The Map Is Not the Territory: Ukraine, Manufactured Consent, and Europe’s War of Attrition
By Gerry Nolan | Ron Paul Institute | December 16, 2025
Western headlines are screaming that Ukraine has “encircled” Kupyansk city… a glorified town, selling it as a nightmare for Moscow. But this is not a battlefield report. It is narrative management, timed precisely to negotiations in Berlin. Kupyansk is not Stalingrad. It is not Kursk. It is not even a decisive urban fight. It is a ruined settlement on the Oskol, a former logistics node reduced to rubble, where control is measured not in flags but in fire control, drone dominance, and whether men can be rotated without being killed.
And when even Reuters couches claims as “unverified,” you know what that means. When it hedges, pauses, and inserts distance between claims and confirmation, it is signaling that fog is being weaponised. What exists on the ground is block-by-block ruin fighting, contested neighbourhoods like Yubileynyy, clashes near Mirovoye and Radkovka, infiltration attempts, temporary interdictions. Battalion-scale collisions between exhausted units in a place that barely functions as a glorified town.
The unit scale tells the truth the headlines obscure. Kupyansk has never hosted a force capable of deciding a front. Within the urban core, the Russian presence has been limited and exposed, with little time to dig in deeper, the town’s ruins making sustained fortification difficult, relying on fire control rather than secured occupation. With thousands tied down protecting the flanks and barely a battalion inside the city itself, Ukrainian assaults are not sweeping counteroffensives but concentrated pushes by swarms of worn formations, often built from forcibly mobilised men with minimal training, starving and thin on ammunition, cannibalized from fronts like Sumy, and thrown into an urban graveyard to manufacture leverage.
This is not manoeuvre warfare. It is attritional contact deliberately framed as momentum to serve a media and political narrative rather operational gain. What matters is that the map is not the territory. In this war, a coloured overlay often marks a brief window of drone interdiction, hours, not control. Fire control can deny movement, but without sustainment it cannot secure ground. Fire control without sustainment does not produce breakthroughs. It produces graveyards. Ukraine has been forced by its Western patrons into too many of them already.
Kupyansk does not change the war unless it becomes part of a broader operational rollback and it won’t. Otherwise, it is a bad PR bargaining chip, paid for in blood.
While cameras fixate on Kupyansk, the real pressure story runs elsewhere, across a widening arc Western coverage fragments to prevent pattern recognition. West of Russian liberated Seversk, claims and denials continue, but the geometry is clear: Ukrainian forces are stretched thin, defending ground without strategic depth. Around encircled Lyman, the contest is about lines of communication and Ukranian reserve erosion, not symbolism.
Central to the Donbass arc, Pokrovsk and Mirnograd matter not because of names, but because they anchor logistics. Russian control here forces a stark contrast in how the war is being fought. Ukraine is expending irreplaceable manpower to manufacture moments, brief tactical actions designed to win optics for a day. Russia, by contrast, is trading space, fire control, and logistics denial for outcomes that compound over time. One side is managing headlines. The other is managing the war.
To the south, the picture is more dangerous still. Around Gulyaypole, pressure is persistent and cumulative, not theatrical. And beyond it lies the real anxiety Europe refuses to discuss openly, the slow, grinding push toward Zaporozhye city. This is not a sprint. It is a methodical march Westward. If current trends hold, Zaporozhye can be operationally threatened, even encircled in less than six months. That outcome would dwarf any skirmish in the small town of Kupyansk.
This is where time asymmetry becomes decisive. Russia is fighting a time-positive war: industrial scaling and real capacity that dwarfs the fiat, paper-tiger illusory capacity of NATO; deep manpower reserves; and a level of internal cohesion sufficient to sustain a long campaign. Ukraine, by contrast, is fighting a time-negative war, with catastrophic demographic collapse, mass emigration, forced conscription, and shrinking public consent. Every Ukrainian media counteroffensive now borrows against a future that no longer exists to replenish it.
This is one of the real reasons behind Trump’s push. Less sentiment. Not ideology. Geometry. Timelines. Arithmetic. Washington understands that delay only makes the endgame worse, militarily and politically for project Ukraine. Europe understands this too. But Europe cannot admit it without confessing its humiliation.
So Europe clings to suicidal optics. It inflates Kupyansk. It sells illusory leverage. And it sacrifices Ukrainians to buy time, not for victory, but for narrative survival.
Here is the truth Europe works hardest to bury beneath headlines and choreographed resolve: this war no longer reflects the will of the Ukrainian people, and, in truth, it only ever did through manufactured consent that has now collapsed. Not marginally. Not ambiguously. Overwhelmingly. Even after years of saturation messaging, censorship, emergency laws, and relentless narrative conditioning, roughly four-fifths of Ukrainians now demand peace. It is devastating precisely because it persists despite one of the most intensive information campaigns the modern West has ever mounted.
Instead, men are dragged from streets and their homes, beaten, bundled into vans, forced into uniforms, and sent to the front. Videos of violent conscription squads no longer shock because they are the tragic norm.
This is not mobilisation. It is cowardly and punitive coercion, the final refuge of elites who lack legitimacy but demand sacrifice. It is the politics of cowardice, where those who made the decisions never bear the cost, and those who pay the price were never given a choice. These wars are always fought with other people’s sons, for objectives that dissolve under scrutiny, while the architects retreat behind speeches, security details, and moral posturing.
When a state must kidnap its own citizens to sustain a war, it has crossed the final moral line: it is no longer defending a nation, because it never was, but cannibalising one, deliberately sacrificing its people as a tip of the spear against a stronger Russia, to shield the reputations, fortunes, and careers of elites who will never bleed, never fight, and never answer for the ruin they leave behind.
Washington shattered Europe’s strategic autonomy years ago and quietly handed the bill to the continent. NATO expansion without strategy. Economic warfare without insulation. Energy sabotage without a contingency secured. The result was inevitable… Accelerated deindustrialisation, inflation, social fracture, political fragility. Europe emerged poorer, weaker, and strategically irrelevant, yet still clinging to the language of moral authority.
Rather than confront this collapse, Europe chose the refuge of absolutism. Negotiation became heresy. Compromise became betrayal. Peace became appeasement. Diplomacy itself was criminalised, because diplomacy invites the most dangerous question of all. What was this for?
And that question cannot be answered without consequences. Because peace does something war cannot. War suspends politics. Peace resurrects accountability.
Europe does not fear losing the war as much as it fears surviving it with memory intact.
That is why the war must continue. Not to save Ukraine, but to postpone reckoning, at the hands of Europeans.
Which brings us back to Kupyansk.
Kupyansk is not a battlefield turning point. It is a tombstone. Not only for the men buried beneath its rubble, but for Europe’s moral credibility itself.
What will damn this war in the historical record is not how it began, but how long it continued after its flimsy justification collapsed. When even manufactured consent evaporated, when diplomacy was deliberately buried, when Russian defeat quietly gave way to arithmetic, the war did not stop. It hardened. Not because it could still be won, but because ending it would have forced admissions no ruling class was prepared to make.
Kupyansk is not remembered because it mattered militarily. It matters because it exposes the moment when the war ceased to be about territory at all. It marks the point where Europe chose blood over truth, coercion over consent, and narrative survival over human life. Not out of strength, but out of fear.
