Corruption in Journalism
By Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well | September 30, 2019
Columnist Max Boot in the Washington Post put into writing what we have all known for some time: real journalism, Jefferson’s informed citizenry and all that, is dead. The job has shifted to aspirational writing, using manipulated droplets of facts and just plain made-up stuff to drive events.
Boot (pictured) writes to drive Trump from office and overturn the 2016 election.
Max Boot: “Much of my journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in office… I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference.”
Boot has spent the last years creating and circle-supporting others who create false narratives. They manufacture reasons for Trump to resign, to press Democrats to impeach, or at last resort, to influence voters they otherwise hold in contempt for not knowing what’s good enough for them. We kind of figured this out after senior staff at the New York Times had to remind reporters they were “not part of the f*cking resistance,” but it is helpful to see it in daylight. After all, democracy dies in the darkness.
The uber-false narrative Max and others Frankensteined into existence was Russiagate. Trump wasn’t the Manchurian Candidate and there was no quid pro quo for Russian election help. Yet the media literally accused the president of treason by melding together otherwise unrelated truthlets — Trump wanted a hotel in Moscow, some ads were run on Facebook — that could be spun into a narrative to bring Trump down. Correlation was made into causation in a purposeful freshman Logic 101 fail. What was true was of little consequence; what mattered was whether the media could collectively create a story the rubes would believe, and then pile on.
The critical flaw in Russiagate (other than it didn’t happen) was the media creating an end-point they could not control. Robert Mueller was magic-wanded into the Last Honest Man, the Savior of Democracy, as the narrative first unfolded and then fell apart like a cardboard box in the rain. After his dismal testimony there was nowhere for the story to go.
This autumn’s empty box of a narrative is upgraded to play out without end: Trump is manipulating domestic and foreign policy for personal gain via… hotel fees.
At first glance it seems like a non-starter. Trump’s hotels are as much a part of him as the extra pounds he carries. He campaigned as a CEO and announced early on he was not going to divest. But with the first cold slap of Trump’s election victory a narrative was being shaped: Trump could not become president because of his business conflicts of interest; it was danged unconstitutional.
Early proponents of this dreck dug around in the Constitution’s closet and found the Emoluments Clause, a handful of lines intended to bar office holders from accepting gifts from foreign sovereigns, kings, and princes to prevent influence buying. Pre-Trump, the last time the issue was in actual contention was with President Martin Van Buren (no relation) over gifts from the Imam of Muscat.
The media ran with it. They imagined out of whole cloth any foreign government official getting a room at any Trump hotel was a “gift.” Then they imagined whatever tiny percentage of that room profit which actually went to Trump himself represented a bribe. Then they imagined despite the vast complexity of U.S. relations, Trump would alter course because some guy rented a room. It was Joker-like in its diabolicalness, the presidency itself merely a prank to hide an international crime spree. Pow!
It was also ridiculous on its face, but they made it happen. The now-defunct leftist site Think Progress ran what might be Story Zero before Trump even took office. An anonymous source claimed the Kuwaiti Ambassador canceled a major event at one hotel to switch to Trump’s own DC hotel under pressure. It all turned out to be untrue. “Do you think a reception of two hours in the Trump hotel is going to curry favors with the administration when we host thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait? When we have in the past and still do support American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?” the Kuwait ambassador asked when someone got around to his side of the story. But no matter, the narrative was set.
Then it grew. Though the Emoluments Clause is quite specific, the media decided every time anyone stayed at a Trump property it was corruption. Even when Trump visited one of his own homes it was corruption because the Secret Service paid Trump for the privilege. Of course the Secret Service has always paid for the facilities used in their work because the government cannot commandeer private property or accept free rooms (which, ironically, could be seen as a bribe), not from Marriott and not from the Trump Organization. Even Joe Biden still has to charge the Secret Service rent on a cottage he owns, so they can protect him when he’s home in Delaware.
More? T-Mobile booked nine rooms at a Trump hotel, in media hive minds ostensibly to influence federal approval of a $26 billion merger. Those rooms were worth about $2700. Of course the president, who can influence the Dow with a tweet, prefers to make his illegal money off jacked up hotel bills. Think small has always been a Trump trademark.
Reuters headlined how foreigners were buying condos from third party owners (i.e., not Trump or his company), but they were in a Trump-managed building and maybe the monthly maintenance fees would qualify as mini-emoluments? Trump was accused of “hiding” foreign government income at his hotels when servers at the bar failed to ask cash customers if they were potentates or princes (the headline: “Trump Organization Says It’s ‘Not Practical’ to Comply With the Emoluments Clause.”)
