The Bank of Ireland has been criticised after shutting the account of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), the latest in a string of similar moves by European banks.
IPSC has formally complained, following the closure of its account which it uses to lodge donations, and intends to take a case to the Financial Services Ombudsman.
Earlier this year, the Bank of Ireland requested information from IPSC about its funding and how funds were spent, in response to which, IPSC submitted its audited accounts.
According to IPSC, the Bank of Ireland has “failed to give a specific explanation of why it was closing the accounts.”
Kevin Squires, IPSC coordinator told TheJournal.ie : “Bank of Ireland’s silence speaks volumes. Honestly it’s hard to not view this as part of a wider campaign which has seen banks close accounts in the UK, Austria and France.”
“In the last year or so we have had €1,200 go to Palestine to pay for Palestinian scarves, which is a tiny amount. That’s trade with Palestine. It’s not like we’re sending money to people there.”
Vice-President of Sinn Fein and a Teachta Dala for Dublin Central, Mary Lou McDonald, said the decision was “outrageous”.
“The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign are an established advocacy group that have spent years protesting against the treatment of the Palestinian people. To close their account citing that they associate with a ‘high risk country’… this is not only outrageous; this is insulting to the Palestinian people.”
“Bank of Ireland cannot stay silent on this matter,” she added.
The following is from a statement by the IPSC:
This denial of banking rights, the ensuing loss of income and the potential reputational damage to the IPSC comes in the context of similar seemingly coordinated attacks on Palestine solidarity organisations across Europe and the United States. Numerous bank accounts belonging to such organisations have been closed in France, Germany, Austria and the UK. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this attack on the IPSC’s ability to bank – which is, in effect, the ability to function at all – is political in nature and forms part of this wider attack on organisations that advocate for peaceful action to secure Palestinian rights enshrined in international law.
Israel has boasted of conducting a global campaign of ‘lawfare’ – using legal and other punitive threats to silence and attack supporters of Palestinian rights. This attack on the IPSC It appears to be part of this campaign, a politically motivated measure to silence a human rights organsiation that campaigns for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it fulfils its obligations under international law – a campaign the Irish government views as an entirely “legitimate” means of protest “intended to pressure Israel into ending the occupation.”
On 29 April, 2016, Syria Solidarity Movement member Vanesa Beeley placed the following petition on Change.org. On or about 27 September, Change.org removed the petition, citing “violation of community standards”. What community standards? Judge for yourself.
DO NOT GIVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE 2016 TO THE SYRIAN WHITE HELMETS
To do so would prolong the suffering of the Syrian people and reward the White Helmets for being US and UK Government funded and trained agents of “regime change” in Syria.
The White Helmets have received over $ 40 million in funding from the US Government [USAID] and the UK Foreign Office despite their claims of being “fiercely independent and accepts no money from governments, corporations or anyone directly involved in the Syrian conflict”
The UK and US governments are involved in the illegal war against Syria and are intent upon “regime change” in Syria, therefore they are “directly involved in the conflict”.
The White Helmets claim to be “unarmed and neutral” while embedded in areas occupied solely by Al Nusra [Al Qaeda] and ISIS.
They are armed.
They have been photographed and filmed supporting Al Nusra/Al Qaeda who are foreign mercenaries massacring the Syrian people.
The White Helmets foment sectarianism in Syria, calling for the “burning of Kafarya and Foua”, Shia villages in the Idlib area besieged for 5 years by US NATO backed terrorist mercenaries, Ahrar al Sham and Al Nusra.
The White Helmets have assisted in Al Nusra/Al Qaeda executions of civilians in Aleppo [please see evidence in the video]
The White Helmets have been responsible for the majority of anti Syrian Army and Government propaganda, calling for the familiar “No Fly Zone” which, if it had succeeded, would have reduced Syria to the same failed state scenario as we have seen in Libya.
The White Helmets leader, Raed Saleh has just been deported from the US where White Helmet backers USAID [US Government] were about to present him with an award. The US State Department have stated possible connections to “extremist organisations” as the reason.
However the US State Department have made the extraordinary statement that although the White Helmet leader and chief spokesperson to UN and White House is linked with terrorism, the White Helmet Group is miraculously unaffected.
Please bear in mind that George Bush destroyed Iraq and Libya on the pretext of nothing more than their “connections to Al Qaeda”
The White Helmets are Al Qaeda “with a facelift”. They are terrorism and neocolonialism under the umbrella of Humanitarianism.
For the sake of Syria, please do NOT give the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Qaeda aka the Syrian White Helmets.
When it comes to Syria, the supposedly “alternative” media outlet, “Democracy Now!” promotes a line no different from the US State Department. In its September 29, 2016 broadcast, “Democracy Now!” co-host Narmine Shaikh describes a “devastating bombing campaign by the Syrian government and Russia in the city of Aleppo” three days earlier, saying that “the two largest hospitals in Aleppo were forced to close after being hit by airstrikes.”
The broadcast implies that, for no reason, public hospitals in Aleppo were intentionally bombed by Syria and Russia. There is no explanation of why they would do this. No proof is given that the hospitals were operational, whether they were in fact bombed, who bombed them, or who controlled them. Instead, in the background, we see videos of blasted buildings and innocent people, including a small child, apparently being rescued from the rubble of collapsed buildings. The video implies that this was done by the Syrian government and Russia, but the time and place of the footage is not provided. The footage of the rescue of the small child carries the logo of the western propaganda NGO, the White Helmets, and has no credibility. Amy Goodman describes this group as “Syria civil defense forces” but Vanessa Beeley has reported that Syria has a real civil defense organization, which the White Helmets are not a part of; the White Helmets are USAID-funded impostors making propaganda videos to demonize Russia and Assad. Beeley also reports:
“Western media infers that those being targeted are civilians, not members of the Nusra Front and other foreign-funded terrorist brigades, and that all these “civilians” are being mercilessly bombed by Russian and Syrian air strikes.
All three main hospitals are fully occupied by the various armed insurgencies led by the Nusra Front, according to Dr. Hayak [a doctor in non-occupied Aleppo], who said they use the top floors as sniper towers.”
Without comment, “Democracy Now!” plays a clip in which President Obama says, “the key in Syria now is that, unless we can get the parties involved to realize they are just burning their country to the ground . . . there’s going to be a limit to what we can do.” Obama promotes the idea that Syria is in the midst of a terrible civil war and that the most the US can do there is “to mitigate the pain and suffering those folks are undergoing.” How generous of the US! Why doesn’t it just end its massive support for the killers that are attacking and occupying Syria? The question would not be raised by “Democracy Now!”.
By showing dramatic footage of bombed buildings and injured civilians and blaming it on the Syrian government and Russia, “Democracy Now!” is providing everything the US needs to finally claim that it must carry out another “humanitarian war,” this time against Syria. A key promoter of this Orwellian concept is Samantha Power, who, as US ambassador to the UN, barely conceals the contempt she and her fellow neocons have for the rest of the world. In an insulting an officious tone, this instigator of war called Russia “barbaric” for its alleged bombing of Aleppo. “Democracy Now!” airs a clip showing Ban Ki Moon saying the same thing. Though he does not name Russia or Syria, we are led to believe that Russia and the Syrian government were the perpetrators of killing worse than what takes place in “a slaughterhouse.” Of course, when the US kills people, it is always done humanely. Humanitarian killing has been Samantha Power’s specialty since the war on Yugoslavia, where the US and NATO dropped humanitarian bombs on Serbia for 79 straight days.
