Mainstream propaganda machine doubles down on ‘Russia losing’ fantasies
By Drago Bosnic | December 13, 2023
Even before the start of the special military operation (SMO), the mainstream media had been running several propaganda narratives, almost simultaneously. Shortly before the SMO and in the first few days, there was the claim that Russia would take Kiev in three days and most of Ukraine in a week. However, as this didn’t happen (nor was it ever planned to unfold this way in the Kremlin), the mainstream propaganda machine went full afterburner in the opposite direction. Now, Moscow was suddenly losing, the Kiev regime forces are unbeatable, the Russians are suffering from extremely low morale due to massive losses, they’re running out of missiles, shells, fuel and so on, and so forth.
These ludicrous myths never stopped and continued until the failure of the much-touted counteroffensive. That was when many in the political West adopted a somewhat less propagandistic tone and tried mixing in some “realism”. However, this didn’t have the desired effect on the populace in Western Europe and North America. Thus, there’s a slow return to the most ridiculous propaganda one could possibly imagine. For instance, the Wall Street Journal claims that the Neo-Nazi junta will be “able to seize the initiative on the battlefield in 2025 if it can hold out against Russia until the end of next year”. This narrative is being pushed despite the fact that the United States, its primary backer, is about to stop the money flow.
The report initially doesn’t come off as propagandistic as one would expect, but towards the end, the authors still tried pushing debunked propaganda narratives. There are several instances of somewhat unexpected admissions, such as the obvious failure of the Kiev regime’s counteroffensive, as well as the dwindling financial support from the political West. The report also touched upon the growing divisions within the Neo-Nazi junta and the fact that its battered military will need time to recover. However, in a response to the WSJ, its Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba challenged this with a claim that “any pause in the fighting now would allow Russia to regroup and prepare for large-scale offensive operations”.
Kuleba even stated that the Kiev regime forces are preparing fresh brigades for “new counteroffensive and defensive operations”. The WSJ supported the idea and even went as far as to claim that “2024 will be the year of the recovery [for the Neo-Nazi junta troops]”. However, the authors admit that this comes with an important caveat, as the Kiev regime and its NATO overlords will need to “work through their current adversities and continue delivering supplies to troops, an emerging best-case scenario among Western strategists is that next year becomes a year of rebuilding for Kiev’s military“, adding that “the hope would be that a limited number of Ukrainian soldiers can hold Russian forces at bay”.
This would supposedly “allow NATO countries time to train fresh Ukrainian troops, expand armament production and restock Ukraine’s arsenals”. As indicated during a recent NATO meeting, the political West hopes that Russia’s incremental offensive operations will fail, “resulting in a depletion of its manpower and munitions, potentially offering Ukraine better prospects to retake the battlefield initiative in the spring of 2025, if it gets through next year”. However, the WSJ concluded the report with a not-so-optimistic remark of a Ukrainian infantry sergeant who said that when he talks to people at home he tells them that “everything is going well” and doesn’t describe what he sees or feels, which isn’t so upbeat.
“What is the point?”, the WSJ quoted the Ukrainian sergeant.
While the WSJ certainly is part of the mainstream, it’s still a bit more reputable than many other outlets of America’s massive propaganda machine. For instance, the infamous CNN is beating its own records in laughable claims by publishing that “Russia has lost a staggering 87% of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks”. Of course, this information came from “a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress”. The assessment was sent on December 11, as the Republican-dominated Congress was in the middle of effectively canceling the “Ukraine aid”.
The “intelligence” assessment supposedly found that “the war has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force”. Then came the numbers game, where CNN claims that “of the 360,000 troops that entered Ukraine, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, 2,200 of 3,500 tanks and 4,400 of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers have also been destroyed, a 32% loss rate”. CNN says it reached out to the Russian Embassy for comment, which is yet to respond. The most likely scenario is that His Excellency Ambassador Anatoly Antonov is still laughing uncontrollably after reading all this. And he certainly isn’t the only one.
“The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said on CNN’s State of the Union on December 10, adding: “So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?”
Even CNN had to admit that “Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable”, as its “highly anticipated counteroffensive stagnated through the fall”, and that “US officials believe that Kiev is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months”. As for the alleged “staggering losses” of the Russian military, the truth is that Moscow hasn’t been this strong militarily since at least the 1980s. In addition, the Kremlin is effectively returning to a Soviet superpower level with its latest military strategy shift. The very idea that Russia lost well over 300,000 soldiers is beyond ludicrous, as the country would be littered with new military cemeteries in virtually every major settlement. On the contrary, it’s precisely Ukraine that looks like that thanks to the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi junta.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Ukrainian trial demonstrates 2014 Maidan massacre was false flag
By Kit Klarenberg | The Grayzone | December 11, 2023
A massacre of protesters during the 2014 Maidan coup set the stage for the ouster of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Now, an explosive trial in Kiev has produced evidence the killings were a false flag designed to trigger regime change.
Two police officers charged with the mass shooting of opposition protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014 have been released after a Ukrainian court determined the fatal shots in the infamous massacre were fired from an opposition-controlled building.
On October 18 2023, Ukraine’s Sviatoshyn District Court determined that of the five officers on trial, one would be acquitted outright, while another was sentenced to time served for alleged “abuse of power.”
The remaining three, who no longer live in Ukraine, were convicted in absentia on 31 counts of murder and 44 counts of attempted murder. This, under a Supreme Court opinion stipulating suspects can be held collectively responsible for the actions of a group deemed criminal.
The verdict means no one will face jail time, or be in any way punished for their alleged role in the infamous Maidan massacre, which saw over 100 protesters killed, triggered an avalanche of international condemnation and led directly to the downfall of President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled the country mere days later.
The trial began in Kiev in 2016, but the case languished for years. Matters were further complicated in 2019, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traded all five of the accused for prisoners held by Donbas separatists. Two subsequently returned on a voluntary basis to have their day in court.
Unsurprisingly, the verdict has triggered outrage among victims’ families, and prosecution lawyers say they plan to appeal. By contrast, the mainstream media has so far remained eerily indifferent. In an apparent attempt to distort the trial’s outcome, several outlets — including Reuters — simply referred to the court “sentencing” the officers in their headlines. The Kyiv Post went as far as falsely claiming all five had been found “guilty” of “Maidan crimes.”
But there is more to the story than these outlets have let on. As even the Western-funded Kyiv Independent acknowledged, “a former top investigator” previously tasked with probing the massacre said the verdict followed years of deliberate sabotage by Ukrainian authorities, who “have done their best to make sure there are no real results.”
The question of why officials in Kiev would seek to sabotage the probe has been largely ignored by legacy media outlets. But the verdict offers some highly revealing clues.
‘Unknown persons’ behind killing
Littered throughout the 1,000,000 word document are passages demonstrating conclusively that the sniper fire emanated from buildings controlled by the opposition to Yanukovych. Collectively, these excerpts strongly suggest the Maidan massacre was a false flag carried out by nationalist elements who aimed to ensure the president’s ouster.