And of course that Air Force crew staying at a Trump place in Scotland. No matter that the hotel forged its relationship with a nearby airport long before Trump became president, or that the Air Force had used the airport and hotel hundreds of times before Trump became president (going back to WWII), and or that a decision by the Pentagon to have flights stop more frequently there was made under the Obama administration, nope, none of that stopped the media from proclaiming corruption. One piece speculated the $166 a night the Air Force pays for rooms was always part of Trump’s cornerstone financial plan for the floundering multi-million golf course.
But to see how much the corruption narrative really is a media creation, you have only to compare it to how the MSM covered what might have been a similar question in the past. Imagine if journalists had treated every appearance by Obama as a book promotion. What if each speech was slandered across the channels as corruption, Obama just out there pimping his books? Should he have been impeached for commercializing the office of president?
Follow the money, as Maddow likes to say. The Trump Organization pays to the Treasury all profits from foreign governments. In the 2018, $191,000. The year before the amount was $151,470. So Trump’s in-pocket profit is zero.
Meanwhile Obama’s profit as an author during his time in office was $15.6 million (he’s made multiples more since, including a $65 million book advance.) In the two weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama reworked his book deals to take advantage of his new status. He agreed not to publish another non-fiction book during his time in office to keep anticipation high, while signing a $500,000 advance for a young adult version of Dreams From My Father.
Obama’s books were huge sellers in China, where publishing is largely government controlled, meaning Obama likely received Chicom money in the Oval Office. Obama’s own State Department bought $79,000 worth of his books to distribute as gifts.
As with Trump, nothing Obama did was illegal. There are no laws per se against a president making money. Yet no one bothered to raise ethical questions about Obama. No one claimed he sought the presidency as a bully ATM machine. No one claimed his frequent messaging about his father was designed to move books. No one held TV hearings on his profits or into how taxpayer funds were used to buy his books. It’s not “everybody does it” or “whataboutism,” it is why does the media treat two very similar situations so very differently?
Max Boot confessed why. The media has created a pitch-and-toss game with Democrats, running false, exaggerated or shallowly-reported stories to generate calls for hearings, which in turn breath life into the corruption stories they live off. Max Boot and his ilk are doing a new job. Journalism to them is for resistance, condemnation, arousal, and regime change. And that’s one way democracy does die.
Faster than expected except where slower
Climate Discussion Nexus | September 18, 2019
When you get a news story about climate change, it inevitably tells you scientists have looked at something going on in the world, discovered it’s worse than we thought, and concluded that greenhouse gases are to blame. Which at least saves you the trouble of reading further. Except that if you do, you sometimes learn that scientists did not find what journalists claimed up front. For instance we learn from Eurekalert that the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf in Antarctica is being “thawed by a warming ocean more quickly than previously thought.” So why does the lead scientist mention something being more stable than previously thought?
The story in question results from a creative experiment involving “newly digitized vintage film” dating all the way back to the 1970s when, over eight years, scientists flew over the Antarctic recording ice-penetrating radar readings on 35 mm film. Subsequent radar soundings were sporadic until after 2009. So the scientists found a way to digitize the 1970s records to make them comparable to the modern ones.
The result? Glaciers melting and washing away Manhattan? Not exactly. One part of the Antarctic, the Thwaites ice shelf, thinned between 10 and 33 percent over the 40 years of records. Another part, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf basal channel, didn’t change at all. And part of the Thwaites ice shelf regrounded and became stable. And maybe it’s all due to a warming ocean. Except the rate of submarine melting slowed between the 1978-2004 and 2004-2009 segments.
The conclusion? In the underlying article the authors don’t say it’s “worse then we thought”, more like “we didn’t know what to expect and we saw lots of interesting patterns.” The Eurekalert article quotes the lead author that “[We] were able to have one ice shelf where we can say, ‘Look, it’s pretty much stable. And here, there’s significant change’.” The headline rephrases that as “Thwaites Glacier ice shelf melting faster than previously observed.” Well yes, because it wasn’t previously observed so any data would be new; it could also be phrased as “melting slower than previously observed”. And what about the other parts? From there the journalist spins out the money phrase “thawed by a warming ocean more quickly than previously thought” in the first sentence of the article. Maybe hoping you wouldn’t read any further.
Spooks Turned Spox: US Media Now Filled With Former Intelligence Agents
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/05/2019
After years in the shadows overseeing espionage, kill programs, warrantless wiretapping, entrapment, psyops and other covert operations, national security establishment retirees are are turning to a new line of work where they can carry out their imperial duties.
