Cognitive Dissonance on Democracy Now
By Eva Bartlett | In Gaza | May 31, 2015
This post stemmed from a comment made that DN should be covering the tragedy of the Rohingya and the complicity of Suu Kyi, as detailed in Tony Cartalucci’s “Who’s Driving the Rohingya into the Sea?,” excerpts of which I will paste at the bottom of this post.
On Democracy Now, on the subtle side of corporate presstitutery, Eric Draitser commented:
“Goodman is a foundation funded hack who did yeoman service for Obama and the cause of “humanitarian intervention” in Libya. She and Democracy Now disseminated lie after lie, parroting State Department talking points and lies from Human Rights Watch and Navi Pillay. Their “reporter” was a liar embedded with NATO-backed terrorists and they all have Libyan blood on their hands. In all that time reporting about Gaddafi alleged “crimes” (all of which have been debunked and proved to have been lies), they deliberately ignored the ethnic cleansing of Black Libyans in Fezzan, the Tawergha people, etc because it didn’t jive with the “Good rebels vs bad Gaddafi” script they were feeding the so called “progressive left”. Now they try to pretend they didn’t and they were against the war on Libya.
Goodman has done similarly with regard to Syria. They are discredited liars whose good work only comes in opposing Republican wars which takes no courage at all. They are, put simply, left liberal imperialists.
I said in 2011 that Democracy Now and Young Turks and all these other foundation funded left liberal imperialists would never be forgiven for their treachery, and they haven’t been, no matter how they try to whitewash their records.”
Draitser wrote a more detailed review of the criminal lies that enabled the destruction of Libya and murder of innocent Libyans in his “The Truth of Libya (Finally) Goes Mainstream,“ in which he also addresses the war propaganda of DN:
“Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International should face serious investigations into criminal negligence, or at least gross misconduct, in terms of their dissemination of lies – lies which were used as the prime justification for the war in terms of how it was sold to the people. Is it a crime to inflate by 1000% casualty figures, the end result of which is a justification for war? If not, it should be, as without such propaganda, the war could never have been sold to the public.
Media organizations, especially some ostensibly on the Left, should also be held to account for their misinformation and disinformation. Democracy Now is at the top of the list of guilty organizations. As Bruce Dixon, Managing Editor of Black Agenda Report, wrote at the height of the war:
So like every other Western reporter, Anjali Kamat [Democracy Now’s Libya correspondent] never saw any “mercenaries,” just their oversized bullets. She never saw any mass graves of the hundreds or thousands allegedly killed by Khadaffi’s “heavy machine gun fire” either, or that would be on Democracy Now too. It’s not. Nobody’s located the thousands of wounded survivors either, that must have been the result of shooting into crowds killing hundreds of people, and none of this has stopped Democracy Now from carrying the story just like Fox News or CNN or MSNBC…Something is really wrong with this picture. We have to wonder whether, at least as far as the war in Libya goes, whether Democracy Now is simply feeding us the line of corporate media, the Pentagon and the State Department rather than fulfilling the role of unembedded, independent journalists.
As Dixon points out, Democracy Now exhibited at the very least poor journalistic practice, and at worst, served as the left flank of the imperial propaganda machine. By faithfully reporting the “facts”, which have now been utterly discredited, Kamat and Democracy Now primed the pump of left progressive support for “humanitarian” war.
The Bruce Dixon article Draitser cites, “Are “Democracy Now” Correspondents in Libya Feeding Us the State Department and Pentagon Line?,“ further notes:
“There have been many persistent reports from too many sources have pointed to widespread persecutions of black Libyans and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. There are reports of all-black towns in Libya which have been wiped off the map by the Libyan rebels and their allies. Our own Cynthia McKinney has visited the families of some who were lynched — hanged by jeering mobs who used their cell phones to record the ghastly spectacle. Some of the videos of these lynchings were still on YouTube as late as last week.
Make no mistake, Democracy Now is one of the few places that have reported the persecution of migrants and black Libyans. But a careful search of Democracy Now stories from the past six or seven months reveals that of this handful of mentions of ethnic cleansing in Libya, all except one on March 7, 2011, [7] in which Anjali Kamat interviewed migrants from several countries awaiting transport out of Libya originated from Democracy Now studios stateside.
DN’s correspondents in Libya apparently have more important things to do than interview the black Libyan and migrant victims of what Kamat called “populist rage,” a curious and revealing term for lynch law in Libya.
… Anjali Kamat is one of those lazy and irresponsible reporters. She has carried tales of African mercenaries fighting for Muammar Khadaffi many times over the last few months, with no more proof than the rest….
… Democracy Now reporters used to question authority and empire, not serve it. Goodman in the 1990s and Jamail in 2004 told stories that made US officials furious, all of us uncomfortable, and that sometimes put their own safety at risk. That’s not what we see from Democracy Now’s coverage in Libya today, which can hardly be distinguished from that of Al-Jazzeera or CNN.”
Finian Cunningham’s ““Democracy Now” and the “Progressive” Alternative Media: Valued Cheerleaders For Imperialism and War” notes (excerpts):
“With the suppression of mounting facts that Western governments are waging a covert war of aggression in Syria, the Western public is right to treat the conventional media sources with skepticism and outright contempt. Such media are seen as “politicized” and “unreliable”, serving a naked imperialist agenda for Western regime change. In a word, they are damaged goods.
This is where a segment of the so-called alternative media can play a valuable propaganda function for Western powers. Because such media are supposed to be independent, critical, non-corporate, the public tends to consider their reports as objective and unbiased. One such “alternative” news service is “Democracy Now” hosted by Amy Goodman. Goodman is seen as something of a campaigning critical journalist shedding the light of truth on the depredations of the US government, corporations and the Pentagon. But a closer look at what Goodman’s “Democracy Now” is reporting on Syria shows that the purported critical broadcaster has become a purveyor of Western government propaganda. While the mainstream media’s propaganda function is obvious to the informed public, Goodman’s “Democracy Now” plays a more subtle role. Camouflaged with the trappings of critical, independent journalism, “Democracy Now” serves to sow powerful seeds of misinformation in a way that the “compromised” mainstream media cannot.
This misinformation from “Democracy Now” is valuable to the ruling elite because to many of its readers it is not seen as misinformation.
Rather, the “news” on “Democracy Now” is viewed as reliable and representing the views of the anti-war, anti-imperialist constituency. In this way, Goodman is a valuable asset to Washington and Wall Street because her broadcasts can serve to disorient and undermine a constituency that is normally opposed to Western warmongering and imperialism. Many of the subscribers to “Democracy Now” may see through the misinformation. Many, though, may not, and therefore will become embedded with the imperialist agenda. The fact that Democracy Now ratings appear to be holding up would indicate that a lot of its followers are oblivious to the insidious effect of such misinformation. As such, Democracy Now is more valuable to the powers-that-be than, say, the New York Times or the Financial Times. “Democracy Now” ensures that the agenda of the powerful becomes infiltrated in a constituency that would otherwise be opposed to that agenda.
… The Houla massacre on 24 May is a case in point. The BBC and other mainstream media outlets have been shown to be outrageously wrong in their initial rush to blame the atrocity on Syrian government forces when the evidence has slowly emerged that it was most likely the grisly work of Western-backed mercenaries.
It is all the more disquieting when a supposedly informed, alternative news service, Democracy Now, peddles such blatant misinformation – more than six weeks after the massacre occurred and after evidence has been reported that points convincingly to Western-backed perpetrators. On 9 July, Goodman broadcast an interview with Rafif Jouejati, a spokesperson for a Syrian opposition group called the Syrian Local Coordination Committees, based in Washington DC. Despite the mounting evidence of Western, Turkish and Saudi/Qatari covert operations, Goodman gave her guest a free rein to regurgitate the litany of mainstream media calumnies on Syria. Without a hint of scepticism from Goodman, her guest said:
“The bottom line is that the majority of the country is engaged in a popular revolution for freedom, for democracy, for dignity… We have mountains of evidence indicating that [Assad’s] armed forces have been engaged in systematic torture, rampant detentions, massacres across the country.”
Really? The majority of the country engaged in a popular revolution for freedom, democracy and dignity? That sounds more like the fanciful imagination of someone safely based in Washington DC. By contrast, sources in Syria have confirmed that people are terrified by Western-armed gangs running amok in their communities, kidnapping, murdering, evicting families from their homes and burning down business premises.
… Goodman also indulged in the overblown casualty figures from dubious Syrian opposition sources as if they were verifiable accurate data. She even sounded like Hillary Clinton in talking up the “defection” of the hapless former Syrian Brigadier General Manaf Tlass as “significant” when informed sources discount that news as a minor irrelevance.
In the interview between Goodman and her guest (whom sources describe as belonging to a family formerly aligned with the Syrian government), Bashar Al Assad was portrayed as an unhinged leader who is in denial over massacres – massacres, as we have noted, that have most likely been carried out by Western-backed death squads as confirmed by numerous reports.
Preposterously, Assad was described as guilty of much worse crimes than former Egyptian and Libyan rulers Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. Then the “alternative” Democracy Now broadcast this statement from the supposed opposition spokesperson as if it were normal discourse:
“I would like to think that we will proceed with full prosecution in the International Criminal Court. I think the longer this issue goes on and the more violence he [Assad] commits, the more likely he will wish to have a fate such as Gaddafi’s.”
Recall that the Libyan leader was lynched on a roadside by a NATO-directed mob, and sodomised with a knife before being shot dead. It may also be recalled that “Democracy Now” gave prominent broadcasts supporting NATO’s intervention in Libya and justifying the criminal subversion of that country. Going by the latest coverage on Syria, Democracy Now is acting once again under a “progressive” cloak as a propaganda tool for US-led imperialist intervention. Given the misplaced respect among many of the public seeking independent, alternative, accurate news and analysis, this insidious role of Democracy Now is reprehensible. May it be suggested, in the name of media transparency, that the programme be aptly renamed “Imperialism Now”.”
****
Finally, excerpts from the article that sprung today’s renewed look at the lies of DN:
“… The group that is in fact driving the Rohingya from their homes in Myanmar and into the sea – and why this is not reported as the center of the current crisis – are the followers and supporters of the West’s own “patron saint of democracy,” Aung San Suu Kyi.
Suu Kyi herself, and many of the NGOs that support her and her political network are directly and substantially underwritten by the US and British governments.
