By Ahmed Adel | April 12, 2023
The Ukrainian military is planning a new spring offensive, which will reportedly begin between Orthodox Easter on April 16 and Labour Day on May 9. This expected offensive has received much international media attention, particularly because of the bold and bombastic claims made by Ukrainian officials, such as the fallacy that Ukrainian troops will reach Crimea within seven months. However, a leaked US intelligence document found that a shortage of troops, ammunition and equipment could cause the Ukrainian military to fall “well short” of their goals.
It is recalled that Ukraine unveiled on April 2 a 12-point plan on how to integrate Crimea into the country after conquering the peninsula from Russia. However, Washington is sceptical that it can be achieved, meaning that this planned offensive is just a method to secure more weapons, funding and interest from the West.
The leaked document, labelled “top secret,” gave a bleak assessment from early February and warned of significant “force generation and sustainment shortfalls.” More alarmingly for Kiev is that such an offensive will result in only “modest territorial gains.” This leak obviously provides a more realistic assessment of the war in Ukraine, which is why Washington is scrambling and threatening journalists to not publish the contents of the leaks as it obviously contradicts previous claims made by the State Department and their controlled media apparatus.
Most importantly perhaps is that many of the documents are dated to February and March, meaning most of the information is current and relates to the awaited Ukrainian spring offensive.
According to the Washington Post, the leaked document predicts that the Ukrainian military will only achieve “modest success” despite Kiev’s strategy revolving around capturing areas already liberated by Russia in Donbass, while at the same time pushing south to cut the land bridge between Russia proper and Crimea.
The near impossibility of the offensive, according to the document, is because of the potency of entrenched Russian defences, as well as “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies” which will probably “strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive.”
The Washington Post said that the leaks “reveal profound concerns about Ukraine’s readiness to withstand a Russian offensive” while “beyond the leaked document, US officials said the prospects for a modest outcome in the spring offensive also were reinforced in a classified assessment by the National Intelligence Council” which “found that Ukraine was unlikely to recapture as much territory as Kyiv did last fall.”
Although a senior Ukrainian official did not dispute the contents of the leak, another senior official said the revelations were unlikely to compromise the planned spring offensive, saying: “It’s been obvious to everyone since November that the next counteroffensive will be focused on the south, first Melitopol and then Berdyansk. But the exact place — we can change that the week before.”
Perhaps the most interesting changes since the leaks were published is a begrudging acknowledgement in Western mainstream media that the situation is not desperate for Russia, as people have been led to believe since the conflict began, and rather it is the Ukrainian military suffering from significant shortages.
Considering the Washington Post’s propensity to disseminate Ukrainian disinformation and fake news, the newspaper surprisingly acknowledged that “the difficult fight against Russia has exhausted Ukraine’s troops and hardware, making every day the war drags on an advantage to the larger Russian military.”
This is a point that has been argued for well over a year by military experts: Russia has all the time in the world to fight this war on its own terms; Ukraine does not have time as its military is exhausting, Ukrainian civilians are war weary, and European citizens are suffering from a self-inflicted economic and cost-of-living crisis.
As the newspaper noted, “the prospect of pouring billions of dollars into a military stalemate with only incremental gains in one direction or another could weaken the resolve” of those who are backing the Kiev regime, particularly Europe and the US, who could possibly sharpen “calls for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.”
This too will prove difficult though as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has endlessly promised a total victory, including the conquest of Crimea. This is obviously a delusional belief that will never come to pass, and rather it is a fantasy that Zelensky must maintain to continue receiving Western funds and weapons.
None-the-less, as the latest Washington Post article exposes, prospects for success, even with the arrival of thousands of Western-trained Ukrainian soldiers, are very low. This suggests that there could be a catalyst for a narrative shift in Western media, especially if the expected offensive fizzles out to nothingness after making some initial gains.
Yet, as already said, none of these revelations should be considered shocking or surprising if one objectively looks at events in Ukraine.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
April 12, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
A statement by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network:
On Saturday, 8 April, nearly 1,000 people marched through the streets of Berlin in solidarity with Palestine. The reality of this demonstration was that it was strong and organized, an expression of outrage and internationalism against the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed against the Palestinian people by the Israeli occupation regime.
Despite the presence of an excessively large number of police as well as Arabic translators specifically brought by the police to surveil the crowd, there were no incidents reported by anyone while the demonstration took place. Instead, images of the demonstration spread around the world, a sign that Palestinians, Arabs, and internationalists in Germany have not forgotten the ongoing injustice in Palestine.
As always, when there is a large demonstration for Palestine, and particularly when the Palestinian and Arab community in Berlin speaks out for justice and against racism and repression, the attacks and attempts to criminalize the demonstration soon follow. We have seen this same rhetoric play out time and time again, and every time a new pretext is used to incite the suppression of the Palestinian voice in Berlin — as well as the suppression of all voices for justice.
This time, the pretext is a sensationalized video that is widely circulated by German media. The video in question contains deliberate translation errors, open demonization of Palestinians in general and Samidoun Network in particular, and openly vilifies political prisoners on hunger strike fighting blatantly political charges as civilians before occupation military courts, elderly political prisoners being murdered in Israeli prisons due to medical neglect, and child prisoners. The video attempts to highlight a single voice allegedly shouting an anti-Semitic slogan during the demonstration. The individual that allegedly shouted this statement is never shown in the video, they were not joined by any other person, the chant did not come from the front of the demonstration nor over the microphone, and this individual voice in a mass demonstration of a thousand people just happened to be close enough to these “journalists” for them to pick up his chant and use it to launch an extensive smear campaign against organizing for Palestine in Germany.
The identity of this person is entirely unclear, as is their reason for shouting this or even whether they were a participant in the demonstration at all. One thing is clear: they had nothing to do with the organization, direction, leadership or political framework of the mobilization and this statement does not reflect our clear anti-racist, anti-colonial vision for a liberated Palestine. Every single Palestinian demonstration in Germany is routinely and falsely targeted and smeared as anti-Jewish, when it is in fact anti-racist and pro-liberation. This is also being used to try to criminalize Samidoun, our member organizations and our initiatives in other countries thousands of kilometers away, which shows the true intentions of this campaign.