That is, propagandizing the public on cable news. Reborn as cable news pundits, these people are cashing in. So many years working in the dark, only to emerge in the studio lights of the same networks that rail all day everyday against state TV from countries that America hates.
I’m talking about people like…
Below is but a partial list of prominent former spooks turned mainstream media pundits and analysts, to say nothing of the even greater numbers of retired generals the network continuously rely on.
Former CIA Director John Brennan who is now an NBC News senior national security and intelligence analyst.
Fran Townsend, former homeland security advisor to George W. Bush. She’s now a CBS News senior national security analyst.
But CNN takes the cake — it’s the biggest spook show of all.
Jim Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, now a CNN national security analyst.
Retired General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the NSA, now a CNN national security analyst.
Asha Rangappa, former FBI special agent, now CNN legal analyst.
James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent, now a CNN law enforcement analyst.
Tony Bliken, former deputy secretary of state and former deputy national security advisor, and now CNN global affairs analyst.
Mike Rogers, former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, now CNN national security commentator.
Samantha Vinograd senior advisor to the national security advisor under President Obama, now CNN national security analyst.
Steven Hall, retired CIA chief of Russia operations, now a CNN national security analyst.
Philip Mudd, former CIA counter-terrorism official, now CNN counter-terrorism analyst.
* * *
…Welcome to the spook show!
The Campaign to Stop William Barr
By Daniel Lazare | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 5, 2019
The furor over Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky has not been easy to figure out. Contrary to initial reports, the president said nothing about a quid pro quo, and he didn’t push the Ukrainian president to “dig up dirt” on Joe Biden either. All he did according to the official transcript was ask Kiev to look into his activities, and all Zelensky did in response was guarantee that any such investigation “will be done openly and candidly.” An honest inquiry into a politician who cheerfully confessed to forcing out a prosecutor looking into his son’s company – what’s wrong with that?
But now the mystery is solved. The uproar is not about Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani investigating the former vice president. It’s about William Barr investigating Russiagate, which is far more important.
This became clear early this week when the New York Times reported that Trump had also phoned Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and asked him to cooperate with the attorney general. Suddenly, Giuliani and Biden were forgotten as the rest of corporate media screamed themselves hoarse. “Democrats’ worst fears about William Barr are proving correct,” declared the Washington Post. “AG Bill Barr finds himself ‘neck deep’ in Trump scandal,” said MSNBC. The Daily Beast called for his impeachment while the Guardian accused him of nothing less than attempting to “rewrite the history of the 2016 US presidential election.”
This was cheeky coming from a newspaper that tried to rewrite history itself by falsely accusing imprisoned whistleblower Julian Assange of meeting with Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in connection with stolen Democratic Party emails.
But it was all nonsense. Trump’s crimes – waging war on Yemen, blockading Iran, attempting to starve Venezuela into submission, etc. – are almost beyond enumeration. But this is not one of them. Despite the cries of outrage, he did nothing wrong in phoning up Scott Morrison, and neither did Barr in flying to London and Rome to seek their cooperation. Indeed, both men would have been remiss if they didn’t.
The reason is that Australia, Italy, and the UK are as central to Russiagate, the pseudo-scandal that dominated US headlines for two and a half years, as the Ukraine is to l’Affaire Biden. After all, it was an Anglo-Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud who told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” and it was Aussie diplomat Alexander Downer, a self-described “warrior for the Western alliance,” who elicited the news from Papadopoulos at a London wine bar and then triggered a formal investigation by informing the FBI.
It was an ex-British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele who sent the press into a frenzy when someone leaked his phony “golden showers” dossier in January 2017. It was ex-British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove who coached Steele on how to spread word of his “findings,” and it was a long-time US intelligence agent named Stefan Halper, a colleague of Dearlove’s at Cambridge University, who flew Papadopoulos to London so he could pepper him with leading questions:
“It’s great that Russia is helping you and the campaign, right, George? George, you and your campaign are involved in hacking and working with Russia, right? It seems like you are a middleman for Trump and Russia, right? I know you know about the emails.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Papadopoulos says he replied. If he had taken the bait on the other hand, the FBI might have charged him with collusion and forced him to wear a wire so he could entrap other Trump campaign officials as well.
As for Italy, that’s where Mifsud has reportedly been holed up since early 2017. Anyone wishing to get to the bottom of Russiagate would want to know who is protecting him – and hopefully Rome will now help Barr find out.
Russiagate was one of the most bizarre episodes in modern political history, a wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at driving a legally-elected president out of office. The Times, WaPo, MSNBC, and the Guardian were all neck deep in the scandal, and now they’re neck deep in the cover up by attempting to deep-six the official Department of Justice investigation into how Russiagate began before it is even completed. If they get away with it, the big loser will be the public– and democracy as well.