These NGOs and faux-news agencies include the Irrawaddy, Era Journal, and the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), all admitted by the Burma Campaign UK (page 15) to be funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) along with “Mizzima” also fully funded by NED and convicted financial criminal George Soros’ Open Society.
There is also the “Burma Partnership” which upon its “About Us” page is listed a myriad of associations and organizations directly linked to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, including the Students and Youth Congress of Burma, the Forum for Democracy in Burma, and the Nationalities Youth Forum, which is directly funded by the Euro-Burma Office (in turn funded by the EU, and US National Endowment for Democracy), and Open Society.
The heavily US-British-backed Noble Peace Prize laureate’s followers have prosecuted a campaign of ultra-racist genocide aimed at eradicating Myanmar entirely of the Rohingya people, often with orgies of machete-wielding brutality and neighborhood-wide arson leaving scores of people dead, and hundreds, sometimes thousands homeless, destitute, and above all, desperate.
Leading the violence are Suu Kyi’s “saffron monks.” The so-called “Saffron Revolution” of 2007 seeking to oust the Myanmar government and put into power Aung San Suu Kyi and her “National League for Democracy” was named so after the saffron-colored robes of these supporters.
Underneath the “pro-democracy” narrative, however, is an ugly truth that if known more widely amongst the global public, would spell the end of both Suu Kyi and her foreign backers’ agenda in Myanmar.
While the Western media attempts to shift the blame on the Myanmar government itself for the current Rohingya crisis, it was the government that attempted to grant the Rohingya citizenship through incremental programs that included allowing them to vote in upcoming elections. The plan was, however, disrupted by violence spearheaded by Suu Kyi’s followers, as reported by Australia’s ABC News article, “Myanmar scraps temporary ID cards amid protests targeting ethnic minorities without citizenship.”
The irony of Suu Kyi’s supporters, supposedly representing a shining example of democracy worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize, attempting to deny hundreds of thousands of people their right to vote in elections is immeasurable.
Suu Kyi, for her part, has remained utterly silent regarding the brutality and inhumanity of her most loyal and active supporters. While she is portrayed as a woman of courage and conviction, in reality these “virtues” were bought and paid for through millions of dollars of support for both her and her political network over the decades by the US and British governments. While her silence is shrugged off by the Western media as “pragmatic” and “calculated,” it is in reality merely her refusal to condemn the very supporters who have carved out a niche for her amid Myanmar’s political landscape.
… Among Suu Kyi’s saffron butchers, there stands out one leader in particular, Wirathu. Wirathu has been involved in stirring up politically-motivated violence for over a decade. In particular, his group has carried out a bloody campaign against the Rohingya, even landing him in prison in 2003.
The International Business Times published an article titled, “Burmese Bin Laden: Is Buddhist Monk Wirathu Behind Violence in Myanmar?” explaining in further detail:
The shadow of controversial monk Wirathu, who has led numerous vocal campaigns against Muslims in Burma, looms large over the sectarian violence in Meikhtila.
Wirathu played an active role in stirring tensions in a Rangoon suburb in February, by spreading unfounded rumours that a local school was being developed into a mosque, according to the Democratic voice of Burma. An angry mob of about 300 Buddhists assaulted the school and other local businesses in Rangoon.
The monk, who describes himself as ‘the Burmese Bin Laden’ said that his militancy “is vital to counter aggressive expansion by Muslims”.
He was arrested in 2003 for distributing anti-Muslim leaflets and has often stirred controversy over his Islamophobic activities, which include a call for the Rhohingya and “kalar”, a pejorative term for Muslims of South Asian descent, to be expelled from Myanmar.
He has also been implicated in religious clashes in Mandalay, where a dozen people died, in several local reports.
By all accounts, Wirathu is a violent criminal leading mobs which have cost thousands of people their lives and has created a humanitarian crisis that is slowly engulfing all of Southeast Asia. Yet Wirathu is still counted among Suu Kyi’s most vocal supporters and frequently weighs in on high level decisions made by Suu Kyi’s political party. Furthermore, the West has failed to condemn him, place any sanctions upon him, and through their various media outlets, still grant him interviews, lending him continued credibility and influence.
… This systematic genocidal brutality is what has driven the Rohingya to the seas from their rightful homes in Myanmar, scattering them abroad and creating a humanitarian crisis for other nations to bear. In particular, Myanmar’s neighbor Thailand has been criticized vocally by the West as this crisis continues on, and more so now than ever since Thailand has ousted Washington and Wall Street’s political order of choice there in a military coup in 2014.
But it is clear that the source of the problem is in Myanmar, and in particular the violence being used to drive the Rohingya from their homes. Myanmar’s neighbors are but scapegoats for perpetrators not politically convenient for the Western media and the West’s many so-called “international” institutions and rights organizations to name and shame. If anything, the perpetrators have created a political and humanitarian crisis regionally, giving the West an opportunity to meddle even further.
Regardless of what Myanmar’s neighbors do to assist Rohingya being driven from their homes, if the violence driving them abroad to begin with is not stopped, the humanitarian crisis will only continue to grow. Such violence, however, cannot be stopped so long as the self-proclaimed arbiters of international order and human rights not only refuse to condemn those guilty of precipitating this crisis, but in fact actively defend and support them.
For Southeast Asia, and in particular, Myanmar, Thailand, and Malaysia – all nations targeted by the US and British with perpetual political meddling – exposing the true perpetrators of this crisis, and in particular the political order under which these perpetrators are operating, can expose Aung San Suu Kyi and her party and disrupt other foreign backed political proxies across the region like her. By doing so, perhaps an end can be brought to this current crisis today, and the next one prevented from unfolding tomorrow.
The Ronhingya are not “stateless.” They are not “boat people.” They are not “without a home.” Their home is Myanmar. Ultra-racist genocidal criminals, apparently with the support and blessing of the West, have driven them from that home.”
Neocon mouthpiece Ayaan Hirsi Ali exposed as mythomaniac
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | May 18, 2015
The vulgar Neocon-Zionist agent Ayaan Hirsi Ali, darling of Zionist media venues for her anti-Muslim invective and genocidal calls for a “war on Islam,” is exposed thoroughly in this Dutch documentary as a mythomaniac who fabricated entire parts of her past to gain fame and fortune in the West.
The documentary shows that she opportunistically married a Somali-Canadian man in Kenya and then used him to pay her way to Europe where she promptly ditched him and demanded a divorce. Ali invented a story about being a civil war refugee from Somalia when she in fact lived out her childhood peacefully in Kenya. She did this so that she’d meet the requirements to gain residency in the Netherlands. She further invented a fable about fleeing a ‘forced marriage,’ an outright lie she told to a slew of media outlets which has earned her fame and book deals. All of her sanctimonious fibbing eventually paid off when she became an MP in Holland in 2003.
Despite all of her past lies and debauchery, American neocons and Zionist-controlled media outlets (Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, FOX News’ The Megan File, AEI, The Guardian, Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, The Daily Caller, The Richard Dawkins Foundation, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and The Economist) have promoted her as a legitimate commentator. She is nothing more than an extremely mercenary opportunistic megalomaniac who will say anything to get attention. She is a willing tool of the neocon, Zionist warmongers and their agenda for world domination.
Monsanto’s Worst Fear May Be Coming True
By Jonathan Latham, PhD | Independent Science News | May 18, 2015
The decision of the Chipotle restaurant chain to make its product lines GMO-free is not most people’s idea of a world-historic event. Especially since Chipotle, by US standards, is not a huge operation. A clear sign that the move is significant, however, is that Chipotle’s decision was met with a tidal-wave of establishment media abuse. Chipotle has been called irresponsible, anti-science, irrational, and much more by the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and many others. A business deciding to give consumers what they want was surely never so contentious.
The media lynching of Chipotle has an explanation that is important to the future of GMOs. The cause of it is that there has long been an incipient crack in the solid public front that the food industry has presented on the GMO issue. The crack originates from the fact that while agribusiness sees GMOs as central to their business future, the brand-oriented and customer-sensitive ends of the food supply chain do not.
The brands who sell to the public, such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kraft, etc., are therefore much less committed to GMOs. They have gone along with their use, probably because they wish to maintain good relations with agribusiness, who are their allies and their suppliers. Possibly also they see a potential for novel products in a GMO future.
However, over the last five years, as the reputation of GMOs has come under increasing pressure in the US, the cost to food brands of ignoring the growing consumer demand for GMO-free products has increased. They might not say so in public, but the sellers of top brands have little incentive to take the flack for selling GMOs.
From this perspective, the significance of the Chipotle move becomes clear. If Chipotle can gain market share and prestige, or charge higher prices, from selling non-GMO products and give (especially young) consumers what they want, it puts traditional vendors of fast and processed food products in an invidious position. Kraft and MacDonalds, and their traditional rivals can hardly be left on the sidelines selling outmoded products to a shrinking market. They will not last long.
MacDonald’s already appears to be in trouble, and it too sees the solution as moving to more up-market and healthier products. For these much bigger players, a race to match Chipotle and get GMOs out of their product lines, is a strong possibility. That may not be so easy, in the short term, but for agribusiness titans who have backed GMOs, like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta; a race to be GMO-free is the ultimate nightmare scenario.
Until Chipotle’s announcement, such considerations were all behind the scenes. But all of a sudden this split has spilled out into the food media. On May 8th, Hain Celestial told The Food Navigator that:
“We sell organic products… gluten-free products and… natural products. [But] where the big, big demand is, is GMO-free.”
According to the article, unlike Heinz, Kraft, and many others, Hain Celestial is actively seeking to meet this demand. Within the food industry, important decisions, for and against GMOs, are taking place.
Why the pressure to remove GMOs will grow
The other factor in all this turmoil is that the GMO technology wheel has not stopped turning. New GMO products are coming on stream that will likely make crop biotechnology even less popular than it is now. This will further ramp up the pressure on brands and stores to go GMO-free. There are several contributory factors.
The first issue follows from the recent US approvals of GMO crops resistant to the herbicides 2,4-D and Dicamba. These traits are billed as replacements for Roundup-resistant traits whose effectiveness has declined due to the spread of weeds resistant to Roundup (Glyphosate).
The causes of the problem, however, lie in the technology itself. The introduction of Roundup-resistant traits in corn and soybeans led to increasing Roundup use by farmers (Benbrook 2012). Increasing Roundup use led to weed resistance, which led to further Roundup use, as farmers increased applications and dosages. This translated into escalated ecological damage and increasing residue levels in food. Roundup is now found in GMO soybeans intended for food use at levels that even Monsanto used to call “extreme” (Bøhn et al. 2014).