History is unforgiving toward wars waged without consent and prolonged without purpose. It does not care about intentions, speeches, or moral language. It records only what was done, who benefited, and who paid. And when the record is written, it will show that Ukraine was not denied peace because peace was impossible, but because peace would have ended the lie.
That is the real defeat.
The lobby is milking the Bondi Beach attack to silence critics of Israel’s genocide
By Jonathan Cook | December 15, 2025
I, for one, am struggling to stomach the spew of hypocrisy from pro-Israel groups like the Community Security Trust and its policy director, Dave Rich, in the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack.
Establishment media, on the other hand, appear to have a bottomless appetite for efforts by Israel apologists to exploit the genuine fear and grief of the Jewish community to advance a political agenda – one designed to silence criticism of Israel over its two-year slaughter and maiming of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Predictably, the supposedly liberal Guardian once again gave Rich a prominent slot in its comment pages, this time to spin the attack in Sydney into a demand for silencing opposition to Israel’s genocide.
Here are extracts from Rich’s piece in italics, followed by my observations. His all-too-obvious double standards and his glaring misdirection ploys should have disqualified this piece from publication. But the British media simply can’t get enough of this kind of bilge.
Rich: “The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.”
If Rich is so troubled by issues of dehumanisation, why has he remained so steadfastly mute about the long and utterly chilling dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel and by its lobby groups, including his own organisation? Remember, Israeli leaders called the Palestinians “human animals”. It is decades of that kind of dehumanisation that laid the ground for Israel’s genocide. It is precisely because of such dehumanisation that the live-streamed horrors of the past two years made barely any impact on the Israeli public or on opinion among Israel’s supporters.
The truth is it is Rich and his fellow pro-Israel lobbyists who are the ones in the grip of an “ideology of pure hatred” – one that chooses to excuse the mass murder of children when they are Palestinian, blown to pieces and starved for months on end by the very state he identifies with.
Rich: “The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.”
No, it’s not the Bondi Beach attack that has endangered “western liberal democracy”. That was irreversibly hollowed out when western leaders chose to actively collude in Israel’s genocide and defy the rulings of the world’s most respected legal institutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Western liberal democracy was hollowed out when these leaders chose to side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and prioritise his exterminationist agenda over the rule of law.
Rich: “Some people react as if this terrorism is akin to a natural disaster or unforeseen tragedy: blind hatred with no cause or purpose, and therefore no deeper explanation needed. But terrorism does not emerge from a vacuum. It is merely the most violent, lethal expression of a set of attitudes and beliefs that are much more widely held than just by those who wield the gun or the knife.”
How true! Terrorism does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the weapon of the weak, and it feeds off a festering hatred that derives from having one’s community abused and a parallel, suffocating feeling of powerlessness to stop it. That doesn’t justify the Bondi Beach attack, but it does provide us with the “deeper explanation” Rich claims to be searching for.
But even before we read on, we know where he wants to take this.
Rich: “When it comes to antisemitic terror, the ideas that some take as justification for murder are popularised and normalised through the language of much of the anti-Israel movement that has marched up and down our city streets and through our university campuses these past two years.”
And sure enough, there it is. The “antisemites”, according to Rich and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby, are British families marching though their towns and cities to protest a genocide in which the British govermment is actively colluding. They are the criminals, not Israel’s genocide machine.
The “antisemites”, Rich wants you to believe, are those incensed by witnessing Israel slaughter children day after day for more than two years; those incensed at seeing Israel bomb the hospitals needed to treat those children; those incensed at hearing Israel and its supporters deny what we have all seen happening with our own eyes; and those incensed that our governments have not only failed to stop this horror show but have actively demonised their own populations for highlighting their complicity in these crimes.
Rich: “After rapper Bobby Vylan, one half of the group Bob Vylan, chanted “Death, death to the IDF” during a set at the Glastonbury festival in June, it became the rallying cry of anti-Israel protesters everywhere. It got Bob Vylan invited to the Irish parliament and Bobby Vylan on to Louis Theroux’s podcast. Far from a call for death putting the rapper beyond the pale, it made him a celebrity.”
It takes extraordinary chutzpah to exploit the blood spilled in Sydney by special pleading for an Israeli army that is recognised by all major human rights groups, the United Nations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the International Criminal Court to have been routinely committing crimes against humanity in Gaza over the past two years.
If Dave Rich and the Community Security Trust are really so concerned about the dangers faced by Jews because of the many documented, and unpunished, crimes committed by the Israeli army, then maybe he should dedicate a little space to distancing himself and his organisation from that military rather than denying its criminality at every opportunity.
Rich: “Is there a connection between this embrace of a call for death in the name of Palestinian rights, and people inflicting actual death apparently in the name of the same cause? As soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious.”
Both sides can play this game. Is there a connection between the embrace of calls for genocide in the name of Jewish supremacy, and Israeli soldiers inflicting actual death in the name of that cause? Remember Israel’s head of the military said he would deny the people of Gaza food, water and fuel, supposedly in “self-defence”, and that’s exactly what Israel did. Remember Netanyahu himself described the people of Gaza as “Amalek”, a people condemned to genocide by God, and genocide is exactly what Israel did.
Indeed, as soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious. But in the case of Gaza, the death toll is many thousands of times greater than anything inflicted by two twisted gunmen in Sydney.
Rich: “The devastation in Gaza is real and lots of people involved in pro-Palestinian activism do not support antisemitic violence against Jews, whether in Britain or Australia. But like it or not, it seems this movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted.”
Even were this true, it cannot compare to the political culture generated by Rich and his pro-Israel lobbyists. That political culture has not only made violence against Palestinians conceivable but a daily reality for them decade after decade. It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate.
Rich: “This is now a global emergency of antisemitism, and it is the consequence of two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, Jews are angry. And they have every right to be.”
No, that is not the global emergency. The real emergency is a rampant anti-Palestinian racism that has utterly normalised genocide and been given institutional support across the West. It is anti-Palestinian racism, not “antisemitism”, that is the consequence of “two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings”. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, people with a conscience are angry at the two-year genocide endorsed by our governments. And they have every right to be.
Fact Checking The New York Times
Tony Heller | December 6, 2025
The New York Times has a website claiming to show an increase in 90 degree days in US cities. In this short video I fact check their claims using app.visitech.ai
How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? – The New York Times
For Israel, The Terrorist Attack At Bondi Is An Opportunity To Push For War With Iran
The Dissident | December 14, 2025
Today, a horrific terrorist attack was committed against Jewish Australians who were celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, killing 16 people and sending 40 to the hospital.
But for Israel, the terrorist attack is an opportunity to manufacture consent for a war with Iran.
There is no evidence that Iran has anything to do with the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, and all evidence so far that has emerged shows that it almost certainly was not.
The Iranian foreign ministry condemned the attack, saying, “We condemn the violent attack in Sydney, Australia. Terror and killing of human beings, wherever committed, is rejected and condemned”, and evidence released so far suggests the attacker identified so far, Naveed Akram, was a follower of Wahhabi Salafist ideology, which is openly hostile to Shia Islam and Iran.
