The Russians are coming — or coming back, better put.
As the November elections draw near, let us brace for another barrage of preposterous propaganda to the effect Russians are poisoning our minds with “disinformation,” “false narratives,” and all the other misnomers deployed when facts contradict liberal authoritarian orthodoxies.
We had a rich taste of this new round of lies and innuendo in late January, when Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who served as House speaker for far too long, asserted that the F.B.I. should investigate demonstrators demanding a ceasefire in Gaza for their ties, yes indeedy, to the Kremlin.
Here is Pelosi on CNN’s State of the Union program Jan. 28:
“For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine… I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the F.B.I. to investigate that.”
O.K., we have the template: If you say something that coincides with the Russian position, you will be accused of hiding your “ties to Russia,” as the common phrase has it.
Be careful not to mention some spring day that the sky is pleasantly blue: I am here to warn you—“make no mistake” — this is exactly what “Putin,” now stripped of a first name and a title, “would like to see.”
There is invariably an ulterior point when those in power try on tomfoolery of this kind. In each case they have something they need to explain away.
In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the polls, so we suffered four years of Russiagate. Pelosi felt called upon to discredit those objecting to the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza.
Protest against Israeli genocide in Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Now we have a new ruse. Desperate to get Congress to authorize $60.1 billion in new aid to Ukraine, Capitol Hill warmongers charge that those objecting to this bad-money-after-bad allocation are… do I have to finish the sentence?
Two weeks ago Michael McCaul, a Republican representative who wants to see the long-blocked aid bill passed, asserted in an interview with Puck News that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” Here is the stupid-sounding congressman from Texas, as quoted in The Washington Post, elaborating on our now-familiar theme:
“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical on our airwaves. These people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”
I read in the Post that McCaul’s staff abruptly cut short the interview when Julia Ioffe, a professional Russophobe who has bounced around from one publication to another for years, asked him to name a few names.
So was this latest ball of baloney set in motion.
A week after McCaul’s Puck News interview, Michael Turner, an Ohio Republican who, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, swings a bigger stick, escalated matters when, reacting to McCaul’s statements, reported that this grave Russian penetration was evident in the upper reaches of the American government, as again reported in The Washington Post :
“Oh, it is absolutely true. We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti–Ukraine and pro–Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”
Masked communications uttered on the House floor: Hold the thought, as I will shortly return to it.
The VOA Rendition
The taker of the cake — so far, anyway — arrived last week from Voice of America, the Central Intelligence Agency front posing as a radio broadcaster, under the headline, “How Russia’s disinformation campaign seeps into U.S. views.” Same theme: The Rrrrrussians are poisoning America’s otherwise pristine discourse in an effort to block authorization of the assistance bill, which also includes aid to Israel ($14.1 billion) and Taiwan ($4 billion).
To drive home its point, VOA quotes a lobbyist named Scott Cullinane, who works for something called Razom, which means “together” in the Ukrainian language. Razom is a non-governmental organization “formed in 2014 to support Ukrainians in their quest for freedom.” That is, Razom’s founding coincided with the coup in Kiev the U.S. orchestrated in February 2014.
Razom works with a variety of Ukrainian NGOs to advance this cause and sounds to me like a player in the old civil-society-subterfuge game, though one cannot be sure because, on its website and in its annual reports, it does not say, per usual in these sorts of cases, who funds it.
Here is a little of VOA’s report on Cullinane’s recent doings on Capitol Hill:
“On a near daily basis, Scott Cullinane talks with members of Congress about Russia’s war in Ukraine. As a lobbyist for the nonprofit Razom, part of his job is to convince them of Ukraine’s need for greater U.S. support to survive.
But as lawmakers debated a $95 billion package that includes about $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, Cullinane noticed an increase in narratives alleging Ukrainian corruption. What stood out is that these were the same talking points promoted by Russian disinformation.
So, when The Washington Post published an investigation into an extensive and coordinated Russian campaign to influence U.S. public opinion to deny Ukraine the aid, Cullinane says he was not surprised.
‘This problem has been festering and growing for years,’ he told VOA. ‘I believe that Russia’s best chance for victory is not on the battlefield, but through information operations targeted on Western capitals, including Washington.’”
Straight off the top, there has been no Washington Post “investigation.” The Post simply quoted two paranoid congressmen without bothering to question, never mind investigate, the veracity of their assertions.
Beyond this, the question of Ukrainian corruption is another case of the sky being blue. There is no “alleging” the Kiev regime’s corruption: It is thoroughly documented by, among other authorities, Transparency International, which ranks Ukraine among the world’s most corrupt nations.
You see what is going on here? This is an echo chamber, ever treasured by the propagandists.
Puck News, a web publication of no great account, puts out a warmongering reporter’s interview with a warmongering congressman, The Washington Post reports it, another congressman seconds the assertions of the first, the Post reports that, and then VOA joins the proceedings to report that well-established, beyond-dispute facts are Russian disinformation.
And the echoes multiply, like the circles in a pond when a rock is tossed in. Here is how Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily whose Russophobia dates to its founding during the U.S. occupation after World War II, reported on the assistance bill immediately after the VOA report:
“The controversy about the aid, which has already passed the U.S. Senate, is reflected in numerous posts on social media and articles on news sites. As The Washington Post reports, one actor has played a decisive role in this: the Russian government.”
When propaganda is king, you have to conclude, what goes around keeps going around.
It is well enough to laugh at this silly business, transparently calculated as it is. Except that this kind of chicanery has a long history, and we learn from it that the Russians have been coming, off and on, for seven-plus decades. The consequences of these conjured imaginings, we also learn, are very other than funny.
When I decided to write the book that came out last autumn as Journalists and Their Shadows, exploring the past was essential to the project. If we want to understand our “press mess,” as I call the current crisis in our media, we had better understand how it got this way.
In the course of my researches into the exuberant anti–Communism of the early Cold War years, I came upon a lengthy takeout Look magazine published on Aug. 3, 1948, under the headline, “Could the Reds Seize Detroit?” This piece was exemplary of its time.
“Detroit is the industrial heart of America,” the writer began. “Today, a sickle is being sharpened to plunge into that heart… The Reds are going boldly about their business.”
Before he finishes, James Metcalfe — let this byline be recorded — has Motor City besieged in “an all-out initial blow in the best blitzkrieg fashion.” The presentation featured masked Communists murdering police officers and telephone operators, seizing airports, blowing up bridges, power grids, rail lines, and highways.
“Caught in the madness of the moment, emboldened by the darkness, intoxicated by an unbridled license to kill and loot, mobs would swarm the streets.” Communist mobs, naturally.
It is easy to read this now with some combination of derision and contempt. Do we have any grounds to do so? Are we doing things so differently now?
There were dangers implicit in the Look piece. It published Metcalfe’s paranoic fantasy a year and a few months after President Harry Truman gave his famous “scare hell out of the American people” speech to Congress in March 1947. Look was in essence recruiting the public as the Truman administration launched the Cold War crusade.
Representatives McCaul and Turner are on a recruitment drive of the very same kind. They are not lying to one another in any kind of effort to clean up Congress. Do not wait for them to lift a finger on that score. They are lying to you and me in what amounts to a scare-hell operation.
And the danger this time is the same as the danger last time. It is the cultivation of a climate of fear wherein the American public is to acquiesce as the new Cold War proceeds and all manner of laws and constitutional rights are abused.
Last Friday the House reauthorized, for two more years, the law known as Section 702, which allows the intelligence cabal to surveille Americans’ digital communications — without warrants and on U.S. soil — if they claim to be targeting foreigners suspected of subversive activities.
What does this have to do with the way the paranoids on Capitol Hill, reporters at The Washington Post, and professional propagandists at VOA are currently carrying on about assistance to Ukraine?
Nothing. And everything.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
Most news outlets rely on The Associated Press style guide—officially known as the AP Stylebook—as the arbiter for grammar, spelling, and terminology in news coverage. While AP puts forth its style guide as an impartial rubric for fair coverage, its rules often exclude conservative views from the outset.
Take AP’s latest round of updates, released Friday. The updates include guidance on how to avoid “stigmatizing” obese people, admonitions to avoid calling people “homeless” as it might be “dehumanizing,” and warnings to avoid the term “female” since “some people object to its use as a descriptor for women because it can be seen as emphasizing biology and reproductive capacity over gender identity.”
AP’s style guide prefers “anti-abortion” and “abortion-rights” as adjectives, urging journalists to avoid “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” and “pro-abortion.”