This smear tactic aims at putting in question our clear stance against anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, and by extent, our natural stance against the statement allegedly shouted by a single individual in the vicinity of the demonstration. Principled organization for Palestine is by definition anti-Zionist, against this racist and colonial system that oppresses and attempts at eliminating the Palestinian people. And we are joined in this struggle with our anti-zionist Jewish comrades, because our struggle is not in the context of a religious conflict, but is a liberation movement against colonialism, occupation, and oppression.
Two very important points about the weaponization of such incidents that are impossible to account for in a mass demonstration:
- We view such statements as a tool in the hands of reactionary and repressive forces, including pro-apartheid organizations that seek to criminalize support for Palestine.
- Zionism and its ongoing drive to designate this fascist ideology as “Jewish” has long played a nefarious role in confusing Zionism, a racist political ideology, with Judaism and Jewishness. The same is true of Western powers that repeatedly refer to the Israeli occupation as the “Jewish state”, attempting to tar all Jews with the brush of Zionist crimes. It is the Palestinian liberation movement that rejects the equation of Jews with Zionists and the Zionist movement that seeks to institutionalize that same equation.
Further, we are also clear that these coordinated attacks do not reflect any desire to act against racism, including anti-Semitism, in Berlin or in Germany. Instead, they exist to achieve three main objectives:
- Attempt to manufacture a pretext to prohibit organizations working for justice and liberation in Palestine, like the Samidoun Network, or to ban demonstrations, like the upcoming marches to commemorate the 75th anniversary of al-Nakba, the catastrophic occupation of Palestine, as we experienced in May 2022.
- Attempt to manufacture anti-Palestinian racism and repression on the streets of Berlin and to intimidate our community from participating in actions and demonstrations.
- Attempt to draw attention away from the topic of the demonstration itself — that is, the ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine, justified by the German government and its political parties, up to and including the extreme settler movement that marched through the West Bank of occupied Palestine today, the calls to occupy all of Jordan as well as all of Palestine by Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich and the attacks on Palestinians at prayer in Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan.
We will not be silenced or suppressed, and we will not stand by as our community is targeted for repression and criminalization. We urge all to join us on Sunday, 16 April for the March to Free Palestinian Prisoners. With our collective clarity and voice, we once again affirm, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
April 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism | Germany, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment
By Lucas Leiroz | April 11, 2023
Apparently, it is increasingly difficult to hide the catastrophic situation of Kiev’s war arsenal. According to a major Western media outlet, the neo-Nazi regime will run out of most of its anti-air missiles by next month. The source of the newspaper would be an alleged leaked Pentagon’s document. The case shows once again how unfavorable the military scenario of the conflict is for the Ukrainian forces.
The subject was discussed in a recent article published by the Wall Street Journal. According to the outlet, documents leaked on the Pentagon’s official social networks would have exposed an extremely pessimistic forecast about the future of the Ukrainian armed forces, pointing to the nearly total exhaustion of Kiev’s anti-aircraft defense capacity. Anti-air missiles are expected to run out in May, which will further complicate the Ukrainian situation and boost demand for new NATO weapons packages in order to prolong the alliance’s proxy war.
The forecast is based on a calculation taking into account the recent numbers of the Ukrainian army. Currently, Kiev is expending about 69 Buk missiles and 200 S-300 missiles a month to maintain its defense positions against the Russian air attacks. With these numbers, it is most likely that the Buk missiles will run out in early April and that the stock of S-300s will expire by May 3rd, according to Pentagon’s officials in the leaked document.
Indeed, some measures to mitigate the effects of Ukrainian anti-aircraft weakness have already been taken by Western forces. Kiev received three Iris-T anti-aircraft systems from Germany, in addition to eight American NASAMS systems. However, these devices allow a limited number of launches, which do not cover as much territory as the S-300 missiles. This limited aid has made it difficult to efficiently supply new Western missiles to Ukraine, making Kiev still heavily dependent on Soviet-era launch systems.
In this sense, a new wave of broad military support would be needed to overcome the Ukrainian deficit. The US military, according to what is exposed in the revealed paper, estimate that the necessary number will reach 16 Irist-T or NASAMS batteries and up to 12 Patriot or SAMP-T batteries. It is necessary to remember that recently the American president Joe Biden had already authorized the sending of a Patriot battery, at the same time that Germany, France and Italy promised to supply a SAMP-T system to the neo-Nazi regime. However, this equipment has not yet reached Ukraine, which is why the situation of Kiev’s defense has not yet improved.
Since late 2022, requests for military aid focused on anti-aircraft defense have been constant in Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s speeches. He considers this type of equipment a “number one priority”, and his advisors have also requested, in addition to anti-missile systems, the well-known US F-16 fighter jets, which have been repeatedly banned by the US government. Some pro-Ukrainian analysts believe that these aid packages would be a kind of “game changer”, but renowned experts rule out any possibility of reversing the military scenario of the conflict, regardless of whether NATO weapons reach the battlefield.
It is important to note that the US government has not yet commented on the case, with the Pentagon being silent on the authenticity of the supposed leak. The matter comes amid a recent wave of releases of classified Pentagon’s documents. Other reports from the department were exposed on social networks, including information on sensitive topics such as China, the Middle East and terrorism. There has been strong distrust on the part of analysts about the veracity of these alleged leaks. Some commentators argue that if the releases were true there would be no room for the Western media to report their existence, with a strong censorship initiative trying to hide the incident.
Although there is not enough information to point out the veracity of these leakages, it is possible to say that at least with regard to the Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles, there is a great possibility that the numbers are real, considering the evident defeat of Kiev’s forces in the battlefield. In a more realistic perspective, it is possible to suspect that in fact there are no “leaks”, but that the Pentagon would be deliberately publishing the numbers to increase the fear of a Ukrainian defeat in public opinion, boosting support for the shipment of new weapons.
