israel to boycott film festival in France
MEMO | February 12, 2018
The Israeli government is to boycott the Paris Film Festival over the organiser’s decision to air a movie that is said to “hurt the reputation of Israel’s military”.
Culture Minister, Miri Regev, is said to be on a mission to stop the film “Foxtrot” gaining wide recognition. The Israeli movie has a controversial scene in which the Israeli military covers up the deaths of a carload of Palestinian teenagers.
The movie focuses on the life of a family: two parents and their daughter who all reside in Tel Aviv, while their son – who is a soldier – serves far away from them. The movie won the Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival and was shortlisted for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
Regev has not only denounced the movie for “defaming the IDF and its values” she is also putting pressure on the foreign ministry to withdraw its support from the Israeli Film Festival in Paris later in the year.
It seems Regev was unaware that “Foxtrot” was going to open the festival until she visited Paris recently and met with Israeli Ambassador to France Aliza Ben-Nun and her team to discuss a project promoting cultural connections between Israel and France. During the conversation, Haaretz reported that Regev became aware that “Foxtrot” was going to be shown, which according to Regev “contradicts earlier agreements”.
Regev told Haaretz that Israel should not “support a festival that showcases films that slander us throughout the world and contains false content about IDF soldiers and its citizens.” According to Regev, she instructed her ministry’s director general to “make clear to the Foreign Ministry, which is allocating money to the festival, that it is inconceivable for the Foreign Ministry to conduct a policy independent from the government’s policy.”
Regev also complained that the movie was used by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) to highlight the Israeli military in a poor light.
The Israeli Film Festival in Paris is run by the French film association Kolnoah (the Hebrew word for “cinema”). In addition to a stipend from the Israeli foreign ministry, it receives backing from the Israeli Film Fund, the Israeli Film Council and a handful of French-Jewish organisations.
Read also:
Israeli Culture Minister wants to fine Nakba Film Festival venue
US Lawmakers Pushing to Cancel Lorde’s Upcoming Florida Shows
Lorde in concert. (Photo: Lorde’s twitter account)
Palestine Chronicle | February 11, 2018
American Lawmakers in Florida are trying to cancel Lorde’s upcoming shows in the state after the Kiwi songstress and superstar called off her performance in Israel.
Lorde cancelled her Tel Aviv concert in December, following pressure from fans and activists in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is making a stand against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
The decision has seen Republican state Rep. Randy Fine this week pushing for Miami and Tampa to cancel Lorde’s April shows, the Orlando Weekly reported.
Fine based his actions on a Florida law which barred companies that received state funds from doing business over $1 million with organisations associated with BDS.
“When Lorde joined the boycott in December, she and her companies became subject to that statute,” Fine told Orlando Weekly.
“The taxpayers of Miami and Tampa should not have to facilitate bigotry and anti-Semitism, and I look forward to the Miami Sports and Exhibition Authority and the Tampa Sports Authority complying with the law and cancelling these concerts.
“Florida has no tolerance for anti-Semitism and boycotts intended to destroy the State of Israel.”
Florida is one of 20 states with a law in place to deal with businesses that boycott Israel.
In a statement released in December last year Lorde said that “the right decision at this time” was to cancel her June 2018 concert in Tel Aviv.
The Grammy-award winner said that after having “lots of discussions” about the matter, she was “not too proud to admit I didn’t make the right call on this one,” referring to her initial decision to hold the concert.
The cancellation was welcomed by members of the BDS movement.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel posted a statement on Twitter thanking the artist for “heeding appeals from your fans against Israel’s art-washing of its brutal oppression of Palestinians.”
Other artists to have boycotted Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians included Roger Waters, Lauryn Hill and Elvis Costello.
PM vows to clamp down on online abuse… despite spending millions vilifying Corbyn
© Joel Goodman/ Global Look Press
RT | February 7, 2018
Prime Minister Theresa May was applauded on Monday when she pledged new measures to tackle online abuse against politicians. But has the Tory leader forgotten about the millions her party spent on smearing Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn?
In a speech marking the centenary of women gaining the right to vote in Britain, the Tory leader said new measures aimed at tackling online abuse will include a new annual report comprising of data on how social media giants moderate alleged abusers.
Speaking in Manchester, May said: “While there is much to celebrate, I worry that our public debate is coarsening. That for some it is harder to disagree, without also demeaning opposing viewpoints in the process.”
She said she will also ask the Law Commission to shake up legislation so it ensures abuse is illegal online just as it is offline.