Yet one of the largest sections of the updated style guide involves “climate change,” a term that AP says “can be used interchangeably” with the term “climate crisis.”
“Climate change, resulting in the climate crisis, is largely caused by human activities that emit carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies, science organizations and climate scientists,” the AP style guide intones. “This happens from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, and other activities.”
“Greenhouse gases are the main driver of climate change,” the guide adds.
AP insists that this is true, with a capital T. When “telling the climate story,” the style guide urges journalists to “avoid false balance—giving a platform to unfounded claims or unqualified sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views. For example, coverage of a study describing effects of climate change need not seek ‘other side’ comment that humans have no influence on the climate.”
Naturally, this is a red herring. Those who doubt the climate-alarmist narrative don’t maintain that “humans have no influence on the climate.” Rather, we say that the direct impact of human activities—including the burning of fossil fuels—is poorly understood and that efforts to predict future events based on various climate alarmist models have repeatedly failed.
In the 1970s, alarmists warned of a coming ice age. In the 1990s, the form of the destroyer would be global warming. Now, the alarmists have adopted the catch-all term “climate change,” so they can retroactively assign human agency to any disaster that strikes us at the moment.
It’s quite clever, if you want a perpetual fear-mongering tactic. Of course, the narrative is rather inconvenient for the rest of us who want cheaper energy and wish to solve the humanitarian crisis of extreme poverty in other parts of the world.
In fact, The Associated Press tacitly admits that the climate alarmists have no smoking-gun evidence that human activities are bringing about Armageddon.
“Avoid attributing single occurrences to climate change unless scientists have established a connection,” the style guide advises. “At the same time, stories about individual events should make it clear that they occur in a larger context.”
AP’s willingness to completely write off the “other side” proves particularly instructive, considering the style guide’s claim that climate change affects many other issues.
“The climate story goes beyond extreme weather and science,” the Stylebook notes. “It also is about politics, human rights, inequality, international law, biodiversity, society and culture, and many other issues. Successful climate and environment stories show how the climate crisis is affecting many areas of life.”
If journalists can throw out any pretense of objectivity on climate, and insist that climate change impacts all other social issues, can they also safely dismiss the obligation to cover “both sides” on politics, inequality, society, and culture? How does AP aim to prevent this rot from spreading across other topics and preventing fair coverage entirely?
The prognosis is not good. AP has repeatedly put its thumb on the scale to silence criticism of abortion and gender ideology — even going so far as telling journalists to avoid the term “transgenderism” because it “frames transgender identity as an ideology.”
Even while urging journalists to avoid using the terms “climate change deniers” and “climate change skeptics,” the AP style guide suggests a more “specific” alternative, such as “people who do not agree with mainstream science that says the climate is changing” or “people who disagree with the severity of climate change projected by scientists.” Talk about “stigmatizing.”
AP doesn’t admit that the supposed unanimity of scientists on man-made catastrophic climate change is based on a lie—that 97% of scientists don’t actually believe the world is going to end because we burn fossil fuels.
The study claiming to reach that conclusion merely analyzed peer-reviewed research papers, put them in seven categories, and then artificially claimed that the vast majority of the papers making any claim favored the alarmist view. Many scientists have said the study mischaracterized their research.
It remains unclear exactly how greenhouse gases are affecting the planet, mainly because the global atmosphere is extremely complicated. Most climate models fail to predict exactly what will happen. Perhaps decreasing carbon emissions will help the climate, but the science is far less settled than AP would have journalists believe.
If news coverage dismisses all skepticism of an alarmist narrative, it will skew the information ecosystem and disincentivize the very research that helps determine what precise impacts greenhouse gases have on the environment. It may also lead skeptical Americans to dismiss climate science altogether, in the same way that the medical establishment squandered much of its public credibility by suppressing concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So why does The Associated Press put its thumb on the scale? The creators of the style guide may legitimately believe there is only one perspective, but they also have a hefty economic incentive to act like it.
AP has received large grants from left-wing foundations, particularly for its climate reporting.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation spent $2.5 million on AP’s climate and education reporting, the Washington Free Beacon reported. That foundation also funds Planned Parenthood.
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded AP a $750,000 grant in 2021 for a climate change initiative to report on “the increased and urgent need for reliable, renewable electricity in underserved communities worldwide.”
The KR Foundation, a Danish nonprofit that seeks the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” gave approximately $300,000 to The Associated Press in December 2022, but APappeared to hide that donation until late last year.
AP may push climate alarmism even without these funds—the latest style guide appears to feature left-wing groupthink on a host of issues—but the money still provides extra incentive.
The AP’s increasingly leftward tilt—and its attempt to force its groupthink through its style guide—creates a rather hostile climate for actual journalism, let alone good science.
It’s often a marvel to see the Western media’s capability to fabricate lies and hurl mud at China. Bloomberg, citing anonymous officials, recently accused China of “providing Russia with significant quantities of components to build cruise missiles and drones as well as optical parts for tanks and armored vehicles.”
The report, published on Saturday, claimed that “while there is no evidence China is providing lethal assistance, people familiar with the US intelligence assessment characterized the aid as just as significant, saying that without the imports, Russia’s military industrial base would struggle.”
The theory of “Chinese components found in Russian weapons,” or “China secretly sends [military] gear to Russia” has been repeatedly hyped up by Western media outlets since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, upon closer examination of all the stories and quotes, no solid evidence can be found to support these claims.
Ignoring the fact that the components they normally talk about are typically civilian products circulating in the international market, American media outlets fail to specify the exact equipment models that are allegedly exported from China to Russia, or how they are utilized by the Russian military in combat situations. Instead, they continue to assert that Russia is receiving military support from China without providing concrete evidence to support this assertion.
Take a look at the enterprises Bloomberg listed this time, such as Wuhan Global Sensor Technology Co. and Hikvision. Their products are mostly used in the fields of thermography, firefighting and rescue, intelligent driving, road traffic, network and data processing, and video monitoring. Without proof, US media insists those products, which are widely used in civilian, traffic and medical sectors, are exported for missiles and tanks. This is like alleging that a frozen carrot can be used as a deadly weapon.
The logic reminds us of other US claims, such as Chinese garlic posing a threat to US national security, the “Washing powder” excuse being a prelude to US-led Iraq War, as well as US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s rhetoric about the Russian military taking chips from dishwashers and refrigerators to fix their military hardware.
Given such a cognitive level, how can the US come up with anything serious? When the US smears China about providing military components to Russia, its aim is quite obvious. First, blame China for the failure to defeat Russia on the battlefield, finding excuses for the prolonged conflict. It believes Russia should have been brought to its knees long ago, but why not? It must be China’s fault. Second, as long as the US wants to sanction Chinese companies, it can choreograph whatever convenient excuse it needs. When Chinese electric vehicles were the target, the US made up the excuse “overcapacity.” When Washington wants to target certain Chinese high-tech companies, it can conveniently come up with the label of helping Russia to ramp up military production, Shen Yi, a professor at Fudan University, told the Global Times.
The words and actions of the US have shown that it is completely unreasonable and will resort to any means, with any excuses, to contain China.
When Western media target China and pressure China not to provide lethal military assistance to Russia, they are trying to push the “China’s special responsibility theory” in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, China’s “active neutrality” stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict will stand the test of history.
The practices of China and the US are qualitatively different. When facing regional conflicts, China will never proactively provide weapons to any parties concerned. In contrast, the US constantly sends heavy weapons to the Ukrainian battlefield but still cannot win the proxy war. Instead of reflecting on its own issues, all it does is look for someone to blame. This only proves incompetence.
The previous three parts of this series provide overwhelming evidence that American President Franklin Roosevelt knew a Japanese carrier force was sailing east to attack Hawaii in late 1941. Few Americans know about this shocking fact because their government controls informational sources. In 1989, the BBC produced a great documentary about the Pearl Harbor attack titled: “Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor.” Not only does this documentary expose the truth, the title says that President Franklin Roosevelt sacrificed 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor to trick Americans to support his goal of entering World War II. As a result of tighter government controls, this documentary can no longer be found on the BBC’s Timeline documentary website and it is blocked from posting at YouTube.
In a scathing account from within National Public Radio (NPR), Senior Editor Uri Berliner blasted the company for open political bias and activism. Berliner, who says that he is liberal politically, wrote about how NPR went from a left-leaning media outlet to a virtual Democratic operation echoing narratives from figures like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.). The objections have long been voiced, including on this blog, but this account is coming from a long-standing and respected editor from within the company.