Two guests appear on the September 29 program, both introduced as grassroots Syrian human rights activists. The first, Osama Nasser, seems to be stumbling over a script he was given to read while Amy Goodman struggles not to look annoyed. Nasser says that Aleppo is being attacked by Russia and Syrian regime forces and that the US is doing nothing to help, as if the US were not already there in any other capacity. For instance, he does not mention the ongoing occupation of Aleppo by US forces cloned from al-Qaeda, and the “Democracy Now!” hosts do nothing to raise this obvious point. Al-Qaeda foreign mercenaries are supposed to be the arch-enemy of the US, so mentioning them would only confuse people. Thanks to other news sources, we know that the Syrian army and Russia are fighting to force al-Qaeda out of Aleppo.
When Osama Nasser gets through his talking points, on comes the more polished Yasser Munif, speaking from Emerson College in Boston. Munif pushes an idea designed to appeal to western leftists, that since 2011 Syria has been experiencing a domestic grassroots revolution, the main enemy of which is President Assad, who came down on the revolution with brutal repression. Munif does not mention that the 2011 protests were likely orchestrated by Israel and the West in the first place to destabilize Syria. But one would think, if they didn’t get this in 2011, that when they saw their cause being taken over by thousands of mercenaries from other countries, these grassroots revolutionaries would perhaps take a break from the “revolution” to get rid of the invaders. But Munif and other proponents of the so-called grassroots movement insist that all along there has been only one problem – the Syrian government. The US State Department and the Syrian Revolution are, conveniently, in full agreement: Bashar al-Assad is the root of all evil. “Assad must go” is at the top of the list of propaganda points.
In his commentary, Munif says that the Syrian government has used the media “to create a parallel reality” – a phrase taken from whoever creates buzzwords for John Kerry, who said in the same week that Russian-Syrian assertions of the US responsibility for sabotaging a ceasefire made him feel like he was living in “a parallel world.” The world that most other people live in could see that the US was clearly guilty of sabotage.
The propaganda we are seeing in the world today relies on a full 180º overturning of reality. The horrendous crimes being committed by the US, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others in Syria, as they are carried out, are immediately blamed on the victims of those crimes – the people of Syria — and on Russia, the one nation which has stood up in Syria’s defense. “Democracy Now!” is doing its part in this subterfuge by making sure that liberals and leftists who follow the show are properly misled. It does this by devoting a lot of its program space to good causes, like exposing the epidemic (surely a policy by now) of police murders of blacks on US streets. Indeed, most of the September 29 program was devoted to the then latest murder of Ugandan refugee, Alfred Olango.
But “Democracy Now!” is no different than any of the mainstream media news programs – it omits any analysis of Israel’s role in instigating a war against Arab and Muslim nations, it omits any critique of the power of the Israel lobby, it omits any examination of the neocons and their agenda for Israel, and it omits any coverage of the fact that the September 11, 2001 attacks were planned and carried out by the neocons and others in order to begin the succession of wars that followed. This is by no means a complete list of the services rendered by “Democracy Now!”. The program would not be on the air, getting generous funding and wide exposure, if it were not doing some heavy lifting. The self-righteousness coming off the screen of this supposedly radical left news program makes it even more offensive than Fox News.
UPDATE (9/30/2016): As a result of this article, the Kansas City Public Library has issued a statement regarding the incident. Read that statement below.
“For someone to be assaulted and then arrested for asking a question, in a public library of all places, is abhorrent. The library should be a place where people of all points of view can feel safe and welcome,” Steve Woolfolk, director of public programing at the Kansas City Public Library told the Dissent NewsWire.
But that is exactly what happened during a question and answer session with former Bush Administration official and current Washington Institute for Near East Policy distinguished fellow Dennis Ross, when a local activist was arrested after asking Ross a question.
“I have spent the last 10 years of my life trying to cultivate that atmosphere through public programming at the library. Library staff should be the final arbiters of what constitutes reasonable discourse at a public event held inside a public library,” Woolfolk explained to the Dissent NewsWire. Yet, when he tried to intervene on the questioner’s behalf, Woolfolk found himself arrested at an event he helped plan.
The Kansas City Public Library is no stranger to hosting events, sometimes with controversial speakers. According to Woolfolk, the library hosts about 12 to 20 events a month and in the past has featured such speakers as Sandra Day O’Connor, Stephen Breyer, Dan Rather, Hal Holbrook, Robert Reich, and David Boaz. While Woolfolk does not like bringing armed security into the library, he notes that the library will make exceptions for talks that are particularly controversial. However, in spite of hosting several controversial speakers in the past or having audience members asking highly incendiary questions, the library has never had a problem. Woolfolk explains that when someone goes on for too long at the microphone, he merely politely reminds them that there are many others waiting for a chance to ask a question, a tactic he says has worked successfully in the past.
On May 9, 2016, the Kansas City Public Library hosted an event entitled “Truman and Israel,” featuring Ross, and sponsored by the library, the Truman Library Foundation, and the Jewish Community Foundation (JCF) of Greater Kansas City. Given that there had been a shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City several years back, the library agreed to allow off-duty police to be on the scene. However, the library set two conditions. First, nobody could be forcibly removed for asking an unpopular question. Second, nobody could be removed at all without consulting with the library staff, who would only allow an individual to be removed if staff concluded they were an imminent threat. In addition to the off-duty police officers, private security guards associated with the JCF were also present. In spite of these precautions, a local peace activist, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, was removed. When Woolfolk tried to sort things out he was arrested.
According to Rothe-Kushe, he believes he was singled out due to his outspoken activism as soon as he had arrived at the event. Rothe-Kushel, who had RSVP’ed in advance, alleges that security subjected him and an associate to more rigorous security protocols, including a search of his bag, that the other hundreds of attendees were not made to endure.
After Ross’s presentation, the floor was opened to the audience for questions. Woolfolk stood just off-stage, in case there was any question about removing someone. Rothe-Kushel was first in line and managed to ask Ross a question. After Ross answered, Rothe-Kushel, who was still standing at the microphone at this time, attempted to offer his own response to Ross. A private security guard grabbed Rothe-Kushel, who asked the guard not to touch him, before being grabbed more aggressively. At this point, one of the off-duty police officers came over, and according to Woolfolk three different individuals were grabbing Rothe-Kushel. Woolfolk walked over, and with his hands at his sides, stood between the security detail and Rothe-Kushel. He told the security detail that he was director of programming for the library and that Rothe-Kushel had indicated that the would leave voluntarily if asked to. The security detail let go of Rothe-Kushel and he left.