The evidence “was quite sufficient to conclude categorically that on the morning of February 20, 2014, persons with weapons, from which the shots were fired, were in the premises of the Hotel Ukraina,” the court found.
Another section reveals “Hotel Ukraina” was “territory… not controlled by law enforcement agencies at that time.” Numerous video recordings show that before, during, and after the massacre, the building was overrun by the far-right opposition party Svoboda, whose leaders used the premises to coordinate their anti-Yanukovych activities on the streets below.
In at least 28 of the 128 shootings considered during the trial, the court ruled that whether “due to the lack of information, the incompleteness or contradictory nature of the submitted data,” the “involvement of law enforcement officers has not been proven,” and that “other unknown persons cannot be ruled out.”
Furthermore, the verdict effectively ruled out any involvement of Russian security and intelligence services in the massacre, a conspiracy theory promoted heavily by pro-Maidan elements.
“The ‘Russian trace’ was not confirmed after examining the relevant documents,” the court found. It concluded that those individuals who were suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, and were being “constantly monitored,” did not have “any participation in the events on the street.”
For Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, a University of Ottawa political science professor who has spent years documenting overwhelming evidence of opposition responsibility for the massacre, such findings are a long-overdue vindication of his research. In comments to The Grayzone, he explained that the conviction of three police officers in absentia for the murder of 28 Maidan protesters and attempted murder of 36 was “based on a single fabricated forensic ballistic examination.”
The flawed “forensic examination of bullets reversed [the] results of 40 other ballistic examinations” taken previously — every one of which, Katchanovski notes, “showed bullets of Berkut police Kalashnikovs did not match those retrieved from bodies of killed Maidan protesters.”
In the end, “the trial produced an extraordinary volume of evidence proving protesters were shot at from various buildings controlled by pro-Maidan elements,” he says, pointing to the “over 100 witnesses, including 51 anti-government activists injured during the shooting, [who] testified to having been shot from these areas, or seeing snipers located there.”
Elsewhere, the verdict rejected a 3D-model reconstruction of the shooting of three Maidan activists, produced by a New York City-based “unconventional architecture practice” named SITU. This bogus analysis, which was financed to the tune of $100,000 by the Kiev branch of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, was heavily promoted by The New York Times and other Western media outlets and held up as definitive proof that Ukrainian security forces were responsible for the deaths. But the SITU model changed the location of victim’s wounds — from the side or back of their body to the front — and altered the angles of the bullets’ trajectory to fraudulently convict police for their murders.
As Katchanovski explains, “This is deliberate fraud and disinformation.”
“SITU’s bogus modeling allowed The New York Times and many others to deny the existence of Maidan snipers, and brand as ‘conspiracy theory’ any suggestion the massacre was a ‘false flag,’” he says.
But if the Berkhut officers were not responsible for the dozens of deaths that day, the question remains: who was?
Maidan killers move to Odessa
In August 2023, the New York Times revealed that the Ukrainian gunrunner Serhiy Pashinksy, once openly condemned by Zelensky himself as a “criminal,” had become the top private supplier of arms to Ukraine. Pashinsky sourced grenades, artillery shells and rockets “through a trans-European network of middlemen,” then sold, bought and resold the arms “until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most.” The hustle has enriched him to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Pashinsky, a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, was a central figure in the Maidan coup. As The Grayzone subsequently revealed, he has been accused by three Georgian mercenaries of personally orchestrating the February 2014 massacre, supplying the weapons used and personally picking targets to be shot. When Israeli journalists confronted Pashinsky about these allegations, he threatened to have his associates track them down at home and “tear them apart.”
During the Maidan trial, defense lawyers made prominent mention of those same Georgian mercenary snipers. Along with Maidan leaders, and Western-backed fascist paramilitary Right Sector, the snipers were also implicated in the May 2014 Odessa massacre, a gruesome incident in which scores of Russian-speaking anti-Maidan protesters were forcibly herded into the city’s Trade Unions House, which was then set alight. In all, 46 died due to burn injuries, carbon monoxide poisoning, and attempts to escape the horrors by jumping out of windows. Non-fatal casualties reportedly totaled around 200.
Katchanovski says that as with Maidan, evidence points to the role of an extremely well-organized plot to carry out the Odessa killings:
“A Georgian sniper who confessed their Maidan massacre role in an Israeli documentary also revealed one of the massacre’s organizers dispatched them to Odessa right before the attack on separatists there.”
Post-coup, coverup after coverup
From the beginning of the Maidan trial, witnesses and prosecutors were subjected by far-right Ukrainian figures to a campaign of intimidation. During proceedings, Neo-Nazi C14 and Azov activists stormed the courtroom, attacked defendants, and placed tires outside the court in an apparent threat to burn the building down. The presiding judge was even beaten by a Maidan activist.
“Covert pressure from Zelensky’s administration and the far-right is likely much greater than what we have seen publicly,” Katchanovski commented to The Grayzone. “Ukraine’s judiciary isn’t independent. Zelensky’s administration routinely and openly interferes in proceedings, and even dismissed the entire Constitutional Court. It’s a very difficult situation for the judges and jury. There were direct threats from the far-right to convict the accused.”
Accordingly, some wounded protesters who initially testified to the presence of snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings later revoked their accounts. They subsequently admitted the prosecution met with them privately, to discuss what they’d said on the witness stand. For Katchanovski, “this is proof the coverup goes to the top of the Ukrainian government.”
Many Ukrainians, especially in the East, have held this same suspicion since Ukraine’s post-Maidan nationalist coup government adopted a wide-ranging amnesty law in 2014. That legislation granted Maidan protesters blanket immunity from prosecution for every serious crime imaginable, including murder, terrorism, and seizure of power. The law also prohibited official investigation of any anti-government agitator for these crimes, and ordered the destruction of all relevant evidence that had previously been collected.
A high-ranking official within Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Office has since admitted that prosecutors handling the Maidan massacre investigation and trial were covertly selected and appointed by none other than Pashinsky. Efforts to conduct a parliamentary commission to probe the killings were blocked by Petro Poroshenko, the rabidly anti-Russian President of Ukraine who succeeded the ousted Yanukovych in 2014.
The official tampering was understandable, Katchanovski argues, given how fundamental Kiev’s narrative of the Maidan massacre is to the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government. The false flag mass murder led directly to Yanukovych, justifying the withdrawal of government forces from downtown Kiev, the seizure of government buildings by Maidan activists, and the president’s unconstitutional removal by the Ukrainian legislature.
All these developments paved a path to the eight-year-long civil war in Donbas, which claimed the lives of over 14,000 and precipitated Russia’s invasion in February 2022. For Katchanovski, the link between the false flag massacre and ongoing war in Ukraine is obvious. The verdict, he says, makes that even more clear.