Berliner details how NPR, like many media outlets, became openly activist after the election of Donald Trump to the point that the company now employs 87 registered Democrats in editorial positions but not a single Republican in its Washington, DC, headquarters.
In his essay for The Free Press, Berliner notes that after Trump’s election in 2016, the most notable change was shutting down any skepticism or even curiosity about the truth of Democratic talking points in scandals like Russiagate. Berliner said that NPR “hitched our wagon” to Schiff and his now debunked claims.
Berliner says that he was rebuffed in seeking a modicum of balance in the coverage about the coronavirus “lab leak theory,” the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the 2016 Russia hoax.
As discussed on this blog, NPR repeated false stories like the claims from the Lafayette Park riot. Berliner gives an account that is strikingly familiar for many of us who have raised the purging of conservative or libertarian voices from our faculties in higher education:
“So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.
In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thoughtwhen she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”
For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations”
Former NPR analyst Juan Williams stated in an interview this week that, as a strong liberal voice (now at Fox), he found the same bias at NPR. Williams was fired by NPR as this shift seemed to go into high gear toward greater intolerance for opposing views.
Despite these criticisms, NPR has doubled down on its activism. For example, when it came time to select a new CEO, NPR could have tacked to the center to address the growing criticism. Instead, the new CEO became instant news over social media postings that she deleted before the recent announcement of her selection. Katherine Maher is the former CEO of Wikipedia and sought to remove controversial postings on subjects ranging from looters to Trump. Those deleted postings included a 2018 declaration that “Donald Trump is a racist” and a variety of race-based commentary. They also included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.
NPR has abandoned core policies on neutrality as its newsroom has become more activist and strident. For example, NPR declared that it would allow employees to participate in political protests when the editors believe the causes advance the “freedom and dignity of human beings.”
The rule itself shows how impressionistic and unprofessional media has become in the woke era. NPR does not try to define what causes constitute advocacy for the “freedom and dignity of human beings.” How about climate change and environmental protection? Would it be prohibited to protest for a forest but okay if it is framed as “environmental justice”?
NPR seems to intentionally keep such questions vague while only citing such good causes as Black Lives Matter and gay rights:
“Is it OK to march in a demonstration and say, ‘Black lives matter’? What about a Pride parade? In theory, the answer today is, “Yes.” But in practice, NPR journalists will have to discuss specific decisions with their bosses, who in turn will have to ask a lot of questions.”
So the editors will have the power to choose between acceptable and unacceptable causes.
The bias seemed to snowball into a type of willful blindness in the coverage of the outlet, which is supported by federal funds.
After the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, NPR declared that it would not cover the story. It actually issued a statement that seemed to proudly refuse to pursue the story, which was found to be legitimate:
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
Berliner’s account is reminiscent of the recent disclosures from within the New York Times. Former editors have described that same open intolerance for opposing views and a refusal to balance coverage.
Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet has finally spoken publicly about his role in one of the most disgraceful chapters in American journalism: the Times’ cringing apology for running a 2020 column by Sen. Tom Cotton. Bennet said publisher AG Sulzberger “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage” to appease the mob.
Former New York Times editor Adam Rubenstein also wrote a lengthy essay at The Atlantic that pulled back the curtain on the newspaper and its alleged bias in its coverage. The essay follows similar pieces from former editors and writers that range from Bari Weiss to his former colleague James Bennet. The essay describes a similar work environment where even his passing reference to liking Chick-Fil-A sandwiches led to a condemnation of shocked colleagues.
None of this is likely to change the culture at NPR any more than such discussions have changed faculties in higher education. Raising the virtual elimination of conservative or Republican voices on faculties is met by the same forced expressions of disbelief. While mild concern is expressed, it is often over the “perception” of those of us who view universities as intolerant or orthodox.
Of course, there remains the question of why the public should give huge amounts of money to a media outlet that is so politically biased. News outlets have every right to pursue such political agendas, but none but NPR claim public support, including from half of the country that embraces the viewpoints that it routinely omits from its airways.
“We Israelis are the biggest Holocaust deniers – The Jewish state learned that it can commit its own Holocaust in Gaza and deny that it exists” – Jonathan Ofir for Mondoweiss.
Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa reports from her visit to Gaza:
The reality on the ground is infinitely worse than the worst videos and photos that we’re seeing in the West.
People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses,” Abulhawa writes. “Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.”
“What I see is a holocaust.” she summarizes. “The incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.”
What has underpinned this wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians and children in Gaza – the 7th October Hamas “atrocities” that include the media-amplified claims of “mass rape”?
Claims led by the discredited ZAKA organisation whose founder has a history of rape and pedophilia. ZAKA is reminiscent of the CIA/MI6 White Helmet propaganda productions in Syria from 2013 onwards, designed to criminalise the Syrian government. You can read my archive of investigative work exposing this organisation here.
I am not going to focus on the debunked claims made by the Zionist Hasbara industry. You can read and watch the multiple investigative reports that have dismantled the genocide-justifications here – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
Twoleading Palestinian media organizations, The Palestine Chronicle and Friends of Palestine Network, conducted a joint investigation, based on media reports, in addition to historical and political analyses.
I recommend following this X account to also have real-time updates on the collapse of the Zionist propaganda mill.
Journalist and researcher, William Van Wagenen, has also covered much of what actually took place on October 7th. Van Wagenen includes the “baked baby” narratives that were circulating shortly after the 7th October Resistance operations.
Eli Beer, founder and president of another rescue organization, United Hatzalah, made similar false claims.
While attending the Republican Jewish Coalitions’ Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas on 28 October, he claimed that “A little baby in the oven – These bastards put these babies in the oven and put on the oven … We found the kid a few hours later.”
Like all the other atrocity tales, this was also walked back and mocked on social media by the majority of independent media outlets who saw through the fabrication immediately.
2013 in Adra Industrial City, north of Damascus, Syria – extremist factions including Al Qaeda (Nusra Front) burned civilians alive in a bread furnace. The same extremist factions supported by Israel to overthrow a pro-Palestine Syrian government.
In 2014, a frail 16 year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was burned alive by Israeli extremist settlers amidst a number of Zionist settler kidnappings of young Palestinian boys.
… the preliminary autopsy report states that the remnants of a burned substance (soot) was present in Muhammad’s respiratory passages and lungs, indicating he had inhaled the substance while being burned alive.
Hussein Dawabshe with grandson Ahmad in 2016
In 2015 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four, only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.
At the preliminary court hearing in Lod, terrorist Zionist settlers chanted:
“Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill”
In December 2015, a video showing dozens of wedding guests celebrating the arson went public via Channel 10. The guests are seen dancing with Molotov cocktails, knives and guns, and stabbing a photo of baby Ali Dawabsheh.
Literally 24 hours after the October 7th Resistance operation, on various interviews I recommended avoiding the rush to judgement being rammed down our throats by a Zionist-partisan media crush. I was absolutely correct to have cautioned thus and consider myself vindicated by the last six months of investigation into the Zionist hysterical claims.
Claims that only the Palestinian Resistance was responsible for all deaths on the day that unleashed genocide upon Palestine – or rather the intensification of a genocide that began 100 years ago under a malign British Mandate.
The reality of thousands of children horrifically burned, eviscerated, incinerated, executed, abused and tortured by the sadistic IOF forces since October 7th is something that cannot be eclipsed by the lies peddled by the genocidal maniacs intent on the extinction of Palestinians.
Euromed Monitor – Euro-Med Monitor’s field team documented the Israeli army’s field execution of 13 children near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The majority of them were with their families, following the Israeli military’s instructions to evacuate their areas, when they were shot dead.
Israel’s Rape Culture
In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the goal of acquiring land led to the use of brutal tactics aimed at the dispossession and elimination of the indigenous population. Colonizers embraced sexual terrorization as an instrument for achieving this strategy. – Tamam Mohsen
The “only Democracy in the Middle East” is reported to be a hub of sexual abuse, rape and ritual pedophilia cases. According to the Berghahn Journals:
Sexual violence is a common phenomenon in Israeli society. Despite its frequency, it is still kept silent in the public sphere. The last few years have seen a rise in awareness on the topic of sexual abuse and harassment; however it is a crime with a very low percentage of incident reports. This is for a variety of reasons, the main reason being that we live in a society that tends to blame the victim, which causes them feelings of shame and humiliation preventing them from reporting the incident.
