Report: UK smears Iran to justify ban on Palestine Action
Press TV – November 4, 2025
A leading British “PR consultancy” working for the Israeli regime’s top arms producer has been found culpable of fabricating and planting a false media narrative linking Palestine Action to Iran, in what appears to be a coordinated effort to justify the group’s eventual proscription.
According to British news magazine Private Eye, a “trusted witness” said Georgia Pickering, head of the London-based PR firm CMS Strategic, which represents Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, boasted about planting a story in The Times alleging that the Islamic Republic was bankrolling the direct-action network.
The story appeared just days before the UK government moved to outlaw Palestine Action under its “terrorism” legislation in July.
The fabricated report, which claimed that the Home Office was probing Tehran’s alleged financial ties to the group, was later recycled by The Daily Mail and the GB News channel, amplifying suspicions and pressure against the movement.
However, when Private Eye reached out to the Home Office, officials said they did not recognize the claims, effectively disowning the narrative that had dominated headlines.
A spokesperson for Palestine Action dismissed the entire affair as “baseless” and “ridiculous”, while CMS Strategic publicly denied involvement in the article, despite Pickering’s private admission.
Further revelations highlighted that the smear campaign did not emerge in isolation.
Just two days before the story broke, the pro-Israeli lobby group We Believe in Israel claimed on social media that Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) was the “darker puppeteer” behind Palestine Action, despite offering no proof beyond vague references to “similar slogans.”
In the months leading up to the group’s ban, the same lobby orchestrated a “multi-front” campaign pushing for Palestine Action’s proscription, issuing two reports whose language was later echoed almost verbatim by Yvette Cooper, the then–home secretary, in her official statement outlawing the movement.
For years, Palestine Action has led a relentless grassroots campaign against Elbit Systems, targeting its factories and offices for producing weapons used by the Israeli regime in its assaults on Palestinians, including its war of genocide on the Gaza Strip that began in October 2023.
Merz claims about Russian drones are ‘lies’ – opposition politician
RT | October 31, 2025
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is misleading the public about a drone threat allegedly posed by Russia, Sahra Wagenknecht, the leader of the left-wing BSW party, has said. The chancellor did not hesitate to link recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sightings across Germany to Moscow even though he had no evidence, she told the broadcaster ZDF on Thursday.
According to Wagenknecht, Merz was blowing the issue out of proportion, with the German media unquestioningly adopting his point of view, even though evidence pointed in the other direction.
“Mr. Merz goes on TV… and lies,” she said, adding that the chancellor made his statements after some of the incidents had either been proven to have no connection to Russia or turned out to have never happened at all. “It’s simply a vague suspicion, which has been largely refuted, and then discussed by the chancellor on public television.”
She was referring to the chancellor’s interview with the German broadcaster ARD earlier this month, when he said that “our suspicion is that Russia is behind most of these drone launches” and called the UAVs a “serious threat to our security.”
The interview came just days after the German police said that a drone incident at Frankfurt airport was caused by a local UAV enthusiast. Claims of drone sightings near a military base in northern Germany in early October were also refuted by the Bundeswehr, which stated that “there were no registered drone overflights” in the area, “contrary to the media reports.”
Several drone sightings were reported over critical German infrastructure earlier this month. One such incident led to dozens of canceled flights at Munich airport. The developments prompted some officials, including Merz, to claim the drone flights had been orchestrated by Moscow.
Moscow has repeatedly denied any connection to the incidents. Berlin has “no reasons” to blame Moscow for the recent drone sightings, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in early October, commenting on Merz’s interview with ARD. “Europe is full of politicians who tend to blame Russia for everything,” he said at the time, calling the accusations “baseless.”
Constructing chaos: Tel Aviv’s hand in Syria’s sectarian slaughter
The Cradle | October 29, 2025
On 7 March, Syrian security forces and affiliated armed factions perpetrated the massacre of more than 1,500 Alawite civilians, including many elderly, women, and children, in 58 separate locations on the Syrian coast.
Though the killings were executed by sectarian forces loyal to Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani), a former Al-Qaeda commander, the path to the massacre was paved by a covert Israeli strategy aimed at inciting an Alawite uprising.
Israel’s plan hinged on pushing Alawites into the “trap” of launching an armed rebellion, with false promises of external support, only to give Sharaa’s forces the pretext to carry out the mass slaughter of Alawite civilians in “response.”
Israel’s goal was consistent with its long-standing aim, articulated in the infamous Yinon Plan: to dismantle Syria and reshape it into “weak, decentralized ethnic regions,” following former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
Netanyahu goes to Washington
After 14 years of sustained support from the US, Israel, and regional allies, the extremist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – formerly the Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front – seized control of Damascus in December 2024. Its leader, Julani, rebranded as Ahmad al-Sharaa, swiftly assumed the presidency.
On the very day of this power shift, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took credit for Assad’s fall and began a mass bombing campaign to destroy what was left of the country’s military capabilities.
However, toppling Syria’s government and destroying its army was not the end of Israel’s plan for Syria.
On 9 January, Netanyahu’s cabinet met to discuss organizing an international conference to “divide Syria into cantons,” Israeli news outlet i24 News reported.
“Any proposal deemed Israeli will be viewed unfavorably in Syria, which necessitates an international conference to advance the matter,” the outlet noted.
In other words, to be successful, Israel’s project to divide Syria needed to originate, or seem to originate, from Syrians themselves.
Less than a month later, on 2 February, Netanyahu visited Washington to present a “white paper” regarding Syria to US officials.
After Netanyahu’s visit, Reuters reported that “Israel is lobbying the United States to keep Syria weak and decentralized, including by letting Russia keep its military bases there to counter Turkey’s influence.”
The Times of Israel later commented that Israel was lobbying the “US to buck Sharaa’s fledgling government in favor of establishing a decentralized series of autonomous ethnic regions, with the southern one bordering Israel being demilitarized.”
Reports later leaked into political circles about a meeting two days later, on 4 February, between US officials and a representative of the most influential Druze religious leader in Syria, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, in Washington, DC.
Al-Jumhuriya reported that according to Syrian and American sources with direct knowledge of the meetings, discussions revolved around “a plan for an armed rebellion against the government of Ahmad al-Sharaa.”
The rebellion would reportedly include Hijri’s Druze forces from Suwayda, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from northeast Syria, and Alawite groups from the Syrian coast, but with “Israeli support.”
When asked about the meeting, Hijri’s representative confirmed to Al-Jumhuriya that it had taken place but stated that the proposal for a rebellion had not come from the Druze.
“The proposal originated from a state, not from any Syrian faction,” Hijri’s representative clarified, in a likely reference to Israel.
Inventing the insurgency: Meqdad Fatiha
Just two days later, on 6 February, an Alawite resistance group, the “Coastal Shield Brigade,” was allegedly formed.
A video announcing the group’s establishment claimed its fighters would respond to sectarian massacres carried out by HTS-led security forces against Alawites since December, including in the village of Fahel, where 15 former officers in the Syrian army were killed, and the village of Arzeh, where 15 people were killed as well, including a child and an elderly woman.
In both villages, former officers in Assad’s army had given up their weapons and completed a reconciliation process with the new authorities in Damascus, but were nevertheless murdered in their homes by militants linked to Syria’s new extremist-led security forces.
The Coastal Shield Brigades was allegedly led by Meqdad Fatiha, a former member of the 25th Special Forces and the Republican Guard of the Assad government.
Activists on social media circulated the video, which allegedly showed Fatiha declaring the establishment of the brigade from a base in the Latakia Mountains.
However, there was no evidence that the group was real. Fatiha’s face was covered by a black balaclava in the video, making it impossible to verify whether he was really the person speaking. This was odd, given that his appearance was already known from his Facebook profile.
The theatrics pointed to an intelligence fabrication – likely Israeli – designed to present the illusion of an organic Alawite insurgency.
A meeting in Najaf?
Just five days later, the narrative of an organized Alawite insurgency was reinforced by reports in Turkiye Gazetesi, an Islamist-leaning pro-government newspaper in Turkiye.
The report claimed that Iranian generals and former commanders in the Syrian army under Assad had met in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq to plan a major uprising against Sharaa in Syria.
The scheme reportedly involved Druze factions, the Kurdish-led SDF, Alawite insurgents on the coast, Lebanese Hezbollah, and, improbably, ISIS.
Large amounts of weapons were allegedly being sent by land from Iraq and by sea from Lebanon to the Syrian coast, the report added.
“Some surprising events were expected to occur in Syria in the near future,” the Iranian generals allegedly in attendance said.
While “surprising events” did occur one month later with the massacre of Alawites on 7 March, the reports of the Najaf meeting are likely fabricated.
It is unlikely that a Turkish newspaper would have access to a detailed account of a secret meeting taking place between top Iranian generals and former Syrian officers.
