For NYT, Israel Is Always Nearing ‘Apartheid,’ but Never Quite Gets There
By Gregory Shupak | FAIR | April 26, 2019
Following Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election as Israeli prime minister earlier this month, the New York Times’ editorial board (4/11/19) wrote:
Under Mr. Netanyahu, Israel is on a trajectory to become what critics say will be an apartheid state like the former South Africa—a country in which Palestinians will eventually be a majority, but without the rights of citizens.
A harsh criticism? Actually, the paper has been saying that Israel/Palestine could “become” an apartheid state for the better part of two decades. It ran a piece in 2003 (1/29/03) arguing that
if Israel does not give up the territories, it will face a choice: relinquish either democracy or the ideal of a Jewish state. Granting Palestinians in the territories the right to vote would turn Israel into an Arab state with a Jewish minority. Not allowing them to vote would result in a form of permanent apartheid.
For almost 20 years, the paper has suggested that Israel/Palestine risks devolving into an apartheid state if it continues to rule over Palestinians in the territories—Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—who cannot choose their rulers. This population includes approximately 4.75 million occupied Palestinians—320,000 in East Jerusalem, 2.8 million in the rest of the West Bank and 1.8 million in besieged Gaza—to say nothing of the millions of Palestinian refugees who cannot return to their homes and participate in elections because the people who put on those elections won’t let them.
That situation has remained the same, not only for the period that the Times has been publishing material saying the arrangement might someday add up to apartheid, but since 1967. Yet the Times persists in characterizing Israeli apartheid as a hypothetical future development. The paper acknowledges that governing millions of Palestinians but denying them the vote is a form of apartheid, so there’s no justification for saying, after nearly 52 years of such disenfranchisement, that that will eventually constitute apartheid, but for some unspecified reason doesn’t yet at this point.
Tom Friedman’s Groundhog Day
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman appears to be having a Groundhog Day experience: He keeps waking up, looking at Israel’s ethnocracy, and saying that if it continues to be apartheid, it will become apartheid. In 2002 (10/16/02), he commented:
If you think it is hard to defend Israel on campus today, imagine doing it in 2010, when the colonial settlers have so locked Israel into the territories it can rule them only by apartheid-like policies.
2010 came and went, and the “apartheid-like” conditions remained, but Friedman persisted in treating Israeli apartheid as a mere possibility, writing (2/1/11) of the 2011 protests in Egypt:
If Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
A year later (8/1/12), Friedman said:
It is in Israel’s overwhelming interest to test, test and have the US keep testing creative ideas for a two-state solution. That is what a real US friend would promise to do. Otherwise, Israel could be doomed to become a kind of apartheid South Africa.
Two years after that (2/11/14), Friedman said that “Israel by default could become some kind of apartheid-like state in permanent control over… 2.5 million Palestinians.” Even in this so-called criticism of Israel, Friedman does the state a favor by acting as though the West Bank Palestinians are the only ones disenfranchised by Israel, overlooking the refugees and Gaza, even as Israel continues to control the latter. (He also appears to leave out Palestinian Jerusalemites.)
Evidence for Already-Existing Apartheid
As Friedman and his paper kept predicting that Israel/Palestine could turn into an apartheid entity, evidence mounted that it is exactly that. For example, United Nations special rapporteur John Dugard found in 2007 that “elements of the [Israeli] occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law.” He went on to say that at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank and surrounding Jerusalem,
a [Palestinian] person may be refused passage through a checkpoint for arguing with a soldier or explaining his documents…. Checkpoints and the poor quality of secondary roads Palestinians are obliged to use, in order to leave the main roads free for settler use, result in journeys that previously took 10 to 20 minutes taking 2 to 3 hours…. In apartheid South Africa, a similar system [was] designed to restrict the free movement of blacks —the notorious “pass laws.”
Another UN special rapporteur, Richard Falk, noted in 2010 that “among the salient apartheid features of the Israeli occupation” are “discriminatory arrangements for movement in the West Bank and to and from Jerusalem,” as well as
extensive burdening of Palestinian movement, including checkpoints applying differential limitations on Palestinians and on Israeli settlers, and onerous permit and identification requirements imposed only on Palestinians.
A March 2017 report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia concluded that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
That July, however, Friedman (7/12/17) continued to treat Israeli apartheid as something that might happen down the road, wishing that President Trump had admonished Netanyahu in a meeting between the two:
Bibi, you win every debate, but meanwhile every day the separation of Israel from the Palestinians grows less likely, putting Israel on a “slippery slope toward apartheid,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently warned.
Last September (9/19/18), Friedman was still worried about this supposedly theoretical scenario:
Without some dramatic advance, there is a real chance that whatever Palestinian governance exists will crumble, and Israel will have to take full responsibility for the health, education and welfare of the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel would then have to decide whether to govern the West Bank with one legal authority or two, which would mean Israel would be choosing between bi-nationalism and apartheid, both disasters for a Jewish democracy.
Netanyahu, Friedman went on to say, has failed to offer “any new, or old, ideas on how to separate from the Palestinians to avoid the terrible choices of bi-nationalism and apartheid.”