Israel is a Pedophile Haven
Israel is a haven for pedophiles escaping prosecution in other countries. Perhaps the best known case is that of Malka Leifer. A former ultra-Orthodox Jewish school Principal sentenced to fifteen years for child sex abuse.
Israeli author and public speaker Alon Mizrahi went on X to point out Israel’s harbouring of this criminal serial abuser of children:
This lovely lady, from a prestigious Hasidic family, was the principal of an ultra-orthodox Hewish school in Melbourne, Australia who in 2008 “faced trial on 70 sex offense charges laid by Victoria Police, with accusations from at least eight alleged victims” (from Wikipedia).
All victims were her former underage pupils.
To cut a long story short, lovely Malka fled to Israel in 2008, where she comfortably lived, thanks to generous help from senior politicians, psychiatrists, and extremely helpful judges, until 2021, when the scandal was making international news, with high-ranking Australian politicians intervening on behalf of the victims.
In March of 2023 Leifer was found guilty of 18 counts of sexual abuse, including rape, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
But for 13 years, Israel refused to extradite Leifer to Australia, and she was allowed to lead her normal life in a West Bank settlement. And that’s how much Israel cares for (Jewish!) victims of sexual abuse.
In 2020 Jerusalem Post ran the headline – Tens of Thousands of Pedophiles Operate in Israel every year.
Annually there are 100,000 victims of pedophilia in Israel according to one monitoring organisation.
While indigenous Palestinians are denied the right to return to their homeland, a number of pedophiles in Israel are “Jewish” immigrants who have exploited the law of return (whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship) to seek refuge from prosecution for their heinous crimes.
Mainstream media in the US is reporting on the Jewish American pedophiles who “hide from justice” in Israel after subjecting children to abuse and rape. Jewish Community Watch says the majority of its cases originate from modern Orthodox to Ultra-orthodox Jewish enclaves in the U.S., but that it happens across the wider Jewish community.
Even Hollywood’s accused sexual predators are seeking refuge in Israel. Hollywood filmmaker Brett Ratner fled to Israel after six women accused Ratner of sexual assault and sexual harassment in 2017. A report in Haaretz describes Israel as a “hot spot for foreign Jewish sexual predators”.
Another Haaretzreport in 2016 cites Manny Waks, the chief executive officer of Kol v’Oz, a newly formed nonprofit that aims to prevent child sexual abuse in the global Jewish community:
“Sex offenders tend to move from country to country to avoid jail, but what makes Israel unique is the Law of Return, which essentially grants unhindered access to anyone who is Jewish to come here without any real screening,”
The same story was covered by the UK’s Independent. This phenomenon cannot be dismissed as “conspiracy theory”, it is fact.
More Haaretz investigations can be found at these links – 1, 2,
This study explores thought patterns of Jewish Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox pedophiles in Israel and how they resolve the contradiction between their commitment to Jewish Law and having committed sexual offenses against minors.
In 2022 Haaretzreported that 100 rabbis, teachers and other figures who have been accused, charged or convicted of sexual abuse overseas have already found refuge in Israel.
Also in 2022 The Jerusalem Post reported that the rate of sexual abuse of kids is highest among religious Zionist sector. “A new study by the Ne’emanei Torah Va’avodah movement reveals dramatic data on sexual abuse victims from the religious Zionist (Tzioni Dati) sector.” The abused often become abusers. How many of these abused children (majority male) are the IOF forces of tomorrow?
More Jerusalem Post investigations (one Times of Israel ) can be found at these links – 1, 2, 3, 4.
A Haifa psychologist was arrested in 2021 for ‘indecent acts on children in his care’.
In March 2024 almost 6 months after October 7th, an Israeli male nurse, Oren Hananaiev, had his medical licence revoked after being ‘convicted of severe indecent acts without consent and possessing and publishing inappropriate content featuring underage children.’
From the analysis of Hananaiev’s correspondence, many conversations were found with Yaakov, in which he advised him to use sedatives to “prevent resistance” during sexual assault. Furthermore, the investigators found correspondence between the two where Hananaiev suggests certain children’s games where one might sexually exploit kids while they still think that it is part of the game.
The number of incarcerated sex offenders in Israeli prisons, which may be related to the total number of sex offenders, has been steadily increasing, from 350 offenders in 1997, to 1300 in 2009.
About 60 percent of convicted sex offenders in Israel have committed offenses against children under the age of 13.
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is rife with accusations of sexual offences against minors. Pedophiles seek refuge in Israel for a good reason. They are in “good” company.
How many of the Brooklyn, New York, Haredi cult accused of sexual abuse have sought refuge from exposure and justice, in Israel?
A far-right Israeli lawmaker accused Israel of trying to normalise pedophilia as recently as May 2023, only a few months before Israel was accusing the Palestinian Resistance of “mass rape”. As many have stated on social media “an accusation is a confession”.
Israel has failed in almost every way in treating sexually abused children, says a report by a committee of experts aiming to change social norms, treatment and government policy on the issue. – Haaretz
Jerusalem Post reports that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, around 56,000 Israelis have been forced to flee their homes and live in hotels throughout the country.
These hotels are allegedly a “ticking time bomb of crime” – Cases included indecent exposure, crimes against children, and rape amongst other violent incidents. Even Israeli settlers are prey to the overt sexual predation that pervades their society.
Zion Vanuno, 64, is suspected of committing indecent acts against children in a hotel with evacuees in the center of the country. According to the suspicion, Vanuno lured the children with candies to go to different places in the hotel, where he committed indecent acts on them.
Israel – a history of rape as a weapon of terror
In his article “Israel and Rape” journalist Robert Inlakesh goes into some detail about the cases of rape and sexual harassment within the IOF armed forces.
Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israel’s armed forces. According to a Haaretzreport, “a third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].”
In 2020, the Israeli army’s sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.
It has been reported that a growing sector of Israeli society rape Israelis, they rape tourists, they abuse and rape children, they rape their own evacuees. How these predators (especially in the IOF) react to Palestinians that have routinely been dehumanised and reduced to legitimate targets for an inherent predatory sadism is naturally expected to be a hundred times worse. And it is.
On the night of 22-23 May 1948, a week after the declaration of the State of Israel, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura (population 1,500) was attacked and occupied by units of the Israeli army’s Alexandroni Brigade. During the Nakba or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 some 400 villages were razed and occupied by Zionist forces.
Tantura was one of the tens of Palestinian villages and towns inside and outside the boundaries of the UN-envisaged Jewish state specifically targeted for capture under the notorious Plan Dalet, the Haganah master plan for the military establishment of Israel on the largest area possible of Palestine.
Palestinians were caged in makeshift cages and mowed down by machine-gun fire. Schoolchildren were ruthlessly shot even if they had raised their hands in surrender. Civilians were burned alive, buried in communal graves. Young girls were raped.
How different is this to what the IOF are doing in Gaza for the last six months but on an unprecedented scale.
Sabra and Shatila in 1982 witnessed the massacre of an estimated 3,500 Palestinians by Christian militiamen enabled and presided over by the Zionist forces. As journalist Robert Fisk said:
They (Israel) had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance – the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila – and they had established military liason with the murderers in the camps
According to multiple reports rape was also a feature of the Phalange militia on their genocidal rampage through the Palestinian community.
Fisk’s horrifying description of what he saw is haunting – here were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.
No different to the descriptions of decomposing bodies in and around Al Shifa Hospital or the corpses crushed beneath the tracks of a Zionist tank or bulldozer, children shot, their bodies left next to the white flag they were carrying. The terrified elderly man shot dead because he was dehydrated and couldn’t keep moving.
The merciless Zionist bloodlust has only grown in strength since the first days of dispossessing Palestinians of their lands and their lives.
Rape and the threat of rape is systematically used in Israeli prisons for Palestinian women, children and men. A web search will reveal countless reports on the degrading and inhumane treatment of female prisoners forced to endure humiliating body searches and threatened with rape if they do not comply.
The crimes committed by the IOF in Gaza since October 7th replicate the crimes committed during the Nakba and in the 75 years of Zionist occupation of Palestinian territory.
Female detainees were submitted to sexual violence, torture, inhuman treatment, strip searches, sexual harassment, and rape threats while being arrested and held by Israeli army forces according to testimonies collated by Euromed Monitor.
A UN report published in February 2024 said experts were appalled by reported (Israeli) human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls.