What we have seen recently is the absolute failure of the “Ukrainian victory” narrative, as Russian advances have made it clear which side militarily controls the combats. Due to this, there seems to be currently an attempt at “damage control”, with officials and mainstream media partially admitting Ukraine’s defeat. If before the justification for sending weapons was that Kiev would be winning, now it is said that Kiev is losing, but “must win”. The aim is to spread anti-Russian fear in public opinion and to convince ordinary citizens that the shipment of weapons is an urgent measure in order to save the West.
In a rational and strategic analysis, it is possible to see that at no time did Moscow show interest in expanding the limits of its military operation, therefore there is no reason for any kind of fear on the part of Western citizens. On the other hand, the exhaustion of Ukrainian forces seems to be good news, since, faced with the inability to continue fighting, the Kiev regime would be forced to surrender, which would end hostilities. This would be the best-case scenario for all sides except for NATO’s pro-war elites.
Lucas Leiroz is a journalist and researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
April 11, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
After the recent devasting tornadoes in the Midwest and South, some media outlets scrambled to try to link the weather events to climate change, when in fact there is no hard data to support this. In fact, tornado data refute claims that tornadoes are increasing in number, range, or severity. However, Salon, Axios, and the Washington Post among others ran articles suggesting climate change is expanding the length of tornado season and area over which tornadoes commonly form, as well as adding ingredients to the atmosphere to make more and bigger tornadoes.
The Salon article, “How climate change made the Mississippi tornadoes more likely,” (actually a reprint from Grist) claimed, “That added ingredient of more heat and moisture is going to be the big thing that will influence what happens and we can expect potentially worse tornado outbreaks,” said William Gallus, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University.
Axios piled on with “What we know about how climate change affects tornado outbreaks,” which claims, “We also have expectations that the number of severe thunderstorms (hail, wind, tornado) will probably increase in the U.S.”
The Washington Post article, “Here’s what we know about how climate change is influencing tornadoes,” asserts, “Average global temperatures have risen more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, and the impact is clear: Warmer air provides more energy for storms to develop and intensify, and holds more moisture, which can also fuel storms. Warm, moist air is a key ingredient for developing severe tornadic storms.”
These claims of increased storms due to more heat and moisture are misleading at best and demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of how weather fronts collide to form tornadoes. As Climate at a Glance: Tornadoes points out: “Tornadoes typically form when very cold, dry air clashes with warm, humid air. Climate change warms the Arctic more than the tropics and subtropics, resulting in less of a clash between cold Arctic air masses and warm Gulf of Mexico air masses. As a result, fewer and less violent tornadoes are occurring today than in previous periods, despite media claims that tornadoes are getting more frequent, stronger, or both.”
Plus, all of these articles miss one very important and immutable fact: decades of hard data on tornado activity don’t support these claims.
Despite modest warming of the climate over the past 50 years, data show no trend in increasing tornadoes linked to climate change. Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its most recent report, “There is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial-scale phenomena such as tornadoes.”
These articles all focused on the recent severe storms that caused many deaths and widespread destruction. Yet, looking at the actual data for the trend in strong to violent tornadoes suggest no cause for alarm. Violent tornadoes, those rated EF3 to EF5 on the enhanced Fujita tornado scale, have declined in recent decades, based on actual data supplied by the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center.
The hard data on tornado numbers and intensity refute any assertions that tornadoes are worsening due to climate change. The number of strong to violent tornadoes, F3 or higher, has dramatically declined for nearly half a century. Additional evidence shows attempts to tie tornadoes to climate change falls flat. For instance, 2018 was a record-low year for tornadoes in the United States. Even the Washington Post wrote that 2018 was the first year with no violent tornadoes in the United States.
Also flying in the face of climate change attribution during the so-called “hottest decade in recorded history” from 2010 to 2019, two record-low years for tornado strikes in the United States occurred, in 2014 and 2018.
Finally, it is important to note that severe tornado outbreaks are not a global (as in global warming) phenomenon, but mostly limited to the United States with its unique topography and weather patterns.
All of these omissions lead one to ask if the media are aware of hard data and previous articles on the topics of tornados and climate change, or did these outlets simply not wish to consider what those articles and data implied, because they presented inconvenient truths that are counter to their attempts to link climate change and tornado behavior?
Even the scientist quoted in the Post article would not commit to the narrative that climate change was changing tornado behavior.
Per the Post, “That suggests more tornadoes may be likely, too. But scientists aren’t ready to declare that yet.”
Also, according to the Post, “There is nothing concrete to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to see more tornadoes,’ Allen said,” as Dance reported.
The willful choice to ignore these facts is indicative of the shoddy state of what passes for journalism today. The Washington Post’s banner reads, “democracy dies in darkness.” Evidently, science dies in darkness, too.
April 10, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | United States |
Leave a comment
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has ignited a feud with the BBC by labeling the British broadcaster a “government funded media” organization. The BBC denies taking state money and its defenders claim that being funded by the British government differs from being funded by the British public.
Twitter applied the label to the BBC’s main account earlier this week, after slapping US broadcaster NPR with a similar tag describing it as “US state-affiliated media.” While Twitter previously reserved such labels for foreign media outlets – like RT and China’s CGTN, Musk said that applying it to NPR “seems accurate.”
NPR’s tag was changed to read “government-funded media” after an outcry from US liberals.
The BBC bristled at receiving the tag. “We are speaking to Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible,” the broadcaster said in a statement on Sunday. “The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.”
On Twitter, the BBC’s defenders pointed to the license fee as proof of the network’s independence. The BBC, Deadline reporter Jake Kanter argued, “is funded by the British public through a system known as the licence fee. The BBC’s operations and editorial decision-making are entirely independent of the government.”
However, commenters pointed out that the license fee “is a government tax in all but name.”
Set by the government, the fee is an annual payment of £159 ($197) owed by any household with a television or device capable of receiving television broadcasts. The BBC hires contractors to visit the homes of suspected evaders, and those who refuse to pay can be prosecuted by the broadcaster. Around 45,000 people per year are prosecuted for failing to pay the license, the Telegraph reported last month.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics classifies the fee as a tax, and the BBC as part of the “central government sector” of the UK economy.