Erasing Palestinians
Setting aside the troubling assertion that Israelis and Palestinians living as equals would be not only a “disaster,” but as bad a “disaster” as apartheid, Friedman ignored the fact that just two months earlier, the Knesset had passed the Nation State Law that defined Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The law asserted that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” even though 20 percent of the population living inside Israel is not Jewish; encouraged “the development of Jewish settlement” and vowed that the state will “promote its establishment and consolidation.” It declared that “the state’s language is Hebrew,” deprecating Arabic, the first language of roughly half the people under that state’s control.
The Nation State Law demonstrates that the bad faith, future tense descriptions of Israeli apartheid are overly narrow, in that they focus exclusively on the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied since 1967. Yet on the Israeli-held side of the Green Line, Palestinians are systematically discriminated against.
It’s not only the occupation that make Israel/Palestine apartheid. It’s the Israeli state’s foundational principles and actions: driving two-thirds of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homes at its birth, subsequently making more than 2 million of them refugees, and then denying their right to return, despite its being mandated under international law.
Meanwhile, Jewish people anywhere on Earth are given the right to immigrate, because Israeli leaders want to maintain a demographic advantage. They pursue this goal—with decisive help from their sponsors in Washington—through their longstanding operational policy mantra: maximum land, minimum Arabs.
Not even three full days after the New York Times’ most recent brooding about how Israel might “become” an apartheid state, Israel’s Supreme Court approved the demolition of 500 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. Is it apartheid yet?
Accused ‘spy’ Maria Butina wouldn’t be in jail if she ‘wasn’t Russian’ – attorney
RT | April 26, 2019
After gun activist Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in jail for failing to register as a foreign agent, her lawyer stated that things would be completely different if she wasn’t guilty of the crime of being Russian.
“Anyone who thinks that someone who wasn’t Russian would be in this situation is fooling themselves,” attorney Robert Driscoll told reporters on Friday. Butina had just been sentenced to 18 months in prison, with nine served already, and will be deported to Russia after serving her time.
From the moment of her arrest, right up to her sentencing, Butina’s treatment at the hands of the US justice system and in the court of public opinion has been tainted by the cloud of Russian hysteria hanging over Washington DC.
A gun rights activist who wanted to make Russia’s restrictive gun laws more like the US’, Butina landed in the US in 2016 on a student visa. As the founder of a pro-gun group in Russia, Butina hobnobbed with National Rifle Association and Republican figures in America.
However, Butina was arrested last year for failing to register as a foreign agent, a requirement that the 30-year-old didn’t even know she had to meet. Curiously, as she was unaware of the requirement, Butina was charged with a more serious offense that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who knew the law but didn’t follow it.
Given the timing of Butina’s arrest, the media and prosecution went into overdrive. Here, at long last, was a Russian agent caught meddling in American affairs. Assistant US Attorney Erik M. Kenerson claimed she was offering an individual “sex in exchange for a position within a special interest organization.”
Kenerson later backtracked his statement, which he said was based on a “mistaken” understanding of text messages between Butina and a romantic partner.
The media took the bait though. “Sex and schmoozing are common Russian spy tactics. Publicity makes Maria Butina different,” read a USA Today headline. Butina, Time Magazine wrote at the same time, “lived a double life by using sex and a love of guns to infiltrate American political organizations…in order to advance Moscow’s agenda.” Journalists didn’t question Butina’s operation in the open, with USA Today concluding her transparency about her agenda is “evidence the Russians have grown bolder in their spy efforts.”
Would the same low-grade Cold War spy erotica have graced the pages of national news outlets if Butina were, say, a French gun activist?
With the outrage machine at full steam, Butina spent much of the past nine months stewing in a Virginia jail. There, she was allegedly subjected to conditions described by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as “normally reserved for dangerous repeat offenders.”
The Russian embassy in Washington DC, which sent staff to meet with Butina frequently, described the conditions of her detention as “borderline torture,” and detailed a litany of abuses against the Russian activist. Butina was strip searched, denied medication and hygiene items, kept in solitary confinement, and regularly had her sleep disrupted, the embassy claimed.
Lavrov stated that such treatment was designed to poke Butina into accepting a plea deal with prosecutors, which she eventually did in December.
But why were American authorities so desperate to prove sinister Russian activity?
“There’s no allegation of espionage, there’s no allegation of classified information, there’s no allegation she was paying anyone off, there’s no allegation she was recruiting spies. None of the things you would typically see in an espionage case,” Driscoll told RT last year.
“I think this was a political gambit to deal with bigger geopolitical issues to try to ruin the outcome of the summit between Trump and Putin,” human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik told RT at the time, noting that Butina was arrested one day before Presidents Trump and Putin met in Helsinki. As long as the case against Butina dragged on, the US government had human proof that the specter of ‘Russian meddling’ in US politics was alive and well.
In court on Friday, prosecutors did their best to keep the narrative alive. Prosecutor Erik Kenerson told the judge that Butina was concocting a plan to establish communications between the Trump White House and Russia, an issue he said was ‘of extreme importance to the Russian Federation.”