Woolfolk, from past experiences with off duty police, knew that the only thing they could arrest Rothe-Kushel for was trespassing. Woolfolk wanted to make clear that this was a public event at a public library and thus Rothe-Kushel was not trespassing. He went to find his supervisor, but before he could do so Woolfolk says an off-duty and out of uniform police officer grabbed him from behind and threw him against a pillar. Per Woolfolk, the officer never announced who he was or told Woolfolk he was under arrest, but just kept telling him to “stop resisting.” As Woolfolk told the Dissent NewsWire, he informed the officer, “I’d be happy to do whatever he wanted, and that all I was resisting was the urge to fall face first onto the floor.” According to Woolfolk, a second police officer, this one in uniform, delivered several blows to Woolfolk’s knee, causing him to be diagnosed with grade 1 torn MCL. Eventually he was thrown over a chair and handcuffed. When he asked what he was being arrested for, the officer told him he didn’t know.
Woolfolk stands charged with interfering with the arrest of Rothe-Kushel. Rothe-Kushel, like Woolfolk feared, was charged with trespassing and resisting arrest. “Nobody, be it an individual or an agent of the state, should be able to take it upon themselves to silence a point of view simply because they disagree,” Woolfolk informed the Dissent NewsWire. Yet, it would appear that not only is that exactly what happened, but a librarian who tried to make sure that a public library remained a public forum was arrested, as well.
Official Statement from the Kansas City Public Library (9/30/2016)
The Kansas City Public Library continues to work through the aftermath of an incident near the end of its May 9, 2016, event featuring longtime Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, which resulted in the arrest of two people including a Library manager by off-duty police.
The episode at the Library’s Plaza Branch arose from a question to Ross, posed by a local activist during the evening’s question-and-answer session. The reaction by members of an outside security detail, who immediately accosted the questioner, was improper and an infringement on free speech, Library Director Crosby Kemper maintains. And he says the ensuing arrests were unwarranted.
“The Library strives to be a place where people of all points of view can feel safe, welcome, and free to express themselves in an appropriate way,” Kemper says. “And so this incident deeply troubles us.”
What happened:
The off-duty officers were part of a small, private security squad arranged by the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City, one of the Library’s partners in the event. That was to supplement standard Library security. The activist, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, was first to the microphone when Ross’ presentation turned to Q&A, and his question inferred that the U.S. and Israel have engaged in state-sponsored terrorism. Ross responded and, when Rothe-Kushel attempted to follow up, he was grabbed by one of the private security guards and then by others in the private security detail. Steven Woolfolk, the Library’s director of programming and marketing, attempted to intervene, noting that public discourse is accepted and encouraged at a public event held in a public library.
Rothe-Kushel was subsequently arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest. Woolfolk was charged with interfering with his arrest. Their cases are pending.
Kemper termed the response of private security and police “an egregious violation of First Amendment rights.
“The First Amendment’s protection of the rights of free speech and assembly is cherished by all Americans but particularly by libraries and their patrons,” he says. “An overzealous off-duty police officer violated the rights of one of our patrons at Ambassador Ross’ talk in the Library and doubled down by arresting Steve Woolfolk, who was trying to explain the Library’s rules to the officer.
“In defense of the freedom of speech, the Library stands fully in support of Steve.”
Library Patron and Librarian Facing Charges Following Arrests by Homeland Security Liaison During Public Q&A with former Ambassador Dennis Ross
===============
Below is a transcript of the clip with a few additional comments based on another video:
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:
Hi, thank you. I’m very interested in the issue of tribalism and terror. Just today, I ran into an article referencing Truman’s daughter’s, Margaret’s book, disclosing that the Stern Gang sent mail bombs to Truman in ‘47, and we know that when I think – I can’t remember which group blew up the King David Hotel, but Jews were amongst the dead involved in that ‘necessary statecraft’, what ultimately became that. So you see this long history of not only the United States, but Israel utilizing terrorism that includes potentially the death of its own tribe to advance its own geopolitical cause all the way up into the 21st century, including September 11th and that whole mess that I would tell people to look at Alan Sabrosky, the Jewish, courageous Marine who’s exposed the Zionist role in that. So I would ask you, at what point does the Jewish diaspora – do we have to have the ethical courage – I’m a Jewish American – to point out that especially in America, both the countries that operate in our name have used terrorism way too long, including against its own citizens, to project power at home and abroad. When are we going to stand up and be ethical Jews and Americans?
Dennis Ross:
Well, look, I don’t think that as a matter of policy, that the United States or Israel engage in acts of terror. Terror is you target deliberately civilians for an expressed political purpose. The idea that Israel had something to do with 9/11 is just outrageous – they had nothing to do with it. [Applause]
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:
Tell that to the Marine. Tell that to the Marine, Alan Sabrosky.
Look him up, Jewish American Marine.
Dennis Ross:
You know what? You can make up whatever you want to.
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:
I didn’t make that up.
Dennis Ross:
Well, I’m a big believer – as Patrick– Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, everybody’s entitled to their own opinions; they’re just not entitled to their own facts. [Applause]
Greg McCarron:
Take your own advice Dennis.
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:
True—–, Go look at September —- [–mic being cut in and out] …. [off mic] free fall speed
[At this time, while at the microphone beginning to respond to Dennis Ross, Rothe-Kushel’s upper left arm was grabbed with force, with no apparent warning, from behind by the head of the Jewish Community Foundation’s private security detail, and pushed away from the microphone and towards another, currently unidentified, member of security.]
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel: Do not touch me!
Get your hands off me right now!
[Multiple people are grabbing Rothe-Kushel at this point]
You can ask me to leave.
I will leave if asked.
Get your hands off me!
Greg McCarron:
Hey! He has a right to talk without being–
Patron sitting next to Greg:
No he had a right to ask the question and he asked the question.
Greg McCarron:
They don’t have to be putting their hands on him like that!
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:
Get your hands off me.
I will leave if asked.
Get your hands off of me.
I will ask if leaved–
[At this time, Dennis Ross begins to move on to the next question, by stating the following:]
Dennis Ross:
Okay, you know what? I will accept the question and we can ignore that.
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel:
I will leave.
Get your hands off of me!
I didn’t threaten anybody.
In a surreal and stunning example of 21st century propaganda and censorship, Google has cobbled together a coalition it is calling “First Draft” to tackle what it calls “misinformation online.”
First Draft’s “founding partners” include News Corporation’s (parent company of Fox News) Storyful and NATO think tank Atlantic Council’s Bellingcat blog, headed by formally unemployed social worker Eliot Higgins who now fashions himself as a weapons expert and geopolitical analyst despite no formal training, practical real-world experience or track record of honest, unbiased reporting. In fact, between News Corporation and Bellingcat alone, Google’s First Draft appears to be itself a paragon of, and nexus for “misinformation online.”
Google’s Glaring Conflicts of Interest
Google too, having for years now worked closely with the US State Department, faces its own conflicts of interest in “social newsgathering and verification.”In fact, Google has admittedly been involved in engineering intentional deceptions aimed specifically to skew public perception, including doctoring its maps and Google Earth in real-time amid conflicts in favor of US-backed militant groups and through the development of applications designed to psychologically target the Syrian government into capitulating before US-backed militant groups.
An interactive tool created by Google was designed to encourage Syrian rebels and help bring down the Assad regime, Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails have reportedly revealed.
By tracking and mapping defections within the Syrian leadership, it was reportedly designed to encourage more people to defect and ‘give confidence’ to the rebel opposition.