Additionally, the broadcaster does actually receive direct government funding for BBC World Service. The TV license covers 75% of the service’s operational costs while the rest is directly paid for by the UK government to the tune of some £90 million ($111 million) per year. Last month, the service was also awarded a £20 million ($24 million) one-time payment to help “fight against the spread of disinformation around the world.” BBC World Service is predominantly aimed at non-UK audiences and broadcasts in over 40 languages.
The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is also the biggest funder of the BBC’s Media Action service, which additionally receives funding from the governments of the US, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the EU, the UN, as well as donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The service supplies two dozen developing countries with “information they can trust,” per the BBC’s own website.
While the BBC stated that it is editorially independent, internal communications published by the Guardian last month showed that its editors asked reporters to avoid using the term “lockdown” when talking about the government’s response to the Coviid-19 pandemic, under direct order from the government. Furthermore, journalists were instructed to be more critical of the opposition Labour Party due to complaints from the government.
April 10, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | BBC, UK |
Leave a comment
While the sudden leak of numerous classified US documents related to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine reportedly prompted the Pentagon to launch an investigation into the matter, the way the “revelation” was covered by the media makes it look somewhat suspect.
Classified documents that purportedly outline US and NATO plans for the Ukrainian military were leaked to the public this week, and if US media is to be believed, the Pentagon has already rushed to investigate this apparent breach of security.
During an interview with Sputnik, international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda pointed out that the story was broken by the New York Times. According to him, given that US officials are now claiming that part of the story is true and part of it is not, it begets the question: “why was it leaked and what did they want us to believe?”
The leak, Sleboda suggested, likely comes “from the American side or someone within the American side,” with the analyst noting that some of the leaked papers “confirm information that we really already knew,” such as the data about the newly-formed Ukrainian brigades. He suggests taking the leaked information “with a grain of salt.”
Regarding the rationale behind the sharing of the leaked information on social media, Sleboda argued that “a lot of it maybe [was] buttressing the public knowledge of US support for the offensive that is about to be launched.”
“We know that NATO considers it their last-ditch effort, they do not have the ability to continue to sustain the Kiev regime in terms of ammunition, artillery shells, other gear, and for them this is all or nothing,” he mused. “So they’re expecting success out of this and they do not appear to have a plan B in that regard. Plan B might default the Plan D, which is NATO troops enter Western Ukraine or some NATO member-states enter West Ukraine, say Poland and the US, possibly Romania.”
He also observed that the leaked information does not include any specific battle plans, “which seems awfully convenient.”
For more in-depth analysis, check out the latest episode of Sputnik’s podcast Fault Lines.
April 9, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | NATO, New York Times, Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
Weren’t the vaccines supposed to REDUCE deaths from COVID? Oddly, there was no press coverage on this.
Executive summary
The official government numbers show COVID deaths are up in Ontario by nearly 40% since the vaccines rolled out and hospitalizations due to COVID are up by 31%!
Both hospitalization and deaths from COVID were up dramatically.
You can see it yourself (see the red box below):
Deaths went from 5,485 in 2021 to 7,625 in 2022.
Could that be statistical noise? Not likely. Sigma is 74 so it’s a 29-sigma increase. In other words, this increase in death didn’t happen by chance; something caused it.
The data from the Ontario website
We know the vax makes you more likely to get COVID. If you had 3 shots, the Cleveland Clinic study showed you are about 2.5X more likely to get COVID. So that big spike in cases in 2022 is totally expected: it was our own doing. The more people who got COVID, the more people who died from COVID.
You’re less likely to die from a COVID case in 2022 than in 2021 because the variant is less deadly, not because the vaccine worked.
Cases
Hospitalizations
Deaths
Possible explanations
Was this because the virus was more deadly in 2022? I don’t think so.
Let’s look the world’s least vaccinated countries: Yemen, Haiti, and PNG. As you can see, deaths are way down in 2022 because the variants are less lethal:
These numbers show that the “it would have been worse if people weren’t vaccinated” excuse won’t hold any water.
Furthermore, we know the vaccines are super deadly. Consider the following recent post which is based on CDC data:
If it wasn’t the vaccine that caused this dramatic rise, what caused it?
Also, even the US data shows a decrease in 2022 vs. 2021, so it’s hard for Ontario to argue that the virus was more deadly in 2022:
So there is no rock they can hide under.
Of course, this is embarrassing for the narrative which is why nobody is talking about it.
Even Professor David Fisman is silent about the report. I reached out to him for an explanation and he ignored it, exactly as expected.
This is why there is no press coverage of this: because the numbers are inexplicable if the vaccine worked.
I just thought you’d like to know.
Summary
It’s unfortunate that the mainstream press isn’t covering this.
I can’t figure out why. The press is supposed to report this and get comments from both sides. Instead, they ignore the story.
A nearly 40% increase in COVID deaths and the mainstream press ignores the story!?! WTF is going on here?
But I thought people would want to know the truth.
April 8, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Canada, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
Apparently terrorism and murdering reporters get a free pass if the Western establishment doesn’t like the target’s profile – or if the perpetrator risks being linked to an ally.
The radio silence from the West is deafening in the wake of the murder of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky at a cafe in St. Petersburg. Tatarsky was killed after being handed a statue by a young woman, Darya Trepova, that subsequently blew up the entire venue.
For all of the Western officials’ differences with Russia, can they really not at least bring themselves to condemn a blatant act of terrorism in the middle of a major city center? We’re talking here about the same folks who spent two decades kicking down doors around the world under the guise of fighting a “Global War on Terrorism.”
Just a few years ago, cartoonists and writers for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were gunned down in broad daylight at their Paris office by jihadists who objected to the publication’s portrayal of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Western leaders roundly condemned that terrorist act, standing firmly on the principle that you couldn’t just go around murdering people who conveyed thoughts and views that you didn’t like. Many of these leaders even traveled to Paris to march alongside a massive crowd in defense of freedom of expression and the press.
Now, however, they can’t even bother to muster the most meager defense of the same principles in the wake of Tatarsky’s murder in an attack that investigators claim is linked to Ukraine.