The two new herbicide-resistance traits are set to recapitulate this same story of increasing agrochemical use. But they will also amplify it significantly,
The specifics are worth considering. First, the spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba on the newer herbicide-resistant crops will not eliminate the need for Roundup, whose use will not decline (see Figure).
Predicted herbicide use to 2025 (Mortensen et al 2012)
That is because, unlike Roundup, neither 2,4-D nor Dicamba are broad-spectrum herbicides. They will have to be sprayed together with Roundup, or with each other (or all of them together) to kill all weeds. This vital fact has not been widely appreciated.
Confirmation comes from the companies themselves. Monsanto is stacking (i.e. combining) Dicamba resistance with Roundup resistance in its Xtend crops and Dow is stacking 2,4-D resistance with Roundup resistance in its Enlist range. (Notably, resistance to other herbicides, such as glufosinate, are being stacked in all these GMO crops too.)
The second issue is that the combined spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba and Roundup, will only temporarily ease the weed resistance issues faced by farmers. In the medium and longer terms, they will compound the problems. That is because new herbicide-resistant weeds will surely evolve. In fact, Dicamba-resistant and 2,4-D-resistant weeds already exist. Their spread, and the evolution of new ones, can be guaranteed (Mortensen et al 2012). This will bring greater profits for herbicide manufacturers, but it will also bring greater PR problems for GMOs and the food industry. GMO soybeans and corn will likely soon have “extreme levels” of at least three different herbicides, all of them with dubious safety records (Schinasi and Leon 2014).
The first time round, Monsanto and Syngenta’s PR snow-jobs successfully obscured this, not just from the general public, but even within agronomy. But it is unlikely they will be able to do so a second time. 2,4-D and Dicamba-resistant GMOs are thus a PR disaster waiting to happen.
A pipeline full of problems: risk and perception
The longer term problem for GMOs is that, despite extravagant claims, their product pipeline is not bulging with promising ideas. Mostly, it is more of the same: herbicide resistance and insect resistance.
The most revolutionary and innovative part of that pipeline is a technology and not a trait. Many products in the GMO pipeline are made using RNA interference technologies that rely on double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs). dsRNA is a technology with two problems. One is that products made with it (such as the “Arctic” Apple, the “Innate” Potato, and Monsanto’s “Vistive Gold” Soybeans) are unproven in the field. Like its vanguard, a Brazilian virus-resistant bean, they may never work under actual farming conditions.
But if they do work, there is a clear problem with their safety which is explained in detail here (pdf).
In outline, the problem is this: the long dsRNA molecules needed for RNA interference were rejected long ago as being too hazardous for routine medical use (Anonymous, 1969). The scientific literature even calls them “toxins”, as in this paper title from 1969:
Absher M., and Stinebring W. (1969) Toxic properties of a synthetic double-stranded RNA. Nature 223: 715-717. (not online)
As further evidence of this, long dsRNAs are now used in medicine to cause autoimmune disorders in mice, in order to study these disorders (Okada et al 2005).
The Absher and Stinebring paper comes from a body of research built up many years ago, but its essential findings have been confirmed and extended by more modern research. We now know why dsRNAs cause harm. They trigger destructive anti-viral defence pathways in mammals and other vertebrates and there is a field of specialist research devoted to showing precisely how this damages individual cells, whole tissues, and results in auto-immune disease in mice (Karpala et al. 2005).
The conclusion therefore, is that dsRNAs that are apparently indistinguishable from those produced in, for example, the Arctic apple and Monsanto’s Vistive Gold Soybean, have strong negative effects on vertebrate animals (but not plants). These vertebrate effects are found even at low doses. Consumers are vertebrate animals. They may not appreciate the thought that their healthy fats and forever apples also contain proven toxins. And on a business front, consumer brands will not relish defending dsRNA technology once they understand the reality. They may not wish to find themselves defending the indefensible.
The bottom line is this. Either dsRNAs will sicken or kill people, or, they will give opponents of biotechnology plenty of ammunition. The scientific evidence, as it currently stands, suggests they will do both. dsRNAs, therefore, are a potentially huge liability.
The last pipeline problem stems from the first two. The agbiotech industry has long held out the prospect of “consumer benefits” from GMOs. Consumer benefits (in the case of food) are most likely to be health benefits (improved nutrition, altered fat composition, etc.). The problem is that the demographic of health-conscious consumers no doubt overlaps significantly with the demographic of those most wary of GMOs. Show a consumer a “healthy GMO” and they are likely to show you an oxymoron. The likely health market in the US for customers willing to pay more for a GMO has probably evaporated in the last few years as GMOs have become a hot public issue.
The end-game for GMOs?
The traditional chemical industry approach to such a problem is a familiar repertoire of intimidation and public relations. Fifty years ago, the chemical industry outwitted and outmanoeuvered environmentalists after the death of Rachel Carson (see the books Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Trust Us We’re Experts). But that was before email, open access scientific publication, and the internet. Monsanto and its allies have steadily lost ground in a world of peer-to-peer communication. GMOs have become a liability, despite their best efforts.
The historic situation is this: in any country, public acceptance of GMOs has always been based on lack of awareness of their existence. Once that ignorance evaporates and the scientific and social realities start to be discussed, ignorance cannot be reinstated. From then on the situation moves into a different, and much more difficult phase for the defenders of GMOs.
Nevertheless, in the US, those defenders have not yet given up. Anyone who keeps up with GMOs in the media knows that the public is being subjected to an unrelenting and concerted global blitzkrieg.
Pro-GMO advocates and paid-for journalists, presumably financed by the life-science industry, sometimes fronted by non-profits such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are being given acres of prominent space to make their case. Liberal media outlets such as the New York Times, the National Geographic, The New Yorker, Grist magazine, the Observer newspaper, and any others who will have them (which is most) have been deployed to spread its memes. Cornell University has meanwhile received a $5.6 million grant by the Gates Foundation to “depolarize” negative GMO publicity.
But so far there is little sign that the growth of anti-GMO sentiment in Monsanto’s home (US) market can be halted. The decision by Chipotle is certainly not an indication of faith that it can.
For Monsanto and GMOs the situation suddenly looks ominous. Chipotle may well represent the beginnings of a market swing of historic proportions. GMOs may be relegated to cattle-feed status, or even oblivion, in the USA. And if GMOs fail in the US, they are likely to fail elsewhere.
GMO roll-outs in other countries have relied on three things: the deep pockets of agribusinesses based in the United States, their political connections, and the notion that GMOs represent “progress”. If those three disappear in the United States, the power to force open foreign markets will disappear too. The GMO era might suddenly be over.
Endnote: The report by Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson on RNA interference and dsRNAs in GMO crops is downloadable from here. Accompanying Tables are here.
References
Anonymous (1969) Interferon inducers with side effects. Nature 223: 666-667.
Bøhn, T., Cuhra, M., Traavik, T., Sanden, M., Fagan, J. and Primicerio, R. 2014. Compositional differences in soybeans on the market: Glyphosate accumulates in Roundup Ready GM soybeans. Food Chemistry 153: 207-215.
Okada C., Akbar S.M.F., Horiike N., and Onji M. (2005) Early development of primary biliary cirrhosis in female C57BL/6 mice because of poly I:C administration. Liver International 25: 595-603.
Karpala A.J., Doran T.J., and Bean A.G.D. (2005) Immune responses to dsRNA: Implications for gene silencing technologies. Immunology and cell biology 83: 211–216.
Mortensen, David A., J. Franklin Egan, Bruce D. Maxwell, Matthew R. Ryan and Richard G. Smith (2012) Navigating a Critical Juncture for Sustainable Weed Management. BioScience 62: 75-84.
Schinasi L and Maria E. Leon ME (2014) Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Occupational Exposure to Agricultural Pesticide Chemical Groups and Active Ingredients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 11: 4449-4527.
Larry Mendte Gets It So Wrong: How Persistent Iraq Mythologies Inspire Bad Analysis on Iran
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | May 8, 2015
Earlier this week, Kayvon Afshari, communications director for the American Iranian Council, appeared on Another Thing with veteran broadcaster Larry Mendte to discuss the state of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the prospect, in the face of powerful opposition, of a final deal being reached in the coming weeks.
While Afshari’s pro-diplomacy optimism was backed up by important facts not often heard in the media, Mendte made a number of comments that betrayed his role as an ostensibly objective and informed interviewer.
Right off the bat, for instance, Mendte describes the ongoing talks as a negotiation about an “Iranian nuclear arms deal.” That’s a bizarre – albeit revealing – way to begin, namely because that’s not what this is. If anything, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is a nuclear arms deal, one signed back in 1968 by Iran and ratified two year later, as it proscribes all non-nuclear weapons signatories to forever forgo the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
What Iran is negotiating with six world powers about is accepting verifiable limits and constraints on its peaceful, civilian, non-weaponized, non-military, safeguarded nuclear energy program in exchange for the lifting of international and unilateral sanctions and the normalization of its nuclear dossier.
This is not an “arms deal,” as Iran has no “arms” to give up. The United States intelligence community and its allies have long assessed that Iran doesn’t even have a nuclear weapons program, let alone nuclear weapons. Iranian officials, for decades, have consistently maintained they will never pursue such weapons on religious, strategic, political, moral and legal grounds. The IAEA has found no credible evidence that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program.
As the conversation gets underway, Mendte repeats the tired claim that Iran is just biding its time under intense and intrusive scrutiny until – years from now – when it will suddenly emerge with a deadly nuclear arsenal manufactured out of thin air:
The way I understand the deal, and I think some of the people that are critical of it, is that there’d be a decade-long moratorium and then, the president has admitted in an article, in an interview, that after that decade-long moratorium, Iran could start up a nuclear program just like that. As a matter fact, they could advance the program during that decade and then be able to start up, for 10 years. This just puts off the inevitable. Is that fair?
Obviously this is not “fair” and Mendte’s understanding of the deal, or anything having to do with Iran or its nuclear program for that matter, is effectively nonexistent.
Afshari rightly points out to Mendte that Iran already has a nuclear program, one that is legal and guaranteed under the NPT, also noting, “It’s not as though there’s going to be no inspections after ten years. There’s still going to be strict inspections, but they’ll be loosened after that initial ten years.”