Despite the lack of evidence and evidence showing it was not Iran behind the attack, Israel is using the horrific terrorist attack to manufacture consent for war with Iran.
Israel Hayom, the mouthpiece of Israel lobbyist and pro-Iran war hawk Miriam Adelson, published an article quoting an anonymous “Israeli security official” who claimed -without evidence- that “there is no doubt that the direction and infrastructure for the attack originated in Tehran”.
The Israeli newspaper Times of Israel, reported that Australia is “investigating if Sydney attack was part of larger Iranian plot” at the behest of the Israeli Mossad.
Previously, Israel pressured Australia to repeat baseless claims from the Mossad that Iran was behind anti-Semitic attacks in Australia.
As veteran journalist Joe Lauria reported, in August “Australian intelligence said the Iranian government was behind the firebombing of a Jewish temple in Melbourne last year as well as other ‘anti-semitic’ attacks in the country”, “days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly humiliated Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a post on X for being ‘a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews’ after Albanese said Australia would follow several European nations and recognize the state of Palestine.”
As Lauria noted, “The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) did not provide any evidence to prove Iran’s involvement last December in the Adass synagogue attack, which caused millions of dollars of damage but injured no one. It simply said it was their assessment based on secret evidence that Iran was involved”.
Australia’s ABC News reported that, “The Israeli government is claiming credit for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and intelligence agencies publicising Iranian involvement in antisemitic attacks on Australian soil,” adding that “in a press briefing overnight, Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer effectively accused Australia of being shamed into acting”.
Mencer boasted that “Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has made a very forthright intervention when it comes to Australia, a country in which we have a long history of friendly relations”, implying that Israel pressured the Australian government to repeat their baseless claim about Iran being behind the attacks.
ABC reported that the move came days after, “Netanyahu labelled Mr Albanese a ‘weak’ leader who had ‘betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews’” and “Israel announced it would tear up the visas of Australian diplomats working in the West Bank in protest against the Albanese government’s moves to recognise a Palestinian state”.
Israel’s evidence-free claims are already being used by the Trump administration to manufacture consent for war with Iran.
The Jerusalem Post reported that, “A senior US official told Fox News that if the Islamic Republic ordered the attack, then the US would fully recognize Israel’s right to strike Iran in response.”
Israel’s weaponisation of the terrorist attack in Bondi is reminiscent of how Benjamin Netanyahu weaponised the 9/11 attacks to draw America into Middle Eastern wars for Israel.
After the 9/11 attacks, Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that they were “very good” for Israel, because they would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror”.
This, in effect, meant using 9/11 to draw the U.S. into endless regime change wars in the Middle East against countries that had no ties to Al Qaeda but were in the way of Israel’s geopolitical goals.
The top U.S. general, Wesley Clark, said that after 9/11, the U.S. came up with a plan to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”.
Years later, on Piers Morgan’s show, Wesley Clark said that the hit list of countries came from a study that was “paid for by the Israelis”, which “said that if you want to protect Israel, and you want Israel to succeed… you’ve got to get rid of the states that are surrounding” adding that, “this led to all that followed” (i.e. regime change wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria etc.)
Yet again, Israel is weaponising a terrorist attack to manufacture consent for the final regime change war on their hit list.
Why The Wall Street Journal amplifies collaborators instead of Palestinian voices
By Ahmed Asnar | MEMO | December 14, 2025
Once again, The Wall Street Journal has chosen to offer its pages not to genuine Palestinian voices, but to figures who align explicitly with Israeli agendas in Gaza. On 11 December, the newspaper published an opinion piece by Hussam al-Astal, an infamous militia leader presented as a potential military – and possible political – alternative in Gaza. His article echoed Israeli talking points almost verbatim, promoting the fantasy of “disarming Gaza” and for being ready to take part in implementing Trump’s so-called “peace plan” for Gaza in accordance with the Israeli objectives from the plan.
What is most troubling is not al-Astal’s rhetoric itself. His views are neither new nor Palestinian, nor do they reflect any authentic constituency among the Palestinian people in Gaza. What demands scrutiny is The Wall Street Journal’s editorial decision to elevate such a figure while systematically excluding real Palestinian scholars, journalists, and intellectuals who articulate the lived reality, aspirations, and internationally-recognised rights of their people.
According to widely reported Palestinian sources, al-Astal escaped from prison in the early days of Israel’s genocide on Gaza in October 2023. He had previously been sentenced to death in connection with serious criminal charges, including being involved in the assassination of a Palestinian scientist in Malaysia in 2018. Following his escape, he reportedly formed an armed gang operating under Israeli military oversight, engaging in the looting of aid convoys and clashes with Palestinian resistance groups. His militia is said to operate in areas under Israeli fire control, often with aerial cover—an arrangement that speaks volumes about whose interests he serves.
This was not an isolated editorial lapse. In June 2025, The Wall Street Journal published a similar opinion piece by another gang leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, who likewise positioned himself as an alternative for ruling Gaza while attacking Palestinian resistance and looting the people’s aid. Abu Shabab, who was later killed in December under circumstances widely linked to his collaboration, had also reportedly been imprisoned for criminal offenses prior to the war. In both cases, the newspaper chose to amplify figures rejected by Palestinian society, elevating them as if they represented a legitimate political alternative.
What these figures share—beyond their alignment with Israeli objectives—is their well-known illiteracy and complete lack of credibility and political thought. This raises an unavoidable question: who actually wrote these polished English-language opinion pieces? The answer is less important than what it reveals about The Wall Street Journal’s editorial standards and political standing.
The deeper issue is structural. The Wall Street Journal has long denied its pages to Palestinian academics, analysts, and journalists who challenge Israeli narratives with facts, law, and lived experience. Palestinian voices are welcomed only when they validate Israeli policy or undermine Palestinian collective resistance. This is not journalism in service of truth; it is gatekeeping in service of a colonial power.
For decades, much of the Western mainstream media has framed the Palestinian struggle through a distorted lens—portraying occupation as self-defence and resistance as aggression. Palestinians are routinely cast as obstacles to peace rather than a people living under military occupation, apartheid conditions, and now genocide. Over time, this bias has hardened into something more dangerous: complicity.
During Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, this complicity became unmistakable. Major Western outlets, including those that once claimed journalistic rigor, uncritically repeated Israeli allegations of mass rape, beheadings, and other atrocities. Many of these claims were later debunked or contradicted by independent investigations, yet they served their purpose: manufacturing moral justification for the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority of them women and children.
By publishing voices like al-Astal and Abu Shabab while excluding genuine Palestinian perspectives, The Wall Street Journal has crossed from bias into participation. It is no longer merely reporting on power—it is helping shape and legitimize a colonial narrative that seeks to replace a people’s political will with proxies and collaborators.
As for Palestinian voices, they will continue to write, document, and speak—whether Western gatekeepers approve or not. New media spaces, independent platforms, and global civil society have already broken the monopoly once held by legacy outlets like The Wall Street Journal. The truth of Palestine no longer depends on their permission.
History has a way of sorting narratives from propaganda. And when it does, The Wall Street Journal will be remembered not for amplifying the oppressed, but for offering its pages to those who work in service of their occupier.
