Moscow blasts CNN’s ‘false’ US school closure report
RT | December 30, 2016
The CNN is spreading ‘false information’ by reporting that Russia closed the Anglo-American School of Moscow in retaliation to a new set of US sanctions, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“It’s a lie. It appears the White House has completely lost its mind and is now coming up with sanctions against their own children,” Zakharova commented on the report on her Facebook page.
“The CNN broadcaster and other Western media have again distributed false information citing official US sources,” the spokeswoman added.
The Anglo-American School of Moscow has also denied media speculation, with director Ian Forster writing on Facebook that the “school is planning to open as scheduled following the New Year’s break.”
Earlier, CNN cited an unnamed US official who claimed that the Russian authorities ordered the closure of the Anglo-American School of Moscow, attended by children from the US, UK, and Canadian embassy staffs, and a US Embassy vacation house in Serebryany Bor.
The report was quickly picked up by other Western media outlets, which came up with juicy, Star Wars-style headlines for their stories, including “Russia Strikes Back: Moscow Closes US School in Response to Obama Sanctions,” from ABC, and “Putin fires back by closing American school and embassy vacation home in Moscow…” from the Daily Mail.
The CNN source called the move a direct retaliation to the closure of two Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York, which US President Barack Obama announced on Thursday as part of a set of new sanctions against Russian.
According to Obama, the countermeasures were introduced in response to what he called “the Russian government’s aggressive harassment of US officials and cyber operations aimed at the US election.”
Thirty-five Russian diplomats have been expelled from the US, and nine Russian entities, including the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) and the FSB (Federal Security Service), added to Washington’s blacklist.
The facilities in Maryland and New York, located in the coastal area, were used by Russian Embassy staff for recreational purposes. Many diplomats and their families who went there to celebrate New Year’s were forced to leave after the announcement of the sanctions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow will not respond in kind to the US restrictions.
“We won’t cause problems for American diplomats. We’re not going to expel anybody. We won’t forbid their families and kids from using familiar vacation spots during the New Year holidays,” he said.
“Moreover, I invite the children of all American diplomats with accreditation in Russia to New Year’s and Christmas festivities in the Kremlin,” Putin added.
Though the Russian leader expressed regret that President Obama is concluding his term “in such a way,” he added: “I still wish him and his family a Happy New Year.
“I also wish President-elect Donald Trump and the entire American people a Happy New Year!”
According to Putin, Russia will “take further moves on restoring Russian-American relations based on the policies that the administration of President-elect Donald Trump adopts.
READ MORE:
US expels 35 Russian diplomats, closes 2 compounds
Putin: Russia will not expel anyone in response to US sanctions
The Information War on Syria and Beyond
By Rick Sterling | Dissident Voice | December 30, 2016
The U.S. establishment is not happy. They are not content with largely dominating media narratives on Syria and other critical foreign policy issues; they want total dominance.
Thus we now have the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act signed into law on December 24 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017. The bill will mandate the U.S. Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence and other federal agencies to “create a Global Engagement Center to fight against propaganda from foreign governments”.
The bill directs the future Center to be formed in 180 days and to share expertise among agencies and to “coordinate with allied nations”.
This bill was initiated in March 2016, before widespread allegations of “Russian hacking” began. Hillary Clinton voiced strong support for the bill: “It’s imperative that leaders in both the private sector and the public sector step up to protect our democracy, and innocent lives.”
Irony: USA is the Major Purveyor of Propaganda
This bill is remarkable because the US government and agencies appear to be major purveyors not victims of propaganda and disinformation. A good recent example is the accusations of Russian hacking at the Democratic National Committee and Clinton private email servers to “influence’ the U.S. election. Despite the widespread accusations, here is little or no no public evidence in support of this and much to contradict the claims. An analysis by veteran intelligence professionals leads to the conclusion this was a leak, NOT a “hack”, and allegations of hacking the election are “baseless”. On top of that, there is now a credible source, a former UK Ambassador, who says he received the Clinton email data from a disgruntled DNC staffer and delivered the data to WikiLeaks. The accusation that the US election was influenced by Russian hacking appears to be an example of what they claim to oppose: fake news and disinformation for political purposes.
There is a long history of U.S. disinformation and propaganda. Former CIA agents Philip Agee and John Stockwell documented how it was done decades ago. For the past ten years there has been increasing emphasis on using supplied, trained and paid “activists” and “independent journalists” along with social media to spread false stories and news and to undermine or discredit journalists who challenge the orthodoxy. Disinformation, fake news and propaganda are no longer the province of the CIA; it’s managed by the State Department using staff and contractors. The new bill to “counter foreign propaganda” will provide tax payer money and escalate this aspect of the information war.
Propaganda and Disinformation on Syria
Syria is a good case study in the modern application of information warfare. In her book “Hard Choices”, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that the U.S. provided “support for (Syrian) civilian opposition groups, including satellite -linked computers, telephones, cameras, and training for more than a thousand activists, students and independent journalists.”
A huge amount of money has gone to “activists” and “civil society” groups in Syria as well as in the USA and west. These groups have shaped and manipulated public opinion. The fact they are recipients or contractors of one or more governments directly involved in trying to overthrow the Syrian government has generally been ignored or hidden.
In North America, representatives from the Syrian Local Coordination Committees (LCC) were frequent guests on popular media programs such as Democracy Now. The message was clear: there is a “revolution” in Syria against a “brutal regime” personified in Bashar al Assad. It was not mentioned that the “Local Coordination Committees” have been primarily funded by the West, specifically the Office for Syrian Opposition Support which was founded by the United States Department of State and UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
More recently, news and analysis about Syria has been conveyed through the filter of the White Helmets, also known as Syrian Civil Defense. The White Helmets were stated to be neutral, non-partisan, civilian volunteers courageously carrying out rescue work in the war zone. In fact, the group is none of the above. It was initiated by the US and UK using a British military contractor and Brooklyn based marketing company. While they may have performed some genuine rescue operations, the White Helmets is primarily a media organization with a political goal: to promote NATO intervention in Syria. The manipulation of public opinion using the White Helmets and promoted by the NY Times and Avaaz petition for a No Fly Zone in Syria is documented here. The White Helmets hoax continues to be widely believed and receive uncritical promotion but is increasingly being exposed as the creation of a “shady PR firm”. White Helmet individuals have been used as the source for important news stories despite a track record of deception.
