OPCW insiders dispute SECOND chemical weapons probe on Syria, blast ‘glaring technical weaknesses’
RT | April 28, 2020
A group of current and former OPCW employees have explosively slammed the organization for producing what they say is yet another “procedurally and scientifically flawed” report into alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria.
Writing at the Grayzone, the insiders denounced the “compromised” investigation into chemical incidents in the town of Ltamenah in March 2017. The probe was conducted by the watchdog’s newly formed Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), which claimed there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the Syrian government was responsible.
The IIT concluded that sarin and chlorine bombs were dropped by Syrian forces on Ltamenah in a series of attacks in March 2017, saying it was “unable to identify any other plausible explanation.” The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that the alleged evidence gathered by the team came mostly from anti-government groups eager to see a regime change and could only be described as “misinformation.”
The IIT report on Ltamenah was instantly amplified by Western media as fact, despite claims by high-level OPCW whistleblowers that the organization’s leadership had suppressed evidence during a previous probe into an alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018. The suppressed evidence, in that instance, had strongly suggested the incident may have been staged by jihadist rebel groups in order to frame the Syrian government and trigger a Western intervention. The OPCW, however, publicly offered a narrative which backed up Western claims of Syrian guilt, legitimizing US, British and French air strikes conducted in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
The fact that insiders are now also disputing the credibility of the Ltamenah report proves that “dissension within the OPCW ranks extends well beyond the Douma investigation,” the Grayzone said in its editor’s note.
The reports are so flawed and “politically motivated” that many OPCW professionals “no longer wish to be associated” with them, the group wrote, and many feel they should not be seen as representing the work of OPCW inspectors at all.
The Ltamenah report highlights the fact that “influential state parties” are misusing the OPCW to further their foreign policy objectives, and that the IIT was formed not to investigate the incidents but “simply to find the Syrian government guilty,” they said.
Indeed, the ITT merely “glossed over” some “glaring technical weaknesses” in reports from fact-finding missions to Ltamenah. Further damaging the report’s credibility is the fact that not one single member of the IIT conducted a field investigation, and “literally everything” in the case was provided by enemies of the Syrian government – some of whom are reportedly “well-known British military figureheads” who stood to gain by implicating the Syrian government, they said.
The OPCW insiders also took issue with the composition of the IIT, which surprisingly is made up of investigators “without any background or expertise in chemistry.” These so-called investigators are reliant on an “approved” list of “nameless, faceless” experts who represent Western intelligence agencies — a situation which suggests “devious and sinister” motives. This “one-sided array of experts” may be enough by itself to invalidate the conclusions of the IIT, they said.
While the IIT did lend some credence to the possibility of the attacks being staged, it quickly became clear that they did so only “with the express purpose of dismissing it,” they added.
In the article, the staff also briefly examined the question of motive, saying it “figures squarely within the realm of criminal investigation.” It is fair to question why the Syrian government would seemingly only use chemical weapons when they were “in control” of the conflict and not at their most desperate moments, they said.
Referring to a claim that chemical weapons, including sarin gas, were being stored at Shayrat Airbase in 2017, the group says the evidence ranks alongside intelligence reports leading up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in terms of its level of credibility.
The combination of the political bias, the compromised and flawed evidence, the lack of transparency and the singular reliance upon only one side of the story, leads to “serious doubts” about the IIT’s conclusions, the staff wrote.
What the IIT produced was simply the “desired Western opinion” about what “could have” happened. The “weak language” stating there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the Syrian government was responsible arguably implies a 50/50 scenario in which there are also reasonable grounds “not to believe” it, they said.
“At the end of the day, we must be clear that this is little more than an expression of a one-sided opinion,” they wrote.
Finally, the OPCW insiders took aim at the “complicit” mainstream media for interpreting the shaky conclusions of the investigation as hard fact, ensuring the flawed report “is met with no scientific challenge whatsoever.”
Western media continues to spread fake new about North Korea
By Lucas Leiroz | April 28, 2020
In modern warfare, one of the greatest weapons is the power to manipulate information. In a globalized international society, extremely integrated and connected by an infinite information circulation network, a media which controls the dissemination and content of such information is in an extremely advantageous position, as this power allows it to shape public opinion. In the mass society, we are all hostages to the dissemination of information and to the way it is carried out, which puts us in a position of extreme fragility, as we are daily forced to consume false information strategically manipulated by its disseminators.
Lies fill a large part of the mass media, as it is controlled by the most powerful groups in society and which are better able to guarantee their interests. In the Western world, the use of false information to denigrate the public image of people, countries, ideologies and movements that in some way oppose the liberal hegemonic ideology has become frequent. One of the biggest victims of this information war is North Korea, a country that is extremely denigrated in the West with numerous and repeated lies about its political regime and its society as a whole.
North Korean President Kim Jong-un was the youngest victim of the unfounded “death” news in Western media. In fact, it has become common for all North Korean public figures who are absent from the media spotlight for a few days to be reported as “dead” around the world – these death reports are often accompanied by weird accusations that such people were “sentenced to death”, even if there is no evidence for such conclusions. Once again, history repeated itself: after about two weeks without public appearances, Kim Jong-un was presumed dead by the West.
The trigger for world hysteria was Kim’s absence from the celebration of the last Day of the Sun – a traditional Korean holiday – on April 15th. Immediately, a media bombardment began in the West, with worldwide reports of the alleged “death” or “serious state of health” of the Korean President. The legend was generated around an alleged cardiac surgery, which would have been unsuccessful. According to the New York Post, the deputy director of HKSTV in Hong Kong said that Kim would be dead, citing a “very solid source” – which was not identified – while the Japanese newspaper, Shukan Gendai, said that Kim would be in “vegetative state” after undergoing cardiac surgery at the beginning of the month. On social media, the hashtag #kimjongundead quickly gained absurd popularity, being one of the most accessed on Twitter.
Apparently, the West wants to see Kim Jong-un dead, but the truth came out, with a series of official responses denying the avalanche of lies by the mass media. The South Korean intelligence service was the first to report the lie behind the information that Kim either died or was ill. “Our position in the government is firm”, special national security adviser, Moon Chung-in, said in an interview with CNN this Sunday (26), “Kim Jong-un is alive and well”. The adviser also said that Kim had been in Wonsan – a tourist town in the east of the country – since April 13 – which is why he was absent from public commitments – adding, “No suspicious movements were detected so far ”.
Then, a satellite photo captured an image of the President in Wonsan, showing that Kim is alive and well. The North Korean media then responded to the Western media offensive with several messages from Kim, confirming his health and thanking the messages of support received from public figures around the world who sympathized with the President’s alleged serious state of health. The most curious thing is that the lies invented by the West call attention for the degree of accuracy and complexity. Not satisfied with inventing death, vegetative condition and heart surgery, the media agencies released fake news stating that China had sent a team of doctors to operate Kim. Fortunately, Beijing denied the information immediately, leaving no doubt to its deleterious character.
In the end, Kim is alive, well and there is no concrete data that can tell us anything more accurate about his health. Obviously, the lie promoters already knew all this with antecedence, but they were concerned to make a lie in order to provoke inflamed reactions worldwide and destabilize Korea by tarnishing its image, portraying it as a dictatorial country, extremely closed and with a systemic censure – so strong that they are able to hide from the whole world a news as important as the death of their own president.
The darker side of this “fake news age” is that this false information drives big political decisions and is capable of influencing the actions of the people on large scale. Another example of the info-war power is Brazil, where fake news accusing China of having created the new coronavirus was officially admitted by the government, generating a serious diplomatic crisis between both countries and causing a wave of sinophobia and hostility against Asians in the country, with Chinese immigrants being beaten on the streets. On social media, millions of messages containing fake news about the virus are spread daily and already completely permeate the popular mentality.
An important tactic of information warfare is the handling of which news should be broadcast. Despite the huge repercussions of Kim Jong-un’s “death”, very few agencies have so far reported about the farce of this information, or, if they did, have invested little in its dissemination. The reason is simple: in addition to the interest in spreading fake news, denying previous information is costly and damages the image of these media outlets, which prefer to keep the lie.
Even though Pyongyang denies Kim’s death, Beijing denies having sent doctors for heart surgery and South Korea itself admits that it is all about fake news, in the popular imagination of Western mass societies, an image of Korea as a “terrible dictatorship” and “the most closed country in the world” is already formed and can hardly be rebuilt without a strong media work committed to the truth (which is far from emerging).
The fact is that Kim Jong-un is alive and, more than ever, it is proven that most of the content released about non-Western countries is made up of fake news. In our times, the circulation of information is a real battlefield, really worthy of attention for purposes of national defense and strategy.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Narrative Managers Argue China-Like Internet Censorship Is Needed
By Caitlin Johnstone | April 26, 2020
Neoconservative publication The Atlantic has published an article authored by two university professors titled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal”, subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the US was wrong.”