“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,”
Palestinian prisoners that had been stripped naked and were tortured allegedly became entertainment for the Israeli spectators that were brought in by the IOF to watch the sadistic process. They were given permission to film the torture on their mobile phones.
In 2010 a report was submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. It involved the Zionist sexual assault or threatened sexual assault of Palestinian children aged between 13 and 16. The torture was used to obtain confessions from the children, admitting to stone throwing. Read more here, here and here.
The depositions sent to the UN report direct attacks, including squeezing boys’ testicles, pushing a blunt object (a club or rifle stock) between the chair and a child’s buttocks, and repeated threats of “I’ll screw you if you don’t confess you threw stones.”
Of course the Zionist censorship machine moved to shut down the NGO, Defence for Children Palestine, that dared to expose the sexual abuse of minors by Israeli forces and security sectors. In October 2021, the DCIP was designated a terrorist organisation by Israeli authorities along with five other Palestinian NGOs.
Khan Younis in Gaza – History repeating itself?
An account (described by Zionists as fiction) from 1956 describes the slaughter and rape carried out by the Zionist forces in Gaza, in particular in Khan Younis.
According to the accepted Palestinian narrative, about 275 Palestinians were killed in the Khan Yunis massacre, while some 111 people were killed in Rafah. Rape was allegedly permitted to control the rebellious Palestinians.
The following letter was sent by a Golani Brigade soldier to his girlfriend on November 6, the day after the Sinai Campaign concluded, which is kept in the IDF archive. It is no different to the rhetoric we hear from IOF savages now inside Gaza or from the extremist Zionist settlers in West Bank:
Only the Arabs are to blame for all this and at every opportunity I take revenge on them,” he wrote. “I am not satisfied with the amount [of people] I have already killed; we killed hundreds but for me it is not enough. At every opportunity I take revenge on them, and opportunities are not lacking, especially these days when I am among thousands of Arabs. They are under curfew, and this is a great opportunity to do anything we want to them. And I’m doing just that, and I won’t stop until I am on my way home, I swear.
The Nakba was in 1948, the Naksa in 1967, Sabra and Shatila September 1982, the Intifada ‘87. November 3, 1956, however, does not live in infamy. Despite being one of the greatest massacres of Palestinians, the Khan Yunis massacre that brutally took the lives of hundreds of Palestinian men and boys, has only received a footnote in history- a mere few lines in a UN report. (Article in Palestine Chronicle)
The massacre of Khan Yunis in 1956 reached twice the number of the Dier Yassin massacre and lasted longer than the massacre that took place at Sabra and Shatila. Read more here.
Rape is a weapon of terrorists
In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has always been carried out with maximum brutality. The colonizers trained by the British relished sexual terrorism as one of their most potent instruments of power and subjugation of an unruly, justifiably resistant population.
It can be argued that rape or the threat of rape was a primary reason that many communities fled their villages and homes in 1948. The present day oppression of Palestinian women in the Resistance or political movements challenging the Zionist entity is dependent upon rape and sexual abuse to coerce female prisoners into confessions, sometimes even into collaboration.
The freed Palestinian prisoner, Rasmea Odeh, publicly spoke in an American court about how she was raped by Israeli intelligence interrogators. Odeh, who was arrested in 1969 at the age of 19, reported that during her interrogation, she was beaten with wooden sticks and metal bars, and was left naked in a blatant violation of her sexuality.
Odeh was sexually tortured with electric shocks. Wires were attached to her genitals, breasts, abdomen, arms, and legs, and in that disoriented state, she was raped with a stick while her father was forced to watch. (Mondoweiss)
Prominent Israeli Rabbis like Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu have advocated for rape in wartime. A leading Israeli professor, Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, explicitly called for the rape of Palestinian women to deter the Palestinian resistance during the unrest of the summer of 2014.
Later, in 2016, Rabbi Colonel Eyal Qarim of the Israeli Military Rabbinate also echoed the same notion, making allowances for the rape of Palestinian women by Jewish Israeli soldiers “out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors.” (Mondoweiss)
The apartheid Zionist state passed a sexual terrorism law in July 2023. The law was condemned for allowing Jewish Israelis to have a far lesser punishment for rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment than Palestinian citizens.
The law directly targets Palestinian citizens of Israel who are accused of sexually assaulting or harassing Jewish women if authorities deem the motive as “nationalistic”.
The irony should not be lost on you.
Rape by the Zionist military, intelligence or police forces is not restricted to children and women. Men are also submitted to horrific torture practices including rape.
Mustafa Dirani was abducted by an Israeli “elite force” from inside Lebanon in 1994. He was finally released in 2004. Dirani claimed compensation for alleged rape by a Shin Bet interrogation expert.
The ritual humiliation of women is also not confined to within prison walls. Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada on September 28 2000 until July 2006, 68 pregnant women had to give birth at checkpoints, 34 infants and 4 pregnant women died on these checkpoints.
Israel and Abu Ghraib
When the images of prisoners taken by the IOF in Gaza emerged, men stripped down to their underwear in winter, beaten by metal pipes or guns, urinated on by their monstrous captors – it was likened to scenes from Abu Ghraib. As the inhumane abuse expanded across Gaza and included women, the comparisons increased.
Journalist W Van Wagenen wrote about the Israeli involvement in Abu Ghraib, in particular at Facility 1391:
But the “creative” torture techniques focusing on sexual humiliation and rape have a clear origin.
Israeli interrogators were teaching US contractors and MPs torture techniques that Israel has long used against Palestinians and other Arabs.
In November 2003, as Cambone was lauding Israel for its assistance in Iraq, the Guardian published a report detailing the torture Israel subjected prisoners to at a secret prison known as ‘Facility 1391.’
“I was barefoot in my pajamas when they arrested me, and it was really cold,” says Sameer Jadala, a Palestinian school bus driver. “When I got to that place, they told me to strip and gave me a blue uniform. Then they gave me a black sack,” for his head.
Other former prisoners at Facility 1391 have described how they were stripped naked for interrogation, blindfolded, handcuffed, and threatened with rape. (emphasis added)
There can be no denying that Israel has a culture of rape and abuse of those it considers ‘untermensch’. It is engrained in their psyche and has been for almost a century because they believe they are not only “chosen” but “untouchable”. The British spawned a Frankenstein’s monster and they have lost control of the rapacious entity that is committing crime after crime against Humanity, not only in Palestine.
Britain forced Zionism on the population by allowing mass ‘immigration’, by arming the zionists while disarming the Palestinians, and by using all other weapons available to an occupying power to crush resistance. Thousands of Palestinians were killed when they rebelled in the 1930s, all attempts to reason with the British having failed.
Executions and the collective punishment of whole villages were part of how Britain lived up to its ‘sacred trust of civilization.’ The leadership needed for the coming stages of confrontation with the zionists was largely decapitated. The British did their dirty work for them. (Jeremy Salt)
“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence [them] absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.” Judith Lewis Herman – Trauma and Recovery: the aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror.
An illegal settler colonial entity built on genocide, rape, torture, apartheid and oppression will always fail eventually. It is only a matter of time before the truly depraved and rotten Zionist core will surrender to its own internal moral decay and implode.
Brianna Lyman, elections correspondent at The Federalist, recently reported on a panel discussion featuring Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth, and Beth Schwanke, Executive Director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab. Schmidt and Schwanke, speaking at a forum organized by Spotlight PA, voiced their stance on “misinformation” and “disinformation” surrounding elections. Strikingly, Schwanke recommended that rather than conducting self-led investigations, Pennsylvanians should place their confidence in so-called “trusted” sources. These include certain institutions and media outlets that have unfortunately been tied in the past to acts of censorship.
“One thing everyone can do to make sure they are seeing accurate information is to use trusted sources. So in elections that means using the Department of State, that means using your county elections office, it means using media organizations that follow, that adhere, to professional journalism standards like … your local NPR affiliate,” Schwanke said. “And it doesn’t mean you know, ‘doing your own research’ and just asking questions and sharing, you know, posts from – I don’t know, in my case, it’s Uncle Joe, right? It means being thoughtful about where your sources are coming from.”
Schwanke’s advice, interestingly, seemed to discourage individual research, questioning, and sharing of ideas. Instead, she advocated the use of sources like the Department of State, county elections offices, and, strikingly, media organizations such as local NPR affiliates, which she implied upheld superior journalistic standards.