As retaliation for his groundbreaking investigations into the Maidan massacre, Katchanovski’s home and property were illegally seized by local courts in 2014 “with the involvement of senior officials.” Yet the professor remains more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the story.
“One day, the truth of what happened will be officially acknowledged — the only question is when,” he vowed. “Delayed acknowledgment and lack of justice in this case has already cost Ukraine very dearly. There are many conflicts, including the ongoing war, which spiraled from the Maidan massacre. Countless people have suffered needlessly as a result. The time for truth and reconciliation is well overdue.”
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Brewing truth: Climate doomsayers’ cooked up coffee crisis
By Vijay Jayaraj | American Thinker | December 7, 2023
Every day, people across the world wake up to news about climate change affecting their lives. With the seeming randomness of a roulette wheel, the doomsday clique of the climate world daily selects a fresh topic to sow seeds of anxiety among the populace.
Popular things easily recognized — even cherished — by people are continually identified as being at risk of being damaged or destroyed by climate change. Coffee, for example, is a commodity experiencing a surge in popularity, and there are no prizes for guessing what climate doomsayers are saying now.
Yes, coffee is now said to be under threat from man-made climate change. CNN, in a recent article, made this statement: “climate change poses a huge threat to the coffee business and to farmers.” Keeping with its customary approach of presenting climate change as a threat to all manner of things, CNN quotes the Inter-American Development Bank as warning that “rising temperatures will reduce the area suitable for growing coffee by up to 50%.”
Is this claim true? If so, plenty of people would be affected, because coffee is selling like hot cakes.
The brew is a staple in nearly 98% of households in Brazil. According to the 2023 National Coffee Data Trends Report, coffee consumption in the U.S. has hit a 20-year peak, with over 50% of consumers gravitating toward specialty coffee.
Even in my home country, India, there is a sudden deluge of boutique coffee shops. Some chains have opened as many as 50 branches within a span of five years, and that is not an easy task in a country of 1.3 billion tea-lovers. India is now the eighth largest producer of coffee beans.
More than 99% of global coffee production comprises the arabica and robusta species, which are just two of over 140 different species in the Coffea genus. Coffea, especially arabica, depends highly on soil fertility and temperature.
The purveyors of climate apocalypse are particularly interested in the temperature aspect, as it provides a legitimate pathway for indulging in climate scaremongering. Despite widespread concern about increasing warmth, satellite temperature data collected from 1979 to 2023 indicate that there has not been a significant rise in temperatures.
Despite widespread concern about increasing warmth, global satellite temperature data collected from 1979 to 2023 indicates that there has only been a modest rise of less than one-degree C in temperature.
Besides, it is widely acknowledged that warming since the Little Ice Age and increased atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution have boosted agricultural production and the general greening of ecosystems.
Scientists in Brazil have discovered that “carbon dioxide fertilization offsets negative impacts of climate change on arabica coffee yield.” They say that the CO2 fertilization effect will cause a net increase of the average Brazilian arabica coffee harvest by the years 2040–2070.
CO2 enrichment studies in Latin America show that elevated CO2 increased photosynthesis by 40% and increased the efficiency plants’ water use by approximately 60%. Higher CO2 eventually caused a 7–14% increase in plant height and a 12–14% increase in yield. Another study showed that there were significant increases in all leaf area and biomass markers in response to increased CO2.
The research indicates that we might already be reaping the rewards of increased productivity rates in both arabica and robusta coffee varieties thanks to the recent rise in atmospheric CO2. This reality is reflected in the plantations across the globe. Production in South America and Southeast Asia have shown increases in yield during the past two decades.
Brazil and Vietnam are the top two coffee bean producers. Both countries have seen remarkable increases in their yield, with Vietnam’s production climbing from 0.54 tons per acre in 2002 to 1.11 tons per acre in 2021. Meanwhile, Brazil’s yield has also shown significant growth, rising from 0.49 tons per acre in 2002 to 0.87 tons per acre in 2020.
Even if the temperatures were to increase dramatically, experts say that coffee cultivation would be possible in cooler regions at latitudes away from equator or at higher altitudes.
So sit back and drink that morning cup of Joe. Climate is not going to steal your coffee, and thank CO2 for keeping the plantations productive.
Vijay Jayaraj is a research associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a Master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K.
Main National TV Station Pumps INSANE Propaganda
Ivor Cummins | November 20, 2023
Our National main TV station just aired an INSANE piece of WEF/UN-style propaganda – it’s a parody of itself! Nonetheless I have a great time taking it down hardcore ;-) Please share widely – you can download vid here too, to share elsewhere:
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Stop Misinforming about Malaria’s Spread, Washington Post
By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | October 24, 2023
A recent Washington Post (The Post) story, “Where Malaria is Spreading,” claims that climate change could put over 5 billion people at risk of malaria by 2040, primarily due to expanding seasons where mosquitoes can spread the disease, migrating mosquitoes, and increased populations and stagnant water caused by unusual flooding. This is false. Malaria already has a wide distribution, with many areas only avoiding it being endemic due to past suppression efforts. Population growth in areas where the disease remains common may lead to more instances of the disease unless available preventative and prophylactic measures are taken. However, there is no evidence malaria will spread geographically, due to either modestly rising temperatures or increased moisture.
The Post’s article, written by authors Rachel Chason, Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens, and Jahi Chikwendiu, mainly focuses on malaria’s increase in Mozambique. It has seen a 10 percent increase in malaria cases over the past six years. The Post than ties Mozambique’s malaria increase to claims made in a Lancet study, “Projecting the risk of mosquito-borne diseases in a warmer and more populated world: a multi-model, multi-scenario intercomparison modelling study,” which used climate and mosquito-borne disease models to estimate how the transmission seasons and population densities might change with global warming.
The study’s authors say their modelling shows malaria suitability may increase by 1-6 months in tropical highlands in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Americas. Dengue sees similar results, with suitability increasing in lowlands in the Western Pacific and the Eastern Mediterranean by 4 months.
Shamefully, like many studies making misleading and alarming claims attributed to climate change, the Lancet study uses the climate modelling scenario RCP8.5 (RCP meaning representative concentration pathway), which climate scientists admit runs way too hot. Any research that built upon that scenario is going to produce extremely skewed results, because RCP8.5 involves an amount of released carbon dioxide that is actually impossible, even if all the fossil fuels on the planet were burned.
While the Lancet study is suspect, it may still seem logical to assume that the modest warming of the past hundred or so years has and will continue to expand the range of mosquitoes, as well as the number of days during the year in which they are active and biting. However, a large body of research refutes this assumption.
A chapter in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, discusses the results of more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies which demonstrate that temperature alone is not enough to guarantee migration or longer survival of mosquitoes or mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria. There are far more factors that come into play, including human interventions, that outweigh temperature alone.