State Funded Propagandists Claim Anti-War Journalists Are State-Funded Propagandists
By Alan MacLeod | American Herald Tribune | October 5, 2019
Investigative journalism website Bellingcat released a bombshell report September 30, that claimed to uncover a network of “pro-Assad media” infiltrating Western journalism. The author, Charles Davis, alleged there was a “shadowy group” connected to the government of Syria that was financing the careers of both left- and right-wing journalists, bloggers and news outlets that toed an Assadist line. Named in the report as effective agents of Damascus were the likes of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, investigative journalists Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek and Whitney Webb, news outlets like MintPress News and independent journalists such as Caitlin Johnstone. Even the Green Party’s 2016 Vice-Presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka was framed as an Assad puppet. Thus, virtually the entire gamut of Western antiwar voices on Syria was declared to be deceiving the public, feeding them Syrian propaganda.
These are extraordinary claims. Yet the evidence provided was far from extraordinary. Indeed, the base of the evidence given was that many of these figures had accepted awards from a US-based organization dedicated, in their own words to “integrity in journalism” which, Davis insists, is a front to spread Assadist propaganda. Despite the lack of concrete evidence, the article caused waves on social media, with many seeing it as final proof of a worldwide conspiracy.
What Davis did not divulge, however, as was quickly pointed out by many he pointed the finger at, including Mint Press’ Mnar Muhawesh, was that Bellingcat itself is directly funded by some extremely shady organizations, including the Open Society Foundation and the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). That is the same NED that is currently bankrolling the protests in Hong Kong and has organized regime change operations in Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The NED was established as a buffer organization between the CIA and the organizations it was sponsoring. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” NED President Carl Gershman told the New York Times in 1986. “We saw that in the Sixties, and that’s why it has been discontinued.” One of the NED’s founders, Allen Weinstein, was even more frank: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”, he told the Washington Post.
Davis’ report was met with scathing criticism by those who it named as Assad agents.
“I find it terribly ironic that an article that accused MintPress and other anti-war news sites and journalists of receiving “shady state-linked funding” was published on Bellingcat, a site funded by the US government – currently an occupying power in Syria – and Google – the tech behemoth currently working overtime to censor independent media” replied Whitney Webb, when asked by the American Herald Tribune for a response to the allegations, adding that the attempt to paint the Serena Shim Award as “shady” was “quite dishonest” as the cash prize is funded by an all-American political action committee that opposes US interventionism abroad.
Max Blumenthal appeared equally unconcerned with the allegations. “I’ll take a token award from an anti-war non-profit over a byline in an interventionist PR operation literally backed by a CIA cutout that destabilizes socialist and independent nations around the globe any day” he told the American Herald Tribune, adding that “it almost seems that Charles Davis’ entire life is dedicated to attacking and denigrating me. He literally does nothing else”.
If Webb, Blumenthal and others are correct, this latest article is little more than an attempt to denigrate anti-imperialist, anti-war voices, along the lines of what the Atlantic Council has attempted to do. Since 2016, the Council, an offshoot of NATO, has published a series of investigations called “the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses” claiming virtually every political party in Europe that does not fully embrace neoliberal economics and an aggressive policy towards Russia is secretly infiltrated by and directed from Moscow. These parties include Labour and UKIP in the UK, PODEMOS in Spain, Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece and the Lega Nord in Italy.
The Atlantic Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of neocon, interventionist foreign policy planners including Henry Kissinger, ex-Bush officials like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and James Baker, Generals like David Petraeus and Wesley Clark, and a host of ex-CIA directors and senior tech executives. It was this organization that Facebook announced it was teaming up with to fight fake news. Thus, the Council is helping the social media giant to decide what America (and the rest of its 2.4 billion users) sees in their news feeds and what is likely Russian-sponsored fake news. When an organization like this decides what is news and what is not, it is state censorship by any other name. As soon as this partnership was in place, Facebook began deleting news and media channels from Iranian and Latin American (particularly Venezuelan) media that contradicted NATO’s official line on their countries. And Facebook was already working closely with the Israeli government to silence Palestinian voices on its platform.
Eliot Higgins. Credit: Ars Electronica/ flickr
Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, for the record, was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council between 2016 and 2019, where he published purportedly expert and independent reports into Russian aggression in Ukraine. Yet Bellingcat continues to present itself as a neutral observer in the cyberwar between Russia and the West.