Mendte is quick to jump in. “We had strict inspections in Iraq. That didn’t turn out really well,” he patronizingly tells Afshari, continuing, “The reason we went into Iraq, people forget, in the first place, is because the inspectors were thrown out and not allowed in. [There were] supposed to be UN inspections and he [Saddam Hussein] didn’t allow it.”
When Afshari replies that the analogy is a stretch as Iran has never kicked out inspectors and that Iraq’s nuclear program was very different than Iran’s, Mendte is undeterred, insisting on playing out his analogy. “There was a nuclear arms deal in place” before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he says, “and what I’m saying is that lead to the Iraq War. I mean, I know there [were] other factors including 9/11, including President Bush wanting to go after Iraq, but that was the catalyst: the fact that they left out UN inspectors, if you remember at the time.”
While Afshari is a gracious guest and tries to steer the conversation back on track, he really shouldn’t have been so accommodating to Mendte’s version of history. Basically, he should have told him was flat-out wrong. Beyond the fact that Mendte seems to have forgotten that Bush administration claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were false (and that there was no “nuclear arms deal in place” with Iraq), his claim about international inspectors is also completely and totally bogus. How so, you ask?
Saddam never kicked inspectors out of Iraq.
This claim is a canard, a wholesale myth, a straight-up falsehood. It was built up by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq and dutifully reinforced by the mainstream media. In fact, between late November 2002 and mid-March 2003, weapons inspectors from the IAEA and the U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) conducted more than 750 inspections at 550 sites in Iraq.
In January 2003, UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix told reporters that inspectors had been “covering the country in ever wider sweeps” for months but “haven’t found any smoking guns.” An Associated Press dispatch from the time noted, “In almost two months of surprise visits across Iraq, U.N. arms monitors have inspected 13 sites identified by U.S. and British intelligence agencies as major ‘facilities of concern,’ and reported no signs of revived weapons building.”
IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei delivered a report to the U.N. Security Council on March 7, 2003, during which he spoke of increased Iraqi cooperation with international inspections and thoroughly dismantled Bush administration claims about aluminum tubes, high-strength magnets, and importing yellowcake from Niger. ElBaradei concluded, “After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq” and clearly stated the intention “to continue our inspection activities.”
Inspections ended abruptly eleven days later, on March 18, 2003, for one reason: the United States was about to start dropping bombs all over the place.
“In early March,” Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker” blog wrote in 2011, Blix “began getting warnings from senior U.S. and British officials about the safety of the inspectors. Then the company that supplied helicopters for the teams withdrew its equipment from Iraq.”
News reports at the time leave no doubt as to what really happened.
“In the clearest sign yet that war with Iraq is imminent, the United States has advised U.N. weapons inspectors to begin pulling out of Baghdad, the U.N. nuclear agency chief said Monday,” reported the Associated Press on March 17, 2003. The article continued:
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the recommendation was given late Sunday night both to his Vienna-based agency hunting for atomic weaponry and to the New York-based teams looking for biological and chemical weapons.”
“Late last night… I was advised by the U.S. government to pull out our inspectors from Baghdad,” ElBaradei told the IAEA’s board of governors.
Within hours, the evacuation began. “U.N. weapons inspectors climbed aboard a plane and pulled out of Iraq on Tuesday after President Bush issued a final ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to step down or face war,” AP reported the next day. “U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday ordered all U.N. inspectors and support staff, humanitarian workers and U.N. observers along the Iraq-Kuwait border to evacuate Iraq after U.S. threats to launch war.”
“[A]t no time did Iraq throw out the inspectors,” wrote Kessler, in an attempt to forever put these talking points to rest. “[I]nspectors voluntarily ended their mission because of the threat of military action by the United States and its allies.
Larry Mendte’s regurgitation of Rumsfeldian propaganda – 13 years after the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq – should cast doubt on his credibility as a broadcaster. Let’s hope a correction and mea culpa are forthcoming – not to mention an apology to Afshari.
*****
UPDATE:
May 10, 2015 – I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by Larry Mendte’s inability to grasp basic facts. A quick look at some of his past rants on Iran makes clear he’s long bought into the most bellicose and alarmist propaganda pushed by Iran hawks and is incapable of any semblance of critical thought. He sees the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as warnings to other nations, not as lessons to be learned about jingoism, faulty intelligence, war crimes, and imperial adventurism. He thinks Iran has a “nuclear weapons program.” He thinks sanctions “brought Iran to the negotiating table.” He says he knows that Iran wants a nuclear bomb.
Larry Mendte bloviates like he’s in a Darrell Hammond sketch. With one exception: he should be taken far less seriously.
The Economist’s Racist Headline Must be Retracted Immediately
By William K. Black | New Economic Perspectives | May 10, 2015
It took exactly one day for the Tory election victory in the UK to produce the confidence among the Conservatives only remaining media organ with even a semblance of journalistic professionalism to reveal its true racism against the Scots. The Economist felt empowered to headline its article about the other electoral triumph, by the Scots, as “Ajockalypse now.” Wow, that is such a clever title. One can only imagine the back-slapping among the staff in the magazine’s halls at the ability to go full-racist given the election results. (The English have historically treated the Celts as separate “races.”)
Here is a translation of the headline for a non-UK audience. “Jock” is defined in the Urban Dictionary (with a helpful example of usage after the definition):
A term used by English people to generally describe Scottish people in a derogatory fashion (was once a common male nickname within Scotland). It is now considered to verge on racism when used by a non-Scot. The Scottish equivalent for the Irish “Paddy” or “Bog-trotter”.
“Those bloody Jocks are at it again with their whinging over the Barnett Formula and North Sea oil revenues.”
Another major dictionary’s definition is similar.
British Informal.
- a Scottish soldier or a soldier in a Scottish regiment.
- Usually Offensive. a term used to refer to or address a Scot.
The Oxford Dictionary agrees.
noun
informal , chiefly derogatory
A Scotsman (often as a form of address).
The Oxford Dictionary confirms that “Paddy” is used by the English in a similar derogatory fashion to demean the Irish.
noun
informal , chiefly derogatory
An Irishman (often as a form of address).
So the “cleverness” is that the once-respected magazine managed to use an ethnic slur and add an ending to it suggesting that the rise of the Scots as a political power in the House of Commons represents an “apocalypse” – a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Such fun! Let’s see what analogous fun we can have using slurs about other ethnic groups that the English have long despised. Jews, blacks, Catholics, Muslims, and Asians all have such endearing slurs that rhyme with so many words and allow “clever” word play in headlines. Oh, except if the Economist chose any of those groups it would result within the day in a retraction and apology. Celts, however, are fair game and the Scots are the Celtic target of choice today for the Tories. Indeed, Prime Minister Cameron’s paramount election strategy was demonizing the Scots as a “threat” to the English – a fact that the Economist chose to omit in favor of the myth that the Scots were on the “warpath” against the English.
The English papers were littered with other forms of “clever” ethnic slurs in the run-up to the election. “Sweaty sock” rhymes with “jock” and insults Scots as “sweaty” because they are more likely to be industrial laborers. The deliberately doubly offensive “Jockestan” – insulting the Scots and Muslims simultaneously – is a favorite of one of the UK’s prominent “journalists.” A Tory media troll whose claim to “fame” was not being chosen by the Donald as his “Apprentice” uses these slurs. She attacks the SNP leader as a “terrorist” and denounces her because she has red hair. Yes, red hair. Calling someone with red hair “ginger” is a common ad hominem insult in the UK.
I must admit that I once had bright red hair. I also must admit that I was attacked in a book for having red hair by recently deceased Speaker of the House, Jim Wright’s, apologist-in-chief. So perhaps I am biased against the Tory troll. I confess to a wicked wish that the Donald had picked her as his “Apprentice” – they richly deserve each other.
Don’t Bother Sending Us Your “Defenses” of Racism
Ad hominem statements about people’s ethnicity, age, gender, “race,” religion, sexual orientation, and nationality (even hair color) have zero value in policy debates. They are not clever. They demonstrate that the writer or speaker knows that their arguments are unsound.
The effort to blame the victim by claiming that there is something wrong with objecting to bigotry simply adds to the offense. Denouncing those who object to your ad hominem slurs as supposedly being “politically correct” compounds your bigotry. Don’t bother telling me about the “Black Watch.” We do not print such slurs or defenses of slurs that blame the victim.
The BBC’s infamous attempt to defend the use of “Jock” by the English to refer to Scots as “a term of affection in the same way ‘Paddy’” is for the Irish, foundered on the small problem that as I quoted above “Paddy” is a derogatory term used by the English to demean the Irish. The BBC’s effort to defend a slur against Scots by noting that it was equivalent to using a slur to demean the Irish was a singularly inept effort at defending English bigotry. Of course, the BBC did not bother to inform the reader that “Paddy” was “chiefly derogatory” according to the Oxford Dictionary. U.S. slave owners had all kinds of terms for their slaves that they purported to be “a term of affection.” Every such term was a vile insult. To the extent the slave owners actually believed that the slaves considered such terms “affectionate” they demonstrated that they had no understanding of their slaves because they lacked even the most basic empathy needed to understand the people they routinely abused and insulted.
Conclusion
I call on the Economist to immediately retract its naked racism and apologize to everyone. And make it a real apology, not one of these offensive “to anyone who was offended” non-apologies. Ethnic slurs are not acceptable to any civilized person of any background. I hope that others will join me in calling on the Economist to act immediately to begin to remedy this travesty.
The Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh all have very short names that are polite and congenial to journalism. Use them. Ethnic slurs are vile and a sure indicator of journalistic incompetence. They are the opposite of “clever.”
The Central Role of Israel in the U.S. State Religion
By Gary Leupp | Dissident Voice | April 28, 2015
The national secular religion of this country consists of a cluster of rarely questioned premises, usually inculcated in childhood, comparable to the articles of a real religious creed.
The first proposition is the idea that we live in a “free” country, as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty idol that towers over New York City’s harbor. The system absolutely insists on this point, incessantly hammering it in. It’s its basic tenet. Indeed it’s presented as “self-evident.” You’re in this country, ergo, you are FREE.
It’s inflicted by osmosis. Every institution transmits it. Those who doubt it are encouraged to think they must be mentally ill. (Of course you’re free, you’re told. And so fortunate to be so! How can anyone question that?)