Recent Propaganda: Blatant Lies?
As the armed groups in east Aleppo recently lost ground and then collapsed, western governments and allied media went into a frenzy of accusations based on reports from sources connected with the armed opposition. CNN host Wolf Blitzer described Aleppo as “falling” in a “slaughter of these women and children” while CNN host Jake Tapper referred to “genocide by another name”. The Daily Beast published the claims of the Aleppo Siege Media Center. They titled it “Doomsday is held in Aleppo” and claimed the Syrian army was executing civilians, burning them alive and “20 women committed suicide in order not to be raped.” These sensational claims were widely broadcast without verification.
In fact, the news and reports on CNN and throughout western media were coming from highly biased sources and many of the claims can be accurately described as propaganda and disinformation. As one indication, the Aleppo Media Center was created by the Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO) based on K Street in Washington DC, the base of operations for Public Relations and Marketing firms.
In sharp contrast to the wailing and dubious reports of CNN and most western media, RT and other media outlets have broadcast videos and interviews showing popular celebrations at the “liberation of Aleppo”. Jan Oberg of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research has published a powerful photo essay describing his eye witness observations in Aleppo including the happiness of civilians from east Aleppo reaching the government controlled areas of west Aleppo. Dr. Nabil Antaki, a medical doctor from Aleppo, describes the liberation of Aleppo in an interview titled “Aleppo is Celebrating, Free from Terrorists, the Western Media Misinformed.” The first Christmas celebrations in Aleppo in four years are shown here, replete with marching band members in Santa Claus outfits. Journalist Vanessa Beeley has published testimonies of civilians from East Aleppo. The happiness of civilians at their liberation is clear.
Contrary to the mythology of rebel “liberated zones” , there is persuasive evidence the armed groups were never popular in Aleppo. American journalist James Foley described the situation in 2012 like this:
Aleppo, a city of about 3 million people, was once the financial heart of Syria. As it continues to deteriorate, many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition — one that is hampered by infighting and a lack of structure, and deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups.
The rebels in Aleppo are predominantly from the countryside, further alienating them from the urban crowd that once lived here peacefully, in relative economic comfort and with little interference from the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad.
The Overall Narrative on Syria
Analysis of the Syrian conflict boils down to two competing narratives. One narrative, pervasive in the West, is that the conflict is a fight for freedom and democracy against a brutal regime. This description has been promoted in the West and Gulf, in those countries which have been fueling the conflict from the start. This narrative is also put forward by some self-styled “anti-imperialists” who seek a “Syrian revolution”.
The other narrative is that the conflict is essentially a war of aggression against a sovereign state. The aggressors include western NATO countries plus Gulf monarchies, Israel and Jordan.
Censorship and domination of western media is so thorough that one rarely hears the second narrative. This is true of much of the liberal and progressive media as well as mainstream. For example, listeners and viewers of the generally progressive TV and radio program Democracy Now have rarely if ever heard the second narrative described in any detail. Democracy Now news has frequently broadcast the explanations of Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and others associated with the US position. They have rarely if ever broadcast the explanation and viewpoint of the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, the Syrian Foreign Minister or countless analysts inside Syria and around the world who have written about and follow events there closely.
Democracy Now has done repeated interviews with proponents of the “Syrian revolution” and never with analysts who say this is a war of aggression. This, despite the fact that many prominent international figures see it as such. For example, the former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua and former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D’Escoto, has said, “What the U.S. government is doing in Syria is tantamount to a war of aggression, which, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, is the worst possible crime a State can commit against another State.”
In many areas of politics, the public affairs program Democracy Now is excellent and challenges corporate media. However in this area, coverage of the Syrian conflict, their broadcast is biased, one-sided and echoes the news and analysis of mainstream western corporate media. This shows the extent of domination of foreign policy news that already exists.
Suppressing and Censoring Challenges
One of the primary purposes of the new Global Engagement Center will be to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation.” This is another remarkable development because there is already widespread censorship and “countering” of alternative analyses of critical international issues. In an article titled “Controlling the Narrative on Syria,” Louis Allday describes the criticisms and attacks on journalists Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal for straying from the “approved” western narrative on Syria. Some of the bullying and abuse has come from precisely those people, such as Robin Yassin-Kassab, who have been frequent guests in liberal western media.
Recently Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett returned to North America after being in Syria and Aleppo. She conveyed a very different image and criticized biased media coverage of the Syrian conflict. She pointed to western media broadcasting claims without credible sources or evidence. Bartlett appeared at a United Nations press conference and then did numerous interviews across the country during a speaking tour. During the course of her talks and presentation, Bartlett criticized the White Helmets and questioned whether it was true that Al Quds Hospital in opposition held East Aleppo was attacked and destroyed as claimed.
Snopes is a useful website which has exposed many urban legends and false rumors. Unfortunately they have many internal challenges and have become inconsistent in their investigations. In an examination titled “White Helmet Hearsay” Snopes writer Bethania Palmer says claims the White Helmets are “linked to terrorists” is “unproven”. She overlooks numerous videos, photos, and other reports showing White Helmet members celebrating Nusra/Al Qaeda battle victory, picking up the bodies of civilians executed by Nusra executioner, and alternatively being rebel/terrorist fighter with weapon but later wearing a White Helmet uniform. The “fact check” barely scrapes the surface of public evidence.
The same writer did another shallow “investigation” titled “victim blaming” regarding Bartlett’s critique of White Helmet videos and what happened at the Al Quds Hospital in Aleppo. Bartlett suggests that some White Helmet videos may be fabricated and include the same child at different times. Photographs appear to show the same girl being rescued by White Helmet workers at different places and times. While the similarity in appearance is clear, it is uncertain whether or not this is the same girl.