And that is the trick. Under the guise of protecting us from supposedly extensive foreign, state-funded propaganda campaigns, we are, ourselves, being exposed to an even bigger, Western state-funded propaganda campaign, the extent of which is far greater than even the most lurid Russian fantasies of Bellingcat. Last year, for instance, it was exposed that the UK secret services have infiltrated media across Europe, building up “clusters” of sympathetic journalists in many nations in order to push certain lines crucial to their perceived interests. This “Integrity Initiative” as it is known, sprung into action in Spain, using their journalists to stir up a storm of controversy that managed to block the appointment of Colonel Pedro Baños to the position of head of Spanish national security. Baños, the Initiative had decided, was not sufficiently warlike on Russia, and needed to be blocked. Yet this blatant interference in foreign politics received scant attention in corporate media.
Ultimately, there is a new information war being waged in cyberspace, and the lesson to be drawn from this affair is to be very cautious of those decrying Russian propaganda while not also warning against the power of Google and the NSA, or calling for the release of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Cyberspace is the new battleground; and in war, truth is always the first casualty.
Alan MacLeod is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group. His latest book, Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting, was published by Routledge in April.
Amazon, Israel, and the Occupation of Palestine
International Solidarity Movement | October 2, 2019
On September 22nd, Amazon quietly launched its operations in Israel, offering local delivery from a number of Israeli brands, with a Hebrew-language version of its Israel platform coming soon. Consumers in Israel now have faster and broader access to the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace, yet questions remained unanswered about Amazon’s ties with Israeli military, financial, and technology companies involved in the Occupation of Palestine as well as accusations of anti-Palestinian bias against the platform and its founder Jeff Bezos.
Though Amazon Israel was launched barely two weeks ago, Amazon’s business operations with Israel go back much further. As early as 2015, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) began servicing Amazon’s fleet of cargo planes, and now services 80% of Amazon’s aircraft. IAI is a wholly Israeli state owned aerospace and weapons manufacturer which supplies the Israeli army with aircraft, drones, missiles, armored vehicles, spy satellites and more. Its weapons have been used in assassinations and military invasions of Gaza. In the 1970s, IAI sold weapons to the Shah of Iran, and more recently, a UN report in August this year found IAI had sold weapons to Myanmar’s military after it began its genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority. IAI subsidiary Elta North America was recently commissioned to build a prototype of Donald Trump’s wall on the US-Mexico border. Amazon also works with Israeli technology firm NSLComm, which receives funding from the Israeli government, and builds network satellites “that will be used for… military applications”, according to Haaretz.
IAI, which services 80% of Amazon’s cargo planes, also provides aircraft, missiles, and other weapons to the Israeli government. Credit: MOHAMMED SALEM/ REUTERS
While Amazon’s ties with IAI and NSLComm are rarely reported in the media, its multi-million dollar contracts with another security firm has attracted widespread condemnation and protest. Amazon makes millions off providing web servers and database storage for Palantir, a private US data analysis firm which aids Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in identifying and deporting migrants. A petition this summer for Amazon to cut ties with Palantir and ICE gained over 270,000 signatures. Palantir also provides the Israeli government with so-called “predictive systems”, which analyze social media posts to identify Palestinians deemed a “threat”. The result of Palantir’s racially profiled analytics systems is that Palestinians are arrested and face long prison sentences for simply posting photos of family members killed by Israeli forces or in prison, citing Quranic verses, or calling for protests.
In the financial sector, Amazon signed agreements this year with Bank Hapoalim and Bank Leumi, two major Israeli banking institutions, to provide discounts to Amazon customers using Leumi and Hapoalim bank accounts. A 2018 report by Human Rights Watch found both banks guilty of financing construction and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, while Bank Leumi also funds academic institutions in illegal settlements and programs for IDF recruits, even sponsoring gift packages and additional vacation days for Israeli soldiers during the 2014 invasion of Gaza, in which over 2,200 Palestinians, including more than 550 children, were killed. Pension funds and banks in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK have divested from Bank Leumi and Hapoalim due to their human rights violations, while Amazon signs new cooperation agreements with them.
Amazon’s dealings with Israeli companies supporting and profiting from the Occupation aside, many more questions remain. The most troubling of these questions surround how Amazon Israel will deal with realities on the ground in its operations. Will Amazon deliver to customers in illegal settlements? Will Amazon sell products manufactured or grown on Palestinian land seized by armed settlers and considered illegal by the UN and the international community? Will Amazon give Palestinian and Israeli sellers equal access to its platform?