“Her conduct shows how easy it can be for a foreign government to target Americans in the US,” he added.
Butina’s treatment, meanwhile, shows how easy it can be for an innocent student to be targeted by a justice system bent on finding Russians meddling in everything.
BBC Accused Of Serious Errors And Misleading Statements In David Attenborough’s Climate Show
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 26, 2019
The GWPF has now formally submitted its complaint to the BBC about David Attenborough’s Climate Change – The Facts:
The BBC programme, presented by Sir David Attenborough, went far beyond its remit to present the facts of climate change, instead broadcasting a highly politicised manifesto in favour of renewable energy and unjustified alarm.
The programme highlighted suggestions that storms, floods, heatwaves and sea level rise are all rapidly getting worse as a result of climate change.
However, the best available data, published in the last few years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA, contradicts the BBC’s alarmist exaggeration of empirical evidence.
In its 5th Assessment Report (2013), the IPCC concluded:
“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”
In its more recent Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, published in 2018, these findings were reconfirmed. It stated that
“Numerous studies towards and beyond AR5 have reported a decreasing trend in the global number of tropical cyclones and/or the globally accumulated cyclonic energy… There is consequently low confidence in the larger number of studies reporting increasing trends in the global number of very intense cyclones.”
Regarding floods, the IPCC’s Special Report concluded:
“There is low confidence due to limited evidence, however, that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and the magnitude of floods. “
There is also no observational evidence that the rate of sea level rise is getting worse. NASA satellite data shows that since 1993, there has been an annual mean sea level rise of 3.3mm, with no significant level of acceleration in the last three decades.
Suggestions by David Attenborough and Michael Mann that climate change is causing increases in wildfires in the US and globally are also misleading and not supported by any empirical evidence.
According to a survey published by the Royal Society the global area burned has actually declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence to suggest that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago. These are vitally important facts that should have been mentioned if an accurate description of the impact of climate change on wildfires was to be maintained.
In his letter of complaint, Dr Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, has asked the BBC to acknowledge and correct the evident errors and misleading suggestions documented in the complaint and offer remedial measures as soon as possible.
The full complaint is available here (pdf)
Coming Clean on Washing Machine Tariffs
By Dean Baker | CEPR | April 23, 2019
Jim Tankersley had a piece in the NYT yesterday on the cost per job saved of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese washing machines. According to the study, the cost per job saved was $817,000. While that is a steep tab, there are a few points that should be added to this sort of analysis.
First, if the point of the tariffs is to benefit workers, part of this $817,000 cost is going to higher pay to workers who would have jobs with or without the tariff. The study doesn’t look at the impact on wages of workers in the industry, but if the goal is to help workers who make washing machines, then this should be factored into the assessment.
The second point is that this is a partial equilibrium analysis. It doesn’t look at the overall effect on the economy of a reduction in the money we spend on importing washing machines. While this can be hard to assess, since imports of washing machines from China are a very small part of the total economy, other things equal we would expect that less money spent on imported washing machines would translate into a higher-valued dollar. (We are reducing the supply of dollars on world markets, thereby raising the price of dollars.)
This effect is almost certainly very small, but suppose that the reduced payments for imported washing machines raised the value of the dollar by just 0.01 percent. If this rise in the dollar were fully passed on in lower import prices (it isn’t), that would translate in a reduction in the cost of imports to US consumers of $320 million, more than 20 percent of the cost of the tariffs estimated in this study. Even if it would be hard to get any sort of precise numbers, the point is that this is an offsetting effect which could be large relative to the estimated cost of the tariffs.
The third point is that tariffs can sometimes make sense if they allow an industry breathing space to reorganize and regain competitiveness or serve some other goal (e.g. persuading a country to raise the value of its currency). In 1983, Ronald Reagan imposed tariffs on Japanese motorcycles in order to help out Harley Davidson. In 2006, when President George W. Bush wanted to tout the virtues of free trade, he visited a Harley Davidson factory in Pennsylvania which was a major producer of motorcycles for exports. It is unlikely that Harley Davidson would have been exporting motorcycles in 2006 without the tariffs that allowed it some breathing space in 1983.
Of course, none of this means that Trump’s washing machine tariffs are a good idea. If they are in fact part of a well-crafted trade and industrial policy strategy, he is managing to keep this strategy secret from just about everyone. It looks mostly like the main effect will just be that we pay more for washing machines, even if the story may not be quite as bad as advertised.
Wikipedia founder appointed to judge trustworthiness of news, proving satire is dead
By Helen Buyniski | RT | April 26, 2019
The Orwellian browser plugin NewsGuard, which purports to judge the trustworthiness of media outlets, has appointed Wikipedia’s founder to its board, proving that even neoliberal thought police have a sense of humor.
In its bid to “tackle misinformation online,” NewsGuard has named such defenders of journalistic integrity as former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to its advisory board. That’s Wikipedia, “the encyclopedia anyone can edit,” where propaganda and hoaxes cross-pollinate to produce mutant strains of fake news that would make a 19th-century ‘yellow journal’ merchant blush.