“Freedom” is emblazoned on our coinage and many state automobile licenses. It’s proclaimed each school day morning by tens of millions of otherwise innocent children obliged to recite religiously that they live in a nation “with liberty and justice for all.”
This particular component of the national creed is perhaps comparable to the opening article of the Apostles’ Creed, which alludes to belief in “God the Father Almighty.” Because belief in the U.S.A. as the global headquarters of “Freedom” is as central to what some call “Americanism” as monotheism is to Christianity.
The Pledge of Allegiance expresses the belief, not just in the goodness of “freedom” in itself, but in the idea that we actually live in a free country. (How often people protest, when someone criticizes their thoughts or behavior, “Well hey, it’s a free country!” And they usually truly believe this.)
“I’m proud to be an American,” country crooner Lee Greenwood boasts, “where at least I know I’m free.” He knows this, without any religious doubt. “Cause the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.” (Whoever they are. Presumably people who “hate our freedoms” and are actively conspiring somewhere to invade and enslave us.)
Actually, I suspect that the people of Sweden or Denmark are freer than Lee Greenwood is, or imagines himself to be. But do they know they’re free, with the confidence he exudes?
The second article of the national creed is that the U.S. military (commonly referred to as “our troops”)–wherever and whenever they fight–fight for us, somehow, to “defend our freedoms.” Whenever you attend a ball game (as I do regularly in Fenway Park) you’re told that everyone in the stadium is proud to honor the “servicemen and servicewomen” present–the “heroes” who are “defending our freedoms” in Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever. We’re expected to applaud them, even in liberal Boston, and indicate our gratitude for whatever it is they did. And if we read in the morning Boston Globe about these heroes killing civilians we should just put it out of mind.
The ball park MC never considers the possibility that there are Red Sox fans there just for the game, who do not see how U.S. troops’ actions in invaded countries defend their freedoms in any way, and who find this insertion of patriotic content into the program really annoying.
Still the crowd rises to its feet on demand, showing deference, accepting the adulation of the troops as a matter of faith. If you just sit there sullenly, refusing to participate, some drunken patriot might hassle you for your traitorous non-enthusiasm. So in this free country it’s best to just stand up to honor the troops and try to maintain your self-respect by being as nonchalant as possible.
Every cable news viewer has seen that endlessly repeated USAA Military Auto Insurance TV commercial, “Thank you Dad.”
“Thank you, Daddy, for defending our country,” says the cute little Latina girl, in one version.
“Thank you for your sacrifice, and thank you for your bravery,” says an African-American women, to her spouse perhaps.
“Thank you, colonel,” says the young white man to his former superior officer.
“Thank you, Daddy,” says the little black girl.
It’s a movingly multi-ethnic crowd, thanking Daddy for his martial valor. Trace Adkin’s “Till the Last Shot’s Fired” is in the background, urging us to “say a prayer for peace” even as the song glorifies the warrior and places priority on his (as opposed to his victims’) peace.
I’m in the fields of Vietnam,
the mountains of Afghanistan
and I’m still hopin’ waitin’
prayin’ I did not die in vain.Say a prayer for peace for every fallen son.
Set our spirits free. Let me lay down my gun.
… We can’t come home until the last shot’s fired.
It doesn’t seem to make any difference to Adkins what the cause is, or how many people these soldiers killed. They’re heroes–just for doing the unquestionable right thing and firing that last shot (against whoever) as ordered.
The fact is, those who fought in Vietnam and Afghanistan did “die in vain.” Certainly their deaths produced no good for this world. But as suffering servants who sacrifice their lives as commanded, the U.S. military vets occupy the position of Christ in the secular religion. Just as in Christian theology, Jesus is God in human flesh, “our troops” are our (mythical) Freedom personified.
St. Paul writes in his Epistle to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” In the U.S. civic doctrine, the dead troops are the sacrifice necessary to keep us free.
The third proposition in the official state faith is that we live in a democracy, in which the people decide the nation’s fate through exercising their awesome right to vote. This, in the official civic belief system, is the equivalent of the Holy Spirit in Christianity.
Through the ritual of casting a ballot in the hallowed privacy of a voting booth, citizens fulfill their highest civic duty. One is supposed to stand there in that box, in solitude, but in intimate spiritual communication with the benevolent, all-embracing, fatherly state. One is supposed to be grateful to the state for the opportunity to enjoy the right to help determine the future, perhaps by choosing Jed Bush over Hillary Clinton. Or Hillary Clinton over Jed Bush.
One is supposed to leave that sacred space feeling pure and righteous, having performed the highest duty of citizenship. It’s not so important to vote for either one of the two of the viable corporate-sponsored parties (which are really like two factions of a single party, in a one-party dictatorship of the 1%). No. What’s important is to simply vote and, having participated, thereby voted for the system itself.
You’re supposed to leave the ballot box, proud to be an American, because at least you know you voted. You made a difference! You exercised your right. The only downside is that hereafter–whatever happens–you share responsibility. Because you, after all, elected your leaders, didn’t you?
So if you voted for a warmonger who attacks Iran, with hellish consequences, you’ll have to call the inevitable ensuing conflict “our” war, right? Rather than calling it “their” war–the war of the imperialists, from whom you might have appropriately dissociated yourself–just by politely declining the invitation to attend their unpleasant party and play their game.
Voting is fundamentally a statement of faith in the god of Freedom. And in the Christ-like qualities of the divinized warrior who, in this mythology, dies for your precious right to engage in this vapid ritual. Casting a vote in this “democracy” is rather like receiving Holy Communion in the presence of the Holy Spirit.
In the latter rite one reverentially receives and consumes the wine and wafer; in the U.S. civil rite one religiously casts the ballot and swallows the myth.
These three beliefs constitute the Holy Trinity of the national doctrine. They’re indeed all articles of faith, hardly based on reason. After all, how “free” is a country with the world’s highest incarceration rate, with over 700 in jail or prison out of every 100,000?
Almost 7 million adults in this country–nearly 3% of the adult population–are under what’s called “correctional supervision.” With 5% of the world’s population, this free country boasts fully one-quarter of the planetary prison population. 40% of these prisoners are African-American. There are more young black men in prison in this country than in college.
How can anyone speak with a straight face about “freedom” here?
“I wish I knew how it would feel to be free,” sang Nina Simone–quite heretically, in bold opposition to the state faith–in 1967, before fleeing the U.S. in 1970 and ultimately settling in France, which she (among other African-American and other exiles) found somewhat freer at that time.
How “free” are we now really–when all citizens are under electronic surveillance (at a level of sophistication that puts East Germany’s fabled Stasi to shame); while young men of color are routinely harassed by police, while police murders have–if only due to cell phone camera video exposure–become almost daily news stories; while government whistle-blowers are jailed for revealing such phenomena as state-sponsored torture?
And how do U.S. soldiers fight “for us” or “defend our freedoms” by invading countries in wars based on lies?
In my own state of Massachusetts there have been what I suppose can be termed some modest advances in freedom in recent times. (Sunday alcohol sales were allowed in 2004, gay marriage was legally recognized in 2004, marijuana possession was decriminalized in 2008). These changes have a meaningful impact on my community. But none of them had anything at all to do with U.S. troops’ actions abroad. And in fact the U.S. war (based on lies) in Iraq set women’s rights far back in that tortured, mutilated country.
The Democrats and Republicans pretend to have real differences with one another. (Rather like pro wrestlers pretend to truly despise one another before the big fight. It’s all for show.) But seriously: how democratic is a country in which two parties sharing a common faith in capitalist imperialism trade the presidency every so often–always vowing to effect change, even while nothing dramatically changes–while the one percent at the top of society (especially the cancerous tenth of that one percent) relentlessly increases its share of the national wealth?
The recent (2014) empirical study by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Stanford professor Benjamin Page declares that the U.S. is not in fact a democracy but an oligarchy in which individuals and even mass-based interest groups cannot prevail over the tiny elite that makes decisions. “Average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence” on policy, they conclude. “Democracy” in this country is a joke.
The national secular creed also entails support for a foreign state which has nothing to do with U.S. freedom, and has not been a battlefield of U.S. blood sacrifice, but which does significantly impact the sacrament of voting. Whereas belief in the trinity of Freedom, Our Troops, and Voting is formally non-religious, this support is rooted deeply in religion.
I refer of course to the role of Israel in the national belief system.
Members of Congress have been known to cite Genesis 12:3, in the Old Testament, to explain their votes in favor of Israel under any circumstances whatsoever. This is the passage in which Yahweh (God) tells Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” Just the other day Congressman Louis Gohmert (R-TX) declared, “There are many who have been aware of Scripture, and it has been a guide in our relations with Israel.” Enough said!
This sort of ass kissing is politically feasible in a country where, a recent poll showed, 55% of the population believes that God (the Maker of everything) gave what’s now the land of Israel to the Jews in perpetuity. It’s amazing. It would be amusing if the potential ramifications weren’t so horrifying.
President Obama and repeated Congressional resolutions refer to the U.S.’s “eternal support” for Israel. (Notice how such language is never applied to other countries. Despite the “special relationship” U.S. politicians never use such effusive language in referring to ties with the U.K. And recall how France, the U.S.’s oldest ally that gifted it the Statue of Liberty, was vilified as an “enemy” not so long ago–when it refused to support the war on Iraq, based, as that criminal war was, wholly on lies.)
This religious support for Israel in fact produces some amusement in Israel itself, where about a third of the Jewish population considers itself non-religious and takes those Bible fables with a grain of salt. But the support of Christian evangelicals is the key to the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Israeli prime ministers are received like rock stars at Christian events held in support of Israel. Christian Zionist organizations play a major role in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobby group that serves as a virtual agency of the Israel state.
In his May 2011 speech to Congress, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu received 29 standing ovations–including one when he declared, “Israel will not return to the indefensible boundaries of 1967.” Never mind that no country in the world recognizes Israel’s right to any land (on the West Bank, or in Gaza, Syria, or Lebanon) occupied during that “pre-emptive” war of aggression. Never mind that it is official U.S. policy to demand, along with the rest of the world, for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders. The bought-and-paid-for Congress rose to applaud Netanyahu’s insistence of the Jewish right to permanently annex more Arab land.
In his March 3, 2015 address to Congress, by invitation of the Republican leaders in the Senate, Netanyahu devoted all of his time to one topic: the G5+1 talks in Switzerland with Iran, and the need for the Congress to oppose any plans for President Obama’s State Department to sign onto any deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Again, incessant standing ovations!