The report explains:
Gething et al. (2010), writing specifically about malaria, may have put it best when they said there has been “a decoupling of the geographical climate malaria relationship over the twentieth century, indicating that non-climatic factors have profoundly confounded this relationship over time.
More examples from Climate Change Reconsidered are discussed in a Climate Realism post, “Environment Journal Wrong About Climate Change Increasing Malaria,” including papers by a vector-borne disease expert, Paul Reiter, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which explain that while reemergence of malaria and similar diseases in some regions is concerning, “it is facile to attribute this resurgence to climate change.”
The Post admits that endemic malaria “was eliminated in North America and Europe in the mid-1900s, with a better understanding of how to control it.” This is true, and what’s more, a 2010 Nature study (Gething et al.) found that malaria was probably endemic on 58 percent of the world’s surface in 1900, before the period of modern warming, and only 30 percent by 2007, after decades of modest warming.
Almost every credible study, not based on biased computer models, rejects the myopic causal view of the relationship between climate and malaria.
Extreme weather, The Post claims, like flooding are causing cases to rise in places like Mozambique, with “experts” telling them that the frightening trend is likely to continue. While The Post suggests the trends are mostly due to climate change, they also admit that other factors like “increased resistance of mosquitoes to insecticides and of the parasite to drugs” and improved disease reporting and tracking have played a role in the reported increase.
Flooding is unlikely to cause an increase in mosquito-borne illness, because even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports only low confidence that there is even any sign climate change has impacted flooding. Mozambique, a South-East African nation, has suffered some flooding in recent years, but as discussed in Climate Realism, here, any link to long-term climate change lacks evidence. Flooding is a regular occurrence in many parts of southern Africa, and population increases means that during the rainy season more people are living near mosquito-friendly standing water.
Before running this alarming story, The Washington Post should have examined the wider body of research available concerning mosquito-borne illnesses. There is no evidence that warming is currently causing, or will lead to, an increase in malaria cases or deaths. Facts, not fearmongering, should guide The Post’s and other legitimate news outlets’ coverage of climate and disease issues.
The media’s Nord Stream lies just keep coming
Why do billionaires and governments scramble to control the media? Because the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
BY JONATHAN COOK | NOVEMBER 14, 2023
Want to understand why the media we consume is either owned by billionaires or under the thumb of government? The latest developments in the story about who was behind the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe provide the answer.
Although largely forgotten now, the blasts in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 had huge and lasting repercussions. The explosion was an act both of unprecedented industrial sabotage and of unparalleled environmental terrorism, releasing untold quantities of the most potent of the greenhouse gases, methane, into the atmosphere.
The blowing up of the pipelines plunged Europe into a prolonged energy crisis, tipping its economies deeper into a recession from which they are yet to recover. Europe was forced to turn to the United States and buy much more expensive liquified gas. And one of the long-term effects will be to accelerate the de-industrialisation of Europe, especially Germany.
There can be almost no one in Europe who did not suffer personal financial harm, in most cases significant harm, from the explosions.
The question that needed urgently answering at the time of the blasts was one no media organisation was in a hurry to investigate: Who did it?
In unison, the media simply recited the White House’s extraordinary claim that Russia had sabotaged its own pipelines.
That required an unprecedented suspension of disbelief. It meant that Moscow had chosen to strip itself both of the lucrative income stream the gas pipelines generated, and of the political and diplomatic leverage it enjoyed over European states from its control of their energy supplies. This was at a time, remember, when the Kremlin, embattled in its war in Ukraine, needed all the diplomatic influence it could muster.
The need to breathe credibility into the laughably improbable “Russia did it” story was so urgent at the time because there was was only one other serious culprit in the frame. No media outlet, of course, mentioned it.
The United States had both the motive and the means.
US officials from Biden down had repeatedly threatened that Washington would intervene to make sure the Nord Stream pipelines could not operate. The administration was expressly against European energy dependency on Russia. Another gain from the pipelines’ destruction was that a more economically vulnerable Europe would be forced to lean even more heavily on the US as a guarantor of its security, a useful chokehold on Europe when Washington was preparing for prolonged confrontations with both Russia and China.
As for the means, only a handful of states had the divers and technical resources enabling them to pull off the extremely difficult feat of successfully planting and detonating explosives on the sea floor undetected.
Had we known then what is gradually becoming clear now, even from establishment media reporting – that the US was, at the very least, intimately involved – there would have been uproar.
It would have been clear that the US was a rogue, terrorist state, that it was willing to burn its allies for geostrategic gain, and that there was no limit to the crimes it was prepared to commit.
Every time Europeans had to pay substantially more for their heating bills, or filling up their car, or paying for the weekly shop, they would have known that the cause was gangster-like criminality by the Biden administration.
Which is precisely why the establishment media were so very careful for the first months after the explosions not to implicate the Biden administration in any way, even if it meant ignoring the mass of evidence staring them in the face.
It is why they ignored the incendiary report by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – who has broken some of the most important stories of the last half century – detailing exactly how the US carried out the operation. When his account was occasionally referenced by the media, it was solely to ridicule it.
It is why, when it became obvious that the “Russia did it” claim was unsupportable, the media literally jumped ship: credulously reporting that a small group of “maverick” Ukrainians – unknown to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course – had rented a yacht and carried off one of the most daring and difficult deep-sea stunts ever recorded.
It is why, later, the media treated it as entirely unremarkable – and certainly not worthy of comment – that new evidence suggested the Biden administration was warned of this maverick Ukrainian operation against the whole of Europe. It apparently knew what was about to happen but did precisely nothing to stop it.
And it is why the latest reporting from the Washington Post changes the impossible-to-believe “maverick” Ukrainian operation into one that implicates the very top of the Ukrainian military. Still, the paper and the rest of the media steadfastly refuse to join the dots and follow the implications contained in their own reporting.
The central character in the new drama, Roman Chervinsky, belongs to Ukraine’s special operations forces. He supposedly oversaw the small, six-man team that rented a yacht and then carried out the James Bond-style attack.
The ingenuous Post claims that his training and operational experience meant he was “well suited to help carry out a covert mission meant to obscure Ukraine’s responsibility”. It lists his resistance activities against Russia. None indicate that he had the slightest experience allowing him to mastermind a highly challenging, extremely dangerous, technically complex attack deep in the waters of the Baltic Sea.
If the Ukrainian military really was behind the explosions – rather than the US – all the indications are that the Biden administration and Pentagon must have been intimately involved in the planning and execution.
Not least, it is extremely unlikely that the Ukrainian military had the technical capability to carry out by itself such an operation successfully and undiscovered.
And given that, even before the war, the Ukrainian military had fallen almost completely under US military operational control, the idea that Ukraine’s senior command would have been able to, or dared, execute this complex and risky venture without involving the US beggars belief.
Politically, it would have been quite extraordinary for Ukrainian leaders to imagine they could unilaterally decide to shut down energy supplies to Europe without consulting first with the US, especially when Ukraine’s entire war effort was being paid for and overseen by Washington and Europe.