It is also unlikely, and even ridiculous, that Iran and Hezbollah would be coordinating with their long-time enemy, ISIS, or with the US-backed SDF.
Kurdish-Syrian commentator Samir Matini amplified the narrative through widely viewed livestreams, pushing the idea of “surprising events” to come. The aim: to pin Israel’s plan on Iran and Hezbollah and create a smokescreen of chaos.
Sectarian killings fuel resistance
Amid the propaganda claiming a foreign-backed Alawite insurgency was being organized, Julani’s security forces stepped up attacks against Alawite civilians in the coastal region.
Syrian journalist Ammar Dayoub reported in Al-Araby al-Jadeed that Alawites were often targeted solely based on their religious identity, rather than because they were “remnants of the regime.”
Dayoub observed that “these violations have targeted people who opposed the previous regime, and young people who were only children in that period, as well as academics and women.”
In response to the sectarian killings, Alawites began to defend themselves.
One key event occurred on 8 January, when armed men linked to the Damascus government killed three Alawite farmers in the village of Ain al-Sharqiyah in the coastal region of Jableh. The men were working their lands across from the Brigade 107 base when they were killed.
In response, a local man named Bassam Hossam al-Din gathered a group of local men, arming them with light weapons. They attacked members of Julani’s internal security forces, known as General Security, killing one and abducting seven more, before barricading themselves in an Alawite religious shrine.
The General Security launched a campaign against them, swiftly killing Hossam al-Din and his group.
A former intelligence officer of the Assad government, speaking with The Cradle, says these killings motivated him and others to fight back:
“All this fueled enormous resentment in the area, which grew worse day by day. After Bassam Hossam al-Din’s death, some people here – including former government military personnel and civilians – began to gather.”
Crucially, they were “encouraged by reports and promises [of help] they received from outside.”
They were told they would receive support, including by sea, from the US-led international coalition, in coordination with the Druze in Suwayda and Kurds in northeastern Syria.
“They were given hope of escaping this miserable situation,” the former intelligence officer tells The Cradle.
In the following weeks, Alawites continued to clash with Syrian security forces in an effort to defend themselves from raids and arrests.
In late February, Alawite insurgents attacked a police station in Assad’s hometown of Qardaha, located in the mountains overlooking the coastal town of Latakia.
According to Qardaha residents and activists who spoke to Reuters, “the incident began when members of security forces tried to enter a house without permission, sparking opposition from residents.”
“One person was killed by gunfire, with locals accusing the security forces of the shooting,” Reuters added, further suggesting that local Alawite men were acting in self-defense.
What happened in Datour?
The simmering conflict escalated further on 4 March. Reuters reported that, according to Syrian state media, two members of the Defense Ministry had been killed in the Datour neighborhood in Latakia city by “groups of Assad militia remnants,” and that security forces had mounted a campaign to arrest them.
One Datour resident told Reuters there had been heavy gunfire in the early hours and that security forces in numerous vehicles had surrounded the neighborhood.
A security source speaking with the news agency blamed the violence on a “proliferation of arms” among former security and army personnel who had refused to enter into reconciliation agreements with the new authorities.
The source said that local Alawite leaders had, in some cases, cooperated with security forces to hand over former personnel suspected of committing crimes during the period of Assad’s rule in hopes of staving off “crack downs and potential civil unrest.”
Testimonies from residents of Datour collected by Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) indicated that security forces carried out random arrests in Datour and indiscriminately fired at civilian homes, resulting in several deaths, including that of a child.
The campaign was “marked by sectarian rhetoric and intense hate speech directed against the Alawite sect,” STJ added.
A source from Datour speaking with The Cradle reveals that Julani’s government used a prominent local Alawite family to create the proliferation of weapons needed to justify a crackdown.
The Aslan family had previously been close to Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and commander of the army’s elite 4th Division, but quickly established good relations with the new government after it came to power in December.
It became common to see General Security members from Idlib spending time at the Aslan-owned businesses on Thawra Street at the entrance to Datour.
When residents complained to the General Security about criminal activity by the Aslan family, such as stealing money and confiscating homes, the General Security took no action against the family.
The source speaking with The Cradle says that on 4 and 5 March, members of the Aslan family distributed weapons to Alawite men in the neighborhood, encouraging them to take up arms against the General Security.
This was, of course, strange given the close relationship between the Aslans and the General Security, as well as because such a rebellion had little chance of success.
“Why would the Aslan family distribute weapons to fellow Alawites in Datour while knowing a rebellion would fail?” the source asks.
What happened in Daliyah?
On 6 March, a major clash erupted in the Alawite villages of Daliyah and Beit Ana, which lie adjacent to one another in the mountains of the Jableh countryside.
Sources from Daliyah speaking with The Cradle confirm that a large General Security convoy entered the village that morning to arrest a local man, Ali Ahmad, who had written posts against the Julani government on Facebook.
General Security members took Ahmad from his work at the local mini bus station and executed him at the entrance of the village.
The General Security members then entered the nearby house of a retired army officer, Taha Saad, in the adjacent village of Beit Ana, killing his two adult sons.
In response to the killings, local men from the village gathered light weapons and attacked the General Security members. After the General Security called for reinforcements, a convoy of 20 vehicles arrived to assist the government forces in the fight.
The sources in Daliyah speaking with The Cradle state that around 20 members of the General Security and 17 men from the village were killed in the gun battle.
As the clashes continued, Damascus sent helicopters to drop bombs on Daliyah and Beit Ana until a Russian plane forced the helicopters to withdraw.
Julani’s army escalated further by firing artillery at multiple Alawite villages in the mountain areas from the military academy in Rumaylah on the coast, near Jableh city.
A source from Jableh speaking to The Cradle says that the bombings made Alawites “go crazy,” especially because Daliyah is home to an important Alawite religious shrine.
The massacre and its beneficiaries
When the Russian plane appeared over Daliyah and Beit Ana, “People thought that this was ‘the moment,’ so they rose up on that basis,” stated the former intelligence officer speaking with The Cradle.
Alawite insurgents attacked General Security and army positions in various areas across the coast, including Brigade 107 near Ayn al-Sharqiyah, where Bassam Hossam al-Din’s group abducted the General Security members before being killed in January.
“There was no Meqdad Fatiha or anyone else from outside, no Iranians or any others. It was purely a popular force rising up against this situation,” the former intelligence officer explains.
However, they were emboldened by promises of outside help from the US-led coalition, the Druze, and the Kurds.
The clashes at the Brigade 107 base lasted all night, but the Alawite insurgents paused the attack early the next morning, on 7 March, thinking that coalition forces would come to their aid and bomb the brigade.
“They waited two hours, but no strikes came, no support arrived. Their morale collapsed, they realized it was all lies, just a trap,” the source goes on to say.
After the fighting stopped, disillusionment spread, and the Alawite insurgents attacking the base withdrew and returned to their villages.
Al Jazeera’s role
As the fighting still raged on 6 March, Al Jazeera repeated the false reports from Turkish media claiming Alawite insurgents were receiving massive external support from Iran, Hezbollah, the Kurdish SDF, and even Assad.
The news outlet’s propaganda gave Damascus the pretext to mobilize not only formal members of military units from the Ministry of Defense, but also many informal armed factions who responded to calls from mosques to fight “jihad” against Alawites.
On the morning of 7 March, convoys of military vehicles filled with tens of thousands of Sharaa’s extremist fighters began arriving at the coast.
Because the Alawite insurgency was weak and disorganized, with no help from abroad, it was not able to provide any protection to Alawite civilians as the massacres unfolded.
Facing no resistance, Julani’s forces began systematically slaughtering any Alawite men they could find, as well as many women and children, in cities, towns, and villages across the coast, including in Jableh, Al-Mukhtariyah, Snobar, Al-Shir, and the neighborhoods of Al-Qusour in Baniyas and Datour in Latakia.
The massive scope and systematic nature of the massacres, involving such large numbers of armed men in so many locations, suggests pre-planning by Julani and his Defense Minister, Murhaf Abu Qasra – a former commander-in-chief of the HTS military wing.
A media creation
The mobilization of Julani’s forces was also aided on 6 March by new videos appearing online claiming to show Meqdad Fatiha and members of the Coastal Shield Brigade vowing to fight against the new government.
In one video, the man claiming to be Fatiha was masked (this time dressed like a character from the popular video game, Mortal Kombat, and standing against a blank background), making it impossible to know who he was and whether he was in the mountains of Latakia or in a television studio in Tel Aviv or Doha.
In a separate video, Fatiha was masked and dressed just like an ISIS militant beheading Christians on video in Libya in 2015, leading to speculation the video was fake and had been created using artificial intelligence (AI).