The Wikipedia model posits that it’s hopeless to look for absolute truth, so the best we can hope for is “verifiability.” This is achieved by querying “reliable sources” and writing up whatever the consensus is. Editors are forbidden from drawing conclusions based on the sources they use – if a “reliable source” hasn’t covered it, it didn’t happen. And what does Wikipedia consider reliable? The same type of publications that NewsGuard assigns a “green” rating – mainstream media outlets – along with scholarly journals, books from reputable publishers, and so on.
Giving Wikipedia’s co-founder a say in determining what sources will be considered “reliable” in the future may sound like a terrible idea, but wait – there’s more. Wales’ latest project, WikiTribune, launched in 2017 with the lofty goal of fixing the news (sound familiar?) and attempting to wed the Wikipedia model of volunteer editors with the mainstream-media model of paid journalists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out, and Wales fired all the journalists. The project went dormant last year, but is now being re-launched as a “fact-checking wiki,” according to Wales. Surely it’s just a coincidence that he’s been welcomed onto the board of a company that wants to make its plugin part of the internet experience for everyone.
Hoaxes, mistakes, and propaganda written into Wikipedia make their way into “reliable sources” frequently, when rushed journalists who don’t have time for proper fact-checking instead glance at Wikipedia and uncritically reprint what they find there. If these journalists happen to write for a “reliable source,” what they’ve printed then becomes “reliable” for the purposes of Wikipedia, meaning that even if the original hoax, mistake, or propaganda is uncovered and removed, it can now be re-added ad infinitum, because a reliable source said it. This process is so common it has a name – “citogenesis.
Coverage of Wikipedia hoaxes that became ‘real’ tends to focus on the ridiculous ones – the fake Australian Aboriginal deity ‘Jar’Edo Wens’ who made it into a book on religion after hiding out in a Wikipedia entry for nine years – or the seemingly endless parade of celebrity death hoaxes. But citogenesis can have far more damaging effects. Turkish history professor Taner Akcam was detained by Canadian and later US authorities because Wikipedia vandals had written that he was a terrorist.
Editor Edward Patrick Alva fudged the facts in Wikipedia articles about controversial rape incidents on college campuses in order to make them conform to the version of events reported in ‘The Hunting Ground’, a film he helped produce, writes the Washington Examiner. The depiction of colleges as “hunting grounds” for sexual predators has arguably terrified a generation of women based on false and misrepresented data, and the editing of protagonists’ biographies to emphasize rape accusations that were never substantiated rises to the level of libel.
The US media spent years embroiled in a fictional conspiracy involving the Russian government colluding with Donald Trump to get him elected president, and Wikipedia had more to do with that than many people think. After all, when one encounters an unfamiliar name or term in the news – ‘Seth Rich’, ‘kompromat’ – they Google it, and the first result on Google is usually Wikipedia.
Yes, political operatives are editing Wikipedia, and they favor a certain narrative. Before the Mueller report crushed the Russiagate hopes of millions of #Resistance keyboard-warriors, Wikipedia editors – including several administrators – were seriously discussing banning“pro-Trump users” (a category some expanded to include users who denied the reality of the Russian-collusion conspiracy theory) from editing political articles. They had already decided to “purge” an article on “Russian interference in the 2016 US elections” of sources contradicting Russian hacking claims, so it was a logical next step. After all, reliable sources said there was collusion, so it must be true!
Wikipedia claims to be written by everyday people, but its history of pay-for-play editing by everyone from congressional aides to intelligence agencies to members of Parliament to “Zionist editing initiatives” to the Vatican – to say nothing of an army of corporate shills and PR flacks – proves that isn’t the whole story. Wikipedia does not actually forbid editing for pay, nor does Jimmy Wales condemn it, so long as the editor admits their paid status (on their profile page, which the casual Wikipedia reader never sees). What better partner for NewsGuard than a website where the ruling establishment can inject favorable coverage of itself while pretending it comes from the hoi polloi?
Trust in mainstream media dropped to historic lows on both sides of the pond around the time Trump was elected and the Brits voted themselves off the World-Island, outcomes that were both met with apocalyptic dismay from the ruling class. This outbreak of populism was blamed on ‘fake news’, a phenomenon that sprung fully-formed from the forehead of mainstream-media propagandists to explain away the people’s maddening tendency to vote in what they believed to be their best interests. Even though fake news has been a problem since the advent of the printing press, Americans and Brits were told that this new strain of disinformation, bearing the unmistakable imprint of Putin Inc., could single-handedly shatter our fragile democracies if we did not at once put down the independent media and rush back into the comforting arms of “reliable sources” (which happens to be the name of Brian Stelter’s show on CNN, a fact that is surely coincidental).
NewsGuard continues that patronizing narrative, serving up color-coded ‘nutrition labels’ to ensure internet users they won’t accidentally ingest anything spicy that might cause them to radically reconsider their place in the world, or their country’s policies, or their relationship to technologies like NewsGuard. It’s an extra-delicious irony that Tom Ridge, the same man who introduced a color-coded terror warning system during George W. Bush’s presidency, also sits on the advisory board of NewsGuard.
NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks, which has never had to issue a correction, an untrustworthy “red” rating, while trusting Wikipedia – which has unleashed literally hundreds of hoaxes on the world, and that’s only the ones we know about – so much they name its founder to their board. Wales’ appointment to the advisory board of NewsGuard is proof that this organization has never been about stopping the spread of fake news – only spreading their own.
‘We are at war’ with Russia: DNC Chair Perez says Trump ‘compromised’
RT | April 26, 2019
Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez went on CNN to declare a cyber war on Russia, and slammed President Donald Trump for being ‘compromised.’
“The federal government is asleep at the switch,” Perez told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on her show New Day, adding that the president had been disloyal to the country for “weaponizing” hacked material.
“When the Russians called Donald Trump and said ‘I got dirt on Hillary Clinton,’ they should have called the authorities,” Perez said, apparently referring to the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. “Instead they said ‘tell us what you got.’ That’s not right.”
Back in 2016, however, the DNC had no qualms about relying on a foreign intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump from various informants and ‘weaponize’ it in preparation for the presidential election. Steele later admitted sourcing his info from unverified internet sources – but not before it catalyzed two years of ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy and a costly Special Counsel investigation that ultimately found no collusion between Trump and Russia.
Veselnitskaya, interestingly, met with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson on both the days before and after the lawyer’s meeting with Donald Trump Jr. Fusion GPS is the research firm that paid for Christopher Steele’s kompromat job on Trump.
When asked if his party would accept leaked information on President Trump’s tax returns, Perez gave a non-answer.
“Well, again, we are entitled to that,” he said. “If you look at the law that chairman Neil of the House Ways and Means Committee is using. It’s clear. It doesn’t say you are entitled to [release your tax returns] except for the taxes of the president of the United States.”
Although the Mueller probe did not find any link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, to the utter disappointment of some liberal media pundits, the collusion narrative survived. Media continues to speculate whether Trump was somehow compromised by Russia and is on Putin’s short leash. Democrats, including certain presidential hopefuls, have not given up on the hopes to oust Trump from office through impeachment proceedings, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris among the latest to join the rallying cry.
Media trust ranker NewsGuard launches in UK by greenlighting tabloids, adding ex-NATO chief to board
RT | April 24, 2019
NewsGuard, the trust-rating outfit that continues to approve of US media that spread the Russiagate conspiracy theory, has expanded operations to the UK and added a former NATO chief to its advisory board.
Announcing its UK debut on Wednesday, NewsGuard bragged about including Anders Fogh Rasmussen to their advisory board, describing him only as “former prime minister of Denmark.” While he did serve in that capacity between 2001 and 2009, his most recent public office was secretary-general of NATO (2009-2014), which NewsGuard omits from their tweet – but not from the Advisory Board page.
Rasmussen’s colleagues on NewsGuard’s board include former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, as well as the self-described former “chief propagandist” for the US government Richard Stengel.
Other new additions to the board are Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Richard Sambrook, former “Director of Global News for the BBC” who now provides “editing and editorial guidance” for NewsGuard’s “nutrition labels.”
Those labels rank news outlets оn a number of categories, which are then combined into a trustworthiness score, expressed as a green checkmark or red “x.” There is a certain pattern in which kinds of outlets get the former and which get the latter.
Three major UK tabloids – The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star – all got an overall “green” rating, for instance. While NewsGuard claims to be rating outlets rather than individual articles, if you have their extension installed in your browser (and it comes by default with Microsoft’s Edge), you’ll see a NewsGuard symbol next to actual story headlines in your searches.
Media critic John Nolte of Breitbart – in the “red” category just like RT – pointed out on Monday that NewsGuard’s seal of approval can be found on nine of the top 12 debunked stories pushing the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory. He provided screenshots.
Even after the 448-page report by special counsel Robert Mueller spelled out “no collusion” between US President Donald Trump and Russia, multiple mainstream media outlets that have pushed this conspiracy for almost three years have refused to apologize or correct their reporting, claiming instead it was “mostly” proven correct.
“That big, green checkmark of approval still sits next to some of the most misleading stories in history,” Nolte wrote, adding, “In all my decades of following the media, I have never seen a more Orwellian attempt to mislead people by deliberately labeling lies as truth and truth as lies.”
Top 51 Fake News Russiagate ‘Bombshells’ Spread By The MSM
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 04/23/2019
Following the release of the Mueller report, the mainstream media tried to pull a fast one – absurdly claiming that their reporting for the last 2.5 years has been largely vindicated.
Except, they weren’t vindicated at all. In fact, they lied through their teeth, peddling falsehood after falsehood.
To that end, Breitbart‘s John Nolte isn’t about to let them get away with peddling even more fiction about their reporting, and has compiled a list of 51 instances where the MSM flat out lied, borrowing from the work of Sharyl Attkisson, Glenn Greenwald, and Sohrab Ahmari.