Flawed Study Downplays Children’s Risk of Myocarditis From COVID Vaccine
By Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 3, 2025
Readers of The Defender are familiar with the fact that the COVID-19 mRNA shots pose a risk of myocarditis, especially in children. But they may not know that myocarditis is usually permanently disabling, and in adults, it is often fatal within five years.
Tragically, we are now also learning what the trajectory of myocarditis in vaccinated children actually looks like.
This has been a public relations setback for industry and governments that have been advocating, and sometimes mandating, that children as young as 6 months get the vaccines — even though COVID-19 is almost always mild or symptom-free in young people.
This month, 22 British scientists from prestigious universities published a study intended to ease parents’ minds about risks of the vaccine, and simultaneously scare them about the dangers of getting COVID-19.
The message is that yes, there are rare cases — they always use the word “rare” — in which children get myocarditis after vaccination, but hey, no product can be perfect. And it’s better to risk the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. Also, they claim, kids are more likely to get myocarditis if they get the virus than they are to get myocarditis from the vaccine.
That’s the message — and the authors and publisher have the clout to widely broadcast that message in a press release and in news headlines in Britain and America.
But what does the study actually say? In short, it asks the wrong question — and even so, the answer they get must be buried in the appendix, because it’s inconsistent with the message they want to promote.
Article summary omitted evidence of vaccine risk
The study design is deeply compromised because the 22 authors constructed a complicated model to avoid doing a straightforward comparison (vaccine only versus disease only).
And even after they cooked the books, even after they took data from almost 14 million children and teens under age 18 in England, they got a result that is barely statistically significant, with overlapping error bars for the risk from COVID-19 and the risk from vaccination.
It gets worse.
The results, which marginally favored the vaccination, were trumpeted in a summary at the top of the paper and announced to the press.
But buried in the appendix, published separately online, is a table that shows a more relevant version of the comparison.
The version in the summary is from an early time frame when the vaccine was not available. The appendix shows comparable data for the time frame in which the vaccine was available, limited to the ages for which the vaccine was offered.
In the appendix, the risk of myocarditis from the disease is half that of the risk from the vaccine. This blatantly contradicts the summary and the headlines generated by the article — and this was a response to the deceptive version of the question, not the more straightforward one that the researchers chose not to answer.
Study authors asked the wrong question
The most pertinent question is the simple one: Did vaccinated children have a higher incidence of myocarditis than unvaccinated children?
This is an easy question to answer, given the data that these authors (but not the public) had access to. In a few minutes, they could have calculated a rate of myocarditis among vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
However, if they did the calculation, they didn’t report the results. My guess is that they did the calculation, didn’t like what they saw, so they didn’t include it in the published article.
As I stated above, I believe the study authors “asked the wrong question.” What I mean is that the article compares the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from vaccination.
But this is not the most relevant question. Why?
Because many people got the vaccine and then got COVID anyway, so they were unnecessarily exposed to both risks.
Conversely, many children who didn’t get the vaccine, didn’t get COVID. Or, they get such a mild case that they don’t even notice it. These children avoided both risks.
This is why comparing the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from the COVID vaccine is not really the pertinent question. It’s not a question of “either or.”
Authors ‘muddied the waters’ by analyzing myocarditis in kids who got vaccine and the virus
The message the authors wanted to imply was that, even though the vaccine increased the risk of myocarditis, it decreased the risk of COVID — and since COVID itself can cause myocarditis, the total risk is actually lower with vaccination than without.
If that is their claim, it’s easy to determine if it is true. The simplest calculation they could have done with the data available to them was also the calculation most pertinent to what parents want to know: Is my child better off with or without the vaccine?
The authors chose not to offer us the simple answer to that straightforward question.
But — given that they asked the wrong question — they might have derived a clean answer just by comparing the subset of children who were vaccinated but never got COVID to the subset who got COVID but were never vaccinated.
Because the study included data spanning two years from all over the U.K., there were hundreds of thousands of children in these subcategories — more than enough to do a clean statistical comparison.
But again, the authors chose not to do this. Or, my guess, they did the comparison and didn’t like the result, so they didn’t include it in the publication.
Instead, the authors analyzed myocarditis in the large group of children who got both the vaccine and the disease. This muddied the waters because there is no clear way to determine whether it was the disease or the vaccine that damaged the child’s heart.
Hence, the complicated model, based on timing.
The possibility that seems likely is that children who got COVID after the vaccination had the highest heart risk of all. Of course, there is the logical possibility that children who got COVID after vaccination had a milder case, with a lower risk of myocarditis.
However, if that had been the result, I would think the authors would not only have included that result, but also headlined it.
One more thing — the study looked only at the Pfizer vaccine. Myocarditis risk from the Moderna vaccine is estimated to be three times higher than Pfizer. They had the Moderna data and chose not to look at it.
Or they looked at it, decided they didn’t like what they saw, and decided not to report it.
‘This is public relations masquerading as science’
So, to summarize:
- The authors asked a complicated question when a simple one was more relevant.
- Given this wrong question, they did not do the most straightforward analysis to answer it.
- Even so, they found that the vaccine held almost twice the risk of myocarditis compared to the disease. This result was only in Table S16 of the Supplementary Appendix — but mentioned nowhere in the body of the paper, let alone in the summary at the top.
- And still they made prominent announcements to the public, claiming that their study confirms that children are better off with the vaccine than without.
This is public relations masquerading as science. For an article like this to be peer reviewed and featured prominently in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal tells us just how deeply the ecosystem of medical research has been corrupted.
And this is the “science” that our U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies on when they approve dangerous vaccines for healthy children who are at almost no risk from the disease itself.
In most statistical articles, the raw data used for a study are published online and linked in an appendix to the article. However, in this case, the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) granted access to the data exclusively to this prestigious group of scientists.
Personally, I would like to see the raw data and perform the analysis that the 22 scientists should have done from the beginning. Children’s Health Defense is in the process of requesting access from the NHS. Stay tuned …
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Why is Britain now openly admitting the death of British soldiers in Ukraine?
Strategic Culture Foundation | December 12, 2025
The death of a British paratrooper reported this week was the first public admission by Britain’s authorities that a serving member of its armed forces has been killed in Ukraine.
The timing of the official disclosure and its very public, emotive nature raise questions about the motives of the British authorities. The news of the death comes at a critical moment when London and other European capitals seem desperate to sabotage efforts by U.S. President Trump to find a peaceful settlement to the nearly four-year conflict.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer led tributes in the British Parliament on Wednesday to Lance Corporal George Hooley, who was described as a “hero” who “served our country in the cause of freedom and democracy.”
The British media were plastered with fond photos and sentimental commendations of the dead paratrooper.
Britain’s Minister of Defense [sic] John Healey added: “George’s tragic death reminds us of the courage and commitment with which our outstanding armed forces serve every day to protect our nation.”
How exactly British soldiers in Ukraine are “protecting” Britain is not explained.
The Sun newspaper went further to whip up anti-Russian feelings when it subsequently reported that the Kremlin made “disgusting” comments about the death of the soldier. Moscow had simply dared to ask what the British soldier was doing in Ukraine in the first place, and pointed out that British personnel have been participating in “terrorist” attacks on Russian civilian centers along with Ukrainian military units. That much is fact. Ukrainian forces have been firing UK-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russian territory over the past two years. These missiles could not be operated without British personnel on the ground. Similarly, American-made HIMARS and ATACMS, which have also targeted Russian territory, have also necessarily involved U.S. personnel for operation.