“In the face of what is a threat to our democracy, I believe that all of us – individuals, governments, and media old and new – must accept our responsibility to help sustain a genuinely pluralist public debate for the future,” May added.
The comments appear to be a bit rich, however, as they come from the leader of a party which reportedly spent millions on a smear campaign against Labour during the 2017 general election.
The Conservatives were accused of circulating ‘dark ads’ on YouTube and Facebook to deter voters in marginal constituencies from voting for Labour. One of the last installments was an 85-second video made up of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s speeches circulated on Facebook with the caption: “On June 9th, this man could be Prime Minister. We can’t let that happen.”
The ad featured a snippet of an interview with Corbyn, given to Sky News in May 2016, received a widespread backlash as it erroneously framed the Labour leader as condoning IRA bombings. The Labour boss had argued: “All bombing is wrong, of course I condemn [IRA bombings].”
The video was only built to show the channel’s news anchor Sophy Ridge asking, “but you’re condemning all bombing, can you condemn the IRA without equating it to…?” to which Corbyn is heard adding “no.”
In the full footage, however, Corbyn goes on to say: “No, I think what you have to say is all bombing has to be condemned and you have to bring about a peace process. Listen, in the 1980s Britain was looking for a military solution, it clearly was never going to work. Ask anyone in the British Army at the time… I condemn all the bombing by the loyalists and the IRA.”
Corbyn representatives said the Tories were “running a hateful campaign based on smears, innuendo and fake news.”
Labour also sent out ads, but they focused on policies to appeal to the party’s supporters rather than attacking their rivals.
Teacher on Leave After Allegedly Assaulting Student Who Refused to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance
By Jon Queally | Common Dreams | February 3, 2018
A teacher in Colorado this week was suspended after it was alleged that she assaulted a young child who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance—a troubling example of educators who refuse to acknowledge that students have the right to refuse participation in the daily ritual still found in many U.S. schools.
According to CBS News:
A teacher with Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District was placed on paid administrative leave following an alleged incident at the middle school, the school district said Thursday. CBS Denver confirmed the Lafayette Police Department is investigating reports that teacher allegedly assaulted a student who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Karen Smith, [the school’s] physical education teacher, was placed on leave Thursday.
The school’s principal, Mike Medina, sent a letter home to parents Thursday evening notifying them there had been an “incident” involving Smith but said he could not elaborate.
Last year, as Splinter News reported at the time, a teacher in New Jersey was suspended after he bragged about failing students who refused to participate in the pledge.
“They refused to stand, saying ‘they didn’t have to[.]’ I told them that is true and that what makes this country great is ‘that I didn’t have to pass them either,'” Steven Solomon, the teacher, confessed. He was later suspended for his actions.
Though many public schools in the country continue to treat standing as the pledge as compulsory, the U.S. Supreme Court has said forcing students to do so is a violation of their constitutionally-protected rights. The court, as the ACLU explains in an on-line manual directed at students, “has held that it is just as much a violation of your First Amendment rights for the government to make you say something you don’t want to say as it is for the government to prevent you from saying what you do want to say.” All students, the civil liberties group says, “have a right to remain silently seated during the pledge.”
In a 2009 column that appeared on Common Dreams, entitled ‘The Pledge of Allegiance Is Un-American,” Michael Lind put it this way: “In a republic, the people should not pledge allegiance to the government; the government should pledge allegiance to the people.”
Social media giants crack down on RT under Senate pressure
RT | January 26, 2018
Facebook, Google and Twitter are taking action against RT in response to pressure from the Senate Intelligence Committee, but have found very little to indicate ‘Russian meddling’ in the 2016 elections, new documents show.
Google Search, for example, has labels “describing RT’s relationship with the Russian Government” and the company is “working on disclosures to provide similar transparency on YouTube,” according to a letter sent to the committee by Google’s VP and general counsel Kent Walker.
Twitter has “off-boarded” RT and Sputnik “and will no longer allow those companies to purchase ad campaigns and promote Tweets on our platform,”said the letter from the company’s acting general counsel Sean Edgett.
The letters were provided following the October 31, 2017 hearing at which the senators grilled social media executives on alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election via their products and services.
Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) was interested to know whether any of the companies accepted advertising from RT or Sputnik. Unlike Twitter, Facebook and Google continue to carry ads from both outlets. Google’s Walker wrote that such ads remain subject to “strict ads policies and community guidelines,” and that “to date, we’ve seen no evidence that they are violating these policies.”
Walker added that Google took RT out of its Preferred Lineup on YouTube. In November, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, told an international forum that he planned to “de-rank” RT and Sputnik in displayed search results.
Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch wrote that RT and Sputnik can “use our advertising tools as long as they comply with Facebook’s policies, including complying with applicable law.”
Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) asked whether any of the companies provide any data to the Russian government. Twitter said it had received requests for data, but did not comply with any of them. Facebook said it had received 28 requests for data between 2013 and 2017, but that it “did not provide any data in response.”
Google said it had “not complied with every request” but declined to provide any specifics, referring the senators to its Transparency Report. RT’s analysis of that data shows that Google received 237 requests in the first half of 2016 and provided responses in 7 percent of cases. Another 234 requests came in the second half of the year, with a 15 percent response rate. There were 318 requests in 2017 with a 10 percent response rate.
Senator Kamala Harris (D-California) was very interested to hear what the social media companies are doing with the revenue supposedly earned from “Russian” advertising. Edgett’s letter confirmed Twitter’s commitment to donate the $1.9 million that RT had spent globally on ads to “academic research into elections and civic engagement.” He did not specify the organizations that would benefit from this funding.
Although Stretch said that revenue from ads running on pages managed by the Internet Research Agency (IRA, usually described in the Western press as the “St. Petersburg troll farm”) was “immaterial,” he revealed that Facebook has contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to the Defending Digital Democracy Project, an outfit based at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government “that works to secure democracies around the world from external influence.”
Furthermore, the investments Facebook has made to “address election integrity and other security issues” have been so significant that “we have informed investors that we expect that the amount that we will spend will impact our profitability,” Stretch added.
Google said the total amount of revenue from “Russian” ads amounted to $4,700, while the company has contributed $750,000 to the the Defending Digital Democracy Project.
The outfit is run by Eric Rosenbach, former assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration. According to the Belfer Center at Harvard University, Rosenbach recruited Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager Robby Mook and Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager Matt Rhoades to co-chair the project.
Among the project’s advisers is Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, the law firm that has represented Clinton and the DNC, and was revealed to have paid for the notorious “Steele Dossier.” Another member of the project’s senior advisory group is Dmitri Alperovitch, CEO of Crowdstrike, the private company hired by the DNC which originated the accusation that Russia hacked into the party’s emails. Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with anti-Russian reports and partially funded by the US military, NATO, and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Read more:
Virginia Attorney General Attempting to Blacklist Activist & Political Organizations as Domestic Terrorists
The Rutherford Institute | January 26, 2018
RICHMOND, Va. — Warning that attempts by the political establishment to blacklist groups espousing unpopular ideas will endanger and undermine legitimate First Amendment activities across the political spectrum, The Rutherford Institute is calling on the Virginia General Assembly to denounce House Bill No. 1601.
Introduced by Del. Marcia Price and drafted with the help of Attorney General Mark Herring, H.B. 1601 broadly and vaguely defines “domestic terrorism” in such a way as to create a new criminal class of “domestic terrorist organizations” by labeling organizations that are even minimally affiliated with individuals engaged in so-called “acts of terrorism” such as misdemeanor assault, trespass, and damaging property on the land of another. Moreover, once an organization is designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” it becomes a crime to provide that group with a service, whether that be food, lodging, transportation, communication or commerce for any purpose whatsoever.
“If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government), that could be enough to land you on the federal government’s terrorism watch list. Now, under this proposed Virginia law, just associating with someone labeled a ‘domestic terrorist’ is enough to get an organization blacklisted,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “People have forgotten that in his day, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was viewed as a domestic terrorist for his acts of civil disobedience. Under this law, which aims to demonize and criminalize organizations based on their social or political associations with individuals whose unpopular beliefs or anti-government sentiments may be construed as ‘terrorist,’ organizations associated with King would be labeled as domestic terrorists and blacklisted. This is about as McCarthyist and un-American as it gets.”
In the wake of a massive protest in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 that resulted in violent clashes between alt-right and alt-left activists, with little to no intervention by police, Del. Marcia Price and Attorney General Mark Herring collaborated on legislation, House Bill 1601, that would create a new criminal class of domestic terrorists and blacklist any organizations associated, even minimally, with individuals engaged in so-called domestic terrorist activities.
In a letter to the Courts of Justice Committee, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute warn that H.B. 1601 poses grave dangers to the core constitutional rights of activist and political organizations of all stripes across the entire social and political spectrum. Notably, under H.B. 1601, almost any political organization risks being designated a “domestic terrorist organization”; organizations could be classified as terrorist based merely on minimal associations with individuals engaged in acts of so-called domestic terrorism; mired in secret proceedings, the protocol lacks any assurance of due process; the process for mounting an appeal of a “domestic terrorist” designation is overly burdensome and skewed; and the provisions impermissibly burden the right of political association protected by the First Amendment.