It seems that whenever there’s any alleged involvement of Ukraine, the West conveniently turns a blind eye. The automobile explosion that killed Russian journalist and activist, Darya Dugina, near Moscow comes to mind. “American officials said they were not aware of the plan ahead of time for the attack that killed Daria Dugina and that they had admonished Ukraine over it,” reported the New York Times last October. Similarly, the Washington Post reported this week that the “unwritten rule” among Western officials is “don’t talk about Nord Stream” – the pipeline network carrying gas from Russia to Europe that was mysteriously blown up last year – since they “would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or its allies were involved.”
Then there is the “Mirotvorets” list of journalists and activists maintained by Kiev-based NGO, the Mirotvorets Center, which names people “whose actions have signs of crimes against the national security of Ukraine, peace, human security, and the international law.” It has yet to either be shut down by the Ukrainian government or denounced by Western allies, despite a 2017 United Nations report on human rights in Ukraine urging Ukrainian authorities to address it.
Acts of terrorism and affronts to free speech are clearly in the eye of the Western beholder, which would explain why much of the media rhetoric focuses on Tatarsky’s pro-Russia stance. The void left by the lack of official reaction from Western officials is being filled with Western press articles focusing on the Ukrainian-born blogger’s prior involvement with Russian-backed separatist forces in 2014 in the Donbass. There, he got his start in covering events through his Telegram channel, which grew to become wildly popular, with CNN noting his “ardent pro-war commentary.” But if prior military experience of some kind, and taking sides in one’s coverage of armed conflict, was justification for murdering journalists, then every Western veteran who started a blog, and every opinion journalist, would be fair game.
There was no shortage of Western outrage over the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul a few years ago, despite his longstanding activism against the Saudi leadership. Why should the death of this Russian blogger be treated any differently?
Bulgarian investigative journalist, Cristo Grozev, who was heavily featured in the Academy Award-winning feature documentary film about Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, apparently thinks that some people are just “legitimate targets” for terrorism, and argues that the cafe may not have been a “purely civilian location.” Although it was previously owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russian private military enterprise, Wagner Group, that doesn’t magically transform a dining establishment, which welcomes anyone right off the street in the middle of a major city, into some kind of a military base. If an American general walks into the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pentagon City, Virginia, it doesn’t suddenly turn the hotel or its bar into a legitimate military target for bombing by some entity that has a score to settle with Washington.
And what about every journalist who has been embedded as the guest of Western troops in conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan and has promoted the talking points of their hosts while siding with their own country? Are they fair game for picking off now, too?
The prominent Washington Institute for the Study of War think tank, whose board members include American generals Jack Keane and David Petraeus, as well as Washington’s former ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, previously and routinely qualified Tatarsky as a prominent Russian military blogger whose work they apparently considered worthy of informing their research.
It seems like there’s an effort underway by some members of the Western establishment to reframe this egregious act of terrorism and murder as something trivial, all because the target was a Russian whose views they don’t like – and that’s an awfully slippery slope.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
April 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
The BBC recently ran a story claiming that the Antarctic ocean currents were heading for collapse, and to drive home the scare there was even a reference to the 2004 climate disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow. Rapidly melting Antarctic ice was reported to be causing a dramatic slowdown in deep ocean currents, “and could have a disastrous effect on the climate”. Like most of these fanciful scare stories, “could” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting work. But alas, missing from this Net Zero-promoting, model-inventing Armageddon tall tale was a note that the Antarctica ice cap appears to be in balance, and is not actually melting.
According to a paper written by NASA satellite ice-mapping scientists in 2021, Antarctica is “close to balance” in the period 2012-16 at -12 +/- 64 Gt a-1. Gt are gigatonnes and the formula is a scientific way of saying that as near as damn it, well within a margin of error, the Antarctica ice sheet loss is, more or less, zero. Back to 1992, the scientists found large total gains for the sheet.
According to the story in the BBC, reported faithfully in numerous media, as fresh water from the ice cap melts, sea water becomes less salty and dense and a downwards movement of water towards the sea bottom is interrupted. This in turn can affect world oceanic currents. The activist science blog the Conversation reported that “torrents of Antarctic meltwater are slowing the currents that drive our vital ocean ‘overturning’ – and threaten its collapse”. The BBC noted that a similar collapse in the North Atlantic was depicted in The Day After Tomorrow.
As regular readers will recall, the Daily Sceptic has observed that Antarctica is a difficult neighbourhood for activists to get a good scare story going. Over the last seven decades, there has been little or no warming over large parts of the continent. According to a recent paper, (Singh and Polvani), the Antarctica sea ice has “modestly expanded”, and warming has been “nearly non-existent” over much of the ice sheet. According to NASA figures, the ice loss is 0.0005% per year.
The latest scare arises from a paper published in Nature. It is the product of climate models – the BBC noting that the scientists spent 35 million computer hours over two years collecting their results. However, this story is also of considerable interest since it shows that the BBC and most mainstream media are seemingly incapable of questioning any statement that promotes human-caused climate change and the proposed command-and-control Net Zero political solution. This endemic lack of curiosity means that vast areas of science, including atmospheric physics and chemistry, together with weather, geology and geography, are simply off limits in case any doubt should be cast on the suggestion that humans control the CO2 climate thermostat.
The study lead author, Professor Matthew England from Sydney’s University of New South Wales, is able to state, without any inquiring question or contradiction, that “our modelling shows that if global carbon emissions continue at the current rate, then the Antarctica overturning will slow by more than 40% in the next 30 years”. The BBC repeats emissions continuing at the current rate, but England’s paper states that his model has been loaded with a “high emissions” scenario. The paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract in which this admission occurs is freely available.
These “high emission” scenarios are almost certainly RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 that forecast global rises in temperatures of 4-5°C within less than 80 years. As Dr. Judith Curry has recently pointed out, these have been dropped in many science circles on the grounds they are recognised as implausible. Global warming of barely 0.1°C over the last 20 years is almost certainly a factor in this reassessment. Nevertheless, Curry notes that many of the extreme events based on the scenarios are still quoted in IPCC documents. “Rejecting these extreme scenarios has rendered obsolete much of the climate literature and assessments of the last decade,” she states.