It is an open secret that British, French, American, Polish, German, and other NATO forces have been deployed in Ukraine to fight against the Russian military. Up to now, the NATO authorities have maintained a cynical silence about their involvement, pretending that the estimated 30,000 foreign soldiers in Ukraine are “private mercenaries” who have no official affiliation. Russia’s warnings about NATO being a direct participant in war have been dismissed as “Kremlin propaganda”.
But Moscow’s claims have been previously corroborated. Pentagon classified documents leaked in 2023 indicated that 50 British special forces were deployed in Ukraine, making up the biggest contingency of other NATO commandos in combat with Russia.
In March 2024, a leaked audio recording of Germany’s Luftwaffe commander, Lt Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, was released, in which he told other top officials that the British forces were on the ground operating Storm Shadow missiles.
British elite forces from the SAS and SBS (Special Boat Service), which work in conjunction with the paratroop regiments, are known to operate underwater drones in the Black Sea to target Crimea.
It is estimated that 40 British nationals have been killed in combat in Ukraine, along with other NATO nationals. However, the American, British, French, and other authorities have kept a stony silence about the identities and circumstances, implying that the casualties were private mercenaries and “soldiers of fortune”.
Logically, the NATO powers want to deny the depth of their involvement in the conflict. They are supposed to “merely” support Ukraine with the supply of weapons to defend against “Russian aggression.” The admission of NATO armed forces on the ground is an acknowledgment of the reality that the U.S.-led military alliance is at war with Russia. Of course, many independent observers know that already as fact, as does Russia. Still, it behooves the NATO states to suppress the truth and maintain plausible deniability.
Russia has said, with justification, that all combatants in Ukraine are legitimate targets. That includes members of armed forces who claim to be “peacekeepers” or acting as “military advisors”.
Given the secrecy that Britain and other NATO nations have maintained about deployment in Ukraine, and over previous military casualties, it does seem strange that this week saw such a very public announcement about the death of the paratrooper.
The British authorities claimed that Lance Corporal Hooley was killed in an accident “far from the frontlines” while overseeing the testing of an “air defense system”.
That disclosure appeared to be aimed at portraying the soldier in a minimal role working on “defense”. Together with effusive eulogies in the British media for the paratrooper as an honorable person, the intended effect was to rally public sympathy and anger towards Russia.
Britain’s Starmer has been a leading voice, along with France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz, for the deployment of so-called peacekeeping troops to Ukraine as a security guarantee for Ukraine in the event of a peace settlement. The real agenda, however, is to sabotage any peace deal because the Europeans know full well that Russia would never accept such a presence, seeing it as a backdoor for escalating NATO participation in the conflict.
U.S. President Trump has belatedly realized that the proxy war is a dead-end for NATO, especially as Russian forces speed up their advances following the capture of key bastions, including Seversk, Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsk), and Kupyansk. The British and the Europeans are in panic mode to keep the proxy war going because of their vested interests. They can’t accept defeat because of the fatal loss to their political image and fallout from the false narrative they have been spouting to justify a criminal proxy war.
One can expect various provocations and maneuvers to escalate the conflict to avoid peace. Declaring the death of a British soldier should be a damning admission of NATO being at war behind the backs of the public of NATO states. But rather than an admission of culpability, the British authorities, as with other European NATO leaders, are trying to rouse public support for escalation. The civilian head of NATO, former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, gave a speech in Berlin this week in which he stated that European nations must be ready for full-scale war with Russia, like “our grandfathers endured”. The insane European losers want to save their political necks with World War III.
Moscow rebuffs ‘absurd’ German hacking accusations
RT | December 12, 2025
German accusations of Moscow’s alleged involvement in “hybrid attacks” are “unsubstantiated, unfounded and absurd,” the Russian Embassy in Germany said in a statement on Friday.
According to Federal Foreign Office spokesperson Martin Giese, the ministry summoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Nechayev earlier in the day to protest alleged disinformation and cyberattacks. He cited alleged interference in this year’s federal election, and an attack on a German flight controller in August by two separate hacker groups, which he claimed had links to Russian military intelligence agency (GRU).
In response, the embassy said the ambassador had “categorically rejected” the “unsubstantiated, unfounded and absurd” accusations of GRU’s involvement.
The accusations are “yet another unfriendly step aimed at inciting anti-Russian sentiment in Germany” and undermining bilateral relations, it said.
The embassy also referred to EU scaremongering and accusations of alleged Russian plans to attack NATO, calling for Berlin to “stop whipping up hysteria.” Russia “poses no threat to European states,” as President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed, it said.
The embassy also referred to the US-brokered peace talks on the Ukraine conflict, a recent point of tension between European NATO states and Moscow.
Russia stands ready to negotiate, provided they “take Russia’s security interests into account and contribute to addressing the root causes of the Ukraine conflict,” it said.
“It is regrettable that European elites continue supporting the Kiev regime, prolonging the war to the last Ukrainian, and thwarting any progress toward a peaceful settlement.”
A day earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow views the various “fabrications” thrown about by European NATO countries as being primarily aimed at “complicating” the Ukraine peace process and “prolonging the conflict.”
“The West is running out of financial, logistical, and military resources for waging a proxy war,” he said.
Western leaders are desperately trying to “escalate the situation and remain on the warpath,” by advocating for militarization and hyping up an alleged threat from Russia in the hopes that a large conflict will “erase” their political failures, the top diplomat said.
I was canceled by three newspapers for criticizing Israel
By Dave Seminara | Responsible Statecraft | December 9, 2025
As a freelance writer, I know I have to produce copy that meets the expectations of editors and management. When I write opinion pieces, I know well that my arguments should closely align with the publication’s general outlook. But I’ve always believed that if my views on any particular topic diverged from an outlet I’m writing for, it was acceptable to express those viewpoints in other publications.
But I’ve recently discovered that this general rule does not apply to criticism of Israel.
In fact, it appears that publications I’ve had an ongoing relationship with up until recently have canceled me for articles I wrote in other media outlets that were critical of the Israeli government and the Israel lobby in the United States.
In recent years, I penned more than 100 columns for prominent right-leaning publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, and The Daily Telegraph. I’ve covered woke corporations, illegal immigration, inflation, foreign policy, the State Department, censorship, Florida politics and a host of other issues. I never once pitched a column concerning Israel to the aforementioned publications because I know the editors and leadership at those outlets are staunch backers of unlimited U.S. aid to Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his merciless assault on Gaza, not to mention President Trump’s efforts to deport foreign critics of Israel, his administration, and other related issues.
I have never seen an opinion column in The Journal, City Journal or The Telegraph expressing compassion for Palestinian victims of Israel’s military assaults. In fact, quite the opposite. For example, Ilya Shapiro, a contributing editor and the Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute, said in a since deleted tweet, “Ethnic cleansing would be too kind for Gaza.” That comment isn’t an outlier. The prevailing wisdom at these publications is to excuse and defend the behavior of the Israeli government, regardless of the situation.