The article is actually worth reading in full, not just because it’s outrage porn for anyone who values human communication that is unregulated by oligarchs and government agencies, but because it’s actually packed full of extensively sourced information about the way Silicon Valley tech giants are collaborating with western governments to censor speech. The only difference between this article and something you might read on some libertarian website is that this article argues that all of these regulations on speech are a good thing.
Here’s an archive of the article if you don’t want to give clicks to The Atlantic, whose editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg once assured the world that “the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” Do give it a look if this interests you and you have time.
Fmr. Bush admin lawyer/current Harvard Law prof Jack Goldsmith goes full-Thomas Friedman, credits China’s enlightened authoritarian approach to information as “largely right” and laments the US’ provincial fealty to the First Amendment as “largely wrong.” https://t.co/1WyQtgE8bK pic.twitter.com/1M03ybxh0I
— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonyLfisher) April 26, 2020
“In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong,” argue the article’s authors, one of whom is a former Bush administration lawyer. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”
The article paints an accurate picture of the ways in which supposedly independent social media platforms have been collaborating with governments and with each other to regulate speech and have increased that collaboration during the Covid-19 pandemic, noting how “In March 2019, Zuckerberg invited the government to regulate ‘harmful content’ on his platform” and how “As in other contexts, Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and ‘authorities’ (from the World Health Organization to the governments of US states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.”
“These platforms have engaged in ‘strategic collaboration’ with the federal government, including by sharing information, to fight foreign electoral interference,” The Atlantic reports after outlining ways in which Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have been censoring speech in “aggressive but still imperfect steps to fend off foreign adversaries.”
“The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks,” the article’s authors assert. “And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded, the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.”
Last May, a govt org outlined an extremely Orwellian vision for what the US must to do to win “the tech war” against China in AI. It essentially called to remake the entire American economy and society. Now, thanks to Covid19,their vision is taking shape.https://t.co/fhWkyQR5n3
— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) April 20, 2020
This article comes out days after journalist Whitney Webb published another article worth reading titled “Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision”. Webb details how FOIA-obtained document by a US government organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) argues for the need to implement authoritarian measures like increased surveillance more in line with those used in China, in order to prevent the PRC from technologically surpassing the United States.
Webb notes for example how the document “cites the use of mass surveillance on China’s ‘huge population base’ is an example of how China’s ‘scale of consumer market’ advantage allowing ‘China to leap ahead’ in the fields of related technologies, like facial recognition.”
We’re also seeing an increase in surveillance being pushed for in a new report by the think tank Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, arguing that a drastic increase in tech surveillance is “a price worth paying” in order to fight Covid-19. Which is of course hilarious, because having the think tank of a Bush lapdog Prime Minister argue that more surveillance is a price worth paying to stop coronavirus is a lot like a bunch of muggers arguing that time saved by cutting through dark alleyways is worth the increased risk of mugging.
So that’s great. We’re seeing mainstream narrative managers shriek about the need for new cold war escalations against China’s bad, bad authoritarian government, while simultaneously arguing that western governments should espouse Beijing’s worst authoritarian impulses. This as we’ve discussed previously is because consent needs to be manufactured in order for the US-centralized empire to take drastic steps to prevent China from surpassing it and creating a multipolar world, and the freer people are to think and act and organize, the harder that’s going to be.
Oligarchs have no business controlling what we can and cannot say to each other. Governments have no business bringing more and more transparency to us while bringing more and more opacity to themselves. This is ugly, it is abusive, and it must end.
Freedom of speech is actually about freedom of thought. Speech is the carrying agent of thought; controlling human communication is actually about controlling the spread of ideas. Censorship is about controlling the thoughts that the public think in their heads. Speech control is mind control.
Jacobin Magazine Is Funded by Zionist Money; Stiffs Authors
By Eric Striker • National Justice • April 25, 2020
Jacobin Magazine is today the premier magazine of the “Bernie Left” and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Since 2017, they have come under attack for purging many of the original writers who captured the essence of left-wing populism — defending white working people, pushing back against identity politics — and trading them in for liberal interventionists, embrace of “antifa” and anarchist voices, open borders activists, and “sex worker” advocacy.
Research into the 990 forms of the Jacobin Foundation Ltd and some of the organizations giving them grants may provide clues explaining the abrupt change in Bhaskar Sunkara’s editorial line.
According to a 2017 990 form uncovered by National Justice, the Annenberg Foundation gave the Jacobin $100,000. The organization writes checks to numerous Jewish and Zionist causes, as well as a wide variety of pro-immigration and gay lobbies and legal groups.
Walter Annenberg, the foundation’s namesake, was a Wall Street speculator turned media mogul. He used his money to aid Israel’s war effort during the ’67 conflict and was known for backing various ethnocentric endeavors. A six figure check from the Annenbergs to an ostensibly socialist, anti-Zionist publication raises eyebrows, to say the least.
Another significant Jacobin donor, the Jewish Communal Fund, cut the magazine a $70,000 check alongside an infinite list of pro-Israel causes..
While Jacobin reported a total revenue of $1.5 million in 2018 mostly from program services, these two organizations provided a substantial amount of their grants and contributions. The Annenberg Foundation provided almost half of Jacobin’s grant money in 2016 ($219,861), while in 2017 the JCF’s money provided almost 70% of the free cash in this column ($107,301). Not bad!
According to sources who spoke to National Justice on condition of anonymity, the editor’s promise to pay them $50 dollars for their articles never materialized.
Political magazines are rarely profitable and not all can afford to pay their writers, but the Jacobin does not appear to have money problems. According to their latest IRS filings, they have set aside $576,019 in bonds, equities, and ETFs so that they can play the stock market.
In the same year, Jacobin’s Sunkara had the money to purchase the British Tribune, which George Orwell once worked for as an editor. Sunkara immediately fired all of its loyal employees with a pitiful severance package that compensated them for only 70% of their wages.
The prestige-purchase is a mirror image of Will Chamberlain’s costly take over of Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine Human Events, which Chamberlain then proceeded to turn into a crappy gamergate blog.
Sunkara’s latest venture is to employ The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian and Majority Report’s Michael Brooks for a weekend podcast. It’s unlikely either of these two liberal figures are cheap. The description for the show sounds like more “liberals vs conservatives” partisanship interchangeable with the crap on MSNBC.
Bhaskar’s pivot from anti-capitalist advocacy to profitable liberalism is as obvious as the Soviet flag is red.
U.S. Concocting Intel to Frame China for COVID-19 Crisis
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 25, 2020
China’s communist leaders have blood on their hands, so say U.S. hawks. Chinaphobes in Congress and a battalion of media pundits are demanding compensation from Beijing for the spiraling death toll and economic destruction incurred by the United States.
Already U.S. states have begun litigation to sue China. Rightwing think-tanks like the Hudson Institute are projecting that China is liable to pay out trillions of dollars for American losses over the Covid-19 pandemic.
The chorus of “Yellow Peril” fever goes beyond financial retribution right up to creating a casus belli against China. It is no coincidence that U.S. warships have stepped up provocative maneuvers in the South China Sea this week.
President Donald Trump and his top envoy Mike Pompeo have weighed in to point the finger at China for pandemic mayhem hitting the U.S. China is being set up as the scapegoat to “explain” why the supposedly most powerful nation in the world has been left so ravaged by a virus.
The “blame China” narrative turns on two sub-plots. It is claimed in U.S. media that the Chinese authorities knew a lot more than they let on they did about the potential harm from the epidemic when it first emerged in the city of Wuhan in December. The insinuation is that China (and the World Health Organization) engaged in a cover-up about the scale of the disease, thereby putting other nations in danger through misinformation.
The second sub-plot in the “blame China” agenda is that a Chinese virology laboratory leaked out the deadly virus, either by accident or as part of biowarfare program. That again implies a China cover-up. Both sub-plots fit the slogan taken up by Trump supporters and anti-China hawks more generally: “China Lied, People Died”.
In both cases, however, it is more than plausible that the media agitation is information warfare to scapegoat China. What is happening here this: a disastrous current situation in America is being retrospectively “explained” with false U.S. intelligence claims that seek to shift blame on to China, and, crucially, distract from questions about inherent systematic failure in Washington.
On the “China knew more but didn’t let on” claim, the primer for this theme came from an ABC report published on April 9. It quotes anonymous U.S. sources as saying that the Pentagon’s disease experts were briefing the White House and senior national security officials about a new contagion sweeping through China’s Wuhan region as far back as November.
As ABC reported with convenient sinister implication: “Those analyses said China’s leadership knew the epidemic was out of control even as it kept such crucial information from foreign governments and public health agencies.”
The basic problem is “those analyses” referred to by ABC’s anonymous sources are only alleged to have happened. Where’s the evidence, transcripts, memos and so on? An open mind should ask the question: was such an intel assessment even formulated?