Another video was later released in which Fatiha appeared without a mask, saying that previous videos of him were indeed real, and not created using AI. However, the new video also appeared fake, his face, shoulders, and eyes moving in an unnatural way as he spoke.
During multiple visits to the Syrian coast, The Cradle was not able to find any Alawites who expressed support for Fatiha or believed his group was real.
The source from Daliyah states that, “No one here supports Meqdad Fatiha. We all believe he works for Julani. The Coastal Shield Brigade is fabricated.”
A former Alawite officer in Assad’s army from the Syrian coast tells The Cradle, “We only see videos of Meqdad Fatiha online. We believe he is just a media creation.”
After showing The Cradle his rotting teeth, the former officer remarks, “Do you think we are getting help from Iran or Hezbollah? I don’t even have money to fix my teeth.”
An Alawite woman whose husband and two grown sons were murdered on 7 March suggests to The Cradle that Fatiha is a fictitious person, only existing on Facebook and created by the authorities to justify the massacres.
“Who is he? Julani created him. It’s a lie,” she explains.
General Security fatalities
The mobilization of Sharaa’s extremist forces from across the country was also aided by claims that Alawite insurgents had killed 236 members of the General Security in attacks on 6 April.
Some General Security members were certainly killed, but Syrian authorities never provided any evidence for this large number, suggesting it was vastly inflated to heighten sectarian anger. When Reuters requested the names or an updated tally, Syrian officials refused to provide them.
In one case, the pro-HTS “Euphrates Shield” Telegram channel published a photo collage allegedly showing General Security members killed by “regime remnants” during the fighting.
However, one of the fighters shown in the photos quickly posted a story on his Instagram with a “laugh out loud” emoji to show he was still alive, the Syrian Democratic Observatory showed.
Israeli ambitions
On 10 March, before the victims of the massacres had been buried, i24 News published a letter claiming to be written by Alawite leaders, asking Netanyahu to send his military to protect them.
“If you come to the Syrian coast, which is predominantly Alawite, you will be greeted with songs and flowers,” the letter stated.
It also called on Israel to unite against the “Islamic tide led by Turkiye,” while asking for help in separating from “this extremist state.”
When Israel secretly “greenlit” Julani’s massacre of Druze in Suwayda in July, the goal of dividing Syria was further advanced. Many Druze are aware of the covert relationship between Damascus and Tel Aviv, but, fearing extermination, feel they have little choice but to call on Israel for protection and to establish an autonomous region in south Syria.
Three weeks after the massacres of Alawites in March, an Israeli general quietly admitted that sectarian violence in Syria benefits Tel Aviv.
“This thing where everyone is fighting everyone, and there’s an agreement with the Kurds one day, and a massacre of the Alawites the second day, and a threat to the Druze on the third day, and Israeli strikes in the south. All this chaos is, to some extent, actually good for Israel,” stated Tamir Hayman while speaking with Israeli Army Radio.
“Wish all sides good luck (but) do it quietly. Don’t talk about it,” the general added.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch is Turning New York City into a Surveillance Colony
By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | October 29, 2025
In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I investigated Zionists’ role in creating the crisis point at which New York City now finds itself: caught between a colonial elite which has commandeered government and a progressive-socialist backlash to that elite which proposes to expand government. In this report, I will trace how, in response to the progressive-socialist threat to their power, Zionists and their allies are expanding government in new and frightening directions. The leading player in this operation, like in all good intelligence ops, is not a colorful or charismatic character. But she has all of the subtler qualities—connections, management prowess, presentational understatement—that the city’s minders look for in those who hold actual power.
Jessica Tisch, the New York Police Department Commissioner since 2024 who will definitely stay on if either Zohran Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo wins the mayoralty according to public statements made by both men, is the third generation of the billionaire Zionist family that has had prominent roles in shaping the city since the 1980s. Her grandfather, Laurence Tisch, bought CBS in the 1980s not long before his brother Robert bought the New York Giants, establishing the family, which had started in hotels and movie theaters, as the owner of two of the city’s landmark organizations. In the 1990s, Laurence Tisch was a member of The Study Group, the informal philanthropic Zionist gathering co-founded by Leslie Wexner and Charles Bronfman, which led directly and indirectly to the foundation of Taglit Birthright, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and various other projects for Zionist continuity. Laurence’s son and Jessica’s father, James Tisch, is the chairman of the Board of Leows Corporation, the family’s flagship business. James’ wife and Jessica’s mother, Merryl, was the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, responsible for supervising all educational activities in the state; and is the chair of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, responsible for supervising the state university system.
Within this context of a family involved in media, finance, philanthropy, and part-time politics, Jessica Tisch, who is now 44, charted her own specific path: from security to administration to the cusp of politics with the backing of money. She started in the NYPD in the decade of the September 11 attacks; continued in the department in the 2010s; moved in the first half of the 2020s to the Sanitation Department, arguably New York’s most important after police and fire. She has returned in the mid-2020s to the NYPD as its commissioner, while also widely being considered a potential future mayor. Like Mamdani, Tisch is a product, this time a direct one, of the decades of Zionist influence that preceded her rise. Like Mamdani, rewinding Tisch’s career shows how she is the capstone to a project of military policing that began in the 1990s and 2000s but that has sharpened under pressure into a full-blown project of social control.
That project began when crime rose in New York in the 1980s and 1990s in response to displacement and homelessness facilitated by WASPs, Zionists, and their allies co-opting city government to the benefit of finance and real estate. In response, Eric Breindel, the neoconservative Zionist editor of the New York Post who had extensive connections to Wall Street, arranged for the Post to back the then-longshot Rudolph W. Guiliani as a tough-on-crime candidate, delivering him Staten Island and so the city.
At the same time, Michael Steinhardt, the Zionist financier who was integral in the reinvention of Wall Street in the 1980s, became the major donor for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which in turn was the major backer of President Bill Clinton, who shepherded to passage in Congress as his main legislative priority the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act provided newly elected Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton federal funds for law enforcement, with certain conditions attached that increased local spending on policing as well as the size of the NYPD. The NYPD’s budget increased from $1.7 billion to $3.1 billion between 1993 and 2000, also leading to increased city spending, since, under the terms of the Clinton crime legislation, to receive federal funds the city had to spend funds of its own.
During this period, “crime”—defined as everything from murder to unlicensed street vending—fell in response to across-the-board enforcement. After 2001, Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, pushed this practice to its limit with the aggressive practice of “stop and frisk” in minority neighborhoods: a daily distillation of the broader disenfranchisement the black and Latino communities of New York had been experiencing since the 1970s.
Kelly also made sure that the NYPD would benefit from post-9/11 funding of counter-terrorism measures, measures which hinged heavily on techniques for surveillance. And it was by channeling this new priority for social control that Jessica Tisch made her career beginning in 2000s. Fresh out of Harvard, she took “an analyst position available in what was then the counterterrorism bureau” of the NYPD. According to a recent profile in The New York Times:
“Kelly…did not normally meet with applicants for such entry-level jobs, but he ended up interviewing her. ‘Probably because she was a Tisch,’ he said, adding that he had been impressed with her three Harvard degrees.”
“Probably because she was a Tisch” seems like a fair assessment of why the supervisor of 55,000 employees took the time to meet a twenty-something about an entry-level position. But Kelly and Tisch also shared the promising ground of a professional focus: Kelly was committed to surveillance-as-policing, and Tisch’s main interest was data and surveillance. At the NYPD, she began “developing the Domain Awareness System, one of the world’s largest networks of security cameras, including handling contracts to build and expand it.” According to a description of this work in a recent profile of Tisch in New York Magazine, she was Domain’s driving force and Domain her career-maker:
“… Tisch, 27, was tasked with figuring out what to do with more than $100 million in unspent grant money from the federal Department of Homeland Security, which had just built a surveillance network to prevent another terror attack downtown. What if, she asked, the Domain Awareness System went citywide? And what if, instead of trying to stop a suicide bomber, the system tried to spot all kinds of crooks? What if it included the NYPD’s trove of arrest reports and criminal histories? When Tisch sent the privacy guidelines for the system to the lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, they retched…The bosses had the opposite reaction: ‘No, you’ve made it. Congratulations,’ the former colleague recalls them saying.”
Based on an initial grant of $350 million from the Department of Homeland Security and developed with Microsoft technology, the System consists today of “a surveillance network of more than 18,000 interconnected cameras—including those in the private sector—as well as law-enforcement databases.” The system, in one description, “assimilates data from several surveillance tools—license plate readers, closed-circuit television streams, facial recognition software and phone call histories—and uses it to identify people.” As these descriptions suggest, private corporations and nonprofits, for example Rockefeller University in Midtown East Manhattan, can buy in: providing their own cameras then linking them to the surveillance system run out of the NYPD. “And,” according to one report, “when Microsoft turns around and sells the technology to other cities, New York gets a cut.”