Not at the BBC, of course. Settled science – the Science – cannot move on because it suffers from the anti-science proposition that it is somehow settled. Model results suggest deep water circulation in the Antarctic could slow at twice the rate of decline in the North Atlantic, reports the BBC. “It’s stunning to see that happen so quickly,” said climatologist Alan Mix from Oregon State University, a co-author of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment. “It appears to be kicking into gear right now. That’s headline news,” he told Reuters. No, Dr. Mix, it’s a model based on assumptions that are regularly contradicted by the data. Some climatologists it appears have trouble distinguishing fact from their own fevered predictions.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
April 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC |
Leave a comment
The idea of eating bugs has, once again, found its way back into the news. NPR recently released a piece that suggested the pushback against eating bugs is founded on a baseless conspiracy theory that elites want the population to consume bugs. However, the evidence seems to suggest that elites do, in fact, want the population to consume the likes of grasshoppers and fly larvae.
“Including insects in human food has been an emerging,” NPR wrote, “but still marginal, idea among climate scientists and food security experts. In countries where insects have not been a part of the diet, it’s an idea that has long been met with hesitancy and occasional ridicule.
“In recent years, however,” they considered, “this aversion has fused with an amorphous and shapeshifting conspiracy theory in which a shadowy global elite conspires to control the world’s population. For those who espouse the theory, eating bugs isn’t just a matter of disgust, or questioning the impacts of climate change. It’s framed as a matter of individual freedom and government control.”
Though bug-eating is not a new development, world leaders have certainly encouraged the notion that those in the West ought to consider consuming bugs. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested that there would be food shortages in early 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Call it a coincidence, but just two months later, it was reported that primary school children in Wales were possibly going to be fed crickets and mealworms, as a scientist suggested that this would set the tone for an eco-friendly living environment. It was just a few days after this report that the Toronto Sun suggested that consuming crickets could effectively combat food shortages.
In late June 2022, Aspire Food Group had announced that it had set out to produce 9,000 metric tonnes of crickets every year for “human and pet consumption,” which would amount to two billion crickets. Just one month after Aspire Food Group mentioned their cricket goals, food company Actually Foods had listed “organic cricket flour” as one of its primary ingredients.
It is not difficult to see how Biden and Trudeau’s mention of food shortages appear to have ignited serious efforts to introduce bugs as a leading dietary element. There is nothing about this series of events that suggests conspiracy, but rather just plain facts. It is also important to consider that bug-eating has not been a grassroots effort, kicked off by small-town companies attempting to do good in their community. Bug consumption has been embraced and pushed by the largest organizations in the world, including the World Economic Forum (WEF).
However, our so-called food shortages have only been one of the many justifications for introducing bugs into food. Another common justification of those in the bug-eating industry is how superior bugs are in protein compared to what we currently eat. The Vancouver Sun published a piece in 2016 that covered how Enterra intended to “replace unsustainable fish meal and soy as sources of protein and fat with bugs grown on waste food.” The piece also mentioned that bugs would be a hard sell to “hikers and snowboarders.”
CNN reported that the average American, in the not-too-distant future, would maybe “toast bread with cricket flour, drink a protein smoothie made from locust powder, and eat scrambled eggs (made extra-creamy with the fat from mopane caterpillars) with a side of mealworm bacon.”
The piece continued by noting that this hypothetical meal would provide “four times the iron, more than three times the protein and more key vitamins and minerals than the bread, smoothie, eggs and bacon you eat today – all while saving the planet.”
What better way to solidify the fact that bug-eating is being pushed by elites than the World Economic Forum suggesting in 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, that everyone should embrace the eating of bugs, as the global population increases, apparently leaving few other alternatives than consuming bugs.
But for NPR, the anti-bug-eating sentiment is basically just racist. They link not wanting to eat bugs with colonialist sentiments.
“There was very much an idea that you are what you eat back then. And so the Europeans felt they needed European foods,” Julie Lesnik, an associate professor of biological anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit told NPR. “There is very much a worry that if you ate the Indigenous foods, you would become a savage.”
“Conservative media influencers continue to tap into this sentiment today,” NPR declared, before writing that “Lesnik sees a throughline between the early colonizers and the conservative outrage today.”
“The easiest punching bag … is to pick on something that looks uncivilized,” Lesnik said.
But of course it could just be that people just don’t want to eat bugs.
April 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering | NPR, WEF |
Leave a comment
The AP has jumped the shark and shows again the MSM is among the most toxic agents in society
I was working on another big article when news hits that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is planning to run for president.
I’m going to have to come back to that article after reading the most egregious smear piece I’ve ever read. The article was written by an unnamed AP “journalist.”
Whether you are a fan of Kennedy or can’t stand him, every person in America should read this hatchet job for confirmation that journalism in America has now fallen below the gutter.
The real threat to America and “democracy” isn’t RFK, Jr. its instead journalists at once prestigious news organizations who now exist to attack people brave enough to dissent from the authorized narratives.
What follows are excerpts from this hit piece of malicious slander. I added my comments although the examples of yellow journalism are so obvious I probably didn’t need to. (Emphasis added).
“NEW YORK (AP) — Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist and scion of one of the country’s most famous political families, is running for president …”
Comment: The writer got “anti-vaccine activist” into the story after the fourth word. The not- exactly subtle theme of the article is that “anti-vaccine activists” are worse and more dangerous than communists, NAZI’s, KKK leaders and “gold bugs.” As we will see, they are just as atrocious as supporters of Donald Trump, January 6th “insurrectionists” and deniers of Russian election “hacking.”
“… The 69-year-old’s campaign to challenge incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination is a long shot ….”
Comment: So there we have it: The AP somehow already knows Kennedy has no chance to defeat his opponent, a man who has the worst approval ratings in history and is suffering from ever-worsening and plainly obvious dementia (a medical condition the AP will never report).
“… Kennedy … was once a bestselling author and environmental lawyer who worked on issues such as clean water …”
Comment: In this entire “fair and balanced” article, this is the closest thing readers get to a flattering comment about Mr. Kennedy.
FWIW, Kennedy is still a best-selling author. His book “The Real Anthony Fauci” sold more copies than any non-fiction book published in the last two years. (In my own book review, I called this book perhaps the most important non-fiction book published in my lifetime.)