ABC’s report took off in the pundit-sphere even though it updated its report with a disclaimer from the Pentagon denying that any such assessment existed. Fair enough, maybe the Pentagon is mischievously disowning. There again, more likely, ABC is being played by its anonymous sources to concoct an anti-China narrative?
A few other contradictions are the following: Mark Esper, the Pentagon chief, subsequently told ABC in an interview that he didn’t know anything about any such alleged contagion warning which he had supposedly received back in November or December. Esper’s cack-handed tone suggests he simply did not receive any such briefing, rather than any sort of smart sophistry on his part.
Furthermore, if the alleged Pentagon intelligence warning of a new contagion was presumably circulated in Presidential Daily Briefs, why was Trump voicing complacency about the potential pandemic during January and February? Indeed, why was Trump on record for praising China’s efforts at controlling the outbreak during this crucial period if he had been warned, allegedly, about the pandemic and the implied cover-up by Beijing?
Here’s another amusing cause for doubt. The Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) – the agency which purportedly warned of a contagion in China back in November – is officially tasked with detecting diseases which “pose serious risk to U.S. forces” in Asia and internationally. Strangely enough, the NCMI didn’t seem to know about outbreaks of COVID-19 onboard U.S. aircraft carriers deployed in Asia-Pacific which only came to light when navy crews publicly complained – yet we are led to believe the same agency knew what was going down in the obscure environs of Wuhan, even before Chinese authorities knew about the virus.
The second sub-plot is the alleged escape of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The WIV is an internationally respected disease research center, which has partnered with French and other governments’ researchers. It operates at the highest international safety standards, yet somehow the WIV supposedly let a deadly virus escape. There is an added insinuation that the virus was man-made as part of a scientific program. President Trump said last week that Washington “was looking into it” and hinted that the release may even have been deliberate.
This is a shoddy conspiracy theory based on zero evidence, as documented by investigative journalist Max Blumenthal. The claim of “lab release” has been doing the rounds in dodgy rightwing U.S. media like the Washington Times for months. It has recently been elevated by equally dodgy reporting in the Washington Post that has all the hallmarks of an intel psy-ops.
The World Health Organization, as well as a vast body of scientific opinion, concludes that the Covid-19 virus (also known as SARS-CoV-2) is of natural origin emanating from wildlife, and that it is neither man-made nor manipulated in a lab. Indeed, many eminent scientists in the field of virology have condemned “conspiracy theories” claiming the virus came out of a lab as “pure baloney”.
What this all boils down to is an attempt by American anti-China hawks and elements of U.S. intelligence to retrospectively construct a narrative which lays the blame for the Covid-19 global crisis on Beijing. Given the abysmal failure of the U.S. to mitigate this crisis – exposing the deep flaws of its capitalistic society – the temptation is all the stronger for Washington to jump on the bandwagon scapegoating China.
Considering Trump’s re-election hopes are at stake, it is not surprising he is clambering into the driving seat of this bandwagon.
But concocting intel to fit a conclusion is a precarious pursuit. It has disturbing resonance with the Iraqi WMD intel manufacturing and media indulgence which led to disastrous war.
Is U.S. power so shameless that it would prefer war rather than face public accountability for its own criminal complacency and neglect? You better believe it.
Israel and World Jewry
By Evan Jones | American Herald Tribune | April 24, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic hits the world. Undeterred, the Israeli forces of Occupation (including the settlers) escalate the rampage and the outrages. Murders, harassment and arrests, home demolitions, destruction and/or theft of virus aid equipment and food and brutalizing of aid workers, Gaza crop poisoning on a grand scale, West Bank crop destruction, etc. Spitting on Palestinians is now de rigueur. Business as usual. Sadism on a grand scale. Whence the motivation? And the collective psychological reward? The Jewish God is a militant deity.
Israel is a pariah state. It is an apartheid state in its construction, [1] from its inception as an ethnocracy, not one for which the label ‘apartheid’ is merely a dangerous prospect on the horizon with a completely colonized West Bank.
How does Israel survive as such, given that apartheid South Africa has disappeared into history. It survives essentially because of support from the institutionalized structures of establishment world Jewry. Period.
Don’t talk Christian Zionists, as they are a side issue, crazies succoured to dilute the central causal lineage.
The US umbrella is tangibly of enormous importance. But behind the White House compliance is the Zionist lobby, from Truman onward (albeit with occasional wobbles). The Zionist lobby owns Congress; those members they don’t own they simply extrude (starting with William Fulbright in 1974, Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, etc.). The massive role of the US in supporting Israel is a product of institutionalized American Jewry – now centred on the peak body AIPAC.[2] The argument that US support of Israel is an instrumental means of projecting US power in the Middle East is diversionary; the posited hierarchy of master and proxy won’t wash. Cui bono?
The Zionist lobby only recently destroyed what was left of the integrity of the British Labour Party, installing a functionary at its head. The British state is Zionist-occupied territory; ditto that of France, Germany (hobbled by the Jewish holocaust), Canada and Australia.
Israel, as a racist state, is engaged in criminality sui generis. It was a guaranteed outcome known from the start. Theodore Herzl noted (1896):
‘An infiltration [of Jewish migrants to Palestine] is bound to end badly. It continues to the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened … Immigration is consequently futile unless based on an assured supremacy’. Violence was implicit in Zionism from the outset.[3]
The native population felt itself threatened immediately, but the Zionist movement found solace and then salvation in the arrival of World War, the Balfour Declaration and subsequently the British Mandate over Palestine. Until the Zionists could muster the firepower to create its ‘promised land’ unilaterally by terrorism. That firepower was acquired from British training en masse, just prior to World War II (to quell the Arab rebellion) and during the War itself.
As David Hirst notes, regarding the massacres and bombings by Jewish forces in response to the MacDonald White Paper of May 1939: [4]
‘The ideological roots of ‘gun Zionism reach back to Theodor Herzl himself. It was inevitable, as he foresaw, that armed force would eventually come into its own as the principal instrument of a movement which, in its earlier and weaker phase, could only rely on the protection of an imperial sponsor. That phase was now drawing to a close.’
Israeli criminality must be sheeted home to the personnel within the institutions of the Israeli state – politicians, the military and intelligence services, the judiciary, etc. They are crimes of individuals, groupings, institutionalized, the personnel being uniformly Jewish.
Isn’t this criminality bad for world Jewry and what it means to be Jewish? Apparently not. Establishment Jewish institutions, with one voice, sign up for Israel’s crimes. More, support of Israel is their raison d’être – all while simultaneously shedding crocodile tears about anti-Semitism. The global Jewish community, whether Jewish individuals like it or not, is implicated in Israeli criminality by the dominant Jewish organizations who claim to speak for national Jewish communities.
The Wikipedia entry of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), clearly sanctioned by its subject, notes: ‘The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, represents the interests of the Australian Jewish community to …’. Here’s a representative conflation of the interests of the state of Israel and of a national Jewish community in its entirety.
John Lyons was Middle East correspondent for The Australian newspaper during 2009-15. His Balcony Over Jerusalem [5] is notable for the attention paid to the lobby. Like all budding Middle East correspondents, Lyons was inevitably the subject of attempted seduction and, failing that, subsequently the subject of escalating attacks for his endeavour to fulfil his role as independent reporter. A senior Israeli military officer observed to Lyons: ‘The Israel lobby in Australia is the most powerful lobby in the world in terms of impact it has within its own country’.
The nation-based lobby works to ensure that its own government (whichever Party is in power) remains complacent, acquiescent, if not blood red in support. It also works tirelessly to control the information flow. Because Israel stinks, disinformation (lies, counter-narratives, fairy stories) and censorship have to be an integral part of the lobby’s activities. Lyons recounts how, in particular, AIJAC’s Colin Rubenstein constantly pressured senior management at The Australian to close down his reporting. (Senior management of the Murdoch-owned paper supported Lyons, in spite of the attempted scuttling by a middle level editor).
The other major Australian media chain, Fairfax (now Nine Entertainment), owner of the major Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra dailies, has faced the same pressure. Ditto the publicly-owned television stations ABC & SBS. Fairfax/Nine has persistently caved in, granting privileged access to the opinion and letters pages to pro-Israel apologists. An ex-Fairfax journalist, friend, confirms that the pressure of the lobby on management was relentless and intolerable.
In early January, in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age we have Rubenstein glorifying the assassination of Qasem Soleimani as ‘arch-terrorist’, presiding over a claimed multi-tentacled terrorist expansionist reach of Iran in the Middle East, destabilising everything in its wake. Rubenstein even has Iran behind the assassination of Lebanon’s Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Surprisingly, the online comments editor allowed multiple responses from ‘woke’ readers to Rubenstein as an Israel front man, whereas editors scrupulously deny such feedback in the print version of the newspaper. In the same issue of the papers we have an AIPAC flunkey claiming on cue that the essential issue behind US-Iran escalating tension is ‘the pressing need to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons’, bizarrely accusing Iran of undermining the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal.