And of course, Ukrainian leaders would have been only too aware that the US was bound to quickly work out who was behind the attack.
It would be telling indeed that, in such circumstances, the Biden administration would apparently choose to reward Ukraine with more money and arms for its act of industrial sabotage against Europe rather than punish it in any way.
It would be equally astonishing that the three states supposedly investigating the attack – Germany, Sweden and Denmark – would not also soon figure out for themselves that Ukraine was culpable. Why would they decide to cover up Ukraine’s attack on Europe’s economy rather than expose it – unless they were worried about upsetting the US?
And of course, there is the elephant in the room: the Washington Post’s earlier reporting indicated that the US had prior knowledge that Ukraine was planning the attack. That is even more likely if the pipeline blast was signed off by Ukrainian military commanders rather than a group of Ukrainian “mavericks”.
The Washington Post’s new story repeats the line that the Biden administration was forewarned of the attack. Now, however, the Post casually reports that, after expressing opposition, “US officials believed the attack had been called off. But it turned out only to have been postponed to three months later, using a different point of departure than originally planned”.
The Washington Post simply accepts the word of US officials that the most powerful country on the planet fell asleep at the wheel. The CIA and Biden administration apparently knew the Ukrainian military was keen to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines and plunge Europe into an energy crisis and economic recession. But US officials were blindsided when the same small Ukrainian operational team changed locations and timings.
On this account, US intelligence fell for the simplest of bait and switches when the stakes were about as high as could be imagined. And the Washington Post and other media outlets report all of this with a faux-seriousness.
Either way, the US is deeply implicated in the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure and the undermining of its economy.
Even if the establishment media reporting is right and Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, the Biden administration must have given the green light, overseen the operational planning and assisted in the implementation and subsequent cover-up.
Then again, if as seems far more likely, Hersh is right, then there was no middle man – the US carried out the attack on its own. It needed a fall guy. When Russia no longer fitted the bill, Ukraine became the sacrificial offering.
A year on, these muffled implications from the media’s own reporting barely raise an eyebrow.
The establishment media has played precisely the role expected of it: neutering public outrage. Its regimented acceptance of the initial, preposterous claim of Russian responsibility. Its drip-feed, uncritical reporting of other, equally improbable possibilities. Its studious refusal to join the all-too-visible dots. Its continuing incuriousness about its own story and what Ukraine’s involvement would entail.
The media has failed by every yardstick of what journalism is supposed to be there for, what it is supposed to do. And that is because the establishment media is not there to dig out the truth, it is not there to hold power to account. Ultimately, when the stakes are high – and they get no higher than the Nord Stream attack – it is there to spin narratives convenient to those in power, because the media itself is embedded in those same networks of power.
Why do billionaires rush to own media corporations, even when the outlets are loss-making? Why are governments so keen to let billionaires take charge of the chief means by which we gain information and communicate between ourselves. Because the power to tell stories, the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
How Long Has Netanyahu Got Left?
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 2, 2023
Is Israel really losing the media war? In a conflict where the truth seems to be the first and most predominant casualty, this might be the only truth, certainly when we look at recent events. The war in Gaza is not an irony-free zone though. Recently, Israel stormed social media with claims that the Palestinians were faking videos and they took one of a medic giving resuscitation to a victim, claiming that the technique was erroneous, and so, therefore, the video must have been faked. How are we to take this? Given that Israel is the expert on faking videos to support its heinous war crimes, was the logic behind the claims “trust us, we know what we’re talking about when we talk about faked videos”? In either case it failed. The mob justice of social media didn’t give any gravitas to the claims and soon enough the Red Cross said that the health worker was using the right technique.
But how interesting that Israel is now resorting to this level, to stoop so low makes many wonder if they are even close to winning the war. It doesn’t smack of a victorious side to do this and there are other examples, even, previously. When the Baptist hospital was bombed, the IDF didn’t seem bothered that there was documented evidence to prove that it had actually warned the bosses of it, that they, the IDF, were about to bomb it. Almost as soon as it was bombed and Israel fed the revolting swine of western journalists feeding from the teat of mother Israel for all of their information with the assertion that the Palestinians actually blew it up themselves by a faulty rocket which Hamas had just recently fired close to the hospital. The IDF even produced audio of a conversation which apparently confirmed this. The problem with this though was that the audio was faked. There is actually a history of the IDF faking audio conversations. Some will remember the 2010 storming of the Turkish aid boat where the IDF murdered in cold blood ten activists at point blank range. Audio tape of the activists insulting Israel’s special forces soldiers turned out to be fake.
Western media are playing a role in helping Israel though simply by accepting the carefully arranged circus that they have been invited into. No western journalists that I can see are working within Gaza as it’s simply too dangerous so they are forced to lap up the information which is handed to them on a plate standing on the touchlines and being really nothing more than a spectator to a secret war which they can’t and won’t understand. The holocaust which is taking place is about the annihilation of the Palestinians in Gaza. We can’t really call it a war as this would suggest that both sides have a fair chance to compete on a level playing field. In Gaza, the Israelis are starving the Palestinians so that even if they survive, they will be too weak to fight when, or if, the IDF finally go in with their tank divisions.
The story which isn’t being reported by western journalists is how Hamas is already having some victories in hitting tanks with RPGs and how phosphorous is being dropped on civilians. Of course Netanyahu has been promised by the Biden administration that he can break every war crime ever recorded with the knowledge that he and his people will never face any legal action. And this is really a big part of America’s support to Netanyahu as what we are witnessing – but are unable to film due to Israel cutting off electricity and internet – are war crimes which we have never really seen before in the last 100 years except with the holocaust itself during WWII.
The total ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians which will never be reported as such by British journalists, which citizens of the free world cannot actually see, so it will continue until only a few hundred thousand Palestinians remain, who then will be convinced by Israel and the West to move onto another location. In fact, there is documentation to prove that the Israelis were planning all along to move out Palestinian citizens out of Gaza all together with the assistance of Egypt.
The big question is time. Time is really an important component in this war. It is only a matter of time before Biden messes up and is drawn into a war with Israel against Iran. Biden doesn’t want this but he is unfortunately stupid and weak and Netanyahu likes American presidents this way. A looming speech from Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah is expected to give an ultimatum to Israel to stop the mass murder of Palestinians, we will soon be reminded who are the most important players: Iran and Turkey.
Both these countries, although from different Muslim faiths who, in other parts of the Middle East are killing each other, seem to be united in their defiance of Israel. It is no longer a question of if they will react to the Gaza holocaust but when. Biden is out of his depth and the Iranians know this. He has only one real ace to play, which is to get rid of Netanyahu which if he was any other U.S. president, he could probably pull this off. But this is Biden we’re talking about whose foreign policy sheet includes the hugely embarrassing exit from Afghanistan and the 130 billion dollar colossal waste of sending cash to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in the world, which most Americans can’t even find on a map of Europe.