“… But more than 15 years ago, he became fixated on a belief that vaccines are not safe. He emerged as one of the leading voices in the anti-vaccine movement, and his work has been described by public health experts and even members of his own family as misleading and dangerous …”
Comment: It doesn’t matter that his “fixation” that many vaccines are unsafe … is 100 percent correct.
Per the “watchdog” and skeptical journalists at the Associated Press, America’s “public health experts” have never uttered an incorrect statement in their entire careers.
For example, on Covid topics, their batting average is 1.000. The science is completely “settled,” per the experts. It’s only the “old” debunked science that says it’s okay to keep challenging and questioning pronouncements of other scientists.
“Kennedy had been long involved in the anti-vaccine movement, but the effort intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic and development of the COVID-19 vaccine.”
Comment: The article correctly points out that Kennedy is skeptical about the safety and efficacy of many vaccines. Why in the heck would he get fired up about a “vaccine” that’s not even a real vaccine, a gene therapy that was mandated and shot into the arms of billions of people after three months of alleged safety trials? A shot he thinks – based on his copious research – is killing or injuring millions of people, including innocent children.
I would hope such a person’s activism would “intensify” when the Mother of All Dangerous Vaccines was pushed onto the world.
If Kennedy just stuck to railing against contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune or asbestos cases, his life’s calling might be acceptable to the AP. But screaming about a vaccine that 250 million Americans got that is causing 100,000 times more harm is simply … not acceptable.
“… His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered during the pandemic, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8 million …”
Comment: Why did his charity “prosper” and get so many more donors? Could it be that large numbers of people and donors support his work? Does the AP have a problem with non-profits whose work has large numbers of supporters?
Also, Kennedy is the founder and leader of a non-profit that is growing and attracting far more supporters. No other non-profit is doing this work. This means Kennedy went out on a limb by himself. The fact Children Health Defense is becoming very popular and more important actually speaks favorably of Kennedy’s leadership and organizational talents.
“… His organization has targeted false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans, experts have said, which could have resulted in deaths during the pandemic …”
Comment: What are these “false claims?” The AP doesn’t tell us. This is the same AP that’s swallowed hook-line-and-sinker probably 100 “false claims” about Covid.
And note how the author sneaks in his/her point about Kennedy’s efforts harming “Black Americans” and “mothers.”
Re-stated: Kennedy’s work is killing black people … and if you are targeting black people for abuse and death, you are a racist … which means your comments must be banned by social media (which actually happened to Kennedy).
It never occurs to this writer that Kennedy might be trying to save or help black people … “mothers” too.
“… Kennedy released a book in 2021, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” in which he accused the U.S.’s top infectious disease doctor of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy” and promoted unproven COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin, which is meant to treat parasites, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine …”
Comment: Anthony Fauci did play a leading role in a coup against Western democracy.”
“Teflon Tony” led the movement to ban worship services, visits to nursing homes, shut down businesses, closed schools, made wearing worthless masks mandatory … all by emergency orders or bureaucratic edicts.
In a real “democracy,” big decisions are supposed to be voted on by elective bodies after serious and open debate. Our “New Normal” democracy is actually totalitarianism run amok. This is the type of “Western democracy” endorsed by the AP.
It has also been proven, per multiple studies, that ivermectin and HCQ benefit certain Covid patients. I would argue – like Kennedy does in his book – it’s also been proven that studies reaching this conclusion were sabotaged by people like Anthony Fauci.
“… His push against the COVID-19 vaccine has linked him at times with anti-democratic figures and groups. Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 …”
Comment: This is run-of-the-mill slander by association. The writer names allegedly awful figures and then links one person to these supposedly dangerous and nefarious individuals.
“… A photo posted on Instagram showed Kennedy backstage at a July 2021 Reawaken America event with former President Donald Trump’s ally Roger Stone, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and anti-vaccine profiteer Charlene Bollinger. All three have promoted the lie about the 2020 election being stolen …”
Comment: Did you get this? Someone once snapped a photo of Kennedy with Roger Stone and Michael Flynn at … a political rally. In the AP’s more-healthy democracy, people simply can’t attend political rallies to support a cause they think is important.
Note: It’s already “settled” political science that no election fraud happened in the 2020 election. This is a “lie” just like it’s the “truth” that Russia stole the 2016 election after a couple dozen Russian trolls mades some posts that nobody saw on Facebook.
“… The photo was posted but later removed by Bollinger, who has appeared with Kennedy at multiple events. She and her husband sponsored an anti-vaccine, pro-Trump rally near the Capitol on Jan. 6. Bollinger celebrated the attack and her husband tried to enter the Capitol. Kennedy later appeared in a video for their Super PAC …”
Comment: Here we have a shocking case of another outlawed, undemocratic “pro-Trump rally.” Apparently Kennedy is disqualified from running for president because somebody he knows “entered the Capitol” on January 6th.
“… Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates …”
Comment: Showing your papers, persecuting “anti-vaxxers,” “anti-maskers” and “anti-lockdowners” are NAZI-like tactics. So are “quarantine camps.” So are exhortations of political leaders to rat-out your neighbors who are not complying with their masters’ orders.
Plenty of credible scientists and skeptics believe millions of innocent people have already died and/or suffered life-altering medical conditions because of these alleged “mitigation” edicts. Those are Holocaust-type numbers. If the analogy fits …
“… Kennedy has at times invoked his family’s legacy in his anti-vaccine work, including sometimes using images of President Kennedy.”
Comment: To seal the narrative that Kennedy is beyond the pale, we learn that the fiend has actually shown images of his late uncle.
Presidents Biden, Obama and Bill Clinton can publish images of President Kennedy, but not his nephew.
“His sister Kerry Kennedy … told the Associated Press in a 2021 interview her brother is “completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous.”
Comment: This is the last sentence of the story. RFK, Jr. – per his sister no less – is “completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous.”
Kennedy’s sister probably hasn’t even read his book, where Kennedy included more than 2,200 footnotes to back up his claims. She’s probably never spoken to one mother who is anguished (and feels hopeless) because of the loss or debilitating injury suffered by their beloved child.