Rubenstein was in the Herald again in late January, claiming that plenipotentiary Jared Kushner’s ‘Middle East Peace Plan (sic)’, in the formulation of which no Palestinian authorities were invited, is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Thus are Australians fed the regular odious drip, very rarely opposed in print, of the innate necessity and justice of Israel’s criminality.
Rather than the association between Israel and its global Jewish community support being severed as the daily brutality of the Israeli forces of Occupation accumulates, the association has recently been reinforced. The notable vehicle for this reinforcement has been the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism. The Definition skirts over ‘Holocaust Remembrance’ but pays majority attention to the treatment of Israel.
Thus we find that rational criticism, driven by conventional humanitarian principles, of Israel’s criminality is labelled anti-Semitic. More, IHRA personnel and Jewish organizations flog this definition, pressuring, pressuring national governments into submission to accept the definition and to act as repressive agents against free-thinking citizens of those countries.
And to those who object? The issue is concisely contained in a recent skirmish in faraway New Zealand. The brief report on stuff.nz deserves quoting at length. It turns out that the Wellington Jewish Council had requested New Zealand’s capital city to adopt the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. But the Wellington Progressive Synagogue objected, claiming that the definition ‘had the potential to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism (opposition to the state of Israel), as it had already done overseas’. Too kind – not ‘potential’, as the point of the definition is precisely to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Said Progressive Synagogue spokespersons: ‘Its new effect is to regulate the speech of people like ourselves: law-abiding non-Zionists who call for the unexceptional application of law and human rights in Israel/Palestine; Jews and non-Jews alike’. Quite.
The NZ Jewish Council responded that ‘the IHRA definition explicitly stated criticism of Israel could not be regarded as antisemitic’. A dishonest retort. The text includes the sentence ‘… criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’. But this is transparently a ruse to deflect from the substance of the definition’s text for which the sentence is an aberration. And the meaning of ‘similar to that levelled against any other country’? Criticisms of Israel are aimed precisely at structures and practices that set it apart from other countries, including some countries that are utterly on the nose. The IHRA mob mean – we will be the arbiters of what is acceptable criticism. But, in truth, what is ‘acceptable’ criticism is an empty set.
But here’s the clincher. The Jewish Council continues: ‘The writers of the opinion piece were “fringe” and did not have a mandate to speak on behalf of the Jewish community – unlike the Jewish Council’.
‘Fringe’? ‘Mandate’? This is it in a nutshell. If you don’t support Israel 100 per cent, you aren’t a real Jew. And on what basis does the Jewish Council’s presumed ‘mandate’ rest?
Michelle Weinroth, author and member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, nails the fraud and duplicity behind the IHRA push:
‘If the IHRA definition turns a blind eye to the veritable culprits of heinous racism, it nonetheless targets the anti-racist defenders of Palestinian human rights, many of whom are conscientious Jews. … it masquerades as an innocuous, educational, and preventative measure while acting as a penal code that aggresses the advocates of human rights, silencing them with veiled threats. … At its heart sits a false equation between the state of Israel and Jews more generally.’
A false equation between Israel and Jews ‘more generally’. Here’s another one. Recently brought to light, an earlier tussle took place in September 1991 when Israel demanded a $10 billion loan guarantee, which President George H Bush viewed as a means of undermining the forthcoming Madrid peace conference (Blankfort, fn.2). Bush Sr threatened to deny Israel the loan guarantees if the large contingent of migrants from the Soviet Union were to be directed into West Bank settlements. Philip Weiss reports:
‘The Israel lobby group the American Jewish Committee (AJC) decided to support the Israeli government against the White House in 1991 over illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank, even though many officials at the organization privately backed the president. The AJC reasoned that a leading Jewish organization in Washington had a “primary responsibility” to stand up for Israel because the country represents the “collective will” of the Jewish people, an AJC official says.’
Israel represents the collective will of the Jewish people? Were ‘the Jewish people’ consulted?
One of the more remarkable attempts to associate Israel with the ‘collective will’ of the Jewish people, via the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, is a statement by one Robert Wistrich to the UN Commission on Human Rights, published on 10 September 2004.[6] Wistrich’s parents’ lives were blighted by anti-Semitism, and his subsequent stellar academic career was devoted to this very subject. Yet this statement is a wretched mishmash, devoid of logic and history, and conveniently oblivious to Israeli criminality. And this during the Prime Ministership of noted humanist Ariel Sharon. Wistrich claims:
‘Much of the mobilizing power of “anti-Zionism” derives from its link to the Palestinian cause. Since the 1960s, the [Palestine Liberation Organization] has worked hard to totally delegitimize Zionism and the policy has largely succeeded: this anti-Zionism involves a total negation of Jewish nationhood and legitimate Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Israel …’
Legitimate sovereignty in Eretz Israel? Sure. Wistrich’s tribalism has overridden his rigorous academic training. Curious, there are no Jewish dissenters in his grab bag of mad dog anti-Semites in a pragmatic coalition all aimed at the destruction of Israel.
Wistrich couldn’t really avoid this elephant in the room, so he grabbed the bull by the horns in a 2014 issue of Commentary (preaching to the converted). [7] Well-known Jewish intellectuals who don’t toe the Party line are accused of having been mentally and morally captured by infantile Marxism, etc., and/or anti-Americanism, their left-wing blinkered obsessions then finding its next object of abuse post-Vietnam in Israel. Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Howard Zinn (‘Hatred for America, the West, and Israel thrives beneath the cloak of human rights and social justice’), Eric Hobsbawm, Shlomo Sand, Ilan Pappé – all are excoriated for their sins.
In particular, Wistrich couldn’t have ignored Shlomo Sand, whose cannon volleys in The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) and The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012) blasted Wistrich’s self-assured self-righteousness to shreds. Wistrich dismisses Sand (‘his pseudoscientific delegitimization of Israel’) as merely having ‘revived long-discredited theories – such as Arthur Koestler’s deranged notion that Ashkenazi Jews sprang from Khazars who converted in the 10th century C.E.’. Wistrich ignored that Sand, in genuine scholarly fashion, put Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) into context with a considerable literature on the same theme.
The rhetoric of these contemptible lefties, claims Wistrich, ‘divorced from historical truth and geopolitical reality, negates any possibility of reform or redress concerning genuine grievances’. Genuine grievances? A chink in the armour? How could there be grievances against Israel that were genuine (the ‘empty set’ again), and who would decide? Evidently not the Palestinian victims or their Jewish sympathizers.
We have a comparable affair when French elder statesman Robert Badinter addressed UNESCO in December 2016,[8] appropriating Holocaust remembrance to plug Israel as synonymous with Jewry per se. Badinter played the same card as Wistrich:
‘What is certain is that in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anti-Semitism has once again spread widely under the name of anti-Zionism. We must have the lucidity to recognize that under this label that refers to Zionism, it is indeed the Jews, and Jews everywhere, who are targeted. And I would say that anti-Zionism under the surface is nothing but the contemporary expression of anti-Semitism, namely, hatred of the Jews.’
The ‘not in my name’ communities, declining to join wholeheartedly the cause of Israel über alles, have been written out of the story. Einstein, Freud, Arendt, camp survivors like Hajo Meyer; individual authors, bloggers and/or activists; non-compliant Jewish organizations; Israeli human rights organizations; etc. It’s the Spinoza syndrome – ignored if too famous; otherwise excommunicated because ‘self-hating’ Jews, ‘fringe’ elements, etc.
When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem,[9] highlighting the bureaucrat over the monster, even her fame didn’t save her from damnation. Daniel Maier-Katkin highlights the ongoing character assassination and its character:[10]
‘[A] campaign against the memory of Hannah Arendt continues, and the ideology that rationalizes and justifies ad hominem attacks and menacing gestures against Jews who dare to criticize Israel persists. As Rabbi [Michael] Lerner and Justice [Richard] Goldstone have learned, a Jew who fears that Israel is on a path that leads to destruction, or who is skeptical of a “divine mission to possess the land,” or concerned about the legality or morality of unrelenting military strategies to secure regional domination, will be attacked as self-hating and anti-Semitic.
‘To hate oneself is ipso facto pathological, and this, it is asserted, leads to irrational hatred of Israel, which is seen as the embodiment of the Jewish people. Thus, defenders of Israeli policies aim to exclude Jewish critics from public discourse by defining them as crazy persons, driven to anti-Semitism by self-loathing. In this way Lerner’s criticism of Israel, or Goldstone’s, or Arendt’s is dismissed as arising from psychological or spiritual disturbance rather than reasoned argument or an ethical posture. Calumny, an old-fashioned blend of slander, distortion, and innuendo, has been a recurring instrument of intimidation in post-Holocaust Jewish politics.’