The Snopes writer goes on to criticize Bartlett for her comments about the reported bombing of the Al Quds Hospital in East Aleppo in April 2016. A statement at the website of Doctors Without Borders says the building was “destroyed and reduced to rubble”. This is clearly false since photos show the building with unclear damage. Five months later, the September 2016 report by Doctors Without Borders says the top two floors of the building were destroyed and the ground floor Emergency Room damaged yet they re-opened in two weeks. The many inconsistencies and contradictions in the statements of Doctors Without Borders resulted in an open letter to them. In their last report Doctors Without Borders (MSF) acknowledges that “MSF staff did not directly witness the attack and has not visited Al Quds Hospital since 2014”.
Bartlett referenced satellite images taken before and after the reported attack on the hospital. These images do not show severe damage and it is unclear whether or not there is any damage to the roof. This was the basis for Bartlett’s statement. In the past week, independent journalists have visited the scene of Al Quds Hospital and report that that the top floors of the building are still there and damage is unclear. The Snopes investigation about Bartlett’s statement is superficial and ignores much larger issues of accuracy and integrity. Instead it appears to be an effort to undermine the overall eye-witness observations and analysis provided by a journalist who is challenging the mainstream narrative.
The Coming New McCarthyism?
U.S. propaganda and disinformation on Syria has been overall effective in misleading much of the population. Most Americans are unaware how many billions of tax payer dollars have been spent on yet another “regime change” attempt. Many liberal and progressive news outlets have failed to challenge the propaganda and disinformation on Syria. It has been left to RT and a host of smaller media outlets to challenge the government and mainstream media.
The passage of HR5181 “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation”, suggests that the ruling powers seek to escalate suppression of news and analysis which runs counter to their narrative. Despite their current dominance in the media and information arena, that is not enough. They seek to further squelch opposing voices. The bill calls for “countering” and “refuting” what they deem to be propaganda and disinformation. A slush fund of $20M is provided to hire or reward “civil society groups, NGOs, journalists and private companies “ who participate in the campaign.
Progressives need to prepare for the escalation of the information war.
Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist and member of Syria Solidarity Movement. He can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com.
Buoyant Putin and Sinking Western Mis-Leaders
By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.12.2016
Future historians may well record 2016 a vintage year for Russian President Vladimir Putin. At any rate, at this point we can say it has been a good year for the Russian leader and his country’s international standing. Even Western media, which did its best to discredit, even demonize, Putin have had to admit so, albeit begrudgingly.
This week, the London Financial Times described the Russian leader as «Buoyant Putin». While last week, the Washington Post headlined: «Moscow has the world’s attention. For Putin, that’s a win».
The Washington Post surveyed some of the key developments over the past year as being in Putin’s favor, including a shaky European Union and the British Brexit vote to quit the bloc, an unwieldy NATO military alliance unsure of its purpose, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and the retaking of the strategic Syrian city of Aleppo.
The victory by the Syrian army in Aleppo, crucially aided by Russian military power, was surely a crowning achievement for Putin. When Putin ordered intervention in Syria at the end of 2015, it was predicted by US President Barack Obama that the move would result in a quagmire for Russia. A year later, Putin’s decisive intervention has been vindicated as rolling back a jihadist campaign to destroy Syria.
Syrians celebrating the defeat of extremists in Aleppo have not only confounded earlier predictions; the «liberation», as it is being feted by Syrians, serves to expose Western governments and their media as having grossly distorted the war as some kind of popular uprising against a «tyrannical regime», rather than being what it is: a foreign-backed criminal conspiracy for regime change deploying jihadi terror proxies.
So the Russian-backed military campaign in Syria is a clear winning event for Vladimir Putin.
However, on the range of other world events outlined above, while they may be said to be in Putin’s favor, it is more a case of denial by Western leaders about their own failures, instead of attributing these setbacks to the alleged machinations of the Russian leader.
Putin may indeed be «buoyant». But it is also true that the mixed political fortunes are due to the sinking of Western mis-leaders through their own incompetence and baleful policies.
The Washington Post article cited above had this to say: «The Russian leader is winning because the post-Cold War order he has railed against has been thrown into chaos, and the Kremlin’s fingerprints are widely seen to be all over it».
Just who is «widely seeing» the Kremlin’s alleged depredations is not specified by the Washington Post. But a safe assumption is that the newspaper is being led by US intelligence and the CIA in particular, whose multi-million-dollar links to the outlet’s owner Jeff Bezoz have been documented elsewhere by Wayne Madsen.
It is true that Putin has often deplored the post-Cold War order of American unipolar ambitions, its disregard for international law and its conceited «exceptionalism» for unleashing military violence to enforce foreign interests. Putin has said that such policy is the fount of chaos in international relations. If anything, he has been proven right when we survey the conflict-ridden mess of the Middle East from US wars, supposed «nation-building» and regime-change operations. But to then attribute this chaos of the post-Cold War as having the «Kremlin’s fingerprints all over it» is an absurdity.
The same goes for other aspects of post-Cold War «chaos». The election of Donald Trump to the White House is alleged by the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC and other US media giants as being the result of Putin overseeing Russian computer hackers interfering in American democracy. Russia has rejected those claims as «ridiculous» – as has Trump.
Rather than dealing with political and social reality of internal decay, the American establishment has tried to divert the cause to alleged Russian malfeasance. The reality is, however, that popular American sentiment is one of disgust with the Washington establishment and its mis-leaders in both main parties, Democrats and Republicans. That disgust embroils the mainstream media which is seen to be an integral part of a corrupt, venal establishment.
To try to lay the «blame» for Trump’s election on Russian cyber-attacks is an insult to a large section of the American citizenry. It is also a sign of chronic denial by the Washington establishment that decades of economic and foreign policy are in shambles – a shambles of its own making.