Top 51 Fake News ‘Bombshells’ the Media Spread About RussiaGate
The list below of 51 might sound like a lot, but it is a drop in the ocean when you recall the thousands and thousands of hours CNN, MSNBC, Meet the Press, This Week, PBS NewsHour, State of the Union, Good Morning America, Reliable Sources, and the Today Show devoted to anchors and pundits pushing the hoax that Trump colluded with Russia.
Not to mention, millions and millions of establishment media tweets and Facebook posts.
Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Shepard Smith, Andrew Napolitano, Joe Scarborough, Chris Hayes, Chuck Todd, Joy Reid, Chris Matthews, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Brian Stelter, Erin Burnett, et al., are alone responsible for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of lies and conspiracy-mongering.
This list of 51 doesn’t count the half-million — half-MILLION — Russia collusion stories published over the past two years, almost all of which were premised on the idea that Trump did, indeed, collude with a foreign power to steal the 2016 presidential election.
This list cannot begin to count the countless times these 51 fake stories were repeated as fact throughout other news outlets, social media, and thousands upon thousands of cumulative broadcast hours.
What’s more, this list of 51 can’t begin to count the countless examples of fake news launched against Trump that have nothing to do with Russia — desperate and deliberate lies involving fish food and ice cream scoops…
Before we begin, credit where it’s due. This list would not have been possible without the lists already compiled by Sharyl Attkisson, Glenn Greenwald, and Sohrab Ahmari.
Michael Cohen went to Prague.
Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie, and Mueller has emails proving it.
Paul Manafort passed polling information to Kremlin.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein forced out.
Federal investigators wiretapped Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, have recordings of Trump.
Phony Russia dossier was initially funded by Republican group.
Donald Trump directed Flynn to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign
Russian social media company provided documents to Senate about communications with Trump official.
- CNN:
Donald Trump Jr. conspired with WikiLeaks.
Robert Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank records.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with Russia intelligence-connected official as late as December 2017.
Trump Deputy National Security adviser K.T. McFarland lied about another official’s contacts with Russians.
- CNN:
Trump’s campaign was never wiretapped.
Manafort notes from Russian meeting refer to political contributions.
Seventeen intelligence agencies concur Russia hacked the 2016 presidential race.
- CNN:
Congress investigating Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.
Former FBI Director James Comey says Attorney General Jeff Sessions told him not to call Russia probe an investigation but “a matter.”
- CNN:
James Comey will testify he never told Trump he was not under investigation.
Putin admits he has compromising information about Trump.
Trump fired Comey after Comey asked for additional resources for the Russia investigation.
Numerous contacts between Trump campaign staff and “senior Russian intelligence officials.”
Among others, a Trump family member will be indicted on February 8.
Paul Manafort visited WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on three occasions.
Trump campaign changed GOP platform on Ukraine.
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Michael Cohen really did visit Prague.
- CNN:
Trump is lying when he calls Russia dossier “phony.”
RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and C-SPAN “confirmed” it had been hacked.
Russia’s hacked the election systems of 21 American states.
Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont.
“More than 200 websites” were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.”
Russia is the main suspect in the sonic attacks that sickened 26 U.S. diplomats.
Trump created a secret Internet server to covertly communicate with a Russian bank.
- CNN:
Donald Trump knew in advance of the Trump Tower meeting.
- CNN:
Mueller Report will show Trump “has helped” Putin “destabilize” the United States.
- NBC:
Russia supports Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI).
-
- CNN:
Sessions failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador.
“There’s actually lots of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.”
Trump revealed classified information to Russians.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Russia paid Trump.
Mueller can show Trump campaign “had a connection to Russian intelligence.”
“Rudy Giuliani just told America that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.”
Evidence suggests Trump could be a Russian “asset.”
- NBC:
Russians began hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails on the day Donald Trump joked about it in July 2016.
Russia spy visited Trump’s Oval Office.
- CNN:
Phony Russia dossier has been “corroborated.”
- NPR:
Donald Trump Jr. lied under oath about Trump Tower deal in Moscow.
Russia successfully hacked voting systems in a number of states.
- CNN:
Trump is “bonkers” for claiming Hillary Clinton behind Russia dossier.
- CNN:
“Every intelligence expert, both under the Obama administration and under the Trump administration,” agrees with the assessment that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
- BBC:
Ukrainian president “authorized” an illegal payment of $400,000 to Michael Cohen for additional face time during a June 2017 meeting with President Trump.
Right On Cue, Indian Media Blames Pakistan For The Sri Lankan Terrorist Attacks
The Cheap Shot That The Whole World Saw Coming
By Andrew Korybko | EurasiaFuture | 2019-04-24
It was only a matter of time before Indian media predictably blamed Pakistan for the Sri Lankan terrorist attacks, which just happened earlier this week in a piece by Vicky Nanjappa for “Oneindia” about “How ISI radicalised Sri Lanka through the Pakistan High Commission“. The writer wasted no time in reminding the reader about a years-long scandal in Sri Lanka initiated by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) and claiming that a Pakistani diplomat on the island nation was responsible for plotting a Mumbai-style attack in South India, never mind the fact that the allegedly masterminded incident that this was being based on was actually a false flag. In fact, it can be argued that one of the consequences of the Mumbai attacks is that India capitalized on the manufactured notion that Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency was behind it in order to portray its rival as a regional bogeyman who all of South Asia had to be suspicious of from then on out, so it’s logical in hindsight why India’s RAW intelligence agency would also cook up a conspiracy about this in Sri Lanka in an attempt to weaken historically strong Pakistani-Sri Lankan relations.