And so, when I wanted to express my disgust at the outrageous number of civilian casualties in Gaza — the Israeli military has killed at least 70,000 Palestinians according to the U.N., including more than 18,000 children — and lament the Trump administration’s efforts to deport people for criticizing Israel, I never considered pitching editors at those three publications.
Between November 2023 and May 2024, I published several columns, including for The Spectator and on my personal Substack, Unpopular Opinions, criticizing Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel. I think my critiques were mild — for example, I never categorized Israel’s actions as a genocide. Given Israel’s flagrant human rights violations, my commentaries were well within the boundaries of how most Americans feel about the carnage in Gaza. For example, in a column I wrote in November, 2023, I noted that:
“I was horrified by the October 7 Hamas attacks. And I was disgusted to see some self-proclaimed pro-Palestine advocates celebrating or justifying the barbaric attack act. This was a horrific act of terrorism, and there’s no excuse for it.”
But I added that I was disappointed with “how many conservative politicians and conservative media refuse to articulate any concern for thousands of innocent Palestinians killed or the more than one million rendered homeless.”
In subsequent columns, I criticized the Republican Party for its fixation on Israel and argued how hypocritical many on the right are in conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism in order to silence critics of the Jewish state.
None of my editors at The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph or City Journal ever said a word to me about what I wrote in these columns. But my relationships with these three outlets deteriorated rapidly and dramatically after I started covering the topic. Prior to being cut off by the Wall Street Journal, I published 34 opinion columns for them since 2017. My relationship with the opinion editor, James Taranto, was good enough that when he visited Tampa, where I live, in 2022, he and his wife took me out to dinner.
I knew where Taranto stood on Israel, having once called Rachel Corrie, an American citizen who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting Israel’s settlement policy, a “dopey… advocate for terror.” Prior to writing critically of Israel, my success rate in pitching columns to Taranto was roughly 30-40% positive. Since then, he has rejected 12 consecutive pitches, all on topics unrelated to the Middle East. Previously, he would send a generic one-liner when he rejected an idea. “I won’t be able to use this, but thanks for letting me see it.” Lately, my pitches don’t even merit a formal rejection. I went from being a regular contributor and on friendly enough terms to socialize after-hours, to being ghosted.
My apparent dismissal at City Journal, where I contributed 62 columns from 2020-2024, took longer and my editor there, Paul Beston, was kinder, but the result was the same. Rather than ignoring me, Beston would apologetically respond to my pitches weeks or even months later once the idea was too late to publish. He also stopped asking me to write columns for the website. Around the same time, the Manhattan Institute, which produces City Journal, fired prominent conservative economist Glenn Loury for being too critical of Israel, so perhaps there was a purge of Israel critics afoot. At least one other Manhattan Institute fellow who was critical of Israel, Christopher Brunet, was also fired last year.
My seeming dismissal at the rabidly pro-Israel Daily Telegraph, where I contributed 30 columns from 2023-2024, was similar to the City Journal experience. My editor there, Lewis Page, was cordial enough, but he, too, started to ignore my emails and stopped asking me to write for his publication. In one case, he asked me to write a column but then never published it.
Is it a coincidence that these three prominent, pro-Israel publications all stopped publishing me last year as I started to criticize Israel in other outlets? It’s conceivable, but quite unlikely given the zero tolerance for dissent on Israel that now permeates much of conservative media.
RS asked Taranto whether the Journal had stopped publishing me because of my views on Israel. Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot — whom I did not work with — responded that Taranto had passed on our inquiry and said, “I don’t recall ever reading a piece by Mr. Seminara on Israel or Gaza, so I have no idea what his views on those subjects are.”
Lewis Page at the Telegraph said my version of this story is “false” and that neither he nor anyone else at his publication knew that I had been critical of Israel. He added that the paper has not “consciously stopped using” my copy.
A spokesperson I do not know and never worked with at City Journal said that they are unaware of my position on Israel. Of course, I don’t expect any of these publications to say, “We stopped commissioning you because we don’t agree with your position on Israel.”
The bottom line is that my views on Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel are in line with those of the majority of Americans and even of a majority of American Jews. According to a Washington Post poll conducted in October, 69% of American Jews think Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and 39% believe it is guilty of genocide. A Pew Research poll released around the same time revealed that 59% of Americans have a negative opinion of the Israeli government. And in a September New York Times/Sienna poll, 35% of Americans said they sympathize with Israel, while 36% said they side with Palestinians.
I am not sorry for criticizing Israel even though it has cost me professionally. In fact, I was probably too cautious and diplomatic in my critiques. But I think it’s a very sad statement on conservative media when news outlets that many Republicans trust have so little tolerance for dissent on a critical issue that undermines American national interests and damages our credibility around the world.
During the crazy, cultural revolution days of 2020, when statues were being toppled and progressives were claiming scalps on a weekly basis, I thought it was just the left that embraced cancel culture and silenced enemies through intimidation. Now I know better.
Dave Seminara is a writer and former diplomat based in St. Petersburg, Florida. He’s the author of four non-fiction books, including, most recently, “Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed & the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth.” He vlogs about his travels on his YouTube channel, @MadTraveler.
Patrik Baab: War Propaganda Destroyed Media & Freedom of Speech
Glenn Diesen | December 6, 2025
Patrik Baab is a German journalist and best-selling author who reported on both sides of the frontline in Ukraine. Baab argues that war propaganda has destroyed the credibility of the media and freedom of speech.
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Pro-Israel Forces Intensify Effort To Control American Discourse
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | December 4, 2025
Across the American political spectrum, support for the State of Israel is steadily eroding. With the long-running, staggeringly expensive redistribution of American wealth and weapons to one of the world’s most prosperous countries under unprecedented threat, Israel’s advocates inside the United States are growing increasingly desperate to suppress the facts, opinions, questions and imagery that are causing this sea change.
Pro-Israel forces have long worked to limit and shape US discourse to Israel’s advantage. However, the intensity and novelty of what’s taking place in 2025 — from the government-coerced transfer of a social media platform to pro-Israel billionaires, to the jailing and attempted deportation of a student for writing an opinion piece, and more — deserves the attention of every American who values free expression, an enlightened electorate, and independence from foreign influence.
Many Americans know that Congress and President Biden teamed up in 2024 to force the Chinese company ByteDance to divest its US operation of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, yet few realize this unusual intervention was motivated in large part by a desire to serve the interests of Israel.
Though politicians pointed to the supposed Chinese menace lurking inside the app — while revealing their lack of sincerity by continuing to use it themselves — the catalyst for the extraordinary legislation’s passage was a sea of viral content illuminating Israel’s rampage in Gaza, casting Palestinians in empathetic light, and questioning the legitimacy of the political philosophy that is Zionism.
The idea that passage of the ban was largely about Israel is no conspiracy theory. American politicians who supported the compelled divestiture of TikTok have candidly said so themselves. Sharing a stage with Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2024, then-Senator Mitt Romney said:
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature. You look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I’d note that’s of real interest to the president, who will get the chance to take action in that regard.”
Similarly, Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told a webinar that pro-Palestinian student protests were “exactly why we included the TikTok bill… because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.”