In sum, Israeli state and settler criminality persist because it is supported uniformly by dominant national Jewish bodies, with de facto support and/or passivity from sections of the Jewish population. This institutionalized structure never fails to claim that it acts for Jewry in its entirety. Dissidents from the demand for unqualified support are cast aside from the tribe.
Is it not then possible, indeed probable, that some cool-headed people will reason that it is appropriate to become an anti-Semite? A stance rooted not in a time-worn shibboleth, but on the seeming support of the vast majority of world Jewry for Israeli criminality and inhumanity? Ersatz anti-Semitism (criticism of Israel), manufactured by the Zionist lobby as cover-up, thus potentially fosters substantive anti-Semitism. The real thing.
The Canadian (Jewish) philosopher Michael Neumann earlier nailed the implications:[11]
‘Inflating the meaning of ‘anti-Semitism’ to include anything politically damaging to Israel is a double-edged sword. … The more things get to count as anti-Semitic, the less awful anti-Semitism is going to sound. …
‘Since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to be anti-Semitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of anti-Semitism becomes morally obligatory. It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labelled anti-Semitic… The more anti-Semitism expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks.
‘Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism is a moral obligation.’
The ‘not in my name’ communities, in their myriad dimensions and considerable expenditure of energy, have made not a jot of difference to Israel’s project. Why?
Gideon Levy, long-time Haaretz journalist providing a window into Israel’s soul, has honed in on the denial, conscious amongst its leaders, subliminal amongst the bulk of the populace, that accompanies Israel’s ongoing criminality. And behind it? Here is Levy in March 2018 (he said the same in an Australian lecture tour in November 2017):
‘There are three core values of Israeli culture that enforce the totalitarian discourse.
‘The first value: we are the chosen people. Secular and religious will claim it. Even if they don’t admit it they feel it. If we are the chosen people, who are you to tell us what to do. The second very deeply rooted value: we are the victims, not only the biggest victims, but the only victims around…. I don’t recall one occupation in which the occupier present himself as the victim. Not only the victim– the only victim….
‘There is a third very deep rooted value. This is the very deep belief again everyone will deny it but if you scratch under the skin of almost any Israeli you will find it there, the Palestinians are not equal human beings like us. They don’t love their children like us. They don’t love life like us. They were born to kill, they are cruel, they are sadists, they have no values, no manners… This is very, very deep rooted in Israeli society. And maybe that’s the key issue. As long as this continues, nothing will move. We are so much better than them, so much more developed than them, more human than them.’
One of Sydney’s Jewish schools, Moriah College, has as its ‘core values’ (not atypical):
‘We strive to foster critical thought, cultural interests, tolerance, social responsibility and self-discipline. … Moriah not only aspires to achieve excellence in academic standards, but maintains and promotes among its students an awareness of and a feeling for Jewish traditions and ethics, an understanding of and a positive commitment to Orthodox Judaism and identification with and love for Israel.’
Critical thought, tolerance, social responsibility, and identification with and love for Israel? Take your pick. You can’t have both.
Endnotes
[1] vide Uri Davis’ Apartheid Israel, 2004; itisapartheid.org.
[2] Jeffrey Blankfort has meticulously documented the rise of AIPAC from the 1950s to its current status as the key determining force in US Middle East foreign policy. ‘Rendering unto AIPAC’, Counterpunch magazine, January 2014.
[3] David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, 1977, third edn., p.140.
[4] Hirst, p.221.
[5] John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir, with Sylvie Le Clezio, 2017.
[6] The Statement is reproduced in the Jewish Political Studies Review, Fall 2004, and made available online.
[7] Wistrich, ‘Judeophobia and Marxism’, Commentary, December 2014.
[8] Robert Badinter, ‘Antisémitisme: tirer les enseignements de l’histoire’, UNESCO, 6 December 2016, reproduced to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January. The speech in English, ‘Anti-Semitism: Learning the lessons of history’, is reproduced here.
[9] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963.
[10] Daniel Maier-Katkin, ‘How Hannah Arendt Was Labeled an “Enemy of Israel”’, Tikkun, Nov/Dec 2010.
[11] Michael Neumann, ‘What is Anti-Semitism?’, in Cockburn & St.Clair (eds.), The Politics of Anti-Semitism, 2003.
Why does MSM believe bizarre rumors coming from the South about North Korea?
The two countries are still technically AT WAR!
By Helen Buyniski | RT | April 21, 2020
The rash of stories claiming North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is on his deathbed – all sourced to a South Korean blog post – show Western media will run any horrific item on the Hermit Kingdom, confident they won’t be contradicted.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is clinging to life by a thread after heart surgery went horribly, horribly wrong! Or at least, US intelligence is monitoring reports that Kim was “in grave danger” after botched surgery, as CNN reported on Monday. The source for Kim’s health troubles was a single report from South Korean web outlet The Daily NK, itself citing a single source in the North.
While CNN acknowledged it “couldn’t independently verify” the story (or anything else happening in North Korea), the outlet ran with it anyway, leading others to do the same. And while the Guardian eventually front-loaded its own article with official denials from China and South Korea as the story began to unravel, its Twitter account reveals the original title, “North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has heart surgery – report,” a much more authoritative-sounding line than the lukewarm “South Korea and China play down Kim Jong-un health claims” it became.
By the time the stories had been edited, however, fervent speculation on “the North Korean succession” was already underway.
None of these stories thought to mention that the South Korean source regularly runs sensationalist pieces depicting the North as a seething pit of death and misery (“Pyongyang hospital construction workers stealing to survive” and “Chagang Province forestry official executed for illegal corn farm” are some recent headlines). Nor do they mention that the South and North never formally concluded the decades-long war that split the Korean landmass, or explain that such atrocity propaganda is typical among enemies.
Indeed, Western media rely on South Korea for news about the North, a weakness which has resulted in some truly preposterous stories being reported with a straight face by Western outlets eager to take a whack at the DPRK piñata.
A 2014 story claiming Kim had his uncle (and several aides) killed by stripping them naked and feeding them to a pack of starving dogs was reported by numerous “reputable” outlets, including NBC and the UK’s Channel 4 even though it originated with a satirical post on a Chinese social network.
About the only thing more embarrassing than publishing the Chinese equivalent of the Onion as straight news is for one of Kim’s “grisly execution” victims to appear in public alongside her executioner. The Telegraph, HuffPost and other ‘reputable’ Western outlets reported in 2013 that Kim had his ex-girlfriend, pop singer Hyon Song-wol, executed by firing squad, citing a South Korean news outlet that in turn cited an anonymous Chinese source. The story was proven spectacularly false last year, when she was photographed alongside the North Korean leader on a factory tour. Incredibly, some outlets still tried to spin the story – the Daily Mail hinted that 10 performers rumored to have been shot alongside her were actually dead, citing South Korea’s intelligence director as their source in a way that implied only Hyon had managed to (literally) dodge the executioner’s bullets.
Yet “numerous” individuals reported executed in South Korean media have later surfaced very much alive, News.com.au admitted last year… before repeating unverified claims that multiple North Korean officials had been executed over the failed US-DPRK peace talks in Vietnam. Why do these outlets keep repeating South Korean propaganda if they know it’s false?
It’s easy for western media to run the most lurid horror stories about the ‘hermit kingdom,’ confident that the only denials will come from state-run media and will be summarily dismissed as the controlled rantings of an ‘Evil Dictator’. Who are you going to believe, a charter member of the Axis of Evil or good old CNN? At a time when the media establishment is widely distrusted and loathed almost as much as politicians, atrocity propaganda is always good for ratings and patriotic sentiment, and there’s no risk of an inconvenient fact-checker bumbling in and making life difficult.
It’s worth noting that trying something similar with other heads of state lasts about five minutes. When UK PM Boris Johnson was hospitalized with coronavirus last month, RIA Novosti published an anonymous NHS source’s claim that he was more seriously ill than the public knew and was to be placed on a ventilator. This was immediately slapped down as “Russian disinformation” (even though it was later admitted that Johnson’s condition had worsened significantly while in hospital). But if the mainstream media is willing to perpetrate this level of disinformation about North Korea, it’s long past time to reconsider trusting their reporting on other countries as well.
Follow Helen Buyniski on Twitter @velocirapture23
Pompeo claims countries will ‘rethink’ Huawei partnerships after Covid-19
RT | April 17, 2020
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has predicted “many, many countries” will reconsider telecom partnerships with China’s Huawei after Covid-19, using Beijing’s supposed lack of “transparency” to take a whack at a favorite target.
Pompeo was “very confident” that the Chinese response to coronavirus would “cause many, many countries [to] rethink what they were doing with respect to their telecom architecture,” he told Fox Business Network on Friday.