The article would continue:
The email detailing Google’s defection tracker purportedly came from Jared Cohen, a Clinton advisor until 2010 and now-President of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, the company’s New York-based policy think tank.
In a July 2012 email to members of Clinton’s team, which the WikiLeaks release alleges was later forwarded to the Secretary of State herself, Cohen reportedly said: “My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”
Cohen would conclude:
“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.”
Can Google then be relied upon to sort out “misinformation online” if it itself is directly involved in manipulating public perception to achieve US foreign policy objectives? To impartial observers, the answer is clearly “no.”
Today, news breaks online. Today, the first images to emerge from a breaking news event have been captured by an eyewitness. Today, injustices that may never have been reported become global news stories because a bystander reached for their smartphone. Today, malicious hoaxes and fake news reports are published in increasingly convincing and sophisticated ways.
We live in a time when trust and truth are issues that all newsrooms, and increasingly the social platforms themselves, are facing. In July, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner wrote about the ways technology is disrupting the truth, explaining “in the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a credible source or not.” Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organisations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source.
The members that constitute the First Draft coalition, however, have enjoyed an uncontested monopoly for decades in determining just what the “truth” actually is, as well as a monopoly over propagating things the global public now know for a fact were “untruths.” Again, we see another case of the proverbial fox guarding the hen house.
The Liars Who Lied About WMDs in Iraq Will Protect Us from Liars Online?
Indeed, many of the organizations that constitute First Draft’s coalition played a pivotal role in perhaps the most destructive and costly lie of the 21st century (to date), that involving alleged “weapons of mass destruction” or “WMDs” in Iraq, serving as the pretext for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
According to some estimates, up to a million perished in the initial invasion and subsequent occupation. More conservative estimates are still in the hundreds of thousands.
Undoubtedly, the invasion, justified by lies propagated across the entirety of US and European media, helped trigger a predictable chain of catastrophes that have left the Middle East to this day in conflict and ruination. These same US and European media organizations, the same ones now signing their names to First Draft, also helped justify the continued presence of US troops in Iraq for years after the invasion, up to and including today.
And the same names signed on to First Draft are also the same names who helped sell the disastrous intervention in Libya and who are now attempting to sell yet another direct Western military intervention in Syria.
And it is perhaps the lack of success these same names are having in selling this most recent potential intervention in Syria that has precipitated First Draft’s creation in the first place.
There is a burgeoning alternative media composed of individual independent journalists, analysts and commentators both biased and impartial, both professional and amateur, competing directly with and overcoming the West’s longstanding monopoly over international public perception. There is also the emergence of professional and competitive national media organizations across the developing world who are taking increasingly large shares of both the West’s media monopoly and its monopoly over the public’s trust.
It is clear that First Draft has no intention of protecting the truth as none among its membership have done so until now individually, but rather in collectively protecting what the special interests behind these organizations want the global public to believe is the truth. First Draft is a desperate measure taken by Western special interests to reassert the West’s dominance over global public perception by leveraging the widely used social media platforms it controls, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as IT giant Google and its large range of services and applications.
In the end, all that First Draft is likely to accomplish is convincing the developing world of the necessity of creating domestic alternatives to Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as to continue expanding their own domestic media organizations to better represent their respective national interests upon the global stage and to dilute the dangerous and destructive media monopoly the West has enjoyed and abused for decades.
Until the members of First Draft can cite a lie told by their competitors that is as destructive and as costly as their own lies preceding and underpinning the invasion and occupation of Iraq or the more recent destruction of Libya, their efforts appear more as a means of further deflecting away from the truth, not defending it.
The Israeli state has launched a major campaign of arrests and political persecution against activists of the National Democratic Assembly or Balad, the political party of Palestinians in ’48 Palestine. The party is represented in the Knesset as part of the Joint List, where its representatives, including Jamal Zahalka, Haneen Zoabi and Basil Ghattas, have been repeatedly targeted for their statements recognizing their own Palestinian identity and their support for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Indeed, today, Israeli attorney general Avichai Mandelblit has approved the police to interrogate Zoabi and Zahalka on the ongoing arrests, regarding “campaign finance issues.”
In the past two weeks, dozens of activists and leaders in the party have been arrested in allegations that were initially trumpeted as related to “corruption,” but are in fact instead attempts to label the party as receiving “improper foreign funding.” Thus, rather than Balad/NDA leaders being accused of stealing money from the party or from the Palestinian people, they are being accused by the Israeli state of bringing money from international and Arab supporters to Palestine to support the Palestinian people. Exact allegations, however, have not been released and are “secret,” withheld from the public and the detainees, reported Al Jazeera. The party issued a statement in which it “unequivocally denies all allegations and calls for the immediate release of all activists.”
The party and other Palestinian activists in ’48 have warned of this as an ongoing attempt to criminalize Palestinian political activity among Palestinian citizens of Israel. Broad protests have taken place throughout Palestine ’48 and political forces throughout the Palestinian population, including Abnaa al-Balad, Hadash and the Higher Arab Follow-Up Committee have denounced the arrest campaign, calling for Palestinian unity against repression.
On 18 September, the homes of party leaders were raided by Israeli police and 20 members and leaders of the party were arrested. Dozens have been released, with some being ordered to house arrest, forbidden from leaving their homes and in some cases from internet usage. Party general secretary Awad Abdel Fattah was released from prison to house arrest Wednesday, 28 September, as were Kayed Attiyah Awni, Ezzedine Badran and Shadi Awad. Deputy General Secretary Yousef Tatour was also released after being detained one day before. Over 35 leaders and activists have been arrested in total in the past weeks, with the majority released. Murad Haddad, member of the municipal council of Shafa ‘Amr and the party’s central committee, saw his detention extended until Wednesday inn a Haifa magistrate’s court. Several lawyers have also been arrested and released, including Eyad Khalayleh, Haneen Ighbarieh, Mohammed Tarabeh and Alaa Mahajna.
Balad labeled the move to interrogate Zahalka and Zoabi as “an escalation in the rabid political persecution against the Assembly and a provocative attempt to smear the reputation of the party….[this] is retaliatory political action that cmes after police have failed to intimidate the members and cadres of the party over the last two weeks.”
The Abnaa al-Balad movement noted in its statement on the repression that “these despicable repressive campaigns have been a systematic practice against our struggling people throughout their history since the beginning of the occupation of Palestine in 1948. We have seen the prosecution of all of the movements and activist national political currents among our people since the Al-Ard movement.”
Indeed, political persecution of the political activity of Palestinians in ’48 is nothing new; for the first twenty years of Israeli occupation, Palestinians lived under martial law and were prohibited from forming political parties; the Al-Ard movement of Palestinian citizens of Israel was prohibited in 1964. The movement of Palestinians in ’48 produced a series of movements, including the protest movement against land confiscation that sparked national protests and general strikes in 1976; after the killing of six Palestinian protesters, 30 March became known as Land Day. Palestinians from ’48 have always been imprisoned alongside fellow Palestinians in Israeli jails; today, there are over 100 Palestinian political prisoners holding Israeli citizenship, including Lena Jarbouni, Raed Salah, Ameer Makhoul and Said Nafa.