Not surprising. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina and head of the Senate’s Foreign Appropriations Committee, had already told Netanyahu publicly that on Iran “Congress will follow your lead.” How to make sense of such fawning stupidity?
Netanyahu has direly predicted that Iran is close to the production of nuclear weapons since 1992, since before today’s college sophomores were born. He’s been a Chicken Little crying that the sky is falling–that Israel is in imminent, existential danger from Iranian nukes. He will not of course talk about Israel’s nuclear weapons, which the Jewish state has possessed since 1979, when it conducted a joint test with its close ally, the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. (In Israel it is a crime for anyone with knowledge about this to reveal what they know; the nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in prison for revealing details about it to the British press.)
Israel is the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. Its leaders think they have the right to have them, since (for some reason) Israel faces so much hostility from its refugee-flooded neighbors in this harsh world. And they decline to submit their nuclear facilities to UN inspection, while demanding that the world prevent Iran from developing any sort of nuclear program. Even a program like that which Brazil or Argentina might boast of, quite legally.
There is amazingly little discussion in this country of the actual history of the modern state of Israel. About how 33 of the UN ambassadors in 1947 (59% of the total at the time) voted for a plan to partition the British Mandate of Palestine that favored the Jewish immigrants over the 65% Arab majority, allotting the Zionist settlers over half the land.
They don’t realize how unrepresentative the UN was at that time, when half the world remained under colonial occupation.
They don’t know that in 1948 many prominent Jewish rabbis in the world opposed the formation of a specifically Jewish-Zionist state in Palestine.
They don’t realize how the entire Muslim world opposed the unfair partition; how major countries that were not majority Muslim (India, Greece, Cuba) voted against it; and how many others (China, Argentina, Ethiopia, Mexico, Yugoslavia, even the United Kingdom) abstained, feeling queasy about the deal and its potential blowback.
They don’t necessarily know that Zionists in the Irgun brown shirt paramilitary group along with the Stern Gang implemented a strategy of terror to produce mass panic and flight that produced 750,000 Palestinian Arab refugees between April 1948 and January 1949. They’ve never been told about the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948.
They certainly don’t realize that many of these Palestinians may be the direct descendents of the Judeans of the Roman province where Jesus lived. It’s not like there was ever really a Diaspora in which the wicked Romans drove out all the Jews. They drove out some, while others remained. Of those who stayed, many became Christians over time and stopped self-identifying as Jewish. Later many converted to Islam. Meanwhile Judeans outside Judea, who numbered in millions even before the birth of Jesus, intermarried with others and for a couple centuries there was actually significant conversion to Judaism by gentiles in both the Roman and Parthian empires.
The Jewish Zionist community in contemporary Israel, which officially represents itself as a people who have “returned” to their ancestral land to which they have some sort of “birthright,” may in fact have less DNA in common with the Judeans of Jesus’ time than with modern European populations. The whole business of Abraham talking with the Supreme Being and being told his direct descendents would possess the Land of Israel forever (and so, who cares what happens to the Arabs?) is mythology. The “call of Abraham” is supposed to have occurred around 1000 years before there even was a written Hebrew language.
Christians in this country, who are prone to be much more literalistic in their reading of the Bible than those in Europe, tend to accept (as real historical phenomena) the story of Noah’s Ark, the bondage in Egypt and parting of the Red Sea. They believe that Moses was given the Law by God himself on Mount Sinai, and that during the conquest of Canaan, the walls of Jericho fell miraculously when the Hebrew “chosen people” blew their trumpets. They believe that the sun once remained stationary in the sky to give Joshua the upper hand in a battle for control of Jerusalem (Joshua 10:13).
The Israeli government and Israel Lobby which serves as its unlicensed agent (de facto exempt from U.S. legal oversight) knows that the U.S. public–largely brainwashed by the secular national religion and its own delusions about being itself a Chosen People inhabiting a Promised Land–is extremely receptive to Israel’s incessant religious pitch. They know that politicians competing for votes know they need to show maximum deference to Israel.
In his March 3 address to Congress, as his mesmerized audience sat imbibing his wisdom, Binyamin Netanyahu sermonized:
We’re an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we’ll read the Book of Esther. We’ll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies.
The plot was foiled. Our people were saved.
The legislators present rose to applaud this allusion to the Bible story, which immediately segued into the claim that “Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei spews the oldest hatred, the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism with the newest technology…”
The fact is, the story of Queen Esther is a myth. Set in the fifth century BCE but composed around the second century BCE, it describes a situation in which numerous Judeans reside in the city of Babylon in the Persian Empire. The exiles had in fact been permitted to leave by 530 BCE, and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, by the Achaemenid founder Cyrus the Great–a Persian (Iranian) who is actually identified in the Old Testament as “the Lord’s anointed one” (Isaiah: 45:1-7).
This validation as an “anointed one” was, by the way, an honor shared by no other non-Jew in the Bible. Not that you’d expect Netanyahu to point out the positive aspects of the very long relationship between Jews and Iran, which (as you know) has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel in the Middle East. The Jewish minority has representation in the Iranian parliament, and maintains synagogues, Hebrew schools and kosher restaurants. (If you don’t know these facts, thank the U.S. mainstream media.)
In the Book of Esther story, the Persian emperor Ahasuerus (commonly identified with Xerxes, a real person who ruled from 486 to 465 BCE and the fifth in the Achaemenid line) becomes dissatisfied with his current wife. He casts her aside unceremoniously and looks for a new spouse, choosing Esther, a Jew, who conceals her background. She finds favor with the ruler. However, her kinsman Mordecai offends Xerxes’ prime minister, Haman (to whom Netanyahu alluded in his speech) by refusing to bow down before him.
Haman learns that both the queen and Mordecai are Jews. Energized by petty pique, he organizes a plot to massacre all the Jews in the land and seize their property. He tells Xerxes there is a “certain unassimilated nation… throughout the provinces of your realm” whose laws so differ from those of other nations that “it is not in the king’s interest to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8-9). He persuades him to agree to an annihilation campaign.
Again, this is pure fantasy. It never happened. But in the story, a huge pogrom is planned, Mordecai heroically organizes mass prayer and resistance, and Queen Esther at the decisive moment reveals her identity as a Jew to the ruler, and defends her people. Xerxes, egged on by his spouse, has Haman hanged and gives the Jews license to exact revenge on their enemies. Indeed, according to this novelette, Jews during the Feast of Purim slaughter 75,000 Persians (Esther 9:15-16). (None of this is supported by contemporary Persian sources.)
Having observed that this is pure fiction, one can ask why Netanyahu wanted to use it last month in his fiction-riddled presentation to Congress. He must have known that anyone present with a little knowledge of Jewish-Iranian history might have asked: “Excuse me, but doesn’t the Esther story actually tell us that Jews have been in Persia (Iran) for 2,500 years, and that Persian rulers were regarded favorably by ancient Judeans as allies–even ‘God’s anointed’ rather than foes?”
And couldn’t one ask, “How did the Jewish Queen Esther ‘give the right’ to the Jews ‘to defend themselves against their enemies’?” The Jews were allowed to kill the 75,000 Persians in the story because the Persian ruler had given them the right. Netanyahu might not have read the text carefully. But one must suppose that even if he had, he wasn’t trying to give the U.S. audience a rigorous textual exegesis. He was presenting his Likud Party program of continued confrontation with Iran (as a supporter of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements) in biblical gift-wrap.
Just by citing an Old Testament work familiar to some Christians–such as those who dominate Congress–Netanyahu plugged into that chord of commonality that many adherents of the national civic religion like to reference when the trinity of Freedom, Holy War, and Voting alone doesn’t quite do the job.
When you’re a U.S. leader and need to get the people on board a new campaign for Mideast war, you can’t just say, “We’re free. But we have to fight to stay free. And we have to vote for the strongest, who will fight hardest for our freedom.” You also need to exploit the religious element and add, “We have to side with Israel, because God said, he would bless those who blessed it, and curse those who didn’t.”
Again, the first three articles in the national civic religion are actually irreligious; they don’t require belief in deities, souls, and afterlives. But the belief in Israel as the Promised Land of a certain bloodline, granted to it in perpetuity by a certain deity in conversations four millennia ago, is an explicitly religious conviction.
Unfortunately these four creedal myths–that we really enjoy freedom; that this countries wars are for freedom; that the act of voting really means “democracy;” and that the U.S. must always as a matter of principle back Israel–constitute a doctrinal whole.
You can presumably lose faith in the fourth while maintaining adherence to the first three, since the latter don’t involve specifically religious beliefs. But polls suggest that the majority of people in this country still accept all four points in the Creed. They would, in the event of an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran–while prizing their freedom, heroic military and parliamentary system–also applaud any Israeli actions in putative defense of the Jews’ “God-given” land.
Even if the Israelis were to deploy nuclear weapons, out of their known arsenal (which U.S. politicians, for some reason, never ever mention) against an Iran which has none, these people would bless rather than curse them. They would see in the action affirmations of “freedom,” heroic military action, and “democracy” alongside adherence to the unquestionable Word of God.
How can one possibly challenge the U.S. state religion–this nonsensical mass of concepts in the service of the 1% including an inordinate share of billionaire Iran-baiting Zionists? Six media corporations (GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS) control the “news” consumed by the great majority of people in this country. They all promote the national belief system.
Freedom. Our troops. The beauty of the ballot box. God and Israel.
They all instruct their reporters, in the event of a Ferguson-style situation, to spin the story away from any radical critique of systemic police brutality victimizing the non-white poor. Of course they all uphold the freedom of the abused people to demonstrate (“peacefully”); they have to confirm the national creed that the people are somehow, basically, “free” under the existing system.
“Journalists” and talking heads from Lou Dobbs to Al Sharpton unite in urging the people to respond properly, responsibly to events that disturb them (whether it’s war, economic injustice, or police brutality) by registering to vote!
Off the streets and into the polling booth! To elect more Obamas, more saviors! (Even though–let me repeat–Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have concluded empirically that in the U.S. your vote means very little.)
They all resist criticism of war, and investigative journalism before the next war-based-on-lies occurs. They all get critical as the U.S. enters a morass, and belatedly might even question the premises for a particular war. But they will always, culturally, uphold the warrior as the soul of the nation. Even after a war has itself been discredited, clearly exposed as based on lies, the warrior is upheld as a freedom fighter and social role model.