Of course, mere divestiture wouldn’t guarantee that TikTok would start suppressing anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian content in the United States. To have the desired effect, the buyer — who required White House approval — would have to be an ardent supporter of Israel. That’s just how things played out. In September, President Trump approved the sale of TikTok’s US operations to a joint venture led by Larry Ellison, the founder of tech-titan Oracle and the fourth-richest man in the world.
Ellison has expressed his “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and has been a major benefactor of the Israeli Defense Forces, via donations to IDF-supporting organizations. He spent at least $3 million on Marco Rubio’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, after being assured by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations that Rubio would “be a great friend to Israel.” There are other Israel-favoring billionaires in the consortium now controlling TikTok’s American presence, among them NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch and investment trader Jeff Yass.
Americans were propagandized into fearing Chinese control of TikTok users’ data. Now that data will be controlled by Oracle, a firm whose founder has described Israel as his own nation, said “there is no greater honor” than supporting the IDF, and invited Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a seat on the board. It’s also a firm with strong business ties to the Israel government, and a firm whose Israel-born executive vice chair and former CEO last year declared, “For [Oracle] employees, it’s clear: If you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.”
A few months before the TikTok divestiture was finalized, the company installed former IDF soldier and self-described “passionate” Zionist Erica Mindel as TikTok’s hate speech manager in July. Weeks later, and just days before the transfer of TikTok’s US operation was approved, the platform posted new guidelines on Sept 13 about what’s allowed on the platform.
Soon after the change, users and content creators began sharing examples of content being deleted by TikTok, with the platform exploiting its vague new rules about “conspiracy theories” and “protected groups” to reject negative content about Israel — wielding the threat of demonetization of repeat offenders. In a recent appearance on the Breaking Points podcast, Guy Christensen, who has 3.4 million TikTok followers, shared his experience:
“What all these videos have in common that have been removed since Sept 13 are that I am talking about Israel, I’m talking about AIPAC’s influence, I’m talking about Larry Ellison and the attempt to put TikTok under Zionist control — I’m criticizing Israel in some way. It’s the same thing I’ve heard from my audience, my friends who are creators. Ever since Sept 13, they’ve had the same exact experience. Videos that are more informational and critical of Israel get removed.”
In a late-September meeting with pro-Israel social media “influencers,” Netanyahu hailed the transfer of TikTok’s US ownership. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield with which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are in social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one.” Expressing hope that, by “talking” with Elon Musk, his X platform could be reshaped to be more Israel-protective too, Netanyahu added, “If we can get those two things, we can get a lot.”
Ellison’s TikTok takeover is troubling enough, but that wasn’t his only media move this year. He also financed his son David’s takeover of Paramount Skydance, the media company that controls many movie and television properties, including CBS. David Ellison quickly installed as head of CBS News Bari Weiss — a self-described “Zionist fanatic” who took a gap year before college to live on an Israeli kibbutz.
Weiss’s history of wrangling over the bounds of acceptable speech vis-a-vis Israel goes back to her sophomore year at Columbia University, when she was part of a group of students who claimed they were subjected to intimidation by Middle East Studies professors over the students’ Zionist views. A university panel found only one of the supposed incidents represented unacceptable conduct.
Both outside observers and network insiders are braced for Weiss to nudge the outlet’s reporting to Israel’s benefit, and there are early indications validating worries about her bias. Citing executive sources inside CBS, the Wall Street Journal reported that foreign correspondent Chris Livesay, who was set to be laid off as part of a downsizing move that preceded Weiss’s arrival, sent Weiss an email expressing his affinity for Israel and claiming he was “bullied” for his beliefs. Weiss intervened and saved Livesay from the layoff. Other correspondents told the Journal that Livesay’s claim about bullying was bogus.
Compounding the expectations that CBS News is about to become a de facto Israel PR outlet, the network’s new ombudsman — the arbiter of editorial concerns — also has strong Zionist credentials. The New York Times describes Kenneth Weinstein as a “firm and vocal champion of Israel.” On X, Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal noted that, “during a 2021… event with Mike Pence, Weinstein touted his Israel lobbyist creds, describing how he’d been groomed by the Tikvah Fund, the Likudnik training network which will award Bari Weiss its Herzl Award this November.” (The Likud Party is the Israeli party led by Netanyahu.)
Summing up the TikTok and CBS moves, Glenn Greenwald wrote, “The minute the American public starts turning against Israel and the US financing of that country, the world’s richest and most fanatical pro-Israel billionaires start buying up large media outlets and TikTok, then install Bari Weiss and an ex-IDF soldier to control content.”
The transfer of TikTok into Israel-friendly hands isn’t the only example of intensified US government intervention in America’s public square on behalf of the tiny Middle Eastern country.
Much of the Trump administration’s war against anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian speech has focused on college campuses. In the most alarming such move in 2025, the Trump administration has arrested, jailed and attempted to deport foreign students for merely voicing their support for Palestinians or opposition to the Israeli government.
The most atrocious example — which Stark Realities examined in depth earlier this year — centers on a 30-year-old, Turkish Tufts University PhD candidate who was arrested on a Boston street and whisked away to a dismal Louisiana prison, just for co-authoring a calmly-written Tufts Daily op-ed urging the university to formally characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and to sell the school’s Israel-associated investments.
This cruelly despotic tactic is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation. In a policy paper, the think tank urged pro-Israel groups and the US government to characterize pro-Palestinian activists as “effectively members of a terrorist support network,” and then use that characterization to target activists for deportations, expulsions from colleges, lawsuits, terminations by employers, and exclusion from “open society.”
Supporters of Israel have long attempted to stifle critics of the Israeli government by smearing them as antisemites. In 2016, that kind of mislabelling was codified in a definition of antisemitism that’s now being embraced by governments, universities and other institutions in the United States and around the world: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism.”
Some elements of the IHRA definition are reasonable, but others irrationally conflate criticism of the State of Israel with hatred of all Jews. For example, the IHRA definition says it’s antisemitic to “claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or to merely “draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
Other, vague elements of the definition are open to creative interpretations, facilitating bogus accusations of bigotry against Israel’s critics. For example, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “apply double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The IHRA also says it’s antisemitic to make statements about the “power of Jews as [a] collective,” which can put someone who talks about the enormous influence of the pro-Israel lobby squarely in the crosshairs.
Similarly, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” a definition that could ensnare people who — right or wrong — advocate for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement for the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, those who want speech to be policed on Israel’s behalf frequently point to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as inherently antisemitic.
As I wrote in another Stark Realities essay, “No Country Has a Right To Exist”:
Those who support the State of Israel are free to present a case that it’s a just arrangement for the 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians “between the river and the sea.” However, painting those who demand a new arrangement as inherently immoral, genocidal or antisemitic is ignorant at best and maliciously misleading at worst.
Doing its part to vilify Israel’s critics and mislead the public and policymakers, the Anti-Defamation League has employed expansive definitions in its numerical tracking of antisemitic incidents — statistics that are unquestioningly quoted by journalists and cited by pro-Israel politicians.