The same too for the Brexit referendum held in June which saw the stunning result of Britons wanting to quit the European Union. On the back of CIA-inspired claims about Russian interference, British politicians who are miffed over the Brexit result have parlayed similar claims that the Kremlin’s meddling was behind that outcome. Russia has also hit back to rubbish the British claims.
But rather than getting a grip on reality, the official Western paranoia about alleged Russian subversiveness is becoming even more fevered.
With hotly contested national elections coming up next year across Europe, incumbent governments are decrying what they «discern» as Russian interference to push populist, anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties. Voice of America reported this week: «Europe braces for Russian cyber assault before 2017 elections» in Netherlands, France and Germany.
VOA added: «As the chief European architect of sanctions against Russia, analysts say German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the European leader Moscow would most like to see voted out of power».
As with the Brexit and Trump, it is an elitist insult to citizens’ intelligence and their democratic rights, by imposing what is a scare-campaign to discredit widespread popular discontent with establishment governments and the status quo.
People across the West, the US and Europe, are simply infuriated by elitist governments that pursue failed policies of economic austerity and a pro-Atlanticist Cold War geopolitical agenda of hostility towards Russia, inflating a NATO monstrosity based on Russophobia, and slavishly following American imperialism around the world.
Syria may have proven to be a triumph for Putin and his principled stand to defend Syrian sovereignty from a US-led covert war for regime change. But Syria also represents an unmitigated disaster for Washington and its Atlanticist European acolytes.
The massive influx of refugees from Syria and other Middle East war zones is the direct result of the US and its NATO allies waging illegal wars and sponsoring terrorist proxies – the latter in the mendacious notion of being «moderate rebels».
The terror attacks that have shocked France and Germany over the past year – the latest one in Berlin when 12 people at a Christmas market were killed by an alleged jihadist asylum-seeker plowing a 25-ton lorry into them – are the corollary of Hollande and Merkel being complicit in US imperialist wars across the Middle East.
Merkel’s «open door» policy to a million refugees is a failed policy. That judgment is not based on racism or xenophobia. Merkel’s failure is due to her allowing Germany to become an escape valve for US, British and French criminal machinations of regime change in the Middle East.
So it has been a good year for Putin and Russia’s international standing generally – the recent appalling assassination of ambassador Andrey Karlov in Ankara notwithstanding.
It’s also been an atrocious year for Western politicians of the Atlanticist mold. But their downfall is due to their own corruption and incompetence. To seek to scapegoat Vladimir Putin and Russia as «interfering» or «sowing chaos» is a contemptible denial of Western official culpability.
Such is the collapse in official Western politics and institutions, including the establishment media, that the more they spin the anti-Russian narrative, the more popular revolt will grow against their «mis-leaders».
If 2016 becomes a vintage year for Russia, for the West it is proving to be year when the official political vessels cracked open with bitter contents.
Lying and Looking Ridiculous
By Brian Cloughley | CounterPunch | December 30, 2016
The Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels is generally thought to have said that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” In fact he didn’t state that, exactly, but based his marketing of malevolence largely on the premise that “credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false.” What he did say, however, was “the English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”
There is a problem, however, in that although lie-tellers are ridiculous in the eyes of those who know the facts, there are very many people who don’t know the facts because they are either deliberately kept in the dark or are so closed-minded as to be easy targets.
Not much has changed on the propaganda front in seventy-five years, and the malevolent Goebbels would feel familiar with modern developments as regards the Western Establishment’s campaign against President Putin and the movement towards Russia-America rapprochement, as seemingly signalled by President-elect Trump.
On December 16, for example, USA Today reported that “President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial soft spot for Russia is based on decades of courting wealthy Russians to buy condos in his luxury high-rises and invest in his other real estate ventures.”
This line of attack is intriguing because the high-circulation USA Today is owned by the Gannett Company, which “in 2010 increased executive salaries and bonuses . . . Bob Dickey, Gannett’s US newspapers division president, was paid $3.4 million in 2010, up from $1.9 million the previous year. The next year, the company laid off 700 U.S. employees to cut costs.” No luxury high-rises for Gannett employees, then, unless they’re in the top echelon. And although Gannett looks ridiculous—and hypocritical—there aren’t many people who care.
In Britain the Guardian, usually an objective source of news and comment, went with the flow of anti-Russia overkill and warned that “Alarm over the rise of Donald Trump reached a new pitch early this week as officials in Washington worried that the United States has elected a leader who may be uniquely blind to threats posed by Russia.” It didn’t mention what the threats might be, but did have the honesty to end with the words of President Putin that “as I have repeatedly said, it’s not our fault that Russian-American relations are in such a poor state. But Russia wants and is ready to restore fully fledged relations with the United States.”
Of course Russia wants to have good relations with other countries. Such a sensible approach results in commercial benefit and social harmony rather than disharmony and confrontation. But in the period when Russia was trying to rebuild from the dire days of Soviet ideology the West expanded the US-NATO military alliance to 28 countries from 16, and recently deployed US-NATO forward tactical headquarters, thousands of troops, and flights of combat and intelligence-gathering aircraft to countries on Russia’s borders.
As I noted a couple of weeks ago, “In Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia the Alliance has established ‘NATO Force Integration Units’ which are advanced military headquarters whose Mission is ‘to improve cooperation and coordination between NATO and national forces, and prepare and support exercises and any deployments needed’.”
Then some governments and their media became agitated when Russia deployed defensive weapons within its own territory in order to counter the US-NATO movement of armed forces up to is borders.
As reported by Britain’s ultra-right Daily Telegraph, owned by the creepy twin Barclay brothers who own London’s Ritz Hotel and many luxury high-rises (and hate the European Union, while living in the haven of tax-relaxed Monaco), NATO “described Moscow’s decision to send state-of-the-art Bastion missile-launchers to Kaliningrad, which borders Nato members Poland and Lithuania, as ‘aggressive military posturing’.” There was no mention made of President Putin’s explanation that Russia considers it important to take countermeasures against NATO’s expansion and “aim our missile systems at those facilities which we think pose a threat to us.”