In late 2015, the Northern Islamic Movement, a large Islamic political and social organization among Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship, led by Sheikh Raed Salah, was banned by the Israeli state following its extensive campaigns against repression and limitation of access to Al-Aqsa Mosque. Zahalka labeled the move at the time a “declaration of war” against the Palestinian population. Dozens of social organizations were raided and served with orders for their closure, including kindergartens, clinics, mosques and a sports league.
Salah is currently serving a 9-month prison term for “incitement” for delivering speeches against Israeli action at Al-Aqsa Mosque. “Incitement” is the same charge currently being used against Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, also holding Israeli citizenship; Tatour has spent 11 months in prison and then house arrest and is threatened with up to eight years in prison for posting her poetry on YouTube. Tatour’s case has received international support from literary organizations and prominent writers and poets.
Nafa, a former member of the Knesset, is imprisoned for visiting Syria, an “enemy state” and meeting there with exiled Palestinians and Palestinian political parties; interrogation and arrest of Palestinians for visiting Lebanon, Syria or meeting Palestinian political parties labeled “prohibited organizations” are not uncommon.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are subject to over 80 discriminatory laws, including a number of laws specifically targeting Knesset members. These include new laws allowing the expulsion of members if 3/4 of the existing members agree; as well the suspension of members based on majority vote, carried out against Balad MKs earlier in the year, for meeting with the families of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers.
Balad advocates for “a state for all its citizens” and participates in the Joint List, a coalition of mostly Palestinian parties in ’48 formed after a new threshhold law would see most of the Palestinian parties excluded from the Knesset. However, participating in the Knesset is itself highly controversial among Palestinians in ’48 Palestine, and numerous Palestinian citizens of Israel participate in a boycott of Knesset elections. Opponents of Knesset participation emphasize that the Knesset itself is an institution that is fundamentally racist and Zionist and based on the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians. Organizations including the now-banned Islamic Movement in the North and Abnaa el-Balad emphasize that the participation of Palestinians in the parliament, where they are subject to racist laws and repression, is used to beautify the image of Israel internationally and claim that it is “democratic” for all of its citizens.
The holocaust cartoon contest in Iran was attacked in the West, but immensely popular throughout the non-Western world
“East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”
– Kipling’s famous lines certainly apply to “the Holocaust.”
In the West – Europe and the temperate lands it genocidally colonized and settled – most people believe that six million Jews, and uncounted others, were systematically exterminated, mostly in hydrogen cyanide gas chambers, by the government of Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1945.
In the East and South – those lands victimized by European imperialism and colonialism where the victims survived in considerable numbers – the great majority does not believe in “the Holocaust.”
The above figures from the ADL’s Global 100 survey show that only about one in five Asians – and one in ten Middle Easterners and Africans – knows of and believes in “the Holocaust.”
I first became aware of this “Holocaust gap” when I lived in Morocco doing Ph.D. research on a Fulbright scholarship in 1999-2000. My Moroccan colleagues, whether professors or graduate students, sometimes brought up questions like: “What do you think of Robert Faurisson?” I soon learned that Faurisson, who is reviled as a “Holocaust denier” by mainstream Western institutions of power, is an intellectual hero in Morocco – and, as I later learned, the rest of the Islamic world.
No matter how strongly you may disagree with Faurisson and his vast following of North African and Middle Eastern admirers, you must admit that we live in a wildly diverse world in which conflicting beliefs and historical interpretations must coexist, at least until free and open debate leads to consensus.
If Moroccan universities made agreement with Faurisson a litmus test for admission and employment, we North Americans would rightly complain. Yet we are blind to the disgust we evoke in the vast majority of MENA intellectuals by our own refusal to allow Faurisson and those who agree with him to state their actual beliefs, and present their cases, in the North American and European academies.
As I write this, Professor Tony Hall of the University of Lethbridge is under attack by a criminal conspiracy of slanderers and false-evidence-planters who have absurdly framed him as a “holocaust denier.” These individuals appear to have manufactured a hideous “kill all Jews” image, then arranged to have it planted, unbeknownst to Professor Hall, as an obscure comment on his Facebook page. After manufacturing and planting the offensive image, they appear to have conspired with Facebook to have FB blatantly violate its own guidelines by initially refusing to take down the image – a refusal that allowed B’nai Brith to manufacture a scandal.
Since it has emerged that Professor Hall’s detractors, rather than Professor Hall, appear to have manufactured and disseminated the offensive image, they have had to resort to a fallback attack. B’nai Brith Canada, the leaders of the anti-Hall lynch mob, just published an article headlined “Academic Freedom Does Not Include Holocaust Denial.” They label/libel Hall as a “holocaust denier” because, they say, he is “a staunch advocate of launching an ‘open debate on the Holocaust’.”
How is being an advocate of “debating” an issue equivalent to “denying” it?! The claim is self-evidently absurd. The obvious implication is that it is B’nai Brith, not Tony Hall, that doesn’t believe in the holocaust, since they apparently believe the official Western version of the story will implode if debate on it is ever allowed.
B’nai Brith mouthpiece Bernie Farber, in an outrageously libelous article smearing Hall, charges:
In commenting on Menuhin’s Holocaust-denial book Tell The Truth And Shame The Devil, Hall explained, “So, I’m reading that text and having to reassess a lot of ideas.” He went on to say that the book is a “very dramatic re-looking at what happened in Europe in World War Two.”
How is “reassessing ideas” equivalent to “denial” of anything?! Farber, like B’nai Brith, seems to believe that anyone who reads Menuhin’s arguments, and is open to “re-assessing ideas” when exposed to new evidence, will automatically become a “holocaust denier.” So ironically, it seems that the defenders of holocaust orthodoxy are actually closet holocaust deniers! They appear to be terrified that the official Western narrative is so flimsy that it cannot stand even the merest hint of critical scrutiny. What else could possibly explain their behavior?
These Zionist lobbyists are apparently so convinced that the holocaust narrative is fraudulent that they not only feel the need to destroy the reputations and careers of anyone who questions it, but actually make such questioning illegal – and send revisionist historians to prison!
According to Nick Kollerstrom, thousands of people have been prosecuted for “holocaust thoughtcrimes” in Germany alone. The first people who should be imprisoned, I submit, are the Zionists who pushed through these laws – because the fact that they feel the need for these laws proves they do not actually believe in the historicity of the holocaust, and are therefore “holocaust deniers” themselves. If they actually believed what they say they believe, they would obviously be eager to clobber their opponents in a free and fair debate… not with criminal charges and imprisonment.
In fact, I would go one step farther, and assert that anyone who charges anyone else with “holocaust denial” must themselves be a “holocaust denier.” If they actually believed in their version of the holocaust, they would not feel the need to resort to name-calling. Instead, they would muster empirical arguments and evidence.
Read these five books, and you will understand how “the holocaust” looks to a non-Westerner.
No wonder they don’t believe Western mainstream “victors’ history.” The West cranks out outrageous lies to disguise its own crimes. Why should World War II historiography be different?
Because they start out as natural skeptics, approaching the holocaust debates with a jaundiced eye, non-Westerners are likely to avoid being swept away by mass-media-orchestrated Hollywood-style emotions and the Western mainstream narrative. Because they have so much emotional distance from the Western history of persecutions between Christians and Jews, non-Westerners can think dispassionately about such things. And because they have seen the outrageous lies the Zionists have used to construct “Israel” (a euphemism for “genocide in Palestine”) they are naturally skeptical about any and all self-serving Zionist assertions.