One definition of courage is one’s willingness to do something he knows could be dangerous to his life, or harm his career …. Or cause a person to become estranged from long-time friends and family members. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has stuck to his principles and convictions even though his own sister apparently hates what he is trying to do.
Significantly and tellingly, this article does not include one paragraph or quote of anyone saying anything complimentary about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Here is a man who wrote one of the most important books of our times, started an ultra-successful if politically incorrect non-profit (Children’s Health Defense) and has filed numerous lawsuits against Big Pharma and other companies that have harmed innocent people.
It would have been easy for fair-minded journalists to find thousands of Americans who had glowing things to say about Robert F. Kennedy and his life’s work and how it benefitted them. But the article did not include even one favorable quote.
Kennedy also started a journalism site (The Defender ) which is publishing hundreds of stories that the mainstream press and AP won’t write about.
Almost by himself, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has begun to change the narrative on the entire corrupt Science/Medical Industrial Complex.
Forget his scholarship on the Covid atrocities, millions of people are now receptive to his long-ignored claim that vaccines are probably causing an epidemic of autism (today, 1-in-34 kids are now diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum).
He also rails against ever-increasing censorship and has been one of the most conspicuous victims of this Orwellian campaign.
Probably within one hour of his announcement he was running for president, the AP hit the wires with an article seeking to make this man seem like the worst villain in history.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must scare the hell out of the people and organizations he wants to purge and discredit.
Since his life’s calling threatens the agendas of the worst actors in our society and threatens the Status Quo, they will do anything in their power to harpoon his presidential bid before it even gets started.
Of course his campaign is a “long shot.” He’s fighting the most corrupt and dangerous organizations on the planet … one of these organizations being the Associated Press.
April 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Associated Press, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
Leave a comment
In this Grayzone exclusive, reporter Jeremy Loffredo visits the Donbas Express, a musical instruction camp for youth from the war torn regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, and reveals the reality of a program described by State Department-funded researchers who inspired the ICC arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin as a “re-education” camp.
Find more reporting at https://thegrayzone.com
By Wyatt Reed – Sputnik – 02.04.2023
There’s radio silence from legacy media as a new exposé completely undermines “the allegation by the ICC… that Russia is running a network of camps that are holding children as hostages and committing a war crime by illegally deporting Ukrainian children.”
A stunning new report has debunked the narrative that camps in Russia for children from the Donbass constitute ‘crimes against humanity,’ completely undermining the allegations that serve as the basis for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Russian President Vladmir Putin.
In late March, the Prosecutor General for the ICC claimed that President Putin had personally committed a “war crime,” citing what it insisted was the “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from the regions of the Donbass that the Kiev regime claims as its own.
The ICC prosecutor “appeared to have based his arrest warrant on research produced by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL),” a State Department-funded entity whose executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, recently claimed on CNN that “thousands of children are in a hostage situation,” per The Grayzone, an independent American investigative outlet.
State Department spokesman Ned Price seized on that report, which his employer funded, to condemn what he called “Russia’s system of forced relocation, re-education and adoption of Ukraine’s children,” an allegation which was later echoed by the ICC.
But “according to the Yale Lab,” Grayzone journalist Jeremy Loffredo explained in a new video report, the outrageous allegations of war crimes on the part of the Russian President were based on simple Google searches, involved “zero interviews with actual victims… [and] the researchers didn’t even attempt to see any of the camps in person.”
Now the Grayzone has unveiled never-before-seen footage, captured by Jeremy Loffredo in Russia last year, showing the alleged “re-education” camps – and they’re nothing like what the State Department claims.
Although the Yale researchers and the International Criminal Court “are probably under the impression that no Western journalist has been to these so-called ‘re-education camps,’” Loffredo explains in a new video report, “that assumption would be wrong.” Indeed, the journalist says, “I visited one of these camps four months ago – unaware that it would be so important to future war propaganda.”
Rather than a re-education camp, Loffredo explains with his co-author, Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, he found “a hotel full of happy campers receiving free classical music lessons in their native Russian language from first-class instructors.”
Loffredo interviewed one of the camp’s instructors, violin teacher Peter Lundstrom, who said that many of the 80 children from the Donetsk and Lugansk region who came to the music camp had first-hand experience with the war that’s been raging in the backyard for over nine years: “Some of them lost their relatives and friends,” he notes. “In the conflict zone, they cannot continue their professional music studies.”
In a subsequent interview with the Grayzone, HRL’s executive director admitted the camps were actually less Third Reich and more “teddy bear.” In other words, the lead author of the report used to justify an ICC arrest warrant for the Russian president seemed to acknowledge that the kids aren’t being stolen, but are merely being given respite from the trauma of life in a conflict zone.
Detailing his findings in comments given to Sputnik News, Blumenthal says their report “completely demolishes the entire case” against the Russian President and “exposes it as a public relations stunt that is driven by a hyper-politicized [ICC] prosecutor captured by the US and a State Department-funded report.”
Between Loffredo’s trip to one of the camps in question, the original text of the report at the center of the allegations, and the Grayzone’s interview with the director of the group which authored it, Blumenthal says the “three layers of journalistic inquiry” totally debunk “the allegation by the ICC… that Russia is running a network of camps that are holding children as hostages and committing a war crime by illegally deporting Ukrainian children.”
But despite the groundbreaking nature of their findings, Blumenthal says not a single mainstream media has reached out to him in the 24 hours since publishing the report: “Western media is doing all it can to ignore this devastating debunking of the Yale HRL report that inspired the ICC arrest warrant,” he noted.
But this shouldn’t as a surprise, the award-winning journalist says, because mainstreams outlets are seeking to “prevent the populations of countries whose governments are sponsoring this proxy war from learning the truth – which is that this is a politicized warrant driven by a bogus investigation that relied on no field research, whose own report debunks itself.”
Ironically, concludes Blumenthal, it’s clear the ICC warrant and the US government-sponsored report it’s based on were both “designed to obstruct diplomacy with the Russian government in order to prolong the war, and therefore to increase the level of human rights abuses that have been taking place.”
April 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | Russia, United States |
Leave a comment