“And when Huawei comes knocking to sell them equipment and hardware, they will have a different prism through which to view that decision,” he continued.
The diplomat denounced the Chinese Communist Party’s “fail[ure] to be transparent and open, and handle data in an appropriate way,” bolstering the narrative the Trump administration has kept up throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Washington accused China early on of hiding the spread of the disease – even as it dragged its feet preparing for the epidemic to hit US shores – and later insisted Beijing was covering up both deaths and new infections.
The government had briefly let up on hammering Huawei amid the chaos the outbreak unleashed, quietly granting the company another 45-day license extension before doing business with it becomes officially off-limits for US companies.
However, Pompeo’s comments appear to signal that Washington has refocused its diplomatic efforts on what’s really important: intimidating allies out of using Chinese equipment. The US threatened last year to cut Germany and the UK out of the loop on intelligence-sharing if they partnered with Huawei on building 5G infrastructure, insisting the equipment was backdoored and used by Beijing for spying – although failing to provide any proof of such security risks. Despite US protests, however, both countries have tentatively moved forward in their relationships with the company.
Pompeo went further toward blaming China for the coronavirus outbreak in an interview with Fox News on Thursday, hinting that “We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was. There’s still lots to learn.” While the ‘wet market’ in question was initially believed to be the origin site for the coronavirus epidemic that has taken the world by storm, several studies have since called that theory into question, revealing that the earliest infected patients actually had no exposure to the market.
Doubling down on his insistence that Beijing had been doomed by its failure to be “open and transparent,” Pompeo grew vague about what the State Department knew and if it had received, as reported, a set of lurid cables in 2018 from US officials describing lax security procedures at the Wuhan lab.
How the Nicaraguan Opposition Distorted the Government’s Response to COVID-19
By John Perry | Council on Hemispheric Affairs | April 21, 2020
Masaya, Nicaragua – The right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, having failed in their attempted coup in 2018, still looks at any potential crisis as a new opportunity to attack the Sandinista government. Their latest chance, of course, arrived with the coronavirus pandemic. Even though the virus has barely hit the country yet, the government is under attack. The international media are lapping up opposition propaganda and ignoring or disparaging the government’s efforts to deal with the coming crisis, even though preparations began before those in many other countries.
Since early April, Nicaragua’s well-connected opposition leaders have used their contacts in the international press to push a series of stories relating to the pandemic. These stories – detailed below – variously claim that President Daniel Ortega is in quarantine or has died, that his government is in denial about the coronavirus or that it is ill-prepared and inactive in the face of the threat. None of this is true. What is worse, it seems based on the tone of news coverage, that reporters who are unable to visit the country nevertheless make little attempt to find out what action the government is actually taking and whether opposition criticisms have any substance.
At the time of writing (April 16, 2020) Nicaragua has only nine confirmed virus cases, all of them people who have come from abroad or their immediate contacts.[1] The opposition and the media pour scorn on the official figures and (without evidence) claim that infection levels are far higher. Ignoring the daily press briefings by Dr. Carlos Sáenz, Secretary General at the health ministry, the opposition claims that Nicaraguans are being kept in the dark. Despite health officials having visited 2.7 million households,[2] sometimes on several occasions, to dispense advice (see photo), the opposition complains that there is little or no guidance on combating the virus.
How the international media attacks developed
The attacks began on April 4 with BBC World, which in addition to criticising President Daniel Ortega for not making public appearances asserted that his government had taken “no measures at all” in the face of the virus threat.[3] Then The New York Times (April 6), asking Where is Daniel Ortega?, said his government had been “widely criticized for its cavalier approach” to the pandemic.[4] It quoted opposition supporters who say the public “is deeply dubious about government claims.” On April 8, The Guardian said that Ortega was “nowhere to be seen.” [5] By April 13, The Washington Post said Ortega had “vanished” and castigated his government’s “laissez-faire approach” (the Post’s print edition even managed to report that nine virus victims had died, when there has been only one death so far).[6]According to The Guardian, on April 12, the “authoritarian” Daniel Ortega is one of only four world leaders who are in denial about the coronavirus (among the others is, of course, the right-wing Bolsonaro in Brazil).[7] The attacks have even been reproduced by the international medical journal, The Lancet. On April 6, an article entitled Love in the time of COVID-19 labelled the government’s approach as “erratic” and “violating the human rights of its citizens.” [8]
The real situation in Nicaragua
What is the real situation in Nicaragua? The country has had health checks at its borders for months, far sooner than in the US. Travellers entering Nicaragua are managed tightly, and officials follow up with new arrivals by phone and by house visits, as I know from my own and friends’ direct experiences after arriving in the country. Two lengthy and porous land frontiers make it preferable to keep borders open so as to minimise informal crossings which make health checks impossible. When people do cross illegally, neighbors often report them using a free, dedicated phone number set up a few weeks ago. This number is also used to obtain more general advice on the virus. Nineteen hospitals have been identified to receive virus cases and 37,000 health workers and 250,000 volunteers have been trained accordingly.[9] The result is that – so far at least – Nicaragua’s nine virus cases represent the lowest infection rate in Latin America.
Social distancing and its costs
In the international press, opposition spokespeople call for more drastic measures such as social distancing and school closures. Reporters ignore the obvious dilemma that faces poor countries in deciding when to take such steps. Importantly, even though the World Health Organization has emphasized the importance of social distancing, it also recognises this dilemma. Its Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said this on April 16:
“Governments must consider that for some countries and communities, stay-at-home orders may not be practical, and may even cause unintended harm. Millions of people around the world must work every day to put food on the table. They cannot stay at home for long periods of time without assistance.”[10]
In Nicaragua, because all confirmed COVID-19 cases so far have come from abroad, the government assessment is that no or very limited local, community transmission has taken place.[11] This is why there continues to be vigilance while wider measures have not yet been imposed. If self-isolation becomes necessary it will carry a massive cost as seen for example in the US and other countries, as most people need to go to work daily to eat. There is no reliable mechanism to distribute subsidies, nor can small, poor countries like Nicaragua borrow with impunity to pay for them. Many Nicaraguans live in cramped houses in densely populated neighbourhoods, making social distancing extremely difficult. The government is genuinely attempting to balance the fight against the virus with the economic needs of the population. To impose an untimely lockdown, at a time when the spread of the virus appears to be still under control, would not only cause huge resentment and hardship but could be totally counterproductive. Of course, government policy is subject to change as the situation evolves and any objective assessment must be based on the government’s future handling of the crisis, not only on its response to date.
The Lancet article cites approvingly the contrasting policies of El Salvador and Honduras. In the former, President Nayib Bukele forced people to self-isolate, offering a subsidy of $300 per family which caused massive, unregulated queues and then rowdy protests outside government offices.[12] The Los Angeles Times reported (April 7) that in some areas the lockdown is enforced by gangs with baseball bats.[13] In Honduras, a “militarized quarantine” has led to police violence, more than 1,000 arrests and the confiscation of almost 900 vehicles, according to respected human rights group COFADEH.[14] Despite these actions, both countries have much higher infection levels than Nicaragua. So does Costa Rica. All of these neighbouring countries are quick to criticise the Ortega government and express fears for cross-border contamination, when the reality is that Nicaragua should be the country that fears contamination from its neighbours. This is not to say that mitigation is inherently counterproductive; the point is that if a situation does call for quarantine, state actors ought to inspire a sense of solidarity and understanding rather than impose punitive and coercive measures that divide people rather than unite them.
International media are more sympathetic to other low-income countries
The irony is that international media have carried a number of articles about the dangers of imposing draconian measures in poor countries. In The Observer, Kenan Malik pointed out that whether in the UK or the developing world, we’re not all in coronavirus together.[15] As he says, in many poor countries “only the privileged can maintain any kind of social isolation.” David Pilling in the Financial Times points out that in developing countries, the lockdown cure could be worse than the disease.[16] Mari Pangestu, a managing director with the World Bank, says in the Daily Telegraph that for the poorest countries, the full danger from coronavirus is only just coming into view, because of its effect on their ability to maintain food and medical supplies.[17]
Astonishingly, the international media treat their sources in the Nicaraguan opposition as bone fidewhen there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Even in the current crisis, they have excelled themselves, as Ben Norton has shown in The Grayzone.[18] They created a fake account posing as Nicaragua’s TV Channel 4, with invented statements supposedly by Vice-President Rosario Murillo, announcing school closures that were never planned.[19] They purport to give advice on issues such as social distancing, as if this isn’t available from the government, when in fact, it is (and, as Norton points out, in their daily lives several of them ignore their own recommendations).[20] Within Nicaragua, Facebook is alive with false rumours from opposition sources about deaths allegedly caused by the virus, attempting to undermine people’s confidence in official figures.