The rumours are that Biden is thinking in the longer term than Israel and that he believes that Netanyahu doesn’t have long in office as many Israelis don’t support his war crimes strategy, a point made by Haaretz recently which pointed out his demise was not long off. Something’s got to give. The servile, revolting, passive international press pack might be all that Netanyahu has left.
As the German Health Ministry drowns in millions of unwanted vaccine doses, Karl Lauterbach begs Germans to please, please line up for their fifth jab
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | November 1, 2023
From the erstwhile vaccine propagandists at Der Spiegel, who I think are also tiring of the insipid autumnal vaccination liturgy and its noxious political enablers:
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has again called on people to get a booster vaccination. “Despite the pandemic and awareness campaigns, the importance of the Covid booster is apparently greatly underestimated,” he tells Spiegel. “So far, unfortunately, only a fraction of those for whom it is recommended have had a booster vaccination.” He calls on all at-risk groups and older people to catch up and ideally combine it with a flu vaccination.
According to the vaccine uptake statistics of the Robert Koch Institute, only about 2.5 million people have received three or more boosters. This means that only a fraction of those over 60 are likely to have sufficient protection against Covid …
They let Lauterbach flap his gums a little more about population immunity, Long Covid, secondary infections and how the vaccines can make all this better because reasons, before sticking the knife in him:
Lauterbach urgently needs to boost vaccine uptake. The pharmaceutical contracts concluded under his predecessor Jens Spahn have secured much larger quantities of vaccine than are currently being used. Between September and November, about 14.1 million vaccine doses of monovalent vaccine targeted at XBB 1.5. will be delivered. An additional 10.6 million vaccine doses of Novavax XBB 1.5. vaccines will also become available, as soon as they are approved by the European Commission.
Our dissolute snake oil salesmen – who is either so stupid or so desperate that he actually tweeted a link to this not-so-subtle takedown – is currently sitting on 11.5 million Pfizer/BioNTech doses, trembling at the prospect of Novavax dropping another 10 million on his head, with no hope at all that more than 5 million Germans will ever line up for these worthless products. This is despite the best efforts of the regional press, who have been trying to gaslight their elderly readers into getting yet another jab since September. Today the Main Post published a typical piece, claiming that vaccine demand is starting to creep up now, really it is; while yesterday it was the turn of Münchner Merkur to claim that everyone is talking about the shiny new vaccines and to drag in some pulmonologist to talk about the “predominantly positive reception” they’ve enjoyed.
Dear idiot reporters: The official vaccine dashboards may be down, but the RKI still publish day-by-day uptake statistics. Stop lying.
What really happened on 7th October?
Evidence is now emerging that up to half the Israelis killed were combatants; that Israeli forces were responsible for some of their own civilian deaths; and that Tel Aviv disseminated false ‘Hamas atrocities’ stories to justify its devastating air assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | October 24, 2023
Two weeks after the Hamas breakout assault on Israel on 7 October, a clearer picture of what happened – who died, and who killed – is now beginning to emerge.
Instead of the wholescale massacre of civilians claimed by Israel, incomplete figures published by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz show that almost half the Israelis killed that day were in fact combatants – soldiers or police.
In the interim, two weeks of blanket western media reporting that Hamas allegedly killed around 1,400 Israeli civilians during its 7 October military attack has served to inflame emotions and create the climate for Israel’s unconstrained destruction of the Gaza Strip and its civilian population.
Accounts of the Israeli death toll have been filtered and shaped to suggest that a wholesale civilian massacre occurred that day, with babies, children, and women the main targets of a terror attack.
Now, detailed statistics on the casualties released by the Israeli daily Haaretz paint a starkly different picture. As of 23 October, the news outlet has released information on 683 Israelis killed during the Hamas-led offensive, including their names and locations of their deaths on 7 October.
Of these, 331 casualties – or 48.4 percent – have been confirmed to be soldiers and police officers, many of them female. Another 13 are described as rescue service members, and the remaining 339 are ostensibly considered to be civilians.
While this list is not comprehensive and only accounts for roughly half of Israel’s stated death toll, almost half of those killed in the melee are clearly identified as Israeli combatants.
There are also so far no recorded deaths of children under the age of three, which throws into question the Israeli narrative that babies were targeted by Palestinian resistance fighters. Of the 683 total casualties reported thus far, seven were between the ages of 4 and 7, and nine between the ages of 10 and 17. The remaining 667 casualties appear to be adults.
Age distribution of the Israelis killed during Hamas’ October 7 operation (as of 23 October).
The numbers and proportion of Palestinian civilians and children among those killed by Israeli bombardment over the past two weeks – over 5,791 killed, including 2,360 children and 1,292 women, and more than 18,000 injured – are far higher than any of these Israeli figures from the events of 7 October.
Revisiting the scene
The daring Hamas-led military operation, codenamed Al-Aqsa Flood, unfolded with a dramatic dawn raid at approximately 6:30 AM (Palestine time) on 7 October. This was accompanied by a cacophony of sirens breaking the silence of occupied Jerusalem, signaling the start of what became an extraordinary event in the occupation state’s 75-year history.
As per the spokesperson of Hamas’ armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, around 1,500 Palestinian fighters crossed the formidable Gaza-Israel separation barrier.
However, this breakout was not limited to Hamas forces alone; numerous armed fighters belonging to other factions such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) later breached the armistice line, along with some Palestinians unaffiliated with any organized militia.
As it became apparent this was no ordinary resistance operation, hundreds of videos quickly flooded social media, most of which have been viewed by The Cradle, depicting dead Israeli troops and settlers, fierce gunfire battles between various parties, and Israelis being taken captive into Gaza.
These videos were either taken on the phones of Israelis, or were released by Palestinian fighters filming their own operation. It wasn’t until hours later that more gruesome and downright dubious allegations began to surface.
Unsubstantiated allegations of ‘Hamas atrocities’
Aviva Klompas, a former speechwriter for the Israeli mission to the UN, was the first Israeli of note to spread the claim that there were reports of “Israeli girls being raped and their bodies dragged through the street.”
She posted this on X at 9:18 PM (Palestine time), on 7 October, although an op-ed Klompa published with Newsweek at 12:28 AM (Palestine time), on 8 October, made no mention of any sexual violence.
Klompas is also the co-founder of Boundless Israel, a “think-action tank” that works “to revitalize Israel education and take bold collective action to combat Jew-hatred.” An “unapologetically Zionist” charitable group that works to promote Israeli narratives on social media.
The one case touted as proof of rape was that of a young German-Israeli woman named Shani Louk, who was filmed face down in the back of a pickup truck and was widely assumed dead.
It was unclear whether the fighters filmed with Louk in the Gaza-bound vehicle were members of Hamas, as they do not sport the uniforms or insignia of the Al-Qassam troops identifiable in other Hamas videos – some even wore casual civilian clothing and sandals.