A quick look at Amazon’s policies on its global site, amazon.com, give some indication as to how it might run its Israeli site. Last year, Amazon removed a top-selling T-shirt that reads “Make Israel Palestine Again”, on the grounds that it did not fulfill Amazon’s content policy. Amazon’s content policy prohibits the sale of “products that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views.” Amazon seems to have no problem, however, with selling “IDF” merchandise; at the time of writing this article, IDF T shirts, dresses, Halloween costumes, and even baby clothes were available on its global site. The occupation army has been accused of racism, sexism, religious intolerance, and countless acts of violence, torture, and human rights violations, not only by Palestinians but also by Israeli soldiers.
A screenshot of the “Make Israel Palestine Again” T-shirt removed by Amazon.
Amazon president, CEO, and largest shareholder Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world since 2017 (and according to Forbes, the richest man in history) has yet to speak publicly about Palestine or Israel; he rarely gives public comments on any political issues. But indications of the Amazon founder’s political stances can be seen in the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos purchased the US paper for $250 million USD and has been its sole owner since October 2013.
The Washington Post has published a wide range of articles on Israel and Palestine, and a quick look at their articles and editorials since Bezo’s takeover in October 2013 shows where its editorial staff and leadership stand. It describes the shooting of unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza by Israeli snipers as “clashes”, and Netanyahu as a “prudent, even cautious, statesman” who “quietly restrained the building of Jewish settlements”, even though during his last 10 years in office over 20,000 settlement units were built in the Occupied West Bank. One Washington Post article, titled “Palestinians Kill 3 Israelis as Violence Mounts in ‘Day of Rage’”, acknowledges only in the 6th paragraph that “28 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis.” Israelis are routinely described as “killed”, but Palestinians merely “die”. Another article on electricity cuts in Gaza makes sure to inform the readers in the headline that “it’s not all Israel’s fault”. Last year, the Washington Post ran a full page advert calling New Zealand artist Lorde a “bigot” for canceling a concert in Israel.
From the Washington Post (of which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the sole owner) on May 6, 2019. Israelis are killed, but Palestinians just “die”
Jennifer Rubin, a journalist for the Washington post, once retweeted an article describing Palestinians as “death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages”, “devils spawn”, and “unmanned animals” who should be thrown “into the sea, to float there, food for sharks”. Her writing in the Washington Post declared that endorsements of the one-state solution “amount to calls for genocide”, and called then–Secretary of State John Kerry “intentionally obtuse”–or a liar–for not denouncing the Palestinian right of return. The Washington Post has rejected calls to remove Rubin for promoting racism and Islamophobia.
Given Amazon’s record of involvement with corporations deeply entrenched in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, there is a high possibility of Amazon Israel failing to comply with international and human rights law in its Israeli operations. Should it fail to respect international law and engage in operations directly normalizing, supporting, and profiting from violations of Palestinian rights, Amazon may face boycott calls similar to those taken by BDS against companies like HSBC, SodaStream, Airbnb, Caterpillar, and Hewlett Packard. It remains to be seen what kind of corporate values Amazon Israel will deliver.
Israel Has Murdered 500 Palestinians Since Trump Declared Jerusalem The Capital Of Israel
By Robert Inlakesh – 21rst Century Wire – October 4, 2019
Since December 2017, when Trump announced his recognition that “Jerusalem is Israel’s eternal capital”, at least 481 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli forces according to a new report.
The Centre for Jerusalem Studies, based in the old city of Jerusalem, provided documentation showing that of the 481 murders, 102 were children and 18 were women, 6 of those killed have been described having special needs.
Since the start of the Gaza’s Great Return March, on the 30th of March 2018, over 330 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli forces. No Israelis have been killed or sustained significant injuries, beyond scratches, from the demonstrators. Israel however, still insists that the protests have been non-stop riots which have been going on for nearly a year and a half straight.
Israel is now in the process of figuring out whether Benjamin Netanyahu, currently battling a corruption and bribery scandal, or Benny Gantz, who was summoned to the Hague during his election campaign for involvement in the execution of a family in Gaza, will be their next Prime Minister. But regardless of whom it is, Trump’s alleged ‘Deal of the Century’ seem to be looming on the horizon.
If the Trump administration goes ahead and attempts to implement his plan, which has been alleged to include the possible swallowing of sections of the West Bank by Jordan, as well as the “resettlement” of Gazans to the Egyptian Sinai, the violence will inevitably grow.
Right now, the mainstream Western press is fixated on the Hong Kong protests. They are providing coverage to the anti-China demonstrators in an attempt to lionize groups, many of which have engaged in real violence and vandalism. Yet the demonstrations in Gaza are not only largely ignored, but are perpetually portrayed as violent and the narrative of the Israeli government is sometimes quoted almost word for word.