If the University of Lethbridge expels Professor Tony Hall, it will either have to (1) ban all students and professors from non-Western nations and/or backgrounds, especially the MENA region and the rest of Africa, or (2) force all people from non-Western backgrounds to sign a statement that they will never express their true beliefs about “the holocaust” while they are working or studying at the University.
Some years ago as I became increasingly aware of the severe dishonesty of our mainstream media on all sorts of controversial topics, I began telling a joke to a few of my friends.
Suppose, I would say, that I happened to be out walking one pleasant afternoon in Palo Alto, and suddenly heard a gigantic explosion in the general direction of Mountain View, soon followed by a huge pillar of smoke rising towards the sky. Being busy with my own work, I might have no time to bother investigating, and merely wondered what surprising story the front pages of my morning newspapers would reveal as the cause behind those dramatic events. But when I eagerly opened those papers the following day, mention of the explosion was nowhere to be found, either on Page One or anywhere else, even in my own local San Jose Mercury News. So unless I somehow persuaded myself that I had simply imagined the whole thing, I would henceforth stop believing anything I read—or failed to read—in my once-trusted news outlets.
I thought my allegorical fable rather amusing, and repeated it on a number of occasions. But quite recently I came across a rough counterpart in real life, a remarkable tale that had almost completely escaped my attention for over twenty years.
When I used to recall the leading events of 1996, what came to mind was Bill Clinton’s triumphant reelection campaign in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and political overreach by Newt Gingrich’s Congressional Republicans. Perhaps there had also been some sort of plane crash on the East Coast, though none of the details were sharp or memorable in my mind. But in fact, the sudden mid-air explosion of TWA Flight 800 on a New York to Paris route was actually voted the top national news story of that year, ranking above the presidential campaign, while the 230 fatalities made it by far New York’s worst disaster of the twentieth century, and the second worst airline tragedy in American history to that date. Indeed, some journalists at the time suggested that the resulting media coverage had eclipsed that of any other transportation calamity since the sinking of the Titanic almost a century earlier.
I had almost forgotten the story of that doomed airliner when I opened my morning edition of the New York Times in mid-July 2013 and read a short review in the Arts Section, favorably discussing a new television documentary presenting the “conspiracy theory” that the plane had been destroyed by a missile rather than by an accidental fuel tank explosion as the government investigation had firmly concluded at the time, a verdict strongly affirmed by both the news and editorial pages of the Times. I had recently published “Our American Pravda” and an eminent mainstream academic who appreciated my piece soon dropped me a note pointing to a website discussion of the details of the plane crash, about which I knew nothing. Being preoccupied with other matters, I could only glance at the material, which shocked me, but now that I’ve gone back and spent some time on the topic, the story turns out to be a truly remarkable one.
The outline of facts is hardly complicated. Soon after taking off from New York’s JFK Airport on July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 suddenly exploded in the air just off Long Island. So enormous a loss of life naturally produced an immediate scrambling of numerous federal agencies to investigate the cause, and with widespread fears of terrorism, the FBI launched the largest, most complex investigation in its entire history, deploying some 500 field agents to the area. The investigators soon gathered a copious quantity of seemingly consistent evidence.
Large numbers of local witnesses were immediately interviewed by the swarm of federal agents, with 278 of them reporting that they saw a streak of light, much like a missile, shoot up into the sky in the direction of the aircraft just before the huge explosion. Employees at the local FAA radar installation immediately reported to the government that they had seen what appeared to be a missile closing with the airliner just before it exploded, and other installations produced similar radar records. When tests were eventually performed on the plane wreckage, traces of explosive chemicals were found, exactly the sort used in the warhead of a missile, as well as some reddish-orange chemical residue that a laboratory later identified as likely missile exhaust propellant. An enormous effort was made to locate every possible piece of the wreckage, and for many of these, the contours of the damage indicated an initial explosion external to the plane. Almost immediately after the disaster, a bidding-war allegedly broke out between the national television networks for an amateur home-video showing a missile striking and destroying TWA 800, with the tape eventually being sold for more than $50,000 and briefly broadcast on the MSNBC cable news channel before reportedly being seized as evidence by FBI agents. In addition, a local resident provided a still photo taken at the time showing what seemed to be a missile rising toward the aircraft.
Based on all this initial evidence, many of the early news stories reported that the plane had probably been destroyed by a missile, with widespread speculation about whether the calamity was due to terrorist action or instead accidental “friendly fire” from one of the U.S. naval warships operating in the vicinity. Given the extreme sensitivity of the topic, government officials urged the media to keep an open mind until the full investigation was completed. However, the public debate sometimes turned rancorous, with some individuals soon alleging that a government cover-up was in the works. Eventually, the CIA was brought into the investigation, given its tremendous expertise in certain matters.
After more than a year of detailed research, the government investigation finally concluded that no missile could possibly have been involved, with all the eyewitnesses having been misled by what amounted to an optical illusion caused by the explosion of the aircraft. That explosion itself had been entirely spontaneous, probably caused by a random spark igniting one of the gas tanks. Given the controversy in the case, the CIA helpfully produced a computer animation showing the official reconstruction of the events, which was endlessly broadcast by our news media to explain the disaster to the public. The simulation showed the jetliner spontaneously exploding in mid-air, with no external cause, and just to further clarify matters, the CIA animators also inserted an explanatory message in large text: “There Was No Missile.” The New York Times, and nearly all our other mainstream media repeatedly echoed this same simple conclusion in all their stories and headlines.
The vast majority of our sheep-like population absorbed the simple media message “No Missile” and went back to watching their football games and celebrity music videos, being greatly relieved to know that well-maintained 747 jumbo jets flown by leading national airlines can occasionally explode in mid-air without any external cause.
However, various disgruntled “conspiracy theorists” refused to accept these conclusions, and returned to their “crazy missile conspiracy theories,” thereby earning the hearty ridicule of the entire mainstream media, led by the New York Times. These conspiratorial suspicions even extended to the U.S. navy, which had apparently been staging military exercises in the near vicinity of the calamity, exercises that some claimed including the test-firing of anti-aircraft missiles. Indeed, a local resident later provided a home video clearly showing a missile being fired in that exact same area a few days earlier during previous naval exercises.
The entire remarkable history of this incident is persuasively set forth in a excellent twentieth-anniversary book published earlier this year by investigative journalist Jack Cashill, who has been following the case since the late 1990s, having co-authored a previous book in 2003 and also produced an earlier 2001 television documentary Silenced, now available in its entirely on YouTube.
In addition, the 2013 television documentary by a former CBS producer, whose favorable review by the New York Times marked my first introduction to the topic, was discussed at length and substantially excerpted by NPR‘s Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!
Cashill is strongly affiliated with conservative publications, while someone like Goodman clearly leans toward the left, but the question of whether an American jetliner was destroyed by a missile, and the facts then covered up by the government is a non-ideological matter, so their perspectives seem almost identical.