As observed by Goebbels, the English propagandists “keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” But you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.
Consistent with the Goebbels line of sticking to skewed presentation, Britain’s defence minister, Michael Fallon, a public figure of mixed repute (he is known for alcoholic capers and was found guilty of drunken driving as well as having swindled the Parliamentary expenses system out of thousands of pounds over many years), was reported by Reuters as declaring that the West had “to be strong against Russian aggression towards NATO . . . Russia is a strategic competitor to us in the West and we have to understand that.”
Fortunately, there are sounder and better informed people than the drunken fiddler Fallon, and one of these is the expert Peter Duncan of University College London whose more sober opinion is that “there is no reason for Russia to want to threaten the sovereignty of the Baltic states in the sense of trying to force them to leave NATO or still less to invade them . . . the Russian economy depends on a prosperous Western European economy.”
The Far-Right Western media ignored Professor Duncan’s balanced summation, just as it disregarded President Putin’s own assurance, given in a little-reported interview with Italy’s Il Corriere della Sera, that “I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO.”
But it’s lies that matter when false dogma is being spread. The US-NATO military alliance doesn’t really believe that Russia is preparing to attack the Baltic States and on December 16 President Obama even informed the world media that in his opinion Russia is “a small country, they’re a weak country” which tends to contradict the propaganda line that Russia is a large country, a “strategic competitor” straining at the leash to invade the Baltic States and create mayhem around the world.
The fact that the US spends 596 billion dollars annually on armaments against Russia’s 66 billion is rarely mentioned (NATO as a whole spends 860 billion) except in reputable journals such as The Economist which on December 17, however, chose to pronounce that Mr Trump’s choice of Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State “is disconcerting” because Mr Tillerson actually displayed “opposition to the sanctions imposed on Russia.”
The Western propaganda line is that everything Russia does is reprehensible to the point of evil, and that any westerner attempting to propose dialogue rather than confrontation is “disconcerting” at best, and in the eyes of the tabloid papers a raving traitor to the values of the plutocrats who own them.
The policies and aspirations of President Putin are being presented by the US-NATO military alliance as contrary to the interests of the Western powers, but no attention has been paid to such as Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, the Russia specialist, Strobe Talbott, who stated the obvious when he observed that President Putin “basically wants to make Russia great again.” And he won’t do that by invading the Baltic States or any other country, as he and the West well know.
It’s unlikely that the anti-Russia warniks will stop lying and being hypocritical and ridiculous, but unfortunately they’ll continue to be believed by a significant number of their targets. The irony is that, as Goebbels didn’t say, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.
Report on Russian hacking: ‘Case of fake news & propaganda’
By Annie Machon | RT | December 30, 2016
An FBI and DHS report on Russia’s alleged hacking of the US presidential election provides no evidence and is a case of fake news and propaganda aimed, at undermining the legitimacy of Trump’s win, says former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon.
The Obama administration on Thursday imposed a set of unprecedented measures against Russia over its alleged attempts to influence the US presidential campaign this year. The new sanctions were unveiled after the release of the report by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
However, the document significantly lacks specifics. It doesn’t explain how the two hacking groups described are linked to the Russian government.
RT asked whistleblower, and former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon what she makes of the evidence.
“This is very much a case of fake news, shall we say. It seems to serve two ends as well,” Machon said.
“On the day when the ceasefire is announced, which has been brokered by Russia and Turkey – this is a story that will run and run in America, not the ceasefire in Syria. It’s all going to be about these Russians, and hacking the election and things like that. I think this is the first stage – this is why it was announced that the Russian diplomats were going to be expelled,” she said.
“On the second point as well, it is a mass expulsion – 35 diplomats being thrown out of the country with no proof, with no sort of real intelligence. I think that has also been done to gain the idea, to solidify in public’s mind in America that actually Russia was involved in hacking the election. Where has that phrase evolved from? We don’t know. It was originally just hacking the DNC [Democratic National Committee] e-mails. So I think it is a sort of two-pronged attack that has been carried out; that has been carefully announced today to achieve that,” she said.
“One further point from that in terms of trying to solidify the fact that the Russians interfered in the democratic process of America – is part of this ongoing process to try to undermine the legitimacy of the election of Donald Trump – the next president,” Machon said.
The Joint Analysis Report (JAR) on “Russian malicious cyber activity” issued by the FBI and the DHS National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) on Thursday begins with a disclaimer which reads: “This report is provided “as is” for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.”
According to Machon, the FBI and DHS are “just covering their backs.”
“They know it’s much rubbish… they are trying to blind people with science, but there’s no real evidence,” she said.
“Running in parallel to this is a more serious investigation that Barack Obama apparently asked the CIA to carry out into this alleged Russian hacking of the election. That report is due to be announced no later than January 20 next year,” Machon said, adding that the timing is “interesting” since it’s the date of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The report by the FBI and DHS doesn’t give any warranties, which “points to the fact that it is pure propaganda and they know it,” Machon told RT.
Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes with her ex-partner, David Shayler. Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a public speaker, writer, media pundit, international tour and event organiser, political campaigner, and PR consultant. She has a rare perspective both on the inner workings of governments, intelligence agencies and the media, as well as the wider implications for the need for increased openness and accountability in both public and private sectors.
NYT ‘distorted & took out of context’ words of Russian anti-doping agency head – RUSADA
RT | December 28, 2016
The New York Times misquoted the acting head of Russia’s anti-doping agency (RUSADA), Anna Antseliovich, the agency said in a statement, contesting the newspaper’s claim that Russia acknowledged the existence of an institutional doping program.
“The words of the acting Director General, Anna Antseliovich, have been distorted and taken out of context,” the statement issued by RUSADA says.
The agency went on to explain that Antseliovich was actually just drawing attention to the fact that Richard McLaren, the Canadian lawyer who compiled a report detailing the results of an investigation into doping allegations against Russia, used the words “institutional conspiracy” instead of “state doping system” in his latest December 9 report.