Later, her mother claimed to have evidence that her daughter was still alive, but had suffered a severe head wound. This rings true with information released by Hamas that indicated Louk was being treated for her injuries at an unspecified Gaza hospital.
Complicating matters further, on the day these rape allegations arose, Israelis would not have had access to this information. Their armed forces had not yet entered many, if not most, of the areas liberated by the resistance and were still engaged in armed clashes with them on multiple fronts.
Nevertheless, these rape claims took on a life of their own, with even US President Joe Biden alleging, during a speech days later, that Israeli women were “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies” by Hamas fighters. It is important to note that The Forward’s article on 11 October reported that the Israeli military acknowledged they had no evidence of such allegations at that point.
When the army later made its own allegations of decapitations, foot amputations, and rape, Reuters pointed out that “the military personnel overseeing the identification process didn’t present any forensic evidence in the form of pictures or medical records.” To date, there is no credible evidence of these atrocities that has been presented.
Other outrageous allegations, such as the story of Hamas “beheading 40 babies‘ made headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. Even Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies.” The claims trace back to Israeli reserve settler and soldier David Ben Zion, who has previously incited violent riots against Palestinians and called for the West Bank town of Huwara to be wiped out. No evidence was ever produced to support these claims and the White House itself confirmed later that Joe Biden had never seen such photos.
The Hamas plan
There is little to no credible evidence that Palestinian fighters had a plan to – or deliberately sought to – kill or harm unarmed Israeli civilians on 7 October. From the available footage, we witness them engaging primarily with armed Israeli forces, accounting for the deaths of hundreds of occupation soldiers. As Qassam Brigades’ Spokesman Abu Obeida made clear on 12 October:
“Al-Aqsa Flood operation aimed to destroy the Gaza Division (an Israeli army unit on Gaza’s borders) which was attacked at 15 points, followed by attacking 10 further military intervention points. We attacked the Zikim site and several other settlements outside the Gaza Division headquarters.”
Abu Obeida and other resistance officials claim that the other key objective of their operation was to take Israeli prisoners that they could exchange for the approximately 5,300 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention centers, many of whom are women and children.
Hamas Deputy Head of the Political Bureau of Saleh Al-Arouri, in an interview after the operation, stressed: “We have a large and qualitative number and senior officers. All we can say now is that the freedom of our prisoners is at the doorstep.”
Both sides play this game: Since the start of its military assault on Gaza, Israel has rounded up and imprisoned more than 1,200 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. To date there have been 38 prisoner exchange deals between the resistance factions and Tel Aviv – deals that Israelis often resist to the very last minute.
While these kinds of testimonies trickle out, reports are emerging that Israeli authorities have dialed up the mistreatment, torture, and even killing of Palestinian prisoners in their custody – a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which ironically, a non-state actor like Hamas appears to have followed to the letter.
In relation to the events of 7 October, there are certainly some videos depicting possibly unarmed Israelis, killed in their vehicles or at entrances to facilities, so that Palestinian troops could gain access.
There are also videos which show the fighters engaging in shootouts with armed Israeli forces, where there were unarmed Israelis taking cover in between, in addition to videos of fighters shooting toward houses and throwing grenades into fortified areas. Eyewitness testimony also suggests grenades were thrown into bomb shelters, though by whom is unclear.
Even at the Israeli “peace rave”, which has been cited as the single deadliest attack committed by Palestinian fighters during their operation, videos emerged that appeared to show Israeli forces opening fire through a crowd of unarmed civilians, toward targets they believed to be Hamas members. ABC News also reported that an Israeli tank had headed to the site of the festival.
An Israeli massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri?
In its report on the events at Be’eri Kibbutz, ABC News photographed artillery pieces resembling Israeli munitions outside a bombed-out home. The reporter, David Muir, mentioned that Hamas fighters, covered in plastic bags, were found in the aftermath.
Additionally, videos of the scene show homes that appear to have been struck by munitions that Hamas fighters did not possess. Muir reported that about 14 people were held hostage in a building by Palestinian fighters.
A Hebrew-language Haaretz article published on 20 October, which only appears in English in a must-read Mondoweiss article, paints a very different story of what went down in Be’eri that day. A Kibbutz resident who had been away from his home – whose partner was killed in the melee – reveals stunning new details:
“His voice trembles when his partner, who was besieged in her home shelter at the time, comes to mind. According to him, only on Monday night (9 October) and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages — did the IDF complete the takeover of the kibbutz. The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
Photo evidence of the destruction in Be’eri corroborates his account. Only the heavy munitions of the Israeli army could have destroyed residential homes in this manner.
Aftermath or Be’eri Kibbutz after the fire power of the two sides ceased
Hamas behaviors: Evidence vs allegations
Yasmin Porat, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, said in an interview for an Israeli radio-show, hosted by state-broadcaster Kan, that Israeli forces “eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” going on to state that “there was very, very heavy crossfire” and even noted tank shelling.
Porat had attended the Nova rave and testified to the humane treatment throughout different interviews she conducted with Israeli media. She explained that when she was held prisoner, the Hamas fighters “guarded us”, telling her in Hebrew to “Look at me well, we’re not going to kill you. We want to take you to Gaza. We are not going to kill you. So be calm, you’re not going to die.” She also added the following:
“They give us something to drink here and there. When they see we are nervous they calm us down. It was very frightening but no one treated us violently. Luckily nothing happened to me like what I heard in the media.”
Increasingly, and to the horror of some Israeli officials and news outlets, Israeli eyewitnesses and survivors of the bloodshed are testifying that they were treated well by Palestinian fighters. On 24 October, Israeli state broadcaster Kan bemoaned the fact that prisoner Yocheved Lifshitz, released by Hamas the day before, was allowed to make statements live on air.
As she was handed over to Red Cross intermediaries, the elderly Israeli female captive was caught on camera turning back to squeeze the hand of her Hamas captor in her last goodbyes. Lifshitz’s live broadcast, in which she spoke about her two-week ordeal, “humanized” her Hamas captors even further as she recounted her daily life with the fighters:
“They were very friendly toward us. They took care of us. We were given medicine and were treated. One of the men with us was badly injured in a motorbike accident. Their (Hamas) paramedics looked after his wounds, he was given medicine and antibiotics. The people were friendly. They kept the place very clean. They were very concerned about us.”
More questions than answers
It is essential to recognize that in many reports by western journalists on the ground, the majority of information regarding the actions of Hamas fighters comes from the Israeli army – an active participant in the conflict.
Emerging evidence now indicates that there is a high probability, especially due to the scale of the infrastructural damage, that Israeli military forces could have deliberately killed captives, fired on incorrect targets, or mistaken Israelis for Palestinians in their firefights. If the only source of information for a serious claim made is the Israeli army, then it has to be taken into account that they have reason to conceal cases of friendly fire.