President Ortega addresses the nation
When he addressed the public on April 15,[21] President Ortega said little about the criticisms being made by his opponents, although he noted one item of fake news. A Nicaraguan woman, returning recently to Costa Rica where she works, via a route with no border controls, had been accused in local media of carrying the coronavirus. However, when tracked down and tested by the Costa Rican authorities, she was shown to be free of the disease. Ortega also pointed out that a hospital, various health centers and supplies of medical equipment had been destroyed in opposition arson attacks in Nicaragua during the attempted coup of April 2018; all of these have now been rebuilt or restored, and are available to deal with the pandemic. Referring indirectly to the clamour for Nicaragua to adopt measures like the lockdowns employed in adjoining countries, he pointed out that without work the country dies. And he was able to quote one new statistic: since the worldwide pandemic was officially declared on March 11, a total of 1,237 people had died in Nicaragua; but only one of these had been killed by the coronavirus. In the days ahead we may see a change in public health policy in Nicaragua, but any such change will likely be informed by the situation on the ground, rather than by ill-judged comments in the international media.
John Perry is a writer based in Nicaragua and writes on Central America for The Nation, London Review of Books, Open Democracy, The Grayzone and the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
End notes.
[1] See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
[2] Informe Pastran, April 15 2020 (http://www.informepastran.com/prueba/).
[3] “La larga ausencia en Nicaragua de Daniel Ortega, el único presidente de América Latina que no ha aparecido en público ante la crisis del covid-19”, https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-52145204
[4] “Where Is Daniel Ortega? Nicaragua’s Leader Drops From View”, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/americas/nicaragua-daniel-ortega-coronavirus.html
[5] “President nowhere to be seen as Nicaragua shuns coronavirus curbs”, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/nicaragua-daniel-ortega-missing-anger-fear-month
[6] “The president has vanished; his wife, the VP, says the coronavirus isn’t a problem. Nicaragua declines to confront a pandemic”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-nicaragua-daniel-ortega-missing/2020/04/11/3ad1fafc-79c3-11ea-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html
[7] “Bolsonaro dragging Brazil towards coronavirus calamity, experts fear”, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/bolsonaro-dragging-brazil-towards-coronavirus-calamity-experts-fear
[8] “Love in the time of COVID-19: negligence in the Nicaraguan response”, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30131-5/fulltext
[9] “Brigadistas de salud visitarán a un millón de familias brindando las medidas preventivas ante el coronavirus”, https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:101463-brigadistas-de-salud-visitaran-a-un-millon-de-familias-brindando-las-medidas-preventivas-ante-el-coronavirus-
[10] WHO Director-General’s opening remarks at the Mission briefing on COVID-19 – 16 April 2020”, https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-mission-briefing-on-covid-19—16-april-2020
[11] This and other details about the effects of the epidemic and steps being taken are published in daily press briefings and on the website of the health ministry (http://www.minsa.gob.ni/).
[12] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv0zv1Xv0MQ (March 31, 2020).
[13] “In El Salvador, gangs are enforcing the coronavirus lockdown with baseball bats”, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-04-07/el-salvador-coronavirus-homicides-bukele
[14] “Informe: Crisis de derechos humanos durante la pandemia Covid-19”, https://defensoresenlinea.com/informe-crisis-de-derechos-humanos-durante-la-pandemia-covid-19/
[15] “Whether in the UK or the developing world, we’re not all in coronavirus together”, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/05/whether-in-the-uk-or-the-developing-world-were-not-all-in-coronavirus-together
[16] “In poor countries, the lockdown cure could be worse than disease”, https://www.ft.com/content/6c3a34c2-73f8-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
[17] “For the poorest countries, the full danger from coronavirus is only just coming into view”, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/poorest-countries-full-danger-coronavirus-just-coming-view/
[18] “As Nicaragua confronts Covid, its US-backed opposition exploits the pandemic to create chaos”, https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/13/regime-change-coronavirus-nicaragua/
[19] See https://www.facebook.com/Canal4Nica/videos/205790274093519/
[20] See https://www.instagram.com/tv/B-Gi31SHlTH/?utm_source=ig_embed
[21] See https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:102299-presidente-daniel-ortega-se-dirige-al-pueblo-de-nicaragua . For an English translation of President Ortega’s complete speech of April 15, 2020, see “DANIEL : ‘It is time to swap nuclear weapons for hospitals’ in Tortilla Con Sal. April 16, 2020, http://www.tortillaconsal.com/tortilla/node/9104
All Smoke and No Gun at the OPCW
By Jeremy Salt | American Herald Tribune | April 16, 2020
Over the past decade, the London Guardian has never reported the war on Syria in any way commensurate with the principles of true journalism. It is had been running a line, consistently slanted to do as much damage to the Syrian government as possible. As such, it has been a central conduit in the propaganda war. It closed down ‘comment is free’ on its Syria articles long ago because well-informed readers could see what it was up to and were writing embarrassing correctives.
Throughout, its language has been the language of propaganda – ‘the regime,’ ‘Assad loyalists,’ ‘the dictator,’ ‘the rebels’, ‘the armed opposition,’ ‘the uprising,’ ‘the civil war,’ so on and on, endlessly. Its ‘coverage’ has always been calibrated to the damage it thinks it can do to the Syrian government. In fact, by supporting its ‘rebels’ and by implication the governments arming and financing them, it has only aggravated the damage being done to Syria and its people who, all the evidence suggests, overwhelmingly support their president and their army, not these ‘rebels.’
Silent when its ‘rebels’ are taking a beating, the Guardian springs to life the moment there’s a fresh opportunity to abuse Syria’s president. Accordingly, when the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) issued its latest report on chemical weapon usage in Syria, its sibling Sunday paper, the Observer, was quick off the mark, running a headline on April 12 reading “The Observer view on the smoking gun that should force Assad to face justice.” It went on: “For the first time the world’s chemical weapons watchdog has directly accused Syria’s leadership of ordering illegal attacks on its own people.” Stating accusations from concealed sources as fact, it concludes that “the tyrant in Damascus has not yet won.”
As it turns out, the OPCW report is all smoke but no gun. Unsurprisingly, given their Syria coverage, the Guardian and the Observer are not even interested in distinguishing between the two. For their purposes, the smoke is as good as the gun. What they call “the world’s chemical weapons watchdog” is actually a watchdog protecting the interests of the governments attacking Syria through armed proxies. The Guardian and the Observer are watchdogs protecting the same interests, which in this case means protecting a tainted report coming from a tainted source.
Last year whistleblowers revealed that the OPCW executive had suppressed the interim report by the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) on the alleged chemical weapons attack on Douma in April 2018, and had issued a doctored final report, reversing the on-the-spot findings of its own experts.
The final report concluded that the cylinder said to have crashed through a roof had probably been dropped from the air when its own engineers had arrived at the “higher probability” that it had been placed there manually. As for the heavy amounts of chlorine it suggested had been released from this cylinder, killing 43 people, according to anonymous “witnesses”, what its own chemists said they found in the air were microparticles no different from what would have been in the air normally. On January 20 this year, the OPCW’s inspection team leader at Douma, Ian Henderson, told a specially convened session of the UN Security Council that the evidence indicated there had been no chemical weapons attack at all at Douma.
Its fraudulent behavior exposed, the OPCW secretariat tried to dismiss the evidence of its whistleblower engineers and scientists as “subjective” but the damage to its credibility was terminal, and in seeking to uphold a tainted report from a tainted organization, the Guardian and the Observer only underscore the tainted nature of their own ‘reporting’ and editorials on Syria.
Wisely, in this latest report, dated April 8, “The First Report by the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team” (IIT), a body established in 2018, the OPCW does not return to what happened at Douma in 2018. The subject matter this time is chlorine and sarin attacks said to have been carried out in and around the “village” of Ltameneh on March 24, 25 and 30, 2017.
In fact, Al Lataminah (“Llatameneh”) is not a “village” as described in the IIT report but a town with a population of more than 16,000, according to the census of 2004. This has probably shifted upwards or downwards since then. Close to Hama and only a few kilometers from the strategically important M5 highway, the town is located within territory in the Hama governorate that was under the control of Hayat Tahrir al Sham and other terrorist factions when the chemical weapons attacks were said to have taken place in 2017. Al Lataminah itself was the headquarters of Jaysh al ‘Izza (Army of Glory).
According to the IIT, there were three attacks, one of chlorine and two of sarin, on March 24, 25 and 30, each in cylinders or bombs dropped from the air by Syrian air force SU (Sukhoi) 22 fighter aircraft or helicopters. The format of the report is identical to the format of all its reports, and indeed all the reports put out by the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. Lots of acronyms, weighty officious language implying authority, lots of imputations but virtually nothing in the form of evidence that would stand up in a court.