At that time, McLaren said at a news conference that “it was a cover-up that evolved from uncontrolled chaos to an institutionalized and disciplined medal-winning conspiracy.”
Antseliovich stressed that McLaren ruled out the possibility of the involvement of the Russian leadership in the alleged doping program but she never confirmed the existence of any “institutional conspiracy,” the RUSADA statement emphasizes.
“Unfortunately, [New York Times journalist] Rebecca Ruiz has taken these words out of context and created an impression that the RUSADA executive group acknowledges the existence of the institutional cheating scheme in Russia,” it adds, stressing that “RUSADA… has no authority to confirm or deny such facts.”
The agency then once again re-affirmed its commitment to the fight against doping and strict compliance with the International Anti-doping Codex and Russia’s anti-doping regulations.
On Tuesday, the New York Times published an article titled ‘Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation,’ in which it claimed that Russia “conceded” that its officials carried out “a far-reaching doping operation.”
In its publication, the newspaper cited Antseliovich, as saying “It was an institutional conspiracy.”
The media outlet also cited McLaren telling the paper that he was pleased Russian officials were no longer disputing his finding.
The article was criticized by Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov, who said that it is inconsistent and stressed that Russia insists on the absence of any state-sponsored doping system and makes every effort to fight doping.
“There was not, there is not and there could not be any system of supporting doping in Russia,” Kolobkov told R-Sport.
Kolobkov then drew attention to the fact that Antseliovich “is neither a governmental official, nor a civil servant at all,” as RUSADA is not a governmental organization and is not subordinate to the Russian Sports Ministry.
Stanislav Pozdnyakov, a member of the RUSADA supervisory board and the deputy head of the Russian Olympic Committee, also sharply criticized the article published in the New York Times by calling it a “journalistic fake.”
“The quotes featured in the article were taken out of context of the [interview]. That is why I would call this article a journalistic fake, a bogus story,” he told R-Sport, adding that this type of approach does not help solve the problem of doping that “concerns not only Russia but all sports around the world.”
He also expressed confidence that the sports community would agree with him in his assessment of the New York Times article, and called on foreign journalists to “be more scrupulous about the publication of such materials.”
In response, Rebecca Ruiz insisted that she did not take anything out of context and stressed that all the quotes featured in the article are “correct.”
Ruiz also said that she received confirmation of Russia’s acknowledgement of the existence of the doping program from Vitaly Smirnov, the head of the Russian independent anti-doping commission, although her piece in the New York Times does not feature an exact quote that could back up that statement.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier told journalists: “It was an interview to the New York Times. One should first check how accurate those words were.”
On December 9, McLaren claimed in his report that over 1,000 Russian athletes – in the summer, winter and Paralympic competitions, including 12 Sochi 2014 Olympic medalists – benefited from the alleged plot to conceal positive doping tests.
It followed another McLaren report published in mid-July which focused on the allegation that the Russian Ministry of Sport took part in swapping test samples in Moscow, also claiming that the Federal Security Service (FSB) assisted in the alleged plot.
The probe was based on accusations made in the New York Times by Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, who is due in court in Russia on charges of abuse of authority and his own involvement in doping schemes.
In response, the Russian Sports Ministry said “there is no state-run program promoting doping in sport” and pledged to “fight doping with a zero-tolerance policy.”
Following the release of the second part of McLaren’s findings, Russia was stripped of the Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Championships, which was scheduled to take place in Sochi in February 2017.
Final Christmas Of The Global Warming Fraud
By Tony Heller | The Deplorable Climate Science Blog | December 25, 2016
“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper” – George Orwell
Recognizing that their time is up on January 20, 2017, global warming fraudsters have turned the volume up to eleven with fake news that the Arctic is hot at Christmas.
The Arctic is extremely cold, but there is a very narrow band of relatively mild air running along the Prime Meridian across the pole.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmp_01.fnl.html
Greenland is extremely cold, and has gained a record amount of ice this year.
http://www.summitcamp.org/status/weather/index?period=1week
http://beta.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/
It was all-time record cold -80F in Siberia this week, as the fraudsters behind the climate scam tell the public the Arctic is “super-hot.”
In Surgut a woman was cycling at minus 43C.
Biting cold below minus 60C brings out the best in Siberian face fashion
There are only 90 days per year when the North Pole can melt, and those dates have been running colder than normal in recent years.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Heatwaves in the Arctic have been occurring for as long as people have been visiting there.
Actress Sunburned In Heat Wave At North Pole
The Phoenix – Google News Archive Search
Ice at the pole is currently two meters thick, the same as it was in 1940.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php
In 1940, the ice at the pole was also two meters thick.
The fake news press has been pulling this same Arctic scam for as long as anyone can remember. Arctic conditions are the same as they were 60 years ago, and they have been predicting an ice-free Arctic for as long as anyone can remember.
The Changing Face of the Arctic; The Changing Face of the Arctic – The New York Times
Foxes Guard Facebook Henhouse
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 22.12.2016
The latest mantra of CIA-linked media since the “Pizzagate” leaks of data alleging that Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta and other highly influential political persons in Washington were connected to an unusual pizza place near the White House run by a 41-year old James Achilles Alefantis called Comet Ping Pong, is the need to crack down (i.e. censorship) on what is being called “Fake News.” The latest step in this internet censorship drive is a decision by the murky social media organization called Facebook to hire special organizations to determine if Facebook messages are pushing Fake News or not. Now it comes out that the “fact check” private organizations used by Facebook are tied to the CIA and CIA-related NGO’s including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
In the last weeks of the US Presidential campaign, Wikileaks released a huge number of emails linked to Clinton Campaign Manager, John Podesta. The contents of thousands of emails revealed detailed exchanges between Podesta and the oddly-influential Comet Ping Pong pizza place owner, Alefantis, as well as the Clinton campaign, which held fundraisers at Comet Ping Pong.