For anyone having less than absolute faith in the official pronouncements of our government and our media, the likely reality of what happened is hardly difficult to guess, and for those who currently maintain such naivete, I suspect it will quickly dissipate if they choose to watch the documentaries or read the books. But the loss of TWA Flight 800 is surely of no great importance to our country. Accidents do happen. A large and energetic military, eager to test its latest missile weapons, perhaps carelessly and fatally crossed paths with hundreds of unlucky travelers on their way to Paris. Some 30,000 Americans die each year in fatal car crashes, and risks are inevitable in our modern industrial society.
However, from a broader perspective, I believe that the truly horrifying aspect of the incident is the tremendous ease with which our government and its lapdog media managed to so utterly suppress the reality of what had happened—an American jumbo jet shot down by a missile—and did so although this occurred not in some obscure, faraway foreign land, but within the very sight of Steven Spielberg’s home in the exclusive Hamptons, on a flight that had just departed New York City, and despite such overwhelming physical evidence and hundreds of direct eye-witnesses. The successful cover-up is the important story constitutes a central subtext in all of the books and documentaries on the disaster
Given the eyewitness testimony and other factors, it is hardly surprising that many of the initial media stories either directly referred to a missile strike or at least mentioned it as one of the main possibilities, and indeed there is some evidence that top government leaders initially assumed a terrorist attack. But President Bill Clinton was locked in the middle of his reelection campaign, and while the slaughter of Americans by terrorists might unify a nation, disasters brought about by careless military action would surely have had the opposite political impact. So it seems likely that once terrorism was ruled out and the American military believed responsible, a direct order quickly came down from the highest levels to make the missile and all evidence supporting it disappear, with all our supposedly independent federal agencies, especially the FBI, bowing to that primary directive.
As part of the standard investigation, all the debris were gathered and stored at a hangar for examination, but FBI agents were discovered spiriting away some of the most tell-tale pieces, or even caught in the wee hours of the morning hammering them into a shape that would suggest an internal rather than an external explosion. The amateur video showing the missile strike was only briefly broadcast by a cable news channel before being seized by government agents. When an investigative journalist acquired debris containing apparent missile residue and passed it along to a producer at CBS News, the evidence was quickly confiscated, with the journalist and his wife even being arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for violating an obscure law enacted to prohibit bystanders from removing souvenirs from the scene of a disaster; the veteran CBS producer who accepted the material was vilified as a “conspiracy theorist” and soon forced out of her job, her career destroyed. The written FBI reports of 278 eyewitness statements describing the missile attack were completely ignored, and in a number of cases, later statements were actually fabricated, falsely suggesting that crucial witnesses had revised or recanted their earlier testimony.
These particular examples only scratch the surface of the massive amount of coordinated government fraud and deception that was marshalled to make a missile strike seen by hundreds of witnesses officially disappear from the historical record, and transform the destruction of TWA Flight 800 into a rather mysterious and spontaneous mid-air explosion. The New York Times in particular became the primary mouthpiece of the official “See No Missile” party-line, repeatedly denigrating and ridiculing all those who resisted this total rewriting of the facts and history.
This gatekeeper role of the Times in the cover-up became particularly crucial once the high-profile figure of Pierre Salinger entered the controversy. Salinger ranked as a full-fledged member of the political-media establishment elite, having served as President Kennedy’s press secretary and one of the most visible public figures in Camelot, then briefly as an appointed U.S. Senator from California before becoming a prize-winning journalist and the Paris Bureau Chief for ABC News. Himself half-French by birth, he had many connections to the leadership of that country, which was galvanized by the large number of French victims on the flight. French intelligence became involved, quickly acquiring some of the same voluminous missile-related evidence suppressed by its US counterpart, and passed him the information. Cashill notes that Salinger was a loyal Democrat, and perhaps as a consequence he sat on the story until after Clinton was safely reelected in November, then attempted to break it, publishing a long expose in Paris Match, one of France’s highest-circulation popular magazines.
If Salinger had hoped his prestigious standing and long journalistic record would insulate him from attacks, he was sorely mistaken, and instead the threat his stature and credibility posed to the cover-up unleashed an unprecedented barrage of insult, ridicule, and invective, with the New York Times running 18 consecutive articles attacking him, and America’s leading news magazines, Time and Newsweek adding their own denunciations. Such remarkable vilification may have partly been aimed at dissuading any other prominent figures from similarly breaking ranks and following Salinger’s lead in exposing the true facts, and if so, the effort succeeded and the cover-up held.
Prior to Salinger’s regime disloyalty, he had regularly appeared on leading American television news broadcasts and his opinions were treated with the great deference accorded to a highly-respected elder statesman; afterward he was purged and blacklisted, shunned by our elite media as a “conspiracy nut.” Indeed, upon his death a few years later, the disloyalty he had shown to his establishment colleagues seriously tainted his NYT obituary, which closed by describing the “strange turn” he had taken in advocating theories based upon “discredited” evidence.
I don’t doubt that numerous other prominent figures quietly took the lesson of Salinger’s defenestration to heart, much as high-ranking Soviet leaders noted the dire implications of questioning Stalin’s pronouncements. Indeed, I personally know of at least a couple of individuals prominently situated in our current elite establishment whose private views on various controversial topics would surely rank as “utterly conspiratorial” but who remain extremely reluctant to have those views become generally known.
Or take another example, even closer to me. My old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, clearly ranked in the upper reaches of the DC national security establishment in the early 2000s, serving as Director of National Security Policies at the Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor at Yale. Yet his strongly discordant views on the Bush response to 9/11 and the preparations for the Iraq War caused him to be totally blacklisted from major media access, reduced to publishing his dissenting opinions on an obscure website or in the pages of small, socialistic quarterlies.
When naive individuals suggest that maintaining a large government conspiracy in America is simply impossible because “somebody would have talked” perhaps they should consider the implications of this incident, which occurred so close to the media capital of the world. And if they ever decide to trust Wikipedia on any remotely controversial topic, they should consult the 10,000 word Wikipedia article on TWA Flight 800, comparing that exhaustive presentation with the simple facts provided in this article, or the wealth of additional information in the numerous books and documentaries upon which my treatment was based.
The old Soviet Union was notoriously reluctant to ever acknowledge serious government errors, but its propaganda machinery was of mediocre quality, routinely ridiculed both in the West and among its own citizens. Surely, their Politburo members and Pravda editors would have been green with envy at how easily our own American Regime and its media minions suppressed the true story of TWA Flight 800, shot down by a missile just twelve minutes after it departed JFK Airport in New York City.
Earlier this month, I wrote a blog about some extreme opinions towards Colin Kaepernick refusing to stand during the National Anthem. Last week, another disturbing story emerged.
This time, a Florida public school principal threatened to remove students from school-sponsored sporting events if they choose not to stand for the National Anthem.
“You will stand and you will stay quiet, if you don’t, you are going to be sent home and you’re not going to have a refund of your ticket price,” Lely High School Principal Ryan Nemeth said in a video, according to an NBC 2 report. “It’s something that I’m very passionate about and something we are going to do.”
Nemeth obviously feels strongly about this issue, but that doesn’t mean he can force others to adopt his view. People who choose not to stand probably feel passionate about their form of protest as well. I can’t stress enough that we don’t force the perceived version of patriotism in this country, and that distinguishes our freedom for the better.