Tisch was not only one of the developers, if not the developer, of the system; she also so impressed Kelly with her tenacity dealing with the various technology sub-vendors put in play by the project that he moved her up through the ranks. (She also may have impressed Kelly with her access to funds; the nonprofit the New York Police Foundation, which her uncle chaired and where two of her family members still sit on the board, provided some of the early contributions for testing her surveillance system.) Within a decade, “she became the city’s first information technology commissioner… and within months she was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, struggling to create a contact tracing system and then a vaccine distribution system.” Throughout this time, Tisch was working with at least one like-minded colleague from a similar background. This was fellow Harvard graduate Rebecca Ulam Weiner, the granddaughter of the Zionist nuclear scientist Stanislav Ulam of the Manhattan Project, whose view of her grandfather’s work is instructive:
“As someone whose job it is to keep secrets, I often wonder whether such an experiment [as the Manhattan Project] would be possible today, scientifically or socially.”
Fast forward to November 2024, and an embattled Mayor Eric Adams, whose allies in the black community have increasingly moved away from him even as powerful Zionists have edged closer, appointed Tisch Commissioner. He did this despite vocal concerns from civil liberties advocates that, in the words of one, “It’s really alarming to see a commissioner who built her career on the infrastructure of mass surveillance.” Weiner is Tisch’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, and has let it be known that her department “relies on a mind-boggling suite of assets that Americans might otherwise assume are controlled by the CIA, FBI, DHS, Secret Service, or other agencies.” These include:
“… a legion of intelligence analysts, counterassault and dignitary-protection teams, a flotilla of boats…surveillance aircraft, the nation’s biggest bomb squad, a counter-drone unit, a remote contingent of NYPD detectives… and a network of multilingual undercover operatives…”
Among this “remote contingent” is NYPD Detective Charlie Benaim, “[whose] office could be any squad room in Brooklyn, but for years [has been] an Israeli police station near Tel Aviv,” where “Benaim’s been feeding an endless stream of information, in real time, to his bosses back at One Police Plaza.” According to Weiner, Benaim’s function is “asking the New York question, when something is happening, what would it look like it if it were to happen in New York City, and more importantly than that, how do you prevent it?” A new model for Benaim in answering these questions, apparently, is the Hamas uprising of October 7. This suggests either that the NYPD expects a coordinated attack from foreign operators; or that New York’s security leaders see the city as potentially under siege by its own displaced and ghettoized underclass and plan to respond accordingly.
Telling in this regard is the fact that Tisch’s top priority as commissioner is “doubling down on data-driven policing and surveillance,” an aim which has “sparked fierce criticism from watchdog groups that New Yorkers are living in a surveillance state.” According to New York Magazine, Tisch’s proposed reforms fall along four lines. First, she wants to expand actual surveillance capacities by expanding the city’s camera network “to include more privately owned cameras.” Second, she wants to extend the contract of one of Domain’s less reliable components, “the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system” which “may result in confirmed shootings only less than 15 percent of the time, according to the comptroller’s office,” a fact which Tisch dismisses, “arguing that something is better than nothing.” Third, she wants to use data collected “to surge police resources down to a single block,” allowing for the department to deploy overwhelming force to tackle individual incidents in small areas. (This means essentially treating city policing as counterinsurgency warfare, and it’s not too different than the LAPD tactics that led to the abuse of Rodney King and the fallout that followed.) Finally, “perhaps the biggest change is that she wants to use those same systems and processes to fight ‘chaos,’ not just crime,” meaning that minor noise disturbances or unusual behavior could qualify for police enforcement via surveillance and surges. (Again, this is a retread of the 1990s: “Giuliani-style crackdowns, only with better gear.”)
More instructively still, she feels this way despite at least one recent controversy suggesting that her policies have adverse effects on the very communities historically at the blunt end of militarized policing. According to The New York Times, in an August report, the NYPD used Domain Awareness System’s facial recognition software to identify and arrest for indecent exposure in April a 230 pound 6-foot-2 black man, Trevis Williams. The arrest was made even though a witness said that the offender was about 160 pounds and 5-foot-6 and even though “location data from [Williams’s] phone put him about 12 miles away at the time.” According to the Times, the fact that “a facial recognition program plucked his image from an array of mug shots and the woman identified him as the flasher was enough to land Williams in jail.” This is despite the fact that “other police departments… require investigators to gather more facts before putting a suspect identified by facial recognition into a photo lineup,” and despite advocacy from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to “ban… the use of facial recognition by the police because of the risk of misidentification.”
“In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change,” Williams told the Times about his experience, adding that he still gets panic attacks since his April arrest and subsequent imprisonment. The Times investigation did not report asking for a comment from the NYPD or its Commissioner. Nor did it report that, as early as 2019, 11,000 cases per year were being investigated by the NYPD with the help of facial recognition software.
Despite collateral damage from her policies, positive media profiles of “Commish Tisch” and her subordinates have been plentiful since her accession. In an April 2025 report in The News section of The New York Times, the paper had the following to say about her: She has “an unlikely and remarkable career”; is “the daughter and granddaughter of two strong women, neither of whom came from money”; “learned hard work by example”; is “talkative and purposeful, but circumspect”; is a “no-nonsense technocrat” and “incredibly competent”; commands “a huge amount of respect”; is “very businesslike,” “[takes] no guff,” and should run for mayor. New York Magazine, the city’s go-to venue for fashion and culture commentary, had run an equally complimentary profile in March of 2025 that included the same political prediction.
And, the month before New York Magazine’s profile of Tisch, Vanity Fair ran a profile of Tisch’s deputy Weiner titled “NYPD Confidential.” Headed by a black-and-white photo of Weiner flanked by members of her squad that seemed ripped from a promotional poster of Captain America, the article’s text gave its subject an equally marquee treatment, describing her as “laser focused,” “unfazed,” “poised, cultivated, pin-sharp, convivial, boundlessly curious, charmingly profane,” and “a lightning-quick study” who had “a wicked sense of humor.” All three of these profiles also emphasized, as The New York Times’ editorial board regularly emphasizes, a recent rise in crime in the city without honing in on its obvious causes: financialization, gentrification, and displacement.
The Times is owned by the Sulzberger Family, whose members are ambivalent about Zionism but who have deep connections to Zionists. (Their executive editor, Joseph Kahn, is the son of a committed Zionist corporatist and runs in the billionaire Zionist milieu; their editorial page is dominated by Jewish Zionists of all political persuasions; and the former head of the Sulzberger family wealth office now heads Bill Ackman’s.) Vanity Fair is still owned by the Newhouse Family, which, as I reported in my recent investigation on the rise of Zionist power in New York, was vital to that project thanks to its ownership of Conde Nast. New York Magazine is dependent for its scoops on access to the city’s financial and philanthropic elite, many of them Zionists—its recent profile subjects include not just Jessica Tisch but Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg and Bill Ackman. The message from these media venues seems clear: the Zionist financial powers of New York are squarely behind Jessica Tisch, and want their readers to know it.
It is not, in this context, a coincidence that the Times ran an article soon after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary citing anonymous sources to report that Mamdani was being urged to keep Tisch on if he wins the mayoralty as a “steady pair of hands.” It is also not a coincidence that this story came during a period when Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman, younger Zionist financial-philanthropic operators, were attacking Mamdani as soft-on-crime almost daily and shifting their funding focus to Mamdani’s Independent mayoral competitor, Mayor Eric Adams, to the point of personally vetting Adams’s campaign manager before the position was filled. What this suggested at the time was a pincer movement, in which attacks by Loeb and Ackman pressured Mamdani into keeping Tisch on as a sign of faith in the establishment and détente with Zionism.
And, in late October, with Mamdani still attacked by connected Zionist players for purportedly making Jews feel unsafe despite the fact that he has attracted significant Jewish support, this is exactly what occurred. On October 22, Mamdani announced, four days after Andrew Cuomo had announced the same, that he would ask Tisch to stay on should he win the election. The reported terms on which this “ask” was made are not encouraging when it comes to Mamdani’s leverage over Tisch if he is elected mayor. Details in The New York Times painted a scenario in which Mamdani had publicly (and factually erroneously) made Tisch the poster child for safety in the city without extracting any concessions from her camp in return. According to the Times,
“… Mr. Mamdani confirmed his decision during the final televised debate before the Nov. 4 election. ‘Commissioner Tisch took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,’ Mr. Mamdani said at the debate. “I’ve said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence’… Ms. Tisch’s allies have signaled for months that she would want to stay in the job regardless of the election’s outcome. [Mamdani] campaign officials declined to detail any conversations between the candidate and the commissioner, but said they were confident she would accept. Delaney Kempner, a spokeswoman for Ms. Tisch, referred a reporter back to an earlier statement from the commissioner stressing that ‘it is not appropriate for the police commissioner to be directly involved or to seem to be involved in electoral politics.’”