The Pizzagate scandal exploded in the final weeks of the US campaign as teams of private researchers documented and posted Facebook, Instagram and other data suggesting that Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong were at the heart of a pedophilia ring that implicated some of the most prominent politicians in Washington and beyond.
The New York Times and Washington Post moved swiftly to assert that the Pizzagate revelations were Fake News, quoting “anonymous sources” who supposedly said the CIA “believed” Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. Former NSA senior intelligence expert William Binney claimed the Podesta and Clinton campaign data were leaked, not hacked. The NSA, he pointed out, would immediately identify a hack, especially a foreign hack, and they have remained silent.
The uncovering and release to Wikileaks of the Podesta emails were immediately blamed on Russian intelligence by the CIA, and now by the US President, with not a shred of proof, and despite the fact that NSA. Wikipedia, whose content is often manipulated by US intelligence agencies, rapidly posted a page with the curious title, “Pizzagate (Conspiracy Theory).”
To make certain the neutral interested reader gets the message, the first line reads, “Pizzagate is a debunked conspiracy theory which emerged during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, alleging that John Podesta’s emails, which were leaked by WikiLeaks, contain coded messages referring to human trafficking, and connecting a number of pizzerias in Washington, D.C. and members of the Democratic Party to a child-sex ring.”
‘Fake News’ Mantra Begins
My purpose in mentioning Pizzagate details is not to demonstrate the authenticity of the Pizzagate allegations. That others are doing with far more resources. Rather, it is to point out the time synchronicity of the explosive Pizzagate email releases by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks web blog, with the launch of a massive mainstream media and political campaign against what is now being called “Fake News.”
The cited New York Times article that Wikipedia cites as “debunking” the Pizzagate allegations states, “None of it was true. While Mr. Alefantis has some prominent Democratic friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, he has never met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated by law enforcement for any of these claims. He and his 40 employees had unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news.” The article contains not one concrete proof that the allegations are false, merely quoting Alefantis as the poor victim of malicious Fake News.
That New York Times story was accompanied by a series of articles such as “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study.” Another headline reads, “Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News.” Then on November 19, strong Clinton supporter, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is quoted in a prominent article titled, “Facebook Considering Ways to Combat Fake News, Mark Zuckerberg Says.”
Facebook uses CIA Censors
Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of the world-leading social media site, Facebook.com, the world’s 5th wealthiest man at an estimated $50 billion, has now established a network of “Third Party Fact Checkers” whose job is to red flag any Facebook message of the estimated one billion people using the site, with a prominent warning that reads, “Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers.”
Facebook has announced that it is taking its censorship ques from something called The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This IFCN, a new creation, has drafted a code of five principles for news websites to accept, and Facebook will work with “third-party fact checking organizations” that are signatories to that code of principles.
If we search under the name International Fact-Checking Network, we find ourselves at the homepage of something called the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.
OK. If we look a bit deeper we find that the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network in turn, as its website states, gets money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations of George Soros.
Oh my, oh my! Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who partners with Soros in numerous nasty projects such as convincing African countries to accept Genetically Modified or GMO seeds? Google, whose origins date back to funding by the CIA and NSA as what intelligence researcher Nafeez Ahmed describes as a “plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority‘ “?
The Omidyar Foundation is the foundation of eBay founder and multi billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, which finances among other projects the online digital publication, The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.
And the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Government-financed “private” NGO behind every Color Revolution CIA regime change from the Ukraine Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring? The NED was a CIA project created in the 1980’s during the Reagan Administration as part of privatizing US intelligence dirty operations, to do, as Allen Weinstein, who drafted the Congressional legislation to establish the NED, noted in a candid 1991 Washington Post interview, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
And if we dig even deeper we find, lo and behold, the name George Soros, convicted hedge fund insider trader, tax-exempt philanthropist and giga-billionaire who seems to fund not only Hillary Clinton and virtually every CIA and US State Department Color Revolution from Russia to China to Iran through his network of Open Society Foundations including the 1990’s Jeffrey Sachs Shock Therapy plunder of Russia and most of former Communist East Europe.
Another one of the media working with Zuckerberg’s Facebook censorship of Fake News is the Washington Post, today owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos is a major media business partner of…. The US Central Intelligence Agency, a fact he omitted to inform about after taking over ownership of the most important newspaper in Washington.
Bezos’ Washington Post recently published a bizarre list of 200 websites it claimed generated Fake News. It refused to identify who gave them the list. Veteran Washington investigative reporter, Wayne Madsen, exposed the source of the McCarthy-style taboo list of so-called Fake News. It was a “website called PropOrNot.com that has links to the CIA and George Soros.”
It’s not merely the Pizzagate revelations that have triggered such a massive attack on independent Internet websites. It seems that back in January 2014 at the Davos World Economic Forum control of information on the Internet was a top item of discussion. At the time, Madsen noted, “With the impending demise of World Wide Web ‘net neutrality,’ which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.”
It’s not even the foxes who are guarding the Internet Henhouse. It’s the werewolves of CIA and US Government censorship. Whether the explosive Pizzagate Podesta revelations merely triggered a dramatic acceleration in the timetable for the CIA’s planned “Fake News” operation as the successor to their 1980’s “Conspiracy Theory” linguistic discrediting operation, it’s clear this is no unbiased, objective, transparent public service to protect the Internet public from harmful content.
And, besides, who are they to tell me or you what you are allowed to read, digest and form your independent ideas about? This is a 21st Century reincarnation of the Spanish Inquisition, one by the real fake newsmakers–Washington Post, AP, ABCNews, Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, the CIA and friends. I would say it’s an alarming development of cyber warfare, not by Russia, but by those CIA-run networks that are fomenting Fake News to demonize any and everyone who opposes Washington intelligence propaganda.
Washington Post Record Arctic Fraud Continues Unabated
The Deplorable Climate Science Blog | December 21, 2016
The Washington Post is misleading their frozen US readers once again about the Arctic, telling them the Arctic has temperatures 50 degrees above normal and record low sea ice. They say this is not normal.