Israeli friendly fire was rampant, even in the days that followed, from an army with very little actual combat experience. In the city of Ashkelon (Askalan) on 8 October, Israeli soldiers shot dead and shouted insults at the body of a man they believed to have been a Hamas fighter, yet later realized they had executed a fellow Israeli. This is just one of three such examples of friendly fire in one day, resulting in the killing of Israelis by their own troops.
Amid the fog of war, parties to the conflict have different perspectives on what occurred during the initial raid and its aftermath. It’s not disputed that Palestinian armed groups inflicted significant losses on the Israeli military, but there will be plenty of ongoing debate regarding everything else in the weeks and months to come.
An independent, impartial, international investigation is urgently needed, one that has access to information from all sides involved in the conflict. Neither the Israelis nor the Americans will agree to this, which itself suggests that Tel Aviv has much to conceal.
In the meantime, Palestinian civilians in Gaza endure ongoing, indiscriminate attacks with the most sophisticated heavy weapons in existence, living under the persistent threat of forced and potentially irreversible displacement. This Israeli air blitz was made possible only by the flood of unsubstantiated ‘Hamas atrocities’ stories that media began to circulate on and after 7 October.
The “Israel-Has-No-Alternative” Myth
BY SAM HUSSEINI | OCTOBER 13, 2023
Many are claiming that Israel has no choice.
It has to bomb Gaza, there is no alternative.
In fact, Israel has a choice.
A clear choice.
To reflexively react and bomb Gaza amid massive propaganda before assessing the facts is deranged.
One clear fact is that Netanyahu promised security and he failed. Israelis of every political stripe should be fuming at him, as some are. Never mind for the moment that he had warning of the Hamas attacks and almost certainly wanted conflict.
The choice facing Israel is highlighted by this:
In 2004, bombings on commuter trains in Madrid killed over 190 people. The government was immediately voted out and a new government came in, swiftly got Spain out of Iraq and nothing like that has happened in Spain since.
But the lessons of the train bombings is memory holed and even falsified.
NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reversed what happened, claiming after the Orlando shooting — which was also followed by a flood of lies — that after the bombings in Spain, “the more conservative candidate ended up winning.” (In NPR-speak, “conservative” means more pro-war.) Total propaganda.
The lesson is clear.
Netanyahu isn’t out to protect Israelis.
If he was, he would embrace peace.
You want to stop a group like Hamas from attacking you?
Solve the conflict.
Abide by international law.
Stop bombing people.
Repent for having expelled nonviolent activists.
Withdraw.
Agree to peace.
—
I’ve been suspended by X/twitter, but you can now see my past material there. I’m also now posting on Gab.
Flashback: Babies on Bayonets
Corbett • 10/14/2023
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
In this clip from The WWI Conspiracy (Part Two) we examine the propaganda surrounding the “Rape of Belgium” at the start of WWI and the actions of the baby bayonetting evil Hun savages…
TRANSCRIPT
Once again, just as they did in Britain, the cabal was going to have to leverage its control of the press and key governmental positions to begin to shape public perception and instill pro-war sentiment. And once again, the full resources of these motivated co-conspirators were brought to bear on the task.
One of the first shells in this barrage of propaganda to penetrate the American consciousness was the “Rape of Belgium,” a catalogue of scarcely believable atrocities allegedly committed by the German forces in their invasion and occupation of Belgium at the start of the war. In a manner that was to become the norm in 20th century propaganda, the stories had a kernel of truth; there is no doubt that there were atrocities committed and civilians murdered by German forces in Belgium. But the propaganda that was spun from those kernels of truth was so over-the-top in its attempts to portray the Germans as inhuman brutes that it serves as a perfect example of war propaganda.
RICHARD GROVE: The American population at that time had a lot of German people in it. Thirty to fifty percent of the population had relations back to Germany, so there had to be this very clever propaganda campaign. It’s known today as “babies on bayonets.” So if you have no interest in World War I but you think it’s interesting to study propaganda so you don’t get fooled again, then type it into your favorite search engine: “babies on bayonets, World War I.” You’ll see hundreds of different posters where the Germans are bayonetting babies and it brings about emotions and it doesn’t give you the details of anything. And emotions drive wars, not facts. Facts are left out and deleted all the time in order to create wars, so I think that putting facts back in might help prevent wars. But I do know that they like to drive people on emotion. The “babies on bayonets” getting America into World War I, that’s a key part of it.
GERRY DOCHERTY: Children who had their arms chopped off. Nuns that were raped. Shocking things, genuinely shocking things. The Canadian officer who was nailed at St. Andrew’s cross on a church door and left there to bleed to death. These were the great myths peddled in order to defame and bring down the whole image of any justification for German action and try and influence America into war.
Gerry Docherty, co-author of Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.
DOCHERTY: That’s not to say that there weren’t atrocities on both sides. War is an atrocious event, and there are always victims. Absolutely. And I offer no justification for it. But the lies, the unnecessary abuse of propaganda.
Even when in Britain they decided that they would put together the definitive volume of evidence to present it to the world, the person they asked to do this just so happened to have been former British ambassador to the United States, a man called Bryce, who was very well-liked in the States. And his evidence was published and put forward and there were screeds of stories after stories. But then later it was discovered that in fact the people who took the evidence hadn’t been allowed to speak to any of the Belgians directly but in fact what they were doing is they were listening to a middleman or agents who had supposedly taken these stories.
And when one of the official committee said “Hold on, can I speak to someone directly?” “No.” “No?” He resigned. He wouldn’t allow his name to be put forward with the [official report]. And that’s the extent to which this is false history. It’s not even acceptable to call it fake news. It’s just disgusting.
The campaign had its intended effect. Horrified by the stories emerging from Belgium—stories picked up and amplified by the members of the Round Table in the British press, including the influential Times and the lurid Daily Mail, run by Milner ally Lord Northcliffe—American public opinion began to shift away from viewing the war as a European squabble about an assassinated archduke and toward viewing the war as a struggle against the evil Germans and their “sins against civilization.”
The culmination of this propaganda campaign was the release of the “Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages,” better known as “The Bryce Report,” compiled for “His Britannic Majesty’s Government” and presided over by Viscount James Bryce, who, not coincidentally, was the former British Ambassador to America and a personal friend of Woodrow Wilson. The report was a sham, based on 1,200 depositions collected by examiners who “had no authority to administer an oath.” The committee, which was not allowed to speak to a single witness itself, was tasked merely with sifting through this material and deciding what should be included in the final report. Unsurprisingly, the very real atrocities that the Germans had committed in Belgium—the burning of Louvain, Andenne and Dinant, for example—were overshadowed by the sensationalist (and completely unverifiable) stories of babies on bayonets and other acts of villainy.
The report itself, concluding that the Germans had systematically and premeditatedly broken the “rules and usages of war” was published on May 12, 1915, just five days after the sinking of The Lusitania.
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From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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