Tisch’s strategic mix of aggressive behind-the-scenes lobbying and Olympian public detachment sends a message: as New York Magazine put it less than twenty-four hours after Mamdani made the announcement, she is “the Heiress Who Could Make or Break the Socialist Mayor.” Not long after this article ran, Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, ended five months of ostentatious non-endorsement of Mamdani with a statement endorsing Mamdani—specifically praising his willingness to keep on Tisch. Already, then, thanks to a series of private maneuvers and public feints, Tisch has been placed in the driver’s seat: the establishment’s cooperation with Mamdani is clearly conditioned on Mamdani’s continued acceptance of her.
One difficulty of critiquing moves like these is that the conflation of “Jewish power” and New York is an old trope, in part because New York has been since the early twentieth century a Jewish city. So it should be emphasized, as I have emphasized in my previous report on this topic, that New York’s problem is not a problem of Jewish power. It is a problem of government-tied financialization at the hands of a small number of WASPs and then a small number of Zionists, and it has come at the expense of the people who live in the city, among them many Jews. Now, with a direct threat to Zionists’ influence in the person of Zohran Mamdani, the operation is out front. Zionist financiers have sent one of their own to occupy the most powerful security position in the city, and they are intent on keeping her there. If they fail to install their ally Andrew Cuomo in the mayoralty, which will give Tisch carte blanche, the prospect of them working to sabotage a Mamdani mayoralty in the lead-up to a Tisch For Mayor campaign in 2029 is a very real one.
They will likely do this much like they managed the securance of Jessica Tisch’s job: with media attacks meant to maximize pressure on Mamdani; followed by private assurances to Mamdani that the attacks will stop if concessions follow. These public-private feints, in turn, will push Mamdani into concessions which will make him lose face with his base, isolating him between an unfriendly establishment and a disillusioned electorate. (This trend is already occurring, albeit at the edges, after Mamdani’s public commitment to keeping Tisch, whom many Mamdani voters see as a threat to civil liberties.) Tisch’s allies will manage these plays with the help of The New York Times and other organs of influence (the Conde Nast publications, New York Magazine, the New York Post) which by their own admission are pining for technocratic government predicated on what they call “effective management.”
But there is another equally bad outcome that could accrue should Mamdani win the mayoralty and Tisch stay on as police commissioner. This is the fusion of the most dangerous potential aspect of socialism, total government direction of the economy, with the most dangerous potential aspect of Zionism: total techno-military colonial control. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see how, under a de facto power-sharing agreement between Mamdani and Tisch (Mamdani in charge of domestic welfare, Tisch in charge of security) the worst impulses of both systems will merge to create a city government which is totalistically involved in every aspect of its citizens’ lives, Singapore transfused with Sweden. This outcome for a city which for a century has been read as a triumph of American individualism would be, to understate the case, a seismic shift.
A New Low: Western Media Promotes ISIS-Linked Gangsters In Gaza
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | October 29, 2025
Al-Natour is the embodiment of the archetypal Palestinian collaborator. A man who portrays himself as a victim uses his own experience as a Palestinian to whitewash Israeli genocide.
On October 27, the Washington Post published an article entitled “The ceasefire created two Gazas. One will consume the other.” The author argues that “My Gaza is ready for peace” and that “Hamas is trying to destroy it”, promoting the fictitious Israeli narrative that a utopian Gaza is being made possible inside the portion of the enclave where the occupation forces remain, behind the so-called “Yellow Line”.
The article works to promote the Israeli scheme in Gaza, which has been openly endorsed by US officials, and argues in favor of only allowing reconstruction in the territory operated by Israel, alongside four primary ISIS-linked militias.
Evidently, the article makes no mention of the Israeli armed and controlled Palestinian death squads – composed of convicted drug traffickers, rapists, murderers, ISIS-linked Salafists and aid looters.
The piece is purportedly written by one Moumen al-Natour, which makes even more sense out of why there is no mention of the ISIS-linked death squads, because he himself is an armed member of one such death squad.
Al-Natour is the embodiment of the archetypal Palestinian collaborator. A man who portrays himself as a victim uses his own experience as a Palestinian to whitewash Israeli genocide and lies about every detail to turn himself into a “peace activist” opposed to armed resistance, while simultaneously partaking in activities designed to further the extermination of his own people.
Take, for example, the following excerpt from the ISIS-linked death squad collaborator’s alleged opinion piece:
“My Gaza, where I wish to live, exists between Israel and the yellow line. There, the war is over and change buzzes in the air. People have access to food, medicine and electricity. And other signs of normality are beginning to return, such as some children going back to school. This is the Gaza that is waiting with anticipation to work with a new civil administration and an international protection force that will keep the peace as Israel withdraws. Few there speak of Hamas with any warmth or positivity. For once they no longer have to.”
The territory spoken of here is the area of Gaza where Israel and four ISIS-linked collaborator gangs operate; the only civilians there are the families of the death squads. Any other Palestinians attempting to reach their homes inside this area are bombed or gunned down by Israeli forces.
This territory, on the other side of Israel’s “Yellow Line,” is supposed to be 53% of Gaza, yet in reality is anywhere between 54-58% of the territory, due to Israel violating the ceasefire agreement and operating deeper than agreed upon inside the supposed withdrawal zone.
In addition to this, Israel continues its daily demolition operations against the remaining Palestinian civilian infrastructure inside the territory, again in violation of the ceasefire agreement. The proof of this has been openly published by Israeli soldiers who post videos of their demolition work on social media.
As for access to food, medicine, and electricity, these are provided to the collaborator gangs by Israel and are something they have not lacked during the war. While the people of Gaza were being starved for three months straight earlier this year, al-Natour’s militia friends were living lives of relative luxury.
Not only were al-Natour’s collaborator gang not starved, the so-called “Popular Forces” that he is part of, led by ISIS-linked convicted drug trafficker Yasser Abu Shabab, were living off of the supplies they stole from humanitarian aid trucks and looted from Gaza’s civilian population.
That is what these militant organizations began receiving Israeli backing to do – before being repurposed, armed and given direct combat missions by the IDF and Shin Bet – to rob humanitarian aid trucks and help enforce Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza. All of these collaborator gangs were tasked with involvement in such activities, and many of their militants continue to loot.
Meanwhile, in the Western corporate media and its allied Arab publications, al-Natour and his ilk are portrayed as the peace activists opposed to Hamas tyranny. For al-Natour’s part, he was one of the founders of the “We Want To Live” movement, which claimed its mission was to improve living conditions inside the besieged coastal enclave, described by UN experts as “unlivable” back in 2020.
As an activist, he was accused of working on behalf of Israel and spreading a message critical of Hamas, leading to his arrest. Whether he was a collaborator back then is under dispute, yet, during the genocide, he and his anti-Hamas message were picked up by a media outlet called Jasoor News.
This media outlet’s editor-in-chief is a Washington based journalist, named Hadeel Oueis, who routinely shares anti-Hamas content, including from the Center for Peace Communications (CPC). Oueis also expresses support for the current Syrian leadership of Ahmed al-Shara’a.
The CPC has received considerable donations from the Adelson Family Foundation of Israel’s richest billionaire and top Trump campaign donor, Miriam Adelson. For Jasoor News’ part, it is explicitly anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah, anti-Ansarallah, while publishing pieces in favor of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Western Media Support For ISIS-linked Groups
The recent propaganda opinion piece published by the Washington Post comes as little surprise, as it was the first Western publication to publish an interview with ISIS-linked militia leader Yasser Abu Shabab in November of 2024, when Israel began to give the aid looting gang a facelift and begin promoting them as a “grassroots” anti-Hamas resistance force.
In that WP piece, Abu Shabab claims victim status and that he looted aid out of necessity, expressing that “Hamas has left us with nothing”, despite his gang of collaborators clearly being the only group of Gazans who actually did have something during the genocide. Abu Shabab was used to do Israel’s bidding, blocking the flow of aid to civilians and lived under the protection of the Israeli military while doing so.
Back in July, the Wall Street Journal then published an opinion piece entitled “Gazans are finished with Hamas”, which it claimed was written by Yasser Abu Shabab himself. This was despite the fact that local sources in Gaza attest to Abu Shabab not only being unable to write in English, but also being illiterate and incapable of writing such a piece in Arabic too.
According to anonymous sources belonging to Palestinian journalist Muhammad Shehada, the latest Washington Post piece was published as explicit Israeli propaganda. “Journalists told me a pro-Israeli PR firm in DC is the one that pushed for this propaganda article to be published,” he wrote on X [formerly Twitter], adding that “my sources said there’s a chance the firm is the one that even wrote the op-ed”.