Documents
The Rutherford Institute’s letter to the Virginia General Assembly
Facebook, Google, Twitter Announce ‘Counterspeech’ Psyop to Keep Public Docile
By Jake Andersen | ANTIMEDIA | January 18, 2018
If you’re a radical or search for “extremist” content online, the biggest social networks and internet companies on Earth will soon be converting you into a docile moderate, or at least, they will try.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been screening and filtering extremist content for years, but on Wednesday, the gatekeepers of the internet confirmed to Congress that they are accelerating their efforts and will target users who may be exposed to extremist/terrorist content, redirecting them instead to “positive and moderate” posts.
Representatives for the three companies testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to outline specific ways they are trying to combat extremism online. Facebook, Google, and Twitter aren’t just tinkering with their algorithms to restrict certain kinds of violent content and messaging. They’re also using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to manufacture what they call “counterspeech,” which has a hauntingly Orwellian ring to it. Essentially, their goal is to catch burgeoning extremists, or people being radicalized online, and re-engineer them via targeted propagandistic advertisements.
Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, stated:
“We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence. That’s why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts.”
Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube has deployed something called the “Redirect Method,” developed by Google’s Jigsaw research group. With this protocol, YouTube taps search history metrics to identify users who may be interested in extremist content and then uses targeted advertising to counter “hateful” content with “positive” content. YouTube has also invested in a program called “Creators for Change,” a group of users that makes videos opposed to hate speech and violence. Additionally, the video platform has tweaked their algorithm to reduce the reach of borderline content.
In his testimony, Juniper Downs, YouTube’s head of public policy, said, “Our advances in machine learning let us now take down nearly 70% of violent extremism content within 8 hours of upload and nearly half of it in 2 hours.”
On the official YouTube blog, the company discussed how they plan to disrupt the “radicalization funnel” and change minds. The four steps include:
- “Expanding the new YouTube product functionality to a wider set of search queries in other languages beyond English.
- Using machine learning to dynamically update the search query terms.
- Working with expert NGOs on developing new video content designed to counter violent extremist messaging at different parts of the radicalization funnel.
- Collaborating with Jigsaw to expand the ‘Redirect Method’ in Europe.”
Starting at the end of last year, the company had already begun altering its algorithm so that 30% of its videos were demonetized. The company had explained that it wanted YouTube to be a safer place for brands to advertise, but the move has angered many content producers who generate income with their video channels.
The effort to use machine learning and AI as part of a social engineering funnel is probably not new, but we’ve never seen it openly wielded on a vast scale by a government-influenced corporate consortium. To say the least, it is unsettling for many. One user commented underneath the post, “So if you have an opinion that’s not there [sic] agenda You are a terrorist. Free speech is dead on YouTube.”
For its part, Twitter’s representative told Congress that since 2015 the company had taken part in over 100 training events focused on how to reduce the impact of extremist content on the platform.
In a post called “Introducing Hard Questions” on its blog, Facebook discussed rethinking the “meaning of free expression.” The post posed a number of hypothetical questions, including:
- How aggressively should social media companies monitor and remove controversial posts and images from their platforms? Who gets to decide what’s controversial, especially in a global community with a multitude of cultural norms?
- Who gets to define what’s false news — and what’s simply controversial political speech?”
The three tech giants have been under intense scrutiny from lawmakers who feel the platforms have been used to sow division online and even recruit homegrown terrorists. While the idea of using an algorithm to fight extremism online is not new, a unified front of Facebook, Google, and Twitter has never collectively produced original online propaganda, the specifics and scope of which remain vague despite the companies’ attempts at transparency.
Only recently, in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), was the use of propaganda on the American people by the government formally legalized. Then-President Barack Obama continued strengthening government propaganda at the end of his administration with the dystopic Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act of 2017, which created a kind of Ministry of Truth for the creation of so-called “fact-based narratives.”
It appears that while the government continues to strengthen its potential to conduct psychological operations (psyops), it is also joining forces with internet gatekeepers that can use their algorithms to shape billions of minds online. While one may applaud the ostensible goal of curbing terrorist recruitment, the use of psyops for social engineering and manufacturing consent could extend far beyond the original intent.
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Because no animal reservoir has been found for SARS-CoV-2, it cannot properly be termed a zoonosis.* Should we call it a labnosis? And what does that mean?
By Meryl Nass, MD | July 12, 2021
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
Why did they do it? … continue
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