So a valid question, given the hypocrisy of mainstream media outlets coverage on Hong Kong when paralleled with Gaza, would be, why are they also still pretending to oppose US President Donald Trump? Clearly the agenda behind backing the Hong Kong protests, works hand in hand with President Trump’s plans for China and even more evident is it that channels such as the BBC, CNN, MSNBC etc., clearly are helping Trump get away with allowing the violence against Palestinians to continue.
The reason Palestinians can be executed in such large-scale attacks and massacres, is the fault of the media and international community. This includes the United Nations (UN), International Criminal Court (ICC), Human Rights Organizations and all the self-proclaimed “objective” media outlets. If there is no direct action against Israel for its crimes, we should expect another surge in constantly escalating cycle of violence, perpetuated upon the Palestinian people by the Israelis.
***
Author Robert Inlakesh is a special contributor to 21WIRE and European correspondent for Press TV. He has reported from on the ground in occupied Palestine
NY Times Removes Race Context After Black Girl Admits Faking Hate Crime
To hide the fact they amplified another race hate hoax
By Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars | September 30, 2019
After a 12-year-old African-American girl admitted she lied about a group of white boys cutting off her dreadlocks, the New York Times decided to strip the fact that the accused were “white” from its follow up headline.
The global mainstream media, as well as lawmakers like Rashida Tlaib, amplified Amari Allen’s falsehood after she claimed that three white male classmates had pinned her down, called her “nappy” and “ugly” and cut her hair.
This prompted a wave of sympathy for Allen, a lucrative GoFundMe, and a volley of resentment towards young white men.
In the vast majority of these media reports, the fact that the boys were white was included in the headline.
It subsequently emerged that Allen had faked the entire story, with her grandparents today apologizing to those falsely accused.
However, in the media reports that carried the update to the story, the fact that the entire narrative was predicated on the incident being a racist hate crime was stripped from the story.
In its initial report on the issue, the New York Times headline read ‘Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks on Playground’.
However, in the follow up story, the headline read ‘Virginia Girl Recants Story of Boys Cutting Off Her Dreadlocks’.
The media seems very keen to obscure the fact that they helped inflate yet another race hate hoax that turned out to be nothing but hot air.
“The most noteworthy part of this story is this girl allegedly getting a bit of her hair cut off made international news while the murder of John Weed was ignored,” comments Chris Menahan.
Brexit isn’t David Cameron’s Legacy – Libya is
The MSM’s total disregard for the apocalyptic destruction of the most developed nation in Africa is a crime
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 1, 2019
“The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.”
Lord Acton
David Cameron has a book out. You’ve probably heard. There’s a lot of press coverage. The BBC did a retrospective documentary about him to coincide with it, The Guardian had a review of the book, a review of the documentary, and an interview with the man himself.
Oh, and then another article about how it’s selling less well than Blair’s biography.
This is obviously just about journalists reporting the news, you understand.
It is absolutely not at all a mass marketing strategy camouflaged as “current events”.
Shame on you for thinking otherwise.
Naturally, as is always the case when ex-Prime Ministers make appearances or churn out autobiographies, there is plenty of talk about “legacy”.
Well… what is David Cameron’s legacy?
The media are pretty clear: Brexit.
The BBC documentary is entitled The Cameron Years. It’s in two parts, somehow bloated out to two whole hours in runtime, and is only concerned with the Brexit vote. The first part is entirely dedicated to it, that’s literally all it’s about, with the second half being more general, but still very Brexit-centric.
The reviews of the book are no better. In fact they are worse.
The Telegraph liked it, as did the Times. The Guardian and Independent didn’t, as much, but still praised its “honesty”. They all talk almost entirely about Brexit. Bloomberg headline “David Cameron Wants You to Remember Him for More Than Just Brexit”, pointing out: “The former prime minister’s new memoir, For the Record, spends just 50 of 700 pages on the disastrous referendum”… before going on to review just those fifty pages.
In fact, I’ve read over half-a-dozen reviews of this book, and none of them talks about anything but Brexit.
There is not a single use of the word “Libya” in any of them. Not anywhere. Not in even in passing.
Not. One. Single. Use.
For those of you foggy on the details, Libya was a place that used to look like this:
… and now looks like this:
You would think that the total and complete destruction of the most developed nation on the African continent would warrant at least brief discussion in the “legacy” of the Prime Minister responsible but, apparently, you would be wrong.
(I know we’re only Britain, and we only do what America tells us, but “Only following orders” didn’t work for Goering and probably shouldn’t work for anybody else. Cameron included).