All of this works as part of an Israeli propaganda campaign aimed at legitimizing the agenda to create two separate systems of rule in Gaza, through spreading lies about Hamas and egregiously exaggerating the brutality of its Security Force crackdown on collaborators.
Israel is currently violating the Gaza ceasefire, not only through its daily bombings and sniping of civilians, but also through its refusal to allow sufficient aid to reach the civilian population. The Israelis had committed to allowing 400 aid trucks into Gaza for the first five days of the ceasefire before an unlimited amount afterward, later committing to permit 600 a day to enter, yet have allowed in a daily average of less than 90.
The idea, endorsed by the United States, is to deploy an international invasion force in the Gaza Strip, which will work alongside the ISIS-linked death squads to disarm Hamas. Once the Israelis withhold construction materials and equipment from entering the populated areas of the territory, where Hamas remains in power, they will then offer the civilian population a choice between entering their version of Gaza under occupation, or remaining where they are to starve and rot.
Hamas, along with all the other Palestinian factions, has agreed to hand Gaza over to an interim administration of technocratic governance, but will not disarm until the creation of a Palestinian State. Israel will not allow for this and instead uses its collaborators to fight for its own agenda, depending on its propaganda that is being prominently spread by its Palestinian media allies as a means of justifying this approach.
Inside Gaza, these ISIS-linked gangsters have no popular support. In fact, the vast preponderance of the population supports the Security Forces campaign to stamp out these groups. Despite the propagandists and militia members claiming that they are fighting a tyrannical regime that is killing its own people, the population of Gaza do not believe this narrative and hence will not support such a scheme.
The current round of propaganda against Hamas mirrors the regime change rhetoric used to overthrow countless governments in the region, beginning with Iraq. For example, during the campaign to justify the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Western governments and Washington-based think-tanks paid Iraqi “experts” and “peace activists” to justify the invasion of their own country.
Every time, the regime change script is the same. Except in this case, it is unlikely to succeed due to the grievances of Gazans with Hamas not matching those of their regional neighbors. This, however, will not stop the constant chorus of lies, exaggerations, and distortions from Washington and Tel Aviv’s “peace activists” who turn out to be armed members of ISIS-linked gangs and “Palestinian analysts” who just so happen to work for Zionist think-tanks.
These individuals speak with the language of “peace”, “reconciliation,” and “forgiving Israel”, but are ultimately soulless propagandists who weaponize their identity to serve an agenda aimed at destroying their own people. They value nothing more than status, power, and financial gain.
In the pro-genocide Western corporate media, these voices will continue to be elevated and their claims will never be fact-checked, because these outlets function as stenographers for the US and Israeli governments.
Leaked: Britain’s Ukrainian sniper training plot
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | October 29, 2025
Since the Ukraine proxy war’s eruption, a shadowy cabal of British academics has secretly advised the US National Security Council on escalatory strategies. Many of their recommendations – some inspired by ISIS – have been adopted by Washington. It’s uncertain whether one of the boldest proposals – to train Ukrainian snipers on American soil – was one way or another greenlit. More gravely, this effort was intended to set a trap for the Biden administration, luring the US into deeper involvement in the conflict.
A leaked document, authored in April 2022 by St. Andrews University lecturer and the British cabal’s chief NSC contact Marc DeVore, sets out a bold vision for Washington’s “non-profit associations, civil society and private sector businesses” to tutor Ukrainian sharpshooters. US citizens were reputed to possess “the wherewithal and… motivation to provide such training,” while DeVore judged Donbass’ “slow-moving” battlefield – with its emphasis on “urban combat” – to be “an environment ideal for snipers.”
DeVore believed neither Ukraine nor Russia were “well-provided with snipers”, due to their common military “Soviet heritage”. By contrast, the US was “ideally placed to help Ukraine fill this ‘sniper gap’”, due to the country’s “surfeit of snipers, including US Army and Marine Corps veterans with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the police snipers belonging to large numbers of SWAT teams.” Moreover, DeVore venerated “high standards of civilian marksmanship” in the US, due to “large” national networks of “rifle ranges and shooting clubs.”
The ability to purchase “the world’s most competitive sniper rifles” legally Stateside was an added bonus. Nonetheless, the true icing on the cake, per DeVore, was triangulating the Biden administration into formally endorsing Western arming and training of Ukrainian forces. The academic bemoaned how to date, Washington had been “timid” in offering direct assistance to Kiev, such as avoiding “overtly providing heavy weaponry”, due to “excessive fears of Russian retaliation/escalation,” and a “desire to maintain…deniability” in delivering such assistance.
As such, DeVore believed the sniper training program would offer war-ravenous Republicans the opportunity to “pressure and shame the [US] government into more overtly training Ukrainian forces,” and “openly [criticise] the President for not using the government’s resources to do so.” The academic predicted Biden would “respond to this criticism by publicly revealing more of the US government’s training activities.” That, combined with “Russia’s likely non-response”, would “open the door for the US to further increase the training and equipment it is providing,” DeVore fantasised.
“However, the Biden Administration [responds] to the private-sector training would hand hawkish Republicans a victory,” he forecast. A US-based Ukrainian sniper training program “would also give Republican politicians valuable talking points” for attacking the President. Were the White House to resultantly increase open support for Kiev, “then Republicans could claim credit for forcing him to do so.” If Biden alternatively “sought to circumscribe the training,” gun rights organisations and opposition governors could “wage a popular legal battle against the federal government” to force its reinstatement.
Both would “stand to benefit substantially from the positive public relations” generated both by overseeing the sniper training program, and the ensuing opportunity to “embarrass the Biden administration much more” over its supposedly lackluster backing for the proxy conflict. Still, the ultimate goal was to ensure “much more widespread training of Ukrainian military personnel in the West.” US acquiescence was “necessary for NATO to be able to enhance Ukrainian military capabilities to such a level that Ukraine can bring this war to an acceptable conclusion.”
DeVore drew inspiration for the project from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, when US military magazine Soldier Of Fortune instigated sniper training for Bosniaks and Croats fighting Belgrade’s forces. The outlet, read by wannabe mercenaries and US army veterans, was founded by Robert K. Brown, a retired Lieutenant Colonel “who felt deeply sympathetic to the Croatians and Bosnians fighting for their independence.” Brown thus bankrolled and encouraged readers “with sniping experience” to travel to the region, “and organize a crash course” for sharpshooters.
Locals who were “pretty good shots” were identified, “and swiftly trained…to a standard where they contributed powerfully” to their wars against the Yugoslav army. Moreover, pupils “wrote articles on their activities for Soldier of Fortune, selling magazines and raising awareness” of their independence struggles. DeVore sought to repeat the success of this “non-governmental” training on a “larger scale”. He envisaged enlisting “firearms related non-profits and businesses… to contribute to bringing this about.”
DeVore believed “ideally”, a “major national gun rights” organisation in the US, such as the National Rifle Association “or one of its rivals” would “play a coordinating role.” He foresaw “rifle ranges [being] asked to donate range time, ammunition makers to contribute bullets, and individuals with relevant marksmanship or sniper experience to volunteer their skills.” Pro-proxy war state governors “could also publicly embrace the movement by allowing state forests and National Guard facilities to be used for training”:
“Launching a civil society sniper training program in the [US] could therefore benefit from ideal circumstances, including; a networking of long range ranges where marksmen can be trained; highly skilled snipers and firearms instructors capable of teaching Ukrainians both the fieldcraft and weapons skills they need, and; a significant Ukrainian diaspora in the USA and Canada who could provide volunteers for training.”
DeVore went on to declare that “a large number” Ukrainians living abroad “who want to fight” in the proxy war were “being held back by their [lack] of experience,” suggesting “offering specialist training to… volunteers” among Kiev’s diaspora. Once taught, they would “return home with valuable skills, materially aiding Ukraine’s cause.” More generally, “if friendly governments and civilians help by training critical specialists, it will speed up the process of forming new units and make those that are formed significantly more effective.”
DeVore believed the training should “take place in a two stage process.” First, students would be taught “marksmanship”, during which they fired “thousands of rounds of ammunition to develop the necessary accuracy, rifle maintenance and range estimation skills” at rifle ranges across the US. “The infrastructure and teaching skills needed for this variety of training are fairly common,” he wrote, adding, “the dispersed nature of the training would simplify the accommodation of trainees,” with only a “small number” of pupils housed “near each individual range”.
Once trainees achieved “an adequate level of marksmanship,” they would be schooled by former snipers “in the more specialized skills of camouflage, concealment, infiltration, stalking and other forms of tradecraft.” DeVore proposed conducting this phase “in a combination of forested lands and simulated urban environments” – “large disused factories such as exist in the upper Midwest would be ideal for this purpose.” Upon completing this cycle, “snipers will be transported to Ukraine, where they can put their new-found skills to use.”