Convoluted And Conspiratorial Claims
The enduring motivation to divide Pakistan from its regional partners and opportunistically misportray it as a “state sponsor of terrorism” is what’s also behind the latest attempt trying to connect it to the Sri Lankan terrorist attacks. Mr. Nanjappa reminds his reader about the fake news claims that the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) Buddhist nationalist organization is supposedly being bankrolled by the ISI, which is more than likely another weaponized narrative that ultimately originated with RAW. According to Mr. Nanjappa’s far-reaching theory, the Pakistani diplomat supposedly responsible for organizing a Mumbai-style attack in South Asia also paid the BBS to incite anti-Muslim violence in order to improve the ISI’s recruitment prospects of local Muslims afterwards, with the clear innuendo being that this somehow makes Islamabad responsible for last weekend’s Easter suicide bombings. This convoluted narrative is understandably confusing for most people to follow, but for as much as it turns off readers from outside the region, it nevertheless is meant to be ultra-intriguing for its intended audience in South Asia, especially the Indian one.
Fearmongering For Votes
It can’t be forgotten that Prime Minister Modi is battling for his political life during his country’s ongoing month-long electoral process and that he’s hoping to win re-election on a platform that heavily emphasizes national security. India was just utterly humiliated, however, following the dogfight that it initiated with Pakistan in late February after the Bollywood-style “surgical strike”, which led to New Delhi’s rival capturing one of the downed pilots prior to releasing him as a gesture of peace and then Modi’s own Defense Minister later publicly contradicting her own government by admitting that not a single person was injured in the Balakot attack. For a political leader who prides himself on his notion of national security, these events were certainly embarrassing and reduced his dwindling credibility among the electorate, hence the need to distract voters with more fearmongering scandals in the meantime so that he can improve his re-election odds. Therein lays the relevance of the ridiculous claims that Pakistan is conspiring with Russia and China to wage Hybrid Wars against the entire world and specifically India, respectively.
The BJP’s Hybrid War On India
In reality, these public accusations by the state and civil society are actually a form of Hybrid War in and of themselves, one that’s being waged not only on the minds of the international audience that India intends to trick into thinking that Pakistan is a “state sponsor of terrorism” and therefore should be subject to unilateral US sanctions and multilateral UN ones, but also against its own citizens who these perception management practitioners want to imbue with a deep sense of fear that they can then exploit to mislead their targets into thinking that India can only be protected by re-electing Modi and continuing his “muscular” foreign policy. I predicted in my piece earlier this week about my “Initial Assessment Of The Terrorist Attacks In Sri Lanka” that “it’ll be tempting for some [international forces] to imply that their rivals’ intelligence agencies might have had a hand in the latest events, or at the very least present themselves as super tough on terrorism for domestic political reasons (e.g. Modi during the elections)” which is exactly what India is now doing.
Political Purposes
India’s “Hindi Heartland/Cow Belt”, the stronghold of the BJP’s support, has yet to go to the polls but is about to real shortly in the election’s upcoming phases, so spinning the narrative that Pakistan might have indirectly had a hand in the Sri Lankan terrorist attacks is meant to ensure that as many of Modi’s supporters come out to vote as possible in order to help him win this neck-and-neck election. As an added benefit, New Delhi would be delighted if the Sri Lankan media picked up on Mr. Nanjappa’s piece and provoked one of their pro-Indian politicians to publicly praise it and/or demand an investigation into what India is framing as “Pakistan’s Hybrid War” in the country. Even better, since his article was written in English, international media further abroad might republish it too, especially some of the forces that have an interest in sparking a so-called “Clash of Civilizations”. It would be a dream come true for Modi if these weaponized fake news claims eventually made it to the UN, too.
Concluding Thoughts
It’s unsurprising that an Indian writer decided to opportunistically spin a convoluted and conspiratorial story purporting to link Pakistan’s ISI to the Sri Lankan terrorist attacks since the fake news claims and attendant innuendo being put forth appeal to the preconceived notions of the BJP’s base and will probably succeed in improving voter turnout for this constituency during the next phases of the country’s ongoing month-long electoral process. The introduction of this weaponized narrative into the Internet’s information ecosystem also carries with it the chance that it’ll be picked up by Sri Lankan media and consequently provoke a pro-Indian politician there to publicly praise the piece in order to trigger a crisis in Pakistani-Sri Lankan relations. Moreover, it’s too early to rule out the possibility of other forces republishing it with the intent of intensifying the so-called “Clash of Civilizations”, which might have the horrifying effect of inspiring right-wing “reprisal” attacks against the Western-based Pakistani diaspora in an attempt to trigger more inter-civlizational violence that would superficially advance this false divide-and-rule narrative.