The sources, individual, institutional and governmental (“state parties”) are all concealed. The OPCW says it sought entry into Syria, but was ignored by the Syrian government, which is hardly surprising given the fakery of its report on Douma. It talks of witnesses, who, as its investigators were not on the spot inside Syria, have to be regarded as alleged witnesses. It does not say who they were or where they were when interviewed, but Turkey would be most likely. Neither is there any mention of possible affiliations, perhaps to the White Helmets or one of the armed groups.
The report ties the alleged attacks to the close proximity of Syrian airbases and the daily activity of Syrian aircraft as they take off and return. Syria is fighting a war against terrorist groups that have infiltrated and taken over large parts of the Hama and Idlib governorates, so of course military planes and helicopters are frequently in the air. The ITT imputations that they might have been or could have been involved in chemical weapons attacks are devoid of substance.
The IIT report talks confidently of its chain of custody, including shell remnants said to have been taken from craters to one of its (unidentified) designated laboratories. It does not say who allegedly carried this material out of Syria but as Jaysh al ‘Izza was then in control of the town, one of its members or its sympathizers, committed to the destruction of the Syrian government and out to blacken its name whenever possible, is the most likely.
Included in the IIT evidential chain is information “obtained” during interviews, information “previously” provided by “witnesses,” interviews with “persons of interest” along with the evidence of other unidentified “witnesses” to the attacks and people affected by them. Again, these are alleged witnesses to an alleged attack and people allegedly affected by these alleged attacks. They were NOT interviewed in Syria and the IIT report provides no proof of their authenticity.
The IIT’s further sources include unidentified videos and “documents,” as well as “relevant material” from “various sources,” briefings and advice from unidentified “experts” and “specialists,” information from unidentified “open sources” and “forensic institutes,” and unspecified input from unidentified “state parties.”
Noting the use of tunnels at Al Lataminah by Jaish al ‘Izza, a “military expert” advising the IIT “noted [that] the use of chemical weapons in this area would not be inconsistent [my italics] with a strategy aimed at inflicting terror on both civilians and combatants.” Neither, of course, on the basis of past compelling evidence, would it be inconsistent with the proven attempts by terrorist groups to lure outside governments into launching an air war on Syria by staging faked chemical weapons attacks. The IIT refers to the possibility of a staged attack, but does not take it seriously.
It claims to have received information “from multiple sources”, unidentified of course, that senior Syrian Republican Guard officers (names redacted) sent orders to “former members” of the “previously-designated branch 450, a component of the Syrian Arab Republic’s chemical weapons programme responsible for the storage, mixing and filling of chemical weapons, including sarin, to prepare items for use in the defense of Hama.” By imputation, these “items” were chemical weapons. The IIT also claimed to have “obtained information” that in March 2017, sarin precursors were being stored at a facility at Him Shinshar, in the Homs governorate.
The ITT notes that branch 450 was “officially” dissolved in 2013, insinuating, again, that it wasn’t really, while providing no evidence at all to back up the “information” received from some unnamed source that the Syrian government still had a stock of sarin precursors. It does not say where the “former members” are now, or what they are doing, and provides no hard evidence at all to back up the claim by hidden “multiple sources” that in 2017 they were still involved in the preparation of chemical weapons
The report refers to satellite imaging of the Shayrat airbase (provided by whom?) showing, “according to a specialist” (in what?) “structures” that “could have been used [my italics] to store chemical weapons.” Perhaps they also could have been used to store engine parts, garden tools, food for the base canteen or cleaning material for the toilet blocks but the unknown contents of these “structures” are all part of the buildup to the IIT report’s conclusion that it was “very likely” Syrian air force planes did drop chemical weapons on Al Lataminah.
The same imagery indicated that part of the Hama airbase was a “possible barrel bomb storage depot” with a number of items visible as “possible barrel bombs.” No doubt there is a vast range of other possibilities for what these “items” might have been, so why pick just this one? The ITT also claimed to have “obtained information” that chlorine barrel bombs had been prepared at nearby Masyaf, the 12th century center of the Ismaili fidais (sacrificers) who have passed into history as the Order of the Assassins. According to the IIT’s source, they were taken to Hama, but without there being any inkling of who provided this “information,” such a claim cannot possibly be taken at face value.
The IIT claimed to have “received information” that 176 people were admitted to hospital after the (alleged) sarin attack on March 24 but admitted that it had been unable to locate the medical records. Clearly they would have been of paramount importance in confirming what had taken place, and medical staff in a hospital in a town controlled by Jaysh al ‘Izza could surely have been easily persuaded to provide them. There is no attempt by the ITT, however, to explain why its sources could not come up with photocopies of at least one or two of these records, if indeed there was an attack, if there were indeed casualties and if there were indeed medical records to photocopy.
The IIT further claims to have interviewed casualties and medical staff who described symptoms toxicologists found “plausible” as being consistent with the effects of nerve gas. In fact, sarin is so deadly that it can kill within one to ten minutes, with those who survive often suffering permanent brain damage, raising further questions about its alleged use at Al Lataminah. There is no indication in the IIT report that any of these alleged victims were subjected to a medical examination either in Syria or wherever it was that they were later interviewed. For a team of investigators determined to get to the truth, one would have thought this also should have been a priority.
The IIT claimed to have interviewed individuals “with direct knowledge” of the attacks. It does not say where they were interviewed and how it knew they had “direct knowledge” of the alleged attacks. It further claims that munitions remnants (allegedly) taken from a crater “could be linked” to “potential chemical weapons use.” “Could be” and “potential” are hardly persuasive.
Samples were (allegedly) taken from one crater on March 26, 2017, but not delivered to the FFM until August 12. There is no indication of who in this Jaysh al ‘Izza-controlled town dug up the samples and gave them to the FFM nearly five months later. One would have to conclude that it was most likely someone from Jaysh al ‘Izza, if in fact there was a crater and the samples were taken from it and not somewhere else. Speculating further, the report says that 2000 bombs designed to carry chemical weapons had been converted into conventional bombs after 2013 and supposedly used but the secretariat had been unable to confirm that this had actually happened, conveniently leaving an avenue open to support the IIT’s claims.
The report claims that helicopters dropped four “barrel bombs” on March 25, one falling through the roof of a building, just as a cylinder full of chlorine was said to have done in the discredited report the OPCW issued on Douma. Three “witnesses” were said to have seen the event and reported that three people died as a result and 32 were injured. There is not a scintilla of confirmation for any of this. There is no indication of how the IIT was able to confirm that the individuals it interviewed in another country, apparently long after the event, really were witnesses.
Completely sweeping away the creaking foundations of all of this is the OPCW’s own earlier findings on the destruction of all the Syrian government’s stocks of chemical weapons material, following the staged attack in the Ghouta disrict, near Damascus, in August 2013, designed to draw Barack Obama over his self-declared “red line” so that he would launch an air attack.
Warned by his own intelligence agencies that the attack could be a setup, Obama pulled back at the last minute, but subsequently, the Syrian government offered to have all its stocks of chemical weapons destroyed under international supervision anyway. The process began in September 2013, the Syrian government simultaneously signing on to the International Convention on the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (1997).
By June 2014, the OPCW, the supervising body, reported that all production capacity had been destroyed. The remaining chemicals were removed from Syria and by August 2014, all had been destroyed. In January 2016, the OPCW affirmed that the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons material in the previous three years had been completed. Now, however, the ITT is reproducing an unsubstantiated claim that they weren’t, in order to lend spurious plausibility to its accusations that the Syrian air force dropped chemical weapons and nerve gas on and around Al Lataminah.
The appropriate resting place for this report is not the filing cabinet but the wastepaper basket. With these reports, the OPCW has completely destroyed its credibility. It needs cleaning out, beginning with the sacking of the director-general and the entire secretariat. Otherwise, it should be replaced with a new body, if the world is to have a credible independent chemical weapons watchdog and not one that appears to dance to the foreign policy interests of the US and its global satraps.
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From the Archives
Wartime internment camps in Australia
National Archives of Australia
World War I
During World War I, for security reasons the Australian Government pursued a comprehensive internment policy against enemy aliens living in Australia.
Initially only those born in countries at war with Australia were classed as enemy aliens, but later this was expanded to include people of enemy nations who were naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants of migrants born in enemy nations and others who were thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security.
Australia interned almost 7,000 people during World War I, of whom about 4,500 were enemy aliens and British nationals of German ancestry already resident in Australia.
Records of World War I internment camps
World War II
During World War II, Australian authorities established internment camps for three reasons – to prevent residents from assisting Australia’s enemies, to appease public opinion and to house overseas internees sent to Australia for the duration of the war.
Unlike World War I, the initial aim of internment during the later conflict was to identify and intern those who posed a particular threat to the safety or defence of the country. As the war progressed, however, this policy changed and Japanese residents were interned en masse. In the later years of the war, Germans and Italians were also interned on the basis of nationality, particularly those living in the north of Australia. In all, just over 20 per cent of all Italians resident in Australia were interned. … continue
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