DeVore suggested “positive publicity” from being associated with the program “would be a major inducement for guns rights groups” due to “Financial corruption scandals and the need to defend permissive firearms laws in the wake of mass shootings,” which have “tarnished the image” of these organisations at home and abroad. “Training volunteer snipers for a popular war would provide a public relations bonanza for the organization that spearheads the effort,” the academic mused.
If training for Ukrainian snipers was provided on US soil, it wasn’t conducted in the highly public, politicised manner DeVore advocated. Nonetheless, the mainstream media has acknowledged Kiev’s sharpshooters are dependent on high-end American-made rifles and ammunition, and ongoing shipments of this equipment are no secret. Yet, the profusion of US sniper rifles on the battlefields of Donbass has failed to tilt the frontline in Ukraine’s favour one inch – in the precise manner of so many other British-influenced and concocted proxy war grand schemes.
As this journalist has extensively documented, all Kiev’s gravest military disasters, such as the October 2023 – June 2024 Krynky catastrophe, were planned in London. That effort saw wave after wave of British-trained Ukrainian marines attempt to secure a beachhead in Russian-occupied territory, before marching on Crimea and outright victory in the war. Planning was heavily-informed by a desire to recreate the Normandy landings – D-Day – based on fantastical, Hollywood conceptions of that operation. Coincidentally, so too was DeVore’s sniper training program.
In the leaked document, DeVore suggested his plan would have significant political and public appeal due to “the popularity of fictional resistance narratives, going back to Red Dawn.” In that movie, a gang of American teenage guerrillas successfully beat back an invasion of the US by Soviet forces – a compelling filmic narrative, but hardly a basis for actual war-fighting tactics, one might reasonably think. Such are the dangers of outsourcing battle strategy to academics thousands of miles removed from the frontline, with no military experience.
New Hungarian play shows key Orbán ally locked in box and beaten to death
By Liz Heflin | Remix News | October 29, 2025
A new play in Budapest, written and directed by Béla Pintér, shows a character being put in a box and beaten to death.
As graphic and perhaps unappealing as that may be for many theater-goers, there is an even bigger problem with “Kabuki”: Everyone agrees the character is made up to look like Maria Schmidt, a major ally of Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán and director of a few institutions, namely, the 20th Century Institute, the 21st Century Institute, and the House of Terror Museum.
As the opposition-friendly portal 444 wrote: “But then everything gets really rough when the Fidesz oligarch, Schanda (!) Vera, who looks like Mária Schmidt, asks the poet to be their party’s candidate. The man (…) reluctantly admits that he is unable to run, as he finds the way the government party is treating the martyred (Russian opposition leader) Alexei Navalny so outrageous. The woman is completely upset about this, as she doesn’t think Navalny is worth anything and believes that Russia has free elections, unlike the West.”
The portal continues, stating that “the woman annoys him so much” that he “throws her into a large box and beats her to death with a stick.”
One commentary in Mandiner hit home as to the boundaries being crossed “in the name of art.”
“Béla Pintér’s latest play, in which the beating of the director of the House of Terror Museum is played out on stage, is not art: it is at once hate speech, political incitement, and moral corruption. The play doesn’t make you think, it doesn’t invite dialogue – it just hits you. Both literally and figuratively.
“For someone to dramatize the death of a living, public figure and elevate it to a theatrical experience is not a brave gesture, but a tasteless, inhumane provocation,” wrote Katalin Szily, a member of Fidesz’s coalition partner, KDNP.
“Béla Pintér and his company have now abused this responsibility. This is not satire, not social criticism, but cold cynicism and intellectual vandalism. And the viewer, who watches and applauds, unwittingly becomes part of this ritual of hatred,” she continued.
“Where is the line? Where do we draw the line? Tomorrow, maybe they’ll stage the execution of politicians and journalists and applaud?”
Szily also poignantly asks, “Where, oh where, are the voices in the name female solidarity?”
Author Gabor Bokor also wrote: “Béla Pintér is an important figure in the Hungarian theater world, a pioneer of alternative stage plays, with which he has gained many fans.”
“We can think whatever we want about Mária Schmidt’s statements, we can criticize her in a play, this is part of artistic freedom, but I beg you: Kill her?” he asks.
How Israel-First Jewish Americans plan to re-monopolise the narratives on Palestine
By Jamal Kanj | MEMO | October 27, 2025
The nature of the United States’ relationship with Israel defies logic and reason. It is a parasitic one-sided benefit, entangled in the tentacles of organised influence, manipulation, financial power, and media control. Israel contributes next to nothing of tangible benefit to America’s security, strategic value, or economy, yet Washington continues to design its foreign policy and moral compass around Israel. It is so absurd it borders on sorcery.
A relationship driven by an Israel-first agenda that extends beyond the halls of Congress into the very architecture of the disinformation system. It reshapes how Americans think and how they view the world: through Congress, through newsrooms, through algorithms, and through paid “influencers,” one at a time. To that end, American media and entertainment industries serve as essential tools for molding the nation’s political landscape and American culture. Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz, captured this intent candidly in a 2015 email to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, writing, “We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture.”
A decade later, that vision is maturing. Israel-first Oracle founder Larry Ellison is now poised to acquire major show business studios and news outlets. His son, David Ellison, has become the head of Paramount and CBS through the Skydance–Paramount merger. This is while Ellison senior is in talks to purchase Warner Bros., its film studios, and CNN.
As a major media owner and influential figure in political campaigns, Ellison has a well-documented history of coordinating with Israeli government officials. Evidence of this surfaced recently in hacked emails published by Drop Site News and Responsible Statecraft. In 2015, in an email exchange, Israel’s then–ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, asked Ellison if Senator Marco Rubio had “passed his scrutiny.” Ellison assured him that Rubio “will be a great friend for Israel,” later donating $5 million for Rubio’s presidential primary campaign. Rubio didn’t pass Ellison’s scrutiny as an American patriot; he passed it for Israel.
Under the ownership of Israel-first billionaires, American media outlets have become revolving doors for “embedded” Zionist shaping public perception. Case in point is Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, and the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss is described as “ardent supporter of Israel” who has used her platform to whitewash the Israeli genocide and starvation campaign in Gaza. She is now bringing those talking points from a fringe outlet straight into one of the nation’s major news organizations.
Ellison and other Israel-first donors like Miriam Adelson, who gave Trump’s campaign $100 million, have one single focus: who is best to represent Israel’s interests in Washington. Even Trump, who brands himself as an “America First” president, admits as much telling the Israeli Knesset that his major donor, Adelson, loves Israel more than America.
In addition to traditional media, social media has become the latest arena for influence by Israel-first power brokers. TikTok stands out as the first major platform not owned or controlled by Israel-first investors. For this reason, Tik Tok was possibly the only major social media outlet that escaped the Israeli managed algorithm. It is no coincidence that Israeli officials, along with Israel-first Jewish American politicians and media pundits, have amplified claims of “data security risks” to justify efforts to either shut TikTok down or take control of its messaging.
Leading the push to acquire TikTok are none other than Israel-first Ellison and Murdoch families. The same Israel-first billionaires whose influence extends across media, technology, and politics. The TikTok debate has little to do with data security and everything to do with Israeli narrative security. The concern was never Chinese access to American data, but rather the inability of the Israel-first actors to manipulate TikTok’s algorithm and content flow. Ironically, even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu applauded the planned takeover of TikTok, calling it “the most important purchase going on right now.” “Weapons change over time,” he told a group of Israeli “digital warriors.” “The most important ones are on social media.”
The consequences reach far beyond the newsroom. A Responsible Statecraft investigation revealed that Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been quietly paying American social media influencers up to $7,000 per post to push pro-Israel content without any disclosure. In other words, US information space is being systematically infiltrated by undisclosed foreign propaganda.
What we are witnessing is not just the manufacturing of consent, but a corporate and money colonization of truth. With Ellison’s empire controlling these platforms, Weiss’s like controlling the newsroom, and Israel’s ministries funding the feeds, the American mind is a victim of engineered illusion. This is not a mere media bias. It is institutionalised propaganda disguised as “mainstream journalism.”
Voltaire once wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” For decades, Israel and its enablers have convinced Americans of the absurd: that religion grants Europeans ancestral rights to the Middle East, a nuclear-armed occupier is a victim, and genocide is “self-defence.”
America’s real test of democracy is not on the battlefields, but in confronting AIPAC and Israel-first influence over our executive and legislative branches, the curated news, and most dangerously, the creeping effort to stifle academic freedom in our universities, sealing the colonisation of the American mind.
The intersection of political influence and media ownership raises concerns not only about the extent of its reach, but in how seamlessly it blends into the cultural and political mainstream, making foreign interests appear as domestic consensus. The merging of political power and Israel-first money has reduced US media to an instrument of ideological conformity. Now with Israel-first Fox News, combined with Ellison’s expanding media empire monopolising the narrative, America will finally have its version of the Israel-Pravda.