For example, in early 2024, the ADL claimed that, in the first three months after the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel and the IDF’s brutal assault on Gaza, antisemitic incidents skyrocketed 360%. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Jews faced a threat “unprecedented in modern history.” However, the ADL admitted that it was counting as antisemitic incidents all protests that included “anti-Zionist chants and slogans”
Of course, exaggerating the scale of antisemitism does more than facilitate efforts to suppress criticism of Israel: It also helps the ADL justify its existence and boost its fundraising. The ADL’s over-counting is nothing new. In 2017, the ADL claimed antisemitic incidents in the United States had soared by 86% in the first quarter of the year, and major media outlets ran with the story. However, much of the increase springs from the ADL’s decision to include a huge number of bomb threats phoned into US synagogues and schools by a Jew living in Israel.
The IHRA definition is at the forefront of a broad campaign to suppress candid discourse about Israel and Palestine on college campuses, with multiple state governments ordering public schools to use it to determine what can and can’t be said.
Bard College’s Kenneth Stern, a lead drafter of a 2004 antisemitism definition that was subsequently adopted by the IHRA, has spoken out against the weaponization of the definition to stifle discourse at universities. “The history of the abuse of the IHRA definition demonstrates the desire is largely political—it is not so much a desire to identify antisemitism, but rather to label certain speech about Israel as antisemitic,” Stern wrote at the Knight First Amendment Institute.
Even at schools that haven’t adopted the IHRA definition, activists and scholars who are critical of Israel and empathetic to the Palestinians are being subjected to countless false accusations of antisemitism, and universities are being sued by pro-Israel students who claim the schools tolerate antisemitism.
A Stark Realities analysis of an 84-page complaint filed against the University of Pennsylvania found nearly every alleged “antisemitic incident” was merely an instance in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engaged in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with. Eighteen months later, a federal judge agreed. “At worst, Plaintiffs accuse Penn of tolerating and permitting the expression of viewpoints which differ from their own,” Judge Mitchell Goldberg wrote as he dismissed the case.
Courtroom victories, however, can only do so much to counter the chilling effect of campaigns that vilify students, professors and institutions as antisemitic. That’s especially true when university cash flows are threatened.
Major pro-Israel donors have withdrawn or threatened to suspend donations to various schools, and those threats have been credited with forcing out university presidents like Penn’s Liz Magill. Donor pressure has also led schools to adopt the problematic IHRA antisemitism definition, shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and strip Israel-critical professors of chair positions.
The greatest financial pressure being exerted on universities, however, is coming from the Trump administration, which has not only suspended billions of dollars in funding from various universities that are supposed hives of antisemitism, but has also filed lawsuits and hammered schools with fines. Many of them are surrendering, paying the government large sums and making policy and staffing changes. Last week, Northwestern agreed to pay $75 million to the federal government for its alleged failure to fight “antisemitism.” Earlier, Columbia agreed to a $200 million fine payable over three years, and Brown will surrender $50 million.
There are other avenues by which government force is being tapped to squelch criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinians. Dozens of states have passed legislation that bar individuals and businesses from contracting with the state if they boycott or divest from Israel. That led to a bizarre spectacle in which hurricane-battered Texans applying for emergency benefits were asked to verify that they do not and will not boycott Israel. Comparable federal measures have been introduced, but not yet enacted.
Another proposed federal bill is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to use the IHRA definition when evaluating accusations that colleges tolerate antisemitism — essentially codifying a Trump executive order. It sailed through the House in 2024 by a 320-91 vote, but stalled in the Senate this year amid bipartisan concerns about the definition. Seven amendments had been attached in committee, including one clarifying that criticism of the Israeli government isn’t antisemitism.
Tellingly, champions of the bill said amendments like that were poison pills that would render it un-passable.
The missing ‘If’ that could get us killed: How Western media distorted Putin’s words about war with Europe
The message was rather simple: Russia is ready to respond to aggression. But you wouldn’t know it if you read the headlines
By Timur Tarkhanov | RT | December 4, 2025
A depressing pattern has taken hold in the way parts of the Western press cover Russia: take a volatile subject, strip it of the conditional language that contains it, and then act surprised when the public grows more fearful, more hardline, and less able to distinguish deterrent rhetoric from an intent to attack.
The latest example is the frenzy around Vladimir Putin’s remark about Europe and war. In Russian, his meaning is not subtle: “We are not going to fight Europe, I’ve said it a hundred times already. But if Europe suddenly wants to fight and starts, we are ready right now.” A refusal paired with a threat of readiness if attacked. Many headlines flattened that into “Russia is ready for war with Europe.”
In news reporting, headlines aren’t neutral labels. They are the main event. They set the emotional temperature for millions who will never read beyond the first line, especially on mobile feeds where nuance is a luxury and outrage is a business model. So when a headline drops the words “we are not going to” and discards “if Europe starts,” it’s not just a shortening – it reverses the reader’s perception. The public walks away believing Putin signaled readiness to launch a war against Europe, not readiness in response to one. In a moment when misperception can harden policy and policy can harden into escalation, that is reckless.
Worse, this kind of framing does real political work. It amplifies the narrative long championed by certain European officials – that Russia is poised to attack the EU next, regardless of evidence. If you swallow the headline alone, those officials sound validated. If you read the quote, at minimum you have to admit the claim is not what was said. Maybe you’ll even start asking questions. That difference is the hinge between journalism and propaganda.
This pattern didn’t start this week. Since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, Western coverage has too often treated Russia’s declared motives as unworthy of even being stated without scare quotes, while the most intimidating interpretation of Russian intent is treated as default reality. “Imperial ambition.” “War of conquest.” “Russia wants to reconstitute an empire.” The public is denied the basic reporting function of hearing why Russia is doing what it’s doing. Instead we get a morality play with prewritten roles: one side’s motives are analyzed in paragraphs; the other’s are assumed in headlines.
The same sloppiness shows up in claims that Putin “stalled” peace talks. Negotiations are not a TikTok trend; they are an exhausting grind of sequencing, verification, backchannels, domestic politics, and face-saving. Many major conflicts have required long, ugly diplomatic marathons before anything moved. The Vietnam peace talks, for example, dragged on for years. To declare “stalling” because a meeting ended without a breakthrough is to confuse diplomacy with customer service: “Where is my peace deal? I ordered it an hour ago.”
And if we’re going to talk about “stalling,” we should at least look honestly at which actors have been most allergic to acknowledging battlefield realities. The Russia-US channel – whatever one thinks of it – is the only vector that has shown any capacity to force trade-offs into the open, because it involves the parties with the leverage to make and enforce them. By contrast, the EU and the UK’s public posture has often resembled a maximalist wish list: demands unmoored from the war’s trajectory, presented as prerequisites rather than negotiating positions. It has hardened expectations so thoroughly that any compromise looks like betrayal, and any diplomacy looks like surrender. That is the worst kind of stalling – not merely delaying talks, but by making talks politically impossible.
It didn’t have to be like this, and it isn’t universal. Some outlets have demonstrated that integrity is still possible: they lead with the full quote and include the conditional. They are at least honest with the readers about what was said and what was implied, allowing them to distinguish threat from intent. Far from being “soft on Putin”, this is basic journalistic competence. In a climate where fear sells and escalation eats, and the Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, faithful quotation is a mandatory public safety measure.
Timur Tarkhanov is a journalist and media executive.
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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