Despite what Schwanke says, the importance of being vigilant about our sources of information cannot be overstated. This was vividly demonstrated in the lead-up to the 2020 election when a significant story on Hunter Biden’s laptop by the New York Post was unjustly labeled “disinformation,” and subsequently suppressed across several tech platforms.
As The Federalist reported, what made matters worse, in an incident hinting at bias, NPR blatantly refused to report on the story, with its Managing Editor Terence Samuels declaring it as unworthy of coverage.
The Pennsylvania State Department presented a similar cause for alarm. It announced its collaboration with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to monitor and control online talks deemed a “threat” related to the election process. Despite its claimed intention to offer voters accurate, trustworthy election-related data and to counter threats such as so-called “misinformation,” there is good reason to question the impartiality of its activities. Case in point, CISA had previously facilitated the silencing of Americans expressing valid concerns on social media, as if they were spreading “disinformation,” and even had a post from President Donald Trump flagged under these pretenses.
“Bird flu pandemic could be ‘100 times worse’ than COVID, scientists warn.” That is the headline at the New York Post for one of many media reports out Thursday spreading the latest pandemic scare.
Note the “100 times worse” comparison. Why not “nearly as bad,” “as bad,” or even “twice as bad” as coronavirus? The answer is that the fearmongers know that most people are on to the coronavirus hoax whereby a run-of-the-mill health threat was exaggerated to justify tyrannical measures including forcing termination of a vast amount of in-person interaction, mandating mask wearing, and even pushing and mandating experimental “vaccine” shots marketed as safe and effective despite being both dangerous and ineffective. All the while, good early treatment options were suppressed, resulting in greater sickness and death as well as expansive use of dangerous medical procedures and pharmaceuticals for people whose serious illness could have been prevented.
The world could be turned upside down over coronavirus because of a concerted effort of government and media to paint coronavirus as both extremely dangerous to everyone and something for which there were not already available good medical countermeasures. Both of those assertions were false. But, at the time, many people bought into the charade and trusted that “the science” propounded by the government and media selected “experts” required radical changes in human behavior, widespread participation on novel medical experimentation, and extreme restraints on liberty.
But now it is a new day. Looking back on the coronavirus scare, increasingly people realize, including some who are ashamed to discuss the matter, that they were duped. And they don’t want to be duped again. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” the saying goes.
Yet, trickery is a go-to tactic for expanding power. The government and its business allies in medical and other fields aren’t about to give up on that tactic that reaped such huge gains during the coronavirus scare. Thus the ploy of tacitly admitting what has become common knowledge — that coronavirus was way overblown — so that the repression and profit process can be repeated anew to deal with a threat that, trust us, is this time really, really, really bad.
And what scientist does the New York Post article quote to support the claim that scientists say the bird flu is “100 times worse than COVID” declared in the article’s title? His name is John Fulton, described in the article as “a pharmaceutical industry consultant for vaccines.”
Oh brother: Here we go again. Or do we? If enough people stand up and say “no you don’t this time,” this new dangerous charade can be stopped in its tracks.
In March, the UK, in conjunction with the US and other members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, accused China of engaging in a state-sponsored hacking campaign against them. In response to the alleged ‘attack’ they launched coordinated sanctions against a small group of hackers and their associated businesses.
The sanctions were particularly big news in Britain, where the government suddenly decided that Beijing had been behind a hack on the electoral commission three years ago. Notably, the country’s Conservative party-aligned newspapers all pushed this narrative in an aggressive fashion.
These accusations by the Five Eyes nations are not so much genuine concerns as they are a deliberate and opportunistic act of political theatre which, largely driven by the US, seeks to slander China for diplomatic and political gain. The sanctions, although narrow in scope and thus meaningless, are designed to try and send a message to and about China. It is essentially a fearmongering campaign, which seeks to both undermine Beijing’s engagement with other countries and serve domestic political purposes in the US.
The rhythm of US escalation and de-escalation with China
The US has an adept foreign policy whereby it intentionally chooses to escalate and de-escalate tensions with China at opportune moments, which is precisely why calls for “engagement” with Beijing coming from Washington D.C. cannot be trusted. The US does not change its goals or its policies, only its tactics in consideration of what suits it at that particular moment. Hence it has always alternated between overtures and deliberate provocations. It usually does so by having a certain report or development leaked to the media at an opportunistic time, in order to craft a particular narrative which mandates a certain set of reactions and policy responses.
To give some examples of such, the Trump administration played down tensions with China directly in 2019, even amidst the Hong Kong crisis, in order to secure a “trade deal” with Beijing. Once it got what it wanted by 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic struck, it deliberately unleashed a full-on crusade against Beijing on every front. Similarly, the Biden administration came into office and then immediately upped tensions with China on the Xinjiang issue in order to damage China’s ties with Europe in a build-up to coordinated sanctions as a display of transatlantic unity.
After this was done, it then decided it wanted to “cool” things down for a bit and establish “guardrails” so the rhetoric guns went silent for a few months as Washington reached out to Beijing. Then, as the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics came, it took the “Xinjiang card” off the shelf again with a number of timed leaks and publications geared towards supporting a Winter Olympics boycott, as well as a sweeping ban on all Xinjiang goods under the premise of “forced labour” at that time.
What we see is that the US does not truly de-escalate with China, it “blows hot and cold” and essentially manipulates the media cycle to pursue its policy preferences as it sees fit. This means that major issues pertaining to China only tend to appear when there is an agenda serving it.
The newest phase
Now, the Biden administration has made a political design to escalate tensions with China by accusing it, in coordination with the Five Eyes, of state-backed hacking and cybercrime. The fact that the British government would sit on such an accusation for three years suggests both clear political purpose and timing. The question is, why? First, we are approaching a Presidential election in the US. It was always an inevitability that the administration would want to appear “tough” on China to prevent the issue from being used as an attack point by Biden’s rival, Donald Trump. As seen in 2020, an election year tends to become a year of very aggressive rhetoric and extreme theatrics.
Secondly, there is the goal of undermining China’s engagement with Europe. It has been publicly announced that Xi Jinping will visit a number of European countries in May, including France. As stated above, the US, with the support of the Five Eyes countries, actively seeks to damage Chinese diplomacy with Europe by weaponizing negative publicity in order to narrow political space for engagement.
What we see from this is that the US engages China on its own terms, but seeks to prevent those it deems as “allies” from doing the same, and thus resorts to psychological warfare through the manipulation of mass media.
In conclusion, when one sees these strategies being utilised, one recognises that the Western media has far less independence and impartiality than it claims to have, but is indirectly subject to the preferences of US policy. When the White House says “jump”, reporters ask, “how high?” and thus we see that a new propaganda campaign has been cultivated against Beijing, but of course, we should not be blind to the reality that there is no greater weaponisation of cyberspace and espionage in the world than the system created by the Five Eyes. And are we really going to pretend the CIA doesn’t hack anyone?
WASHINGTON – The US warning about an imminent terrorist attack at a concert venue in Russia was marked “urgent,” but contrary to media reports did not identify Crocus City Hall as the target, Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his new article, citing a US official familiar with the matter.
The CIA allegedly provided the warning to Russian intelligence before the concert at the Crocus City Hall marking it “urgent,” meaning that the data in it “was credible and near term,” Hersh quoted the official as saying.
“The highly secret report on the attack in Moscow was prepared by the Counterterrorism Center at CIA headquarters and delivered to the terrorism division of the Russian Federal Security Service located in the old KGB building in Moscow. Separate briefings were presented in person by the FBI officer at the embassy. This is an established relationship,” the official said.
The warning, however, did not mention Crocus City Hall near Moscow and only said that an attack was being planned at some “public gathering,” according to the official.
The information provided by the official is contrary to a Washington Post report published on Tuesday claiming that Crocus City Hall was specifically identified in the warning as the target of a terrorist attack.
On March 22, several armed men broke into Crocus City Hall, a major concert venue just outside Moscow, and started shooting at people. They also started a fire in one of the auditoriums, which was full of people ahead of a concert. The attack left 695 casualties, including 144 dead, according to the latest data from the Russian Emergencies Ministry.
The four main suspects in the case — all of them citizens of Tajikistan — tried to flee the scene in a car but were detained and charged with terrorism. Russian authorities believe the perpetrators planned to flee to Ukraine, where a safe haven had been arranged for them. An investigation is underway.
Later in March, The New York Times reported, citing European and US security officials, that the US intelligence agencies did not provide the Russian side with all the information they had about the threat of a terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall in the Moscow Region out of fear that Russian authorities might learn about their intelligence sources or methods of work.
Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Alexander Bortnikov also said that the information transmitted by the United States on the preparation of a terrorist attack was of a general nature, and the Russian special services responded to it.
Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
NATO’s air attacks on the Balkan nation were the practical application of a new post-Cold War doctrine. To succeed, this doctrine relied on Western media to report on crisis areas with the appropriate mixture of exaggerations, omissions and outright lies to justify NATO’s virtuous interventions. The military industrial complex could breathe easy and a new generation of journalists began successful careers eagerly spinning their reports to serve the new humanitarian war ideology.
None was more successful than Dublin-born Samantha Power, whose novice reports from Bosnia in the mid-1990s provided the basis for her 2002 book on “genocide” which “quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine.” She has gone on from one top governmental post to another, a Washington star, urging the United States to intervene on moral grounds.
Samantha Power owes her remarkable success to her talent as a writer, her ambition, her striking presence, but not least to the man at the origins of the whole humanitarian war policy.
That was none other than Morton Isaac Abramowitz, a highly influential member of the foreign policy establishment and the main inventor of what would become the “R2P” (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine. The crucial policy contribution of Abramowitz is explained at the start of my 2002 book, Fools’ Crusade, as follows:[1]
As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the early 1990s, Abramowitz headed a project to develop a new U.S. foreign policy for the post-Cold War era. Rather than identifying “threats”, especially at a time when few threats could be seen, a successful new policy needed to combine promotion of U.S. interests with proclamation of U.S. “ideals”.
Theory and Practice
At the Carnegie Endowment in 1992, Abramowitz published the theory of the new U.S. “humanitarian intervention” policy as Self-Determination in the New World Order.
“The vision of a ‘new world order’ since 1990 has been a world with one superpower – the United States – in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.”
That sounds very nice. But put into practice, “collective resistance” means NATO, and “all people are treated justly” depends on Washington’s preferences. The new rules-based order was not to be confused with traditional international law, based on national sovereignty. Globalization was making national sovereignty outdated (except for the United States). “Ideals” make rules more flexible.
The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, “groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination”. […] In the future, the authors announced, “humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable”. The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene.
Abramowitz subsequently helped put his theory into practice in crumbling Yugoslavia. He was the eminence grise behind U.S. diplomats, steering the events leading to the “Kosovo war” that split the province of Kosovo off from Serbia. He was advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the imitation “peace negotiations” staged at Rambouillet to provide an excuse for the bombing of Serbia. The moderate Albanian Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova was replaced by the armed gangster, Hashim Thaci. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright set terms no Serbian leader could accept, demanding the right to station NATO troops over the entire country, with full impunity. The Serb side was then blamed for the failure, and NATO began to bomb on March 24, 1999.
Samantha Steals her Way into Bosnia
Back in 1992, fresh out of Yale, 22-year-old Samantha Power was given a position as intern in the office of Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. As a proofreader, she quickly absorbed the new official doctrine. At that time, her boss was obsessed with the conflicts in Bosnia as implicating the future of NATO. Determined to get to Bosnia where the action was, Samantha stole stationery from the neighboring office of Foreign Policy magazine and forged a letter from the editor to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide her, as Foreign Policy’s “Balkan correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”[2]
From that time on, her work functioned precisely to advance the new “humanitarian intervention” policy of her mentor, Morton Abramowitz. She recalls that his influence helped her get increasingly important assignments – most crucially, writing about the Srebrenica massacre for The Washington Post.
With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
The Western press corps based in Sarajevo tended to become emotionally involved with the Muslim side which was its principal news source. Missing from their dispatches were reports on Muslim massacres of Serbs villages or on the well-armed Islamic fighters who joined the Muslim side from Afghanistan and Arab countries, some of them settling permanently in Bosnia.
When Bosnian Serb forces captured the Muslim base at Srebrenica in July 1995, they evacuated women, children and the aged to safety, while men fled, fearing retaliation. Many were killed in unclear circumstances.
Without reference to such context, Western media focused on reports of a massacre of 8,000 male prisoners as a unique event which branded the Serbs as the guilty party in the three-sided civil war. With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
Calling Srebrenica “genocide” provided the argument for NATO bombing: if Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia, it implied that Serbs were genocidal and risked committing genocide in Kosovo unless NATO intervened. This theory was supported by wildly inaccurate accusations voiced by leading Western politicians during the bombing campaign.
That was the story that was sold to the public by politicians and the media. From the start, the Serb majority in Yugoslavia had been portrayed as invaders in their own country, with everyone else as victims. Thus was destroyed the last semi-socialist, nonaligned country in Europe.
The Kosovo war indeed combined U.S. “interests and ideals”. The ideals were preventing a genocide that never would have taken place (and also, incidentally, preventing a negotiation that could have settled the whole conflict as well). The interests included the immediate construction by the Americans of a giant U.S. military base on the territory of Kosovo, once Serbian forces were obliged to leave.
Genocide and R2P
Samantha Power’s 2002 book was subtitled “America in the Age of Genocide”. To speak of the present as an “age of genocide” is wildly melodramatic, but the purpose is to place virtuous America in the center of drastic moral demands. America must save the world from its genocidal self. “Genocide” was thereby promoted as the most potent pretext for U.S. military intervention – precisely by deploring its absence, both in Bosnia and more convincingly, in Rwanda. The Clinton administration was certainly not going to intervene in Rwanda, because the bloody chaos was in fact favoring the conquest of Rwanda by Paul Kagame and his army, which had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Kagame was a favored client of the United States. There was no reason for Washington to interfere with Kagame’s victory.
But the “failure to stop genocide” was an appeal to the liberal conscience to intervene later on, whenever the U.S. was in need a powerful argument to get rid of a someone it wanted to get rid of. Moammer Gaddafi had been on the U.S.-UK hit list for decades, but had made concessions to gain reconciliation. But when Gaddafi’s usual fundamentalist Islamic opponents in Tripoli used the 2011 “Arab spring” to raise protests, the “threat of genocide” alarm was raised on their behalf. In Washington, action to stop Gaddafi from “committing genocide” was urged by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, while Bernard Henri Lévy raised the alarm in Paris. NATO rose to the challenge, destroyed the most economically successful country on the African continent and murdered its leader, creating a flood of refugees to Europe and other disasters. Most of the liberal left cheered.
Today it is widely recognized that the Irak war was based on deceit and ended in disaster. Other U.S. wars are mostly conceded to have been unfortunate mistakes. There are doubts about Libya, due mainly to the refugee flow. But the destruction of Yugoslavia, and in particular the 1999 “Kosovo war”, is still widely accepted in the West as what it was arranged to appear: NATO’s generous humanitarian intervention to prevent “genocide” by racist Serbs against the oppressed Albanian minority.
The distortions of the Bosnia conflict and the Kosovo war were precisely the practical application of the Abramowitz policy: promote minority rebellions to break down national sovereignty and change governments the U.S. doesn’t like, while supplying NATO with a new geographically unlimited mission of “humanitarian intervention”. Yugoslavia was the starting point of the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order, using the idealistic pretexts set out by Abramowitz. Young Samantha Power, who was very smart, got the point and ambitiously cheated her way into a supporting role as reporter in the Bosnia spectacle, which she eventually transformed into an astonishingly successful career.
I was in Kosovo on my own in months prior to the NATO bombardment and saw quite clearly that in that small province, the Serbs were a frightened minority while Albanians were already tasting their future triumph. There was absolutely no danger of a Serbian “genocide” of Albanians. But Western editors kept sending in ignorant young aspiring journalists, on the lookout for some “Serb atrocity” that could advance their budding career. Editors rejected any report that went in a different direction. It was at that time just plain impossible to publish an unbiased report. I know from experience.
Above all, breaking up Yugoslavia was an exercise in subsequent efforts to undermine the Russian Federation, by inciting the Federation’s ethnic minorities against the Russians. Ukraine was the crucial battering ram. I always used to think of Ukraine when studying the conflicts in the Krajina regions of Croatia and Bosnia, as both words have the same root (border land) and suffered from similar conflicts, notably in World War II. Western powers had revived the Nazi-supported Croatian nationalism against the Serbs to break up Yugoslavia. They would revive much more virulent Nazi-supported Ukrainian nationalism against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, in an effort to weaken and eventually even break up the Russian Federation.