Western journalists know they have a case to answer for their betrayal of Gaza, and it frightens them
By Samuel Geddes | Al Mayadeen | October 24, 2025
Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and former Middle East Bureau chief for The New York Times, Christopher Hedges, this week delivered the Edward Said memorial lecture in Australia. He had also been invited to address the country’s national “Press Club” in which he was to highlight the overwhelming moral failures of Western establishment media outlets, chiefly by amplifying Israeli propaganda and undermining the credibility of journalists in Gaza, most of whom “Israel” has subsequently killed in its decimation of the territory’s population.
It shouldn’t really have come as a surprise then, when the Press Club rescinded its invitation to Hedges on the grounds of “balancing out” its programming. Whether or not the withdrawal was directly influenced by Israeli pressure, the collective media aristocracy of the country would hardly have looked forward to the prospect of an actual, decorated reporter scathingly indicting them to their faces on their systematic malpractice and dereliction of duty that has contributed to perhaps the definitive atrocity of the 21st century.
Stalwart ABC journalist David Marr came out to defend “The Club” in a radio interview with a furious Chris Hedges. Rather than seek to engage with the content of what his speech would have been, Marr set about using his training as a barrister to ambush the real journalist in the room, smearing the sponsorship of his tour by a Palestine advocacy group as a “fundamental breaking of the rules,” according to his definition of journalism.
Beneath the sniveling pettiness and affected outrage of his attacks on Hedges, lurked a palpable sense of indignation that anyone, least of all a decorated journalist, would attack his “club” of establishment approved media personalities for having not done their job, to the point of betraying those Gazans practicing journalism in its purest form.
Marr, whose career is not particularly distinguished by international reporting, much less from a warzone, attempted to impugn Hedges’ authority on Gaza (where he lived for seven years) by pointing out that he hadn’t been in the territory since 2005 and hence his lack of recent experience there might not have measured up to the Club’s exacting standards.
The substance, to the degree there was any to Marr’s arguments, was that those organizations, Sky News, CNN and Reuters, by privileging Israeli talking points about the victims of their attacks, was merely standard due journalistic diligence of including “Israel’s” “perspective” in the interests of balance.
Hedges immediately and rightfully fired back that the job of a journalist is to tell the truth, not to balance it out with lies. “Israel’s” excuses and misdirection do, of course, merit being referred to, but not in a way that explicitly lends them credibility, by literally headlining the report.
What Marr evidently did not seem to understand was that Hedges is not saying that Western journalists manipulate or distort the truth. It is that they systematically amplify Israeli narratives which they know to be false, in a way that drowns out the truth of the story. This creates a false equivalence between Palestinian and Israeli “narratives.” It is precisely this mixing in of lies with truth that allowed “Israel” to get away with killing almost all professional reporters working in Gaza, along with untold numbers of other civilians.
While culpability is by no means exclusive to the Western mainstream press, it is unquestionably responsible for curating a global media discourse that manufactures the kind of doubt and hesitation that has permitted a livestreamed genocide to be perpetrated with full state complicity without consequence.
Perhaps the only valuable insight to be drawn from Marr’s affected and clearly unsuccessful attempt to pillory a journalist worth the title is that leading Western career journalists are, on some level, aware of their complicity. Like the endlessly weaponized accusations of anti-Semitism against opponents of the Israeli regime, it is not borne out of real anger but of a desperate attempt to intimidate those speaking the truth into silence.
There will inevitably come a point at which countless individuals and institutions in Western societies will be called to answer for their conduct during this genocide. That realization seems only now to be tentatively dawning on them.
Pursuing Net Zero Makes the UK Vulnerable to Bad Weather, BBC, Not Climate Change
By Linnea Lueken | ClimateRealism | October 21, 2025
A recent article at the BBC, “Government told to prepare for 2C warming by 2050,” claims that the United Kingdom needs to prepare for increasing extreme weather as the planet approaches 2°C warming. This is false in its framing. Although it’s always a good idea to harden infrastructure against weather, the UK is not suffering more extreme weather due to human emissions of carbon dioxide, and the recommendation of attempting to prevent temperature rise is not going to help anyone.
The BBC’s post discusses a letter written by the UK government’s “Climate Change Committee” (CCC), which the BBC reports said, “[t]he country was ‘not yet adapted’ to worsening weather extremes already occurring at current levels of warming, ‘let alone’ what was expected to come.”
The CCC asked the government to “set out a framework of clear long-term objectives” to prevent further temperature rise, with new targets every five years and departments “clearly accountable” for delivering those goals. It warned that “a global warming level of 2C would have significant impact on the UK’s weather, with extreme events becoming more frequent and widespread.”
These include increases in heatwaves, droughts, floods, and longer wildfire seasons.
These claims are fearmongering, and no amount of deindustrialization – which is what’s implied by the “objectives to prevent further temperature rise”—will stop bad weather from happening, nor will it have any measurable impact on global average temperature.
The simple fact is that the UK contributes a very small amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which would in theory contribute an even smaller amount to warming. According to emissions data, the global share of all UK carbon dioxide emissions is 0.88 percent. Not even 1 percent. Eliminating UK emissions would do absolutely nothing to slow or stop any amount of warming that could be connected to human emissions, if they are, in fact, driving temperature changes.
On top of that, data do not show that weather is becoming more extreme in the UK.
The BBC claims that global warming will increase the wildfire season in the UK, and presumably they believe it must have already done so during the past 150 years of planetary warming. A longer wildfire season should result in more fires. Available data, however, does not show that wildfires are getting more frequent or more intense in the UK. Satellite data from Copernicus show no trend at all.

Chart of United Kingdom yearly burned area and number of fires from Copernicus
For another example, looking at Central England as this Climate Realism post did, the number of days per year breaching 25°C (77°F) show no rising trend, nor does the measured highest daily maximum.
Long term historical data for Europe show that drought is likewise not worse today than it was during the Renaissance, long before industrialization.
What is really notable is that Europe alone has actually already warmed 2°C since about 1820, according to historic European temperature averages, but no catastrophic change in weather has occurred. (See figure below)

Berkeley Earth average European temperature showing a 2.0°C rise since about 1820. Source: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/europe
Weather isn’t getting worse, but bad weather does still happen. The UK’s largest industrial solar facility, for example, blighting the landscape of Anglesey, North Wales, was recently destroyed by a bad storm. That should be enough to give government agencies pause when it comes to at least some net-zero policies, but the real point is that hardening infrastructure against weather should be a priority regardless of climate change. Bad weather will occur, and it will wreck fragile facilities, including solar complexes.
Hardening against weather extremes, which always have and always will exist, is just common sense. As technology develops and new ways of protecting against bad weather are discovered (like the invention of air conditioning) they should be implemented where they can be, as they can be. Achieving net zero – especially for a country that emits negligible amounts of greenhouse gases anyway—will not save the UK from bad weather events.
As a news organization, the BBC should not carry water for its government or government advisory boards that want to continue wasting money on futile “objectives to prevent further temperature rise” when direct efforts to improve infrastructure and harden it against weather extremes, which have happened throughout history, would be far more effective in saving lives and reducing harm.
Hungary blasts ‘fake news’ about Putin-Trump meeting
RT | October 22, 2025
The Western media will continue to spread “fake news” aimed at derailing a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has warned.
Several outlets reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed White House officials, that plans for the meeting in the Hungarian capital had been put “on hold.”
Responding to the claims, Szijjarto took to X to warn that from the moment the meeting was announced following a phone call between Putin and Trump last week, “it was obvious that many would do everything possible to stop it from happening.”
“The pro-war political elite and their media always behave this way before events that could prove decisive between war and peace,” he added.
According to the foreign minister, it will be the same in the run-up to the talks in Budapest. “Until the summit actually takes place, expect a wave of leaks, fake news, and statements claiming that it will not happen,” Szijjarto said.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov had earlier called the claims “infodumps,” intended to disrupt diplomatic progress on settling the Ukraine conflict. “EU and NATO countries are seeking to torpedo everything,” he said.
EU officials have publicly claimed that they would welcome another Putin-Trump meeting. However, El Pais has reported that behind closed doors, Brussels – which continues to support Ukraine and urge increased pressure on Russia – views the summit as a “political nightmare.”
On Tuesday, the Financial Times cited an unnamed EU diplomat as saying “no one likes it,” and that “we are all grinning through our teeth whilst saying this is fine.”
In the same article, the FT claimed that the talks in the Hungarian capital have been “canceled,” and that a White House official has said there are no plans for a Putin-Trump summit “in the immediate future.”
Russian presidential aide Kirill Dmitriev rejected the report, accusing the FT of “twisting” the comments by its source. “Preparations continue” for the Budapest summit, he wrote on X.