How to disabuse people of those doctrinal premises? How to persuade them to see Israel rationally–free of religious baggage–as a normal, oppressive settler-state surrounded by neighbors who are (most understandably) indignant about its aggressions since 1948?
It may well be impossible. State religions are hard to crack. Still, the petering out of state faiths in Europe and the collapse of State Shinto in Japan after 1945 suggest that the U.S. secular national religion might also eventually (as that old Persian expression goes) “fade from the page of time.”
I’m hopeful there will come a time when our youth–frustrated with job prospects and housing issues, fed up with police brutality, burdened with student debt, disgusted with wars based on lies, nauseated by the Stasi-like NSA surveillance of their private lives, shocked by the raw statistics showing how wealth is apportioned in this “free” country, disillusioned by their own engagement with the “American dream”–will rebel big time.
Understanding through experience that this is NOT a free country, and that humanity can do much, much better, they will observe matter-of-factly that U.S. military personnel deployed in imperialist wars are NOT heroes.
They will recognize that elections in this society are a ritual to legitimate the status quo, an ideological trap, not the best means to effect real change.
And they will realize that the mystical hold of Israel over the U.S. polity, which does not advantage the individual citizen at all, is rooted in a mythological misreading of the past.
In today’s world that interpretation of past reality necessarily dovetails with anti-Arab racism and ignorant Islamophobia. Senators and Congressmen will tell you quite frankly they’d be happy to “give” Israel the whole West Bank because the Bible tells them that “the Jews” should ultimately have it.
These fine Christian Zionists have no problem with Palestinian dislocation and disenfranchisement. But maybe their day is ending. The day of the U.S. state religion may be ending. The day that the Israeli prime minister citing biblical fairy tales can dictate U.S. policy in the Mideast may be ending as Bibi reaps the whirlwind of his Bible-thumping address to Congress.
A tsunami of disillusionment is, if not inevitable, at least very likely. It’s good to be disabused of illusions or delusions, religious, patriotic or both. May our youth shuffle off the Zionist coil, seeing it for what it is: the ideological prop for more war that has nothing to do with freedom.
Gary Leupp can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.
Weaponizing Information
By Joyce Nelson | CounterPunch | April 23, 2015
In mid-April, hundreds of U.S. paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade arrived in western Ukraine to provide training for government troops. The UK had already started its troop-training mission there, sending 75 troops to Kiev in March. [1] On April 14, the Canadian government announced that Canada will send 200 soldiers to Kiev, contributing to a military build-up on Russia’s doorstep while a fragile truce is in place in eastern Ukraine.
The Russian Embassy in Ottawa called the decision “counterproductive and deplorable,” stating that the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine have “called for enhanced intra-Ukrainian political dialogue,” as agreed upon in the Minsk-2 accords in February, and that it would be “much more reasonable to concentrate on diplomacy…” [2]
That viewpoint is shared by many, especially in Europe where few are eager for a “hot” war in the region. Nor are most people enamoured of the fact that more billions are being spent on a new arms-race, while “austerity” is preached by the 1 Per Cent.
But in the Anglo-American corridors of power (also called the Atlantic Alliance), such views are seen to be the result of diabolical propaganda spread through the Internet by Russia’s “secret army.” On April 15, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Ed Royce (R-Calif.), held a hearing entitled “Confronting Russia’s Weaponization of Information,” with Royce claiming that Russian propaganda threatens “to destabilize NATO members, impacting our security commitments.” [3]
The Committee heard from three witnesses: Elizabeth Wahl, former anchor for the news agency Russia Today (RT) who gained her moment of fame by resigning on camera in March 2014; Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute (a right-wing UK think-tank); and Helle C. Dale, Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy at The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing U.S. think-tank. [4] The Foreign Affairs Committee website contains video clips of the first two witnesses – well worth watching if you enjoy Orwellian rhetoric passionately delivered.
The day before the hearing, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Royce wrote, “Vladimir Putin has a secret army. It’s an army of thousands of ‘trolls,’ TV anchors and others who work day and night spreading anti-American propaganda on the Internet, airwaves and newspapers throughout Russia and the world. Mr. Putin uses these misinformation warriors to destabilize his neighbors and control parts of Ukraine. This force may be more dangerous than any military, because no artillery can stop their lies from spreading and undermining U.S. security interests in Europe.” [5]
In her formal (printed) submission, Ms. Wahl referred to the Internet’s “population of paranoid skeptics” and wrote: “The paranoia extends to believing that Western media is not only complicit, but instrumental in ensuring Western dominance.”
Helle C. Dale warned of “a new kind of propaganda, aimed at sowing doubt about anything having to do with the U.S. and the West, and in a number of countries, unsophisticated audiences are eating it up.”
Peter Pomerantsev claimed that Russia’s goal is “to trash the information space with so much disinformation so that a conversation based on actual facts would become impossible.” He added, “Throughout Europe conspiracy theories are on the rise and in the US trust in the media has declined. The Kremlin may not always have initiated these phenomena, but it is fanning them… Democracies are singularly ill equipped to deal with this type of warfare. For all of its military might, NATO cannot fight an information war. The openness of democracies, the very quality that is meant to make them more competitive than authoritarian models, becomes a vulnerability.”
Chairman Royce called for “clarifying” the mission of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. federal agency whose networks include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Marti). [6]
The BBG is apparently in disarray. According to Helle Dale’s submission, on March 4, 2015, Andrew Lack, the newly hired CEO of BBG’s International Broadcasting, left the position after only six weeks on the job. On April 7, the Director of Voice of America, David Ensor, announced that he was leaving.
Andrew Lack was formerly the president of NBC News. As Paul Craig Roberts has recently noted, Lack’s first official statement as CEO of the BBG “compared RT, Russia Today, the Russian-based news agency, with the Islamic State and Boko Haram. In other words, Mr. Lack brands RT as a terrorist organization. The purpose of Andrew Lack’s absurd comparison is to strike fear at RT that the news organization will be expelled from US media markets. Andrew Lack’s message to RT is: ‘lie for us or we are going to expel you from our air waves.’ The British already did this to Iran’s Press TV. In the United States the attack on Internet independent media is proceeding on several fronts.” [7]
Ironically, however, it’s likely that one of the biggest threats (especially in Europe) to Anglo-American media credibility about Ukraine and other issues is coming from a very old-fashioned medium – a book.
Udo Ulfkotte’s bestseller Bought Journalists has been a sensation in Germany since its publication last autumn. The journalist and former editor of one of Germany’s largest newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, revealed that he was for years secretly on the payroll of the CIA and was spinning the news to favour U.S. interests. Moreover he alleges that some major media are nothing more than propaganda outlets for international think-tanks, intelligence agencies, and corporate high-finance. “We’re talking about puppets on a string,” he says, “journalists who write or say whatever their masters tell them to say or write. If you see how the mainstream media is reporting about the Ukraine conflict and if you know what’s really going on, you get the picture. The masters in the background are pushing for war with Russia and western journalists are putting on their helmets.” [8]
In another interview, Ulfkotte said: “The German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia. This is a point of no return, and I am going to stand up and say… it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do, and have done in the past, because they are bribed to betray the people not only in Germany, all over Europe.” [9]
With the credibility of the corporate media tanking, Eric Zuesse recently wrote, “Since Germany is central to the Western Alliance – and especially to the American aristocracy’s control over the European Union, over the IMF, over the World Bank, and over NATO – such a turn away from the American Government [narrative] threatens the dominance of America’s aristocrats (who control our Government). A breakup of America’s [Atlantic] ‘Alliance’ might be in the offing, if Germans continue to turn away from being just America’s richest ‘banana republic’.” [10]
No wonder the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on April 15 had such urgent rhetoric, especially from Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute – a London-based international think-tank whose motto is “Prosperity Through Revitalizing Capitalism and Democracy” and whose stated mission is “promoting prosperity through individual liberty, free enterprise and entrepreneurship, character and values.”
At the end of March, Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson (named as a potential successor to David Cameron) helped launch the Legatum Institute’s “Vision of Capitalism” speakers’ series, whose rallying cry is “It’s time for friends of capitalism to fight back.” [11] The sponsor of the event was the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (BVCA), whose membership comprises “more than 500 influential firms, including over 230 private equity and venture capital houses, as well as institutional investors, professional advisers, service providers and international associations.” It is not clear whether the BVCA is also sponsoring the Legatum Institute’s “Vision of Capitalism” series.
The Legatum Institute was founded by billionaire Christopher Chandler’s Legatum Ltd. – a private investment firm headquartered in Dubai. According to The Legatum Institute’s website, its executives and fellows write for an impressive number of major media outlets, including the Washington Post, Slate, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, New Republic, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, and the Financial Times.
Nonetheless, the Legatum Institute’s Peter Pomeranzev told the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs that “Russia has launched an information war against the West – and we are losing.”
Chairperson Ed Royce noted during the hearing that if certain things are repeated over and over, a “conspiracy theory” takes on momentum and a life of its own.
Pomeranzev said the Kremlin is “pushing out more conspiracy” and he explained, “What is conspiracy – sort of a linguistic sabotage on the infrastructure of reason. I mean you can’t have a reality-based discussion when everything becomes conspiracy. In Russia, the whole discourse is conspiracy. Everything is conspiracy.” He added, “Our global order is based on reality-based politics. If that reality base is destroyed, then you can’t have international institutions, international dialogue.” Lying, he said, “makes a reality-based politics impossible” and he called it “a very insidious trend.”
Apparently, Pomeranzev has forgotten that important October 2004 article by Ron Suskind published in the New York Times Magazine during the second war in Iraq (which, like the first, was based on a widely disseminated lie). Suskind quoted one of George W. Bush’s aides (probably Karl Rove): “The aide said that guys like me [journalists, writers, historians] were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality… That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.” [12]
It’s a rather succinct description of Orwellian spin and secrecy in a media-saturated Empire, where discerning the truth becomes ever more difficult.