Temperatures in Greenland are incredibly cold. The reason the North Pole is not as cold as normal is because deep waves in the jet stream have brought the cold air south, and milder air north.
Summit, Greenland Forecast | Weather Underground
It has snowed in the Sahara Desert for the first time in 40 years.
Stunning photos capture rare snow in the Sahara Desert
Arctic sea ice extent is higher than 2012 and 2013, and about the same as last year. There is no “record low sea ice” as the Washington Post fraudsters claim.
Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut
What is going on in the Arctic with meridional circulation was explained by Science News during the 1970s ice age scare. There is nothing unusual going on in the Arctic.
https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/8983
The December 1977 issue of National Geographic showed exactly what was going on.
National Geographic : 1977 Dec
Deep dips in the jet stream brought warm air towards the pole, and cold air to the Midwest and East.
Florida was frozen during January, 1977. California was warm and had record drought.
Alaska was 50 degrees in January 1997, and the bears refused to hibernate. Note the same 50 degree number used in the Washington Post article.
27 Jan 1977, Page 8 – The Sheboygan Press
This is just one more fake news attempt by the Washington Post to derail President Trump’s efforts to end junk climate science. Warm air in one place normally means cold air somewhere else. This is perfectly normal weather and has nothing to do with fake news global warming.
So far, everyone who has jumped in front of the Trump Train has been crushed.
Is the CIA editing your newspaper?
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | December 20, 2016
Here is a great overview by Ed Jones of why corporate media are the arch-exponents of “fake news”. The media are overwhelming owned and controlled by billionaires and gargantuan corporations, who depend on the support of other corporations for ad revenue, and employ journalists from a narrow, privileged class whose careers depend on maintaining access to elite sources. It would be simply astounding in these circumstances if we had anything resembling a pluralistic media.
The data concerns UK outlets, but the same principles apply in the US.
One section makes especially disturbing reading. It is the little-discussed matter of the intelligence services’ deep penetration of most western, and in some cases non-western, media organisations. In short, US intelligence services – and to a lesser extent British ones – have for many decades fed information to sympathetic journalists in key positions inside the “free” media, working with them hand in glove. Additionally, the CIA has sought to put its own people into publications to shape directly editorial content and influence public opinion. In some cases, these people may have reached very senior positions.
Nick Davies, of the Guardian, dedicated a whole chapter of his book Flat Earth News to documenting these practices. Strangely, that chapter is rarely mentioned. Journalists who praise the book instead concentrate on his less revealing concept of “churnalism” – journalism compromised by constraints of time and resources.
Jones adds other sources who make much the same point:
Richard Keeble, professor of journalism at the University of Lincoln, … has written on the history of the links between journalists and the intelligence services. … He quotes Roy Greenslade, who has been a media specialist for both the Telegraph and the Guardian [and is a former editor of the Mirror newspaper], as saying: “Most tabloid newspapers – or even newspapers in general – are playthings of MI5 [Britain’s FBI].”
Keeble goes on to say:
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of ‘one of Britain’s most distinguished journals’ as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll [the British equivalent of the CIA – my emphasis]. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
Keeble has given many more examples in his book chapter of the intelligence services infiltrating the media and changing the politics of the time, including around the miners strikes and Arthur Scargill in the 1980s and during the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003. …
David Leigh, former investigations editor of The Guardian, wrote about a series of instances in which the secret services manipulated prominent journalists. He claims reporters are routinely approached and manipulated by intelligence agents and identifies three ways – providing examples for each in his article – in which they do it:
• They attempt to recruit journalists to spy on other people or themselves attempt to go under journalistic “cover.”
• They allow intelligence officers to pose as journalists “to write tendentious articles under false names.”
• And “the most malicious form”: they plant intelligence agency propaganda stories on willing journalists who disguise their origin from readers.
Remember that those who should be exposing the intelligence services’ manipulation of the mainstream media are the very same mainstream media that are already compromised. In other words, this story of systematic “fake news” planted by our intelligence services is almost impossible for the media to tell because it would expose a very uncomfortable reality: that they are not, as they claim, watchdogs on power, but rather the lapdogs of the powerful.
If all this still seems hard to believe, please watch this video of a senior German journalist admitting that he was recruited by the US intelligence services (h/t Antonio Nascimento). Udo Ulfkotte covered the Middle East for the Frankfurter Allgemeine for 12 years, and says he regularly acted as a conduit for CIA propaganda. He adds that many of his colleagues were doing the same, willingly promoting CIA disinformation.
Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
Featured Video
U.S. Naval Blockade & Ground Invasion of Iran?
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Russian security chief issues warning to four NATO states
- Seyed M. Marandi: U.S. Naval Blockade & Ground Invasion of Iran?
- The Iran War Exposes the Emptiness of American ‘Strength’ in East Asia
- Europe’s Drone Pipeline to Ukraine Could Soon be in Russia’s Crosshairs – Analyst
- EU spied on Orban for years – former Slovak minister
- Fact-Checking the “Placebo Control” Fact Checkers
- An Open Letter To President Donald Trump (My Response) | Candace
- Arms industry given direct influence over university courses
- Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’
- AIPAC ‘slimeball’ Eric Swalwell leaves the stage
- If Americans Knew
- Mark Levin and Jonathan Pollard Push for Nuking Iran
- TCN: America Enables Israel’s Crimes
- Israel’s Next Leader Will Be Just Like Bibi – but Without the Corruption
- Born into war, raised across borders: The story of Gaza’s premature babies separated from their parents amid Israel’s genocide
- Israeli soldiers suspected of raping Palestinian detainee allowed to return to service
- Gaza flooded with sweets as fuel and medicine withheld, health official warns
- Israel, US ready for wars to resume, as Gaza healthcare is in freefall – Daily Update
- Commentary: take away Israel’s biggest weapon
- The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East
- Israeli Media: ‘Diseases Are Everywhere’: Gaza’s ‘Catastrophic’ Healthcare Crisis Is Worsening
- No Tricks Zone
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
Aletho News 