The press silence on Libya is on another level.
They grudgingly discuss Iraq as a “mistake” or “blunder”, they carry on their insane propaganda-war on Syria with fresh gusto every few months (or whenever they need a distraction), but Libya… Libya is the country that must not be named.
Take Jonathan Freedland. He was ALL OVER Libya back in 2011. He campaigned for NATO to do something, preaching about the West’s “responsibility to protect”. Does he mention Libya once in his review of this book? Nope.
He even has the gall to open the piece with this:
“Just as the 700 pages of Tony Blair’s autobiography could not escape the shadow of Iraq, so the 700 pages of David Cameron’s memoir are destined to be read through a single lens: Brexit.”
As if his decision to totally disregard a war crime he not only apologised for, but cheerfully encouraged, was somehow just fate and totally beyond his control.
That’s probably got something to do with the organ trafficking and open-air slave markets.
This was no accident, you understand, Libya is exactly what NATO set-out to make it – a failed state where absolutely everything is for sale. A true capitalist paradise. But discussing that would make it harder to sell “R2P” in the future.
Better to just endlessly rant on about Brexit instead.
Now, obviously, Brexit is (potentially) an important decision for the fate of the country. You can’t deny that.
BUT – let’s be real here – Even IF we leave the EU (and right now that is far from guaranteed), and even IF our leaving is as bad as the worst doom-sayers are predicting, London isn’t going to end up like this…
…. or this:
…. or this:
And at the end of the day, THAT is Cameron’s legacy.
Just as it’s the legacy of the all slimy apologists who cheered him on, and the narrow-minded, self-centred xenophobes who clean up after him.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
UK Defence Chief Carter Claims Country ‘at War on Daily Basis’ Against Alleged Russian Cyber Attacks
Sputnik – September 30, 2019
The UK’s Chief of the Defence Staff Nick Carter has claimed that Britain is at war every day due to constant cyber attacks from Russia and other countries.
In Sunday’s address to the Cliveden Literary Festival, which was also attended by former US General and CIA Director David Petraeus, General Carter also argued that “the changing character of warfare has exposed the distinctions that don’t exist any longer between peace and war.”
“I feel I am now at war, but it’s not a war in the way we would have defined it in the past. And that is because great power competition and the battle of ideas with non-state actors is threatening us on a daily basis,” he said.
Carter referred to Russia’s and China’s alleged “interpretation” of the rules governing international engagement which he claimed threatened “the ethical and legal basis on which we apply the rule of armed conflict.”
He described Russia as “much more of a threat today than it was five years ago.”
“The character of warfare is evolving […] there’s a debate we need to have about what does the future of warfare look like,” Carter claimed, insisting that traditional concept of war only being waged on land, sea and in the air is already outdated.
“The key bit that will give you the edge you need is the way in which information connects [it all] together so we are properly integrated at every level,” he argued.
Carter also claimed that “future warfare is going to be very much information-centric” and that the UK military should clinch a balance between training the armed forces for the new forms of warfare and keeping up a powerful traditional military deterrent, something that is still in place in the Baltic states.
Additionally, Carter made it clear that he shares Petraeus’ view about Russian President Vladimir Putin being “the greatest gift to NATO since the end of the Cold War.”
“NATO’s got some serious political challenges at the moment. “Putin has been very helpful in getting us to make the case as to why we need to modernise,” Carter claimed.
Moscow Rejects Cyber Attacks Involvement Accusations
Russia has repeatedly denied its involvement in cyber-attacks abroad, with presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressing that “these are absolutely unfounded accusations, which are often quite absurd and are not supported by concrete facts.”
He was echoed by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova who said last year that as far as cyber crimes are concerned, “in Western countries, it has become common courtesy to systematically accuse Russia” in such crimes.
“Speaking about reality, all this differs widely from the imaginings of western political consultants because our country is one of the more active participants in international interactivity, especially in information and communication technology,” Zakharova pointed out.
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Book Review
In 2007, Michael Parenti Called Out The Greater Israel Project
The Dissident | January 28, 2026
In my last article, I covered the left-wing scholar Michael Parenti- who passed away at the age of 92 this week- and his prophetic writings on the Ukraine proxy war in 2014.
Parenti’s writings on the Israel lobby and the greater Israel project were equally prophetic.
In his 2007 book “Contrary Notions” Parenti called out “Israel First” Neo-cons and Israel’s role in the Iraq war, and predicted to a tee the future Israeli/American wars in the Middle East in service of Greater Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In a section of the book aptly titled “Israel First”, Parenti wrote… continue
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