Some were quick to challenge authority, as one student and basketball player, Adrianas Pena, told NBC 2 that Nemeth “shouldn’t be ejecting people just because they don’t wanna stand. Everybody has their voice to say something with it.”
This type of threat, especially from taxpayer-funded schools like Lely High, is unacceptable. The explanation for the video is even more irking.
This should always be voluntary.
On Thursday, Greg Turchetta, a spokesman for the Collier County school district said that the video was “taken out of context” because it came after students were “disruptive” during the anthem at a volleyball game.
Really, though? Is the school district really trying to argue that a warning that says “stand for the national anthem or get ejected from the game” is ambiguous and can be taken out of context? Really?
“They may have been laughing and joking, you know, it’s the beginning of an athletic competition,” Truchetta said. “They just came in, I’ve seen it sometimes when people don’t even realize what’s going on… oh the anthem is on, and they might have been slow to react to it.”
Let’s say that’s the case – students were chatting and didn’t even realize the anthem was being played. Surely there were other ways to deal with that than a grown man making a video trying to force every student to be a minion. And if some students made a conscious decision not to take part, they have that right. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that if students have a religious- or conscience-based objection to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, they could opt out. The same rules would surely apply to the National Anthem.
Unfortunately, Truchetta doesn’t think the Constitution applies to minors, since apparently, students can only protest during the anthem if they have written permission from their parents and if their protest is a silent or “peaceful” one. (This is ironic since the video was inspired by Kaepernick’s peaceful protest, but by all means)
I think Fort Myers attorney Michael Noone said it best when he told a local TV station: “I don’t recall anywhere in the Constitution where it says that your freedom of speech rights come into effect when you turn 18.”
JERUSALEM – Israeli authorities released former hunger-striking prisoner Malik al-Qadi to Palestinian medics on Saturday to transfer him to a hospital in the occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Saturday morning that its staff was transferring al-Qadi from the Israeli Wolfson Medical Center to the Istishari Arab Hospital in the city of Ramallah.
Al-Qadi is in a dire health condition after going without food for 68 days to protest being held in administrative detention — internment without trial or charges — by Israel.
Al-Qadi ended his hunger strike on Wednesday, along with fellow prisoners Muhammad and Mahmoud al-Balboul, after an agreement with the Israeli prisons services not to renew their administrative detentions.
Muhammad Balboul, 26, had refused food for 77 days since July 7, while his 23-year-old brother Mahmoud had been on hunger strike 79 days since July 5, and al-Qadi, 25, declared his hunger strike on July 16.
Qaraqe said in a statement on Wednesday that Muhammad and Mahmoud al-Balboul were set to be released on Dec. 8, while Malik al-Qadi would be released on Sep. 22, and that all three of their administrative detentions would not be renewed.
The three had initially launched their hunger strikes amid a mass movement across Israeli prisons in solidarity with hunger-striking prisoner Bilal Kayid, who after 71 days suspended his hunger strike after striking a deal with Israel to end his administrative detention sentence. He was reportedly set to be released on Dec. 12.
Kayid was one of the most high-profile hunger strikers since Palestinian journalist Muhammad al-Qiq came near death during a 94-day hunger strike protesting his administrative detention order, before he was finally released in May.
Rights groups have claimed that Israel’s administrative detention policy, which allows detention for three- to six-month renewable intervals based on undisclosed evidence, has been used as an attempt to disrupt Palestinian political processes, notably targeting Palestinian politicians, activists, students, and journalists.
Although Israeli authorities claim the withholding of evidence during administrative detention is essential for state security concerns, rights groups have instead claimed the policy allows Israeli authorities to hold Palestinians for an indefinite period of time without showing any evidence that could justify their detentions.
According to Addameer, as of August, 7,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons, 700 of whom were being held under administrative detention.
A Canadian company has sold Bahrain technology used to block opposition websites and human rights content on the Internet, Canadian activists say.
Specialists from internet watchdog Citizen Lab said in a report that Canadian Netsweeper website-blocking applications had been identified on nine internet service providers (ISPs) in Bahrain.
The report further disclosed that testing on the ISP of the state-run Bahrain Telecommunication Company (Batelco) showed that at least one of the Netsweeper installations was in use in the small Persian Gulf kingdom.
Citizen Lab researchers highlighted that the installations appear to have become active between May and July of this year.
That is “a few months after the release of a public tender by Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority in January 2016 indicating Netsweeper won a bid to provide a ‘national website filtering solution.’”
The contract is worth either 1.1 million or 3.1 million dollars, the researchers said.
Citizen Lab said, “The sale of technology used to censor political speech and other forms of legitimate expression, to a state with a highly problematic human rights record, raises serious questions.”
Since February 14, 2011, thousands of anti-regime protesters have held numerous demonstrations in Bahrain on an almost daily basis, calling on the Al Khalifah family to relinquish power.
Manama has been relentlessly cracking down on dissent. Troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been deployed to the country to assist in the crackdown on peaceful protests.
Scores of people have been killed and hundreds of others injured or arrested in the Bahraini crackdown on the anti-regime activists.
GAZA – Facebook administration has banned a large number of pro-Palestinian pages and accounts including Hamas-affiliated pages.
The Facebook administration closed over the past few hours several pro-Palestinian pages and accounts, some of which were banned for the tenth time.
A number of online activists accused the administration of online social networking service Facebook of deliberately suspending their accounts to silence the pro-Palestinian pages. Other Hamas members and activists have also voiced similar complaints.
The activists stressed that they never wrote anything on the banned pages that could violate Facebook’s rules.
Filastin al-Hiwar Facebook page which has over 145,000 followers, has also been abruptly suspended by Facebook.
Over the past few days, two Israeli government ministers met top Facebook officials to discuss ways of collaboration between the two parties. The Israeli ministers and Facebook officials have agreed to work together to determine “how to tackle incitement on the social media network,” according to an Israeli newspaper.
The twenty-first century runs on it. Paediatric clinics. Cancer centres. Forensic laboratories. Family-planning counsel. It is used to explain illness, to assign blame, to foreclose questions. It protects the industries whose products and practices are what actually caused the harm.
It isn’t true.
In 2010, Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson looked at over seven hundred genome-wide association studies covering some eighty common diseases. The genes the field had promised were not there. The field invented a term, “missing heritability”, to explain the absence, and has quietly worked to bury the finding ever since.
The Genetic Deception is a book about what Latham and Wilson found. What the field did with it. And what the public was told instead. … continue
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In the past two weeks, dozens of activists and leaders in the party have been arrested in allegations that were initially trumpeted as related to “corruption,” but are in fact instead attempts to label the party as receiving “improper foreign funding.” Thus, rather than Balad/NDA leaders being accused of stealing money from the party or from the Palestinian people, they are being accused by the Israeli state of bringing money from international and Arab supporters to Palestine to support the Palestinian people. Exact allegations, however, have not been released and are “secret,” withheld from the public and the detainees, reported 
On 18 September, the homes of party leaders were raided by Israeli police and 20 members and leaders of the party were arrested. Dozens have been released, with some being ordered to house arrest, forbidden from leaving their homes and in some cases from internet usage. Party general secretary Awad Abdel Fattah was 