David Attenborough’s BBC show would better have been called “Climate: Change The Facts”
Reviewing “Climate Change: the Facts” | April 21, 2019
… If you are going to present a film called Climate Change: the Facts the very least you should be doing is, well, presenting the facts. Well here they are, in two of the areas which made up such a hefty part of the film: wildfires and hurricanes. Are wildfires increasing? They are according to Attenborough. One of the scientists who takes part in the programme, Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University, goes as far as to say there has been a “tripling in the extent of wildfires in the Western US”. He is not specific about his evidence for this claim, nor said over what timeframe wildfires are supposed to have trebled, but it is not a fair assessment of the data collected by the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA). This shows no upwards trend in the number of wildfires in the US over the past 30 years.
But then again, go back further, to the 1920s, and you see that both the number of US wildfires and acreage burned in them has plummeted.
That is nothing to do with the climate – more down to firefighters getting better at tackling fires. But that reduction in wildfires – which, after all, were occurring naturally long before Europeans arrived in the US – has brought with it a problem: deadwood is not being cleared out at the rate which it used to be. As a result, when a wildfire does take hold, it tends to be a more powerful fire, which is one reason large acreages tend to get burned when fires do take hold. That was a large part of the debate which followed the wildfires in California last November.
But I know what will have entered the heads of many of Attenborough’s viewers: that wildfires are being caused by climate change and that is that. […]
The same will be true for hurricanes. If you are a child, for whom hurricanes are a novel phenomenon, watching the film will have given you the impression that hurricanes are pretty much a function of man-made climate change. A voiceover, indeed, makes the claim that climate change is causing ‘greater storms’. But again, the data on cyclone activity in the Atlantic, Gulf and Mexico and Caribbean does not support that idea. Figure one shows a very slight upwards trend in the number of hurricanes occurring in these waters but a flat or perhaps slightly downwards trend in the number of hurricanes making landfall in the US. There are two other methods of measuring hurricane activity which are used by the EPA. The first, the accumulated cyclone index (figure two) shows no obvious trend over the past 70 years. The second, the ‘power dissipation index’ shows an upwards spike in the early years of this century, followed by a reversion to mean since then.
Not that this seems to prevent documentary-makers like Attenborough resorting to footage of houses being demolished by winds and lorries being blown off bridges to show the supposed climate change we are already experiencing.
It is little wonder that terrified kids are skipping school to protest against climate change. Never mind climate change denial, a worse problem is the constant exaggeration of the subject. I had thought David Attenborough would be above resorting to the subtle propaganda which others have been propagating, linking every adverse weather event to climate change. But apparently not. — Ross Clark, The Spectator, 20 April 2019
… [W]e have already seen what can happen when ‘panic’ determines policy: the introduction of measures conceived by a need to be seen to be doing something under pressure from groups such as Extinction Rebellion.
Without making this clear, the film revealed one of the worst examples of this unfortunate effect. A powerful sequence showed an orangutan, fleeing loggers who have been eradicating Borneo’s rainforest.
This is disastrous for both wildlife and the climate because, as the film pointed out, a third of global emissions are down to deforestation, because giant trees lock up a lot of carbon.
But why are Borneo’s forests being cut down? The reason, as Attenborough said, is palm oil, a lucrative crop used in products ranging from soap to biscuits. Unfortunately, he left out the final stage of the argument.
Half of all the millions of tons of palm oil sent to Europe is used to make ‘biofuel’, thanks to an EU directive stating that, by 2020, ten per cent of forecourt fuel must come from ‘renewable’ biological sources. Malaysia says this has ‘created an unprecedented demand’.
To put it another way: misguided ‘action’ designed to save the planet is actually helping to damage it – although the EU has pledged to phase out palm oil biofuel by 2030.
Another example of a misconceived effort to save the planet is Drax power plant in Yorkshire which is fed, thanks to £700 million of annual subsidy, by ‘renewable’ wood pellets made from chopped-down American trees – while pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere than when it burnt only coal.
In theory, the trees it burns will be replaced – but a large part of its supply comes from hardwood forests that take 100 years to mature.
There are times when climate propaganda – for this is what this was – calls to mind the apocalyptic prophets of the Middle Ages, who led popular movements by preaching that the sins of human beings were so great that they could only be redeemed by suffering, in order to create a paradise on earth. Perhaps this is how Attenborough, nature journalism’s Methuselah, sees himself. But climate change is too important to be handled in this manner. It needs rational, well-informed debate. Too often, cheered on by the eco-zealots of Extinction Rebellion, the BBC is intent on encouraging quite the opposite. —David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 21 April 2019
… A former top executive at the BBC has warned that it is “at risk of being eaten” as new figures reveal that more than 880,000 television licences were cancelled last year. Cancellations among the under-75s rose from 860,192 in 2017-18 to 882,198 in the period from March 2018 to the end of February, new data shows. Mosey, 61, criticised the dumbing-down of news and “the nonsense put on social media by BBC” staff. —The Sunday Times, 21 April 2019
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