And for the United States, the humanitarian “ideals” of supporting minorities would be compensated by the major strategic “interest” of eventually gaining control of Crimea, and with it, Russia’s main naval base in Sebastopol. Putin did what any Russian leader not brain-dead would have done: he headed off this disaster by mobilizing the Russian inhabitants of Crimea to vote to return to Russia, which they had never chosen to leave. This obvious act of self-determination is denounced in the West as an invasion.
The Ideological Backlash
Unfortunately, the blatantly tragic misuse of the “humanitarian intervention” or R2P doctrine in Libya has not managed to achieve its discredit. It is threatened now by the danger that it is changing sides in the very global conflicts it has stimulated.
The referendum in Crimea was a democratic measure of self-determination that fit the Abramowitz standards. The Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in 2022 was partially motivated by the sort of consideration featured in the Abramowitz doctrine: defense of the population of Donbas, under attack from an ultranationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, Western governments and media have simply totally ignored any Russia appeal to the ideals of human rights and self-determination, which they consider their own private property as self-declared unique “democracies”. Russia is classed as an “autocracy” whose interests must be malevolent and thus don’t count.
A greater threat to the West’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. Most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full Western backing, committing Genocide – the real thing this time, out in the open, blatant and unrelenting.
The NATO war machine may have to conjure up a new set of moralizing pretexts for its aggressions.
Notes
[1] See Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press, 2002, pp 9-10; Monthly Review 2003
US broadcaster CBS has claimed there is reason to believe that American officials struck by the so-called Havana Syndrome were “attacked” by Russia, despite five US intelligence agencies debunking the theory last year. What’s behind this new round of hysteria?
In what appears to be a bad April Fools joke, a group of Western mainstream media outlets, namely CBS’ 60 Minutes, The Insider, and Der Spiegel, has brought a busted “Havana Syndrome” theory that points the finger at Russia back to life, again.
The latest 60 Minutes show featured a retired army lieutenant colonel, an FBI agent, a Washington DC-based lawyer representing Havana Syndrome sufferers, and Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, well-known for his anti-Russian bias and accused by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in December 2022 of working hand in glove with the Ukrainian security agents on a plan to hijack several Russian warplanes. CBS’ interlocutors asserted to the broadcaster that “there are no barriers on what Moscow” could do.
What’s Havana Syndrome?
Havana Syndrome is a condition that was seemingly first reported in 2016 by employees of the US Embassy in Cuba who complained about vertigo, migraines, hearing and memory loss, and nausea. The symptoms described by the sufferers are often reported to follow pressure in their heads or strange sounds.
Later, some American government, military and intelligence officials and their family members cited similar symptoms at US embassies around the world, triggering speculation about the use of some sort of mysterious energy weapon. Cuba, Russia and China were named as potential culprits behind what the US mainstream media called a “hostile power attack”.
US Intelligence Agencies Debunked Claims of Russian Involvement
After conducting a thorough investigation into the matter under the Biden administration, the US intelligence community (IC) concluded that it was highly unlikely that the collection of debilitating symptoms was caused by unidentified foreign actors’ attacks.
The Washington Post reflected on the IC’s years-long probe, which included the review of approximately 1,000 cases of “anomalous health incidents”, on March 1, 2023.
“Five of [the US intelligence] agencies determined it was ‘very unlikely’ that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions — such as a directed energy weapon — or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick,” the newspaper wrote.
The IC said it found no pattern or common set of conditions that could link the cases in question. It also did not find any proof, including forensic information or geolocation data, that would indicate that a potential adversary had used some sort of “directed energy such as radio waves or ultrasonic beams.”
One official interviewed by the WaPo stated that in locations where US intelligence had a complete ability to monitor the environment for signs of malicious interference, they had found no evidence of an adversary power targeting US government employees. On top of that, there was no intelligence confirming that foreign leaders, including from Russia, had any knowledge of or had authorized a hypothetical attack on US personnel.
The findings of the US intelligence community were met with ire by Havana Syndrome sufferers and their attorneys. This outrage could be partially explained by six-figure compensations promised by the Biden administration to those severely affected by the “syndrome.”
National Institutes of Health Nipped Mystical Sonic Weapons Theory in Bud
Independently of the IC investigation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirmed its conclusions in two studies released on March 18, 2024. The NIH found no evidence of brain or inner ear injury in scans or blood markers of Havana Syndrome sufferers. The results were published in the reputable Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
According to the NIH, 41% of those who complained of the mysterious Havana Syndrome from nearly every geographic area either “met the criteria for Functional Neurological Disorders (FND)” or showed symptoms indicating underlying psychological distress. The reported health complaints were also usually closely related to a wide range of pre-existing conditions, anxiety reactions, or environmental factors.
Commenting on the NIH studies, Robert E. Bartholomew, an honorary senior lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, lambasted peddlers of an “adversary power attack” theory in the scientific community and referred to flaws in their studies in his op-ed for Skeptic.
The scientist stressed that one shouldn’t underestimate the role of psychogenic disorders and distress US diplomats and spies are usually subjected to during their work overseas.
It’s hardly surprising that a mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket was taken by some US Embassy employees in Cuba as the sound of a mysterious sonic weapon, according to him. Psychosis was quick to spread, instigated by fears of an adversary attack.
“Some media commentators and rogue scientists continue to speculate that a small number of cases in US personnel in both Cuba and later around the world, may have involved a directed energy weapon. Yet, Occam’s razor fits well here. Given two competing explanations, the simplest is the most likely,” Bartholomew wrote. “The entire episode is explainable using conventional psychology, and without recourse to foreign actors and secret weapons.”
Havana Syndrome Theory Used to Stoke Fears About US Rivals
What’s behind the Western media agitation with Havana Syndrome? According to Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic, one should pay attention to the timing of the fuss surrounding the energy weapon theory.
“The supposed foreign culprit behind the alleged attacks was constantly cycling through the rogues’ gallery of Washington’s villains of the week, from Cuba, initially, to Russia, then China. The most surprising thing is that Iran didn’t at any point end up in the rotation,” Marcetic noted.
Indeed, the theory of Havana Syndrome being caused by adversaries of the US gained traction at the time when the Trump administration cracked down hard on the Caribbean nation. Reports alleging Chinese traces were fuelled by the US’ trade wars against the People’s Republic and crusade against its hi-tech sector.
Naming Russia as a potential “culprit” fitted into the US foreign establishment’s agenda under both Trump and Biden so as to stoke fears about the alleged “Russian threat”.
The rhetoric of US adversaries being behind Havana Syndrome was just one in a string of other debunked outlandish claims, including fake news that Iran had sentenced fifteen thousand protesters to death; that Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipelines; that China had deliberately flown a spy balloon over the US, and many more, Marcetic emphasized.
According to the journalist, the hysteria was deliberately stirred up by the US to justify unfriendly and hostile acts against the aforementioned nations.
Timing of Havana Syndrome’s Revitalization Speaks Volumes
The timing of the US mainstream media’s effort to bring the Havana Syndrome theory back to life speaks volumes.
First, it comes amid a string of Ukraine’s defeats on the battlefield which appears to inflict serious reputational damage on Biden’s 2024 campaign ahead of the election. Second, it follows the Crocus City Hall terror attack, conducted by Islamists with the apparent participation of Ukrainian operators.
Most recently, Russian investigators have confirmed that the terrorists received cash and cryptocurrencies from Ukraine. What’s more, the Russian Investigative Committee’s report suggests that alleged Ukrainian masterminds could be directly connected to the CIA, MI6 and MI5, Kirill Kabanov, chairman of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, told Sputnik on March 30.
On Sunday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in an official statement that it had conveyed to the Kiev regime its demand that those involved in terrorist attacks on Russian territory, including Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) head Vasyl Malyuk, be arrested and extradited to Moscow.
The Foreign Ministry’s demand was followed by a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) statement on Monday saying that the Biden administration is “covering up those responsible for the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall” and is “stepping up work to form a distorted picture of the large-scale terrorist attack that took place in Russia on March 22.”
Are the allegations once again being circulated by the Western press of powers adverse to Washington causing Havana Syndrome just a part of this strategy?
By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | January 29, 2019
Paris – French President Emmanuel Macron recently voiced support for protesters in Venezuela as his own country has been ground to a halt by protests every weekend.
There is an overused saying that “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” While these few words may be cliche there is definitely one man that they can be applied to after this weekend: Emmanuel Macron.
Even though the French President is into the third month of protests against his government, he has decided to weigh in on the legitimacy of another country’s government and his latest outrageous statements just highlight the hypocrisy of Macron and Western leaders in general. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 