That is why people believe someone like Udo Ulfkotte, who is physically ill, says he has only a few years left to live, and told an interviewer, “I am very fearful of a new war in Europe, and I don’t like to have this situation again, because war is never coming from itself, there are always people who push for war, and this is not only politicians, it is journalists too… We have betrayed our readers, just to push for war… I don’t want this anymore, I’m fed up with this propaganda. We live in a banana republic and not in a democratic country where we have press freedom…” [13]
Recently, as Mike Whitney has pointed out in CounterPunch (March 10), Germany’s news magazine Der Spiegel dared to challenge the fabrications of NATO’s top commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, for spreading “dangerous propaganda” that is misleading the public about Russian “troop advances” and making “flat-out inaccurate statements” about Russian aggression.
Whitney asks, “Why this sudden willingness to share the truth? It’s because they no longer support Washington’s policy, that’s why. No one in Europe wants the US to arm and train the Ukrainian army. No wants them to deploy 600 paratroopers to Kiev and increase U.S. logistical support. No one wants further escalation, because no wants a war with Russia. It’s that simple.” [14] Whitney argued that “the real purpose of the Spiegel piece is to warn Washington that EU leaders will not support a policy of military confrontation with Moscow.”
So now we know the reason for the timing of the April 15 U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, “Confronting Russia’s Weaponization of Information.” Literally while U.S. paratroopers were en route to Kiev, the hawks in Washington (and London) knew it was time to crank up the rhetoric. The three witnesses were most eager to oblige.
Joyce Nelson is an award-winning Canadian freelance writer/researcher and the author of five books.
Notes
[1] “U.S. Military Instructors Deployed to Ukraine to Train Local Forces,” RT.com, April 17, 2015.
[2] Steven Chase, “Russian decries Ukraine training,” The Globe & Mail (April 16, 2015).
[3] http://www.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php/sid/231982691
[4] http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-royce-announces-hearing-russia-s…
[5] Ed Royce, “Countering Putin’s Information Weapons of War,” The Wall Street Journal (April 14, 2015).
[6] http://www.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php/sid/231982691
[7] http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/16/truth-is-our-country/print
[8] http://russia-insider.com/en/print/531
[9] http://washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/leading-german-journalist-admits-cia-bribed-l…
[10] Ibid.
[11] http://www.li.com/events/boris-johnson-launches-vision-fcapitalism-series
[12] Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times Magazine (Oct. 17, 2004).
[13] http://washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/leading-german-journalist-admits-cia-bribed-l…
[14] http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/10/natio-lies-and-provocations/print
MH17 probe looking for witnesses to back ‘Buk missile’ scenario
RT | March 31, 2015
The international team of experts investigating the MH17 tragedy in eastern Ukraine have called for possible witnesses to turn in any evidence that might back a scenario that the airliner was shot down by a Buk missile system.
In a video address, released by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), possible witnesses have been encouraged to share their photo and video materials to prove that a Buk surface-to-air missile launcher was transported through the Donbass region before and after the MH17 incident last July.
“The focus of one scenario is that the MH17 was shot down by a Buk missile system,” JIT said in a statement. “We are looking for witnesses who have seen Buk crew members or have more information about the identity of those involved in ordering and launching the Buk.”
Although some media rushed to conclusions, spokesman for the Dutch Public Prosecutor, Wim de Bruin, emphasized that there is “more than one” scenario. “But the one of the Buk rocket has a lot of unanswered questions and that’s why we have put out an appeal,” de Bruin said, calling it a “leading scenario.”
“This appeal for witnesses does not mean that police and prosecutors have definitively concluded what caused MH17 to crash,” the address said. “For that, more investigation is needed.”
A preliminary report of the official investigation published in September 2014 only said that the crash was a result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that struck the Boeing from the outside. The report did not specify what the objects were, where they came from or who was responsible.
No other verifiable evidence has yet been made publicly available, besides objective air control and military monitoring data partially released by the Russian Defense Ministry, which indicated the presence of Ukrainian surface-to-air batteries and warplanes in the area on the day of the Boeing shooting.
Amid the JIT call for witnesses, a local resident in Lugansk region – whom Reuters cited as saying he saw evidence of a surface-to-air missile launched from rebel-held territory – has told RT that the news agency gave a false report of his interview.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov slammed Reuters’ report as“stovepiping”from a seemingly“respected agency”.
“Attempts at distorting facts, enforcing theories as to what could have happened continue to exist, with some based on openly dirty intentions,” Lavrov told journalists.
Yet the JIT investigators, pursuing their “leading” scenario in the crash investigation, have compiled a video that incorporated both social-media-sourced materials and unverified audio files apparently provided by the Ukrainian Intelligence Service, stipulating direct Russian involvement in the tragedy. The team alleges that the Buk missile launcher was seen several times around the time of the crash, yet no real evidence has been offered to support this theory.
The US intelligence community apparently does not have any evidence to support Russian involvement in any way, investigative journalist Robert Parry told RT, citing his intelligence sources and own probe.
Soon after the tragedy, Parry was told “their actual evidence was going in a very different direction.” Eight months after the tragedy the US stands by its old assessment of the incident all based on “circumstantial evidence” and social media reports, refusing to release new data, Perry says.
Seven Truths Inconvenient to U.S. Foreign Policy
By DAN KOVALIK | January 20, 2012
As George Orwell so eloquently stated, “Truth is the first casualty of war.” Indeed, lying is absolutely necessary to the ability of countries such as the U.S. aiming to wage unprovoked war upon other countries – the worst form of human rights crime as recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal which noted that it is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Given that the U.S. is currently attempting to wage actual war, as well as to carry out acts of war (such as embargos or other forms of economic strangulation), against numerous countries, one is subject to a constant barrage of lies from the U.S. government to justify such acts.
In light of the foregoing, I thought it was important to set forth some truths (though, of course, not an exhaustive list) which undermine the U.S.’s cause for war throughout the world.
1. Gaddafi Troops Did Not Engage In Mass Rapes.
One of the big lies of 2011 (though hard to believe on its face) was that told by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about Libya as a means to justify regime change in that country – a goal not authorized by either the U.S. Congress or the UN. Thus, with a straight face, Ms. Clinton told the press that Gaddafi was passing out Viagra to his troops so they could go out and rape dissidents en masse, and that the troops were indeed engaging in mass rapes. Of course, the compliant media was more than happy to spread such outlandish accusations. What the press was more reluctant to do was to publish Amnesty International’s later report that there was absolutely no factual support for these accusations. As Amnesty International reported, “Not only have we not met any victims, but we have not even met any persons who have met victims.”
2. The NATO-backed Libyan Rebels Have Committed Egregious Human Rights Abuses. Ironically, the NATO-supported rebels themselves did engage in verifiable acts of rape against civilians, as well as the targeted arrests, displacements and disappearance of black Africans (as opposed to Arabs) living in Libya. The most notorious such case was the military assault on the black African town of Tawarga in which the rebels emptied the entire town of its 10,000 residents, forced them into a refugee camp and then burned down the refugee camp. The rebels justified their racist attacks on black Africans upon the claim that they were serving as mercenaries for Gaddafi. This claim also proved to have no factual basis, but again, this did not stop the press from reporting it over and over.
3. The U.S. Has Been Involved In Violent Attacks In Iran for Years.
Hillary Clinton told another big whopper this past week when she adamantly denied “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.” Indeed, the U.S. has been supporting terrorist attacks within Iran for years. As Seymour Hirsch reported as far back as 2008 in a New Yorker piece, the U.S. has been supporting the terrorist group “Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K” for some time. As Hirsch noted, “The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States.” In addition, as Hirsch related back in 2008, the U.S. has been supporting “The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has . . . has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years.”
4. The U.S. Was An Enemy of Democracy & Human Rights In Iran for Over a Quarter of a Century.
While the U.S. points to provocative acts committed by Iran since its revolution in 1979 to justify the continued vilification of that country, what it wants you to forget is that the conflict with Iran began in 1953 and was started by the U.S. itself. Thus, in 1953, the U.S. instigated a coup against the democratically-elected president of Iran, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh (whose crime was to nationalize British oil companies), and replaced him with the despotic Shaw who ruled Iran for the next 26 years. The Shaw ruled Iran through his brutal and torturous Savak – the secret police force which was created by and funded by the U.S. until the 1979 Iranian revolution. In short, Iran has a lot to be angry with the U.S. about.
5. The U.S. Began The Conflict in Afghanistan That Helped Spawn al Qaeda.
While one would believe from the press that the Soviet Union ignited the conflict in Afghanistan by invading that country in 1979, and that the U.S. reacted by supporting covert operations by the Mujahidin – the Mujahidin, who counted Osama bin Laden as one of its leaders, later becoming the nucleus of al Qaida – this is not true. Indeed, the reverse was true. Such covert operations were started by the U.S. before the Soviet Union invaded, and in fact were designed to draw the Soviets into a “Vietnam-like quagmire.” U.S. National Security Adviser Zbignew Brzezinski admitted this later, stating in an interview: “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupported by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet Empire.”
6. The Worst Human Rights Abusers in the Western Hemisphere Are U.S. Allies
While the U.S. government and press constantly vilify Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua by criticizing their human rights policies, allies of the U.S. in the region are by far the worst abusers of human rights. The country with the worst human rights situation in the Americas is Colombia, which also happens to be the U.S.’s number one ally in the Hemisphere and one of the top recipients of U.S. military aid in the world. Colombia’s human rights record is horrendous from top to bottom. Thus, largely because of the forced displacement carried out by the Colombian military and its paramilitary (death squad) allies, Colombia has the largest internally displaced population in the world at over 5 million; Colombia has around 7500 people in prison who can be characterized as political prisoners or prisoners of conscience (compared to the one hundred or so such prisoners which Cuba’s harshest critics allege it has); the paramilitary allies of the Colombian government have killed around 150,000 civilians since the mid-1990’s and have disappeared around 50,000 civilians. In terms of government violence against its own people, close U.S. ally and military recipient Mexico currently runs second to Colombia with about 47,000 civilians killed in the so-called “drug war” being run jointly by the U.S. and Mexico. However, the country that historically tops all of these countries for anti-civilian violence is Guatemala whose U.S.-sponsored military dictatorship (a dictatorship installed by the U.S. back in 1954) killed around 200,000 civilians, mostly Mayan Indians, during the civil war in the 1980’s and 1990’s. This is relevant because the new President of Guatemala, Otto Perez Molina, was a general during this period, was personally responsible for egregious human rights abuses against civilians, and, of course, was supported by the U.S. in his recent candidacy.
7. Cuba Has Played One of the Greatest Humanitarian Roles in the World, Especially given its small size and scant resources.
While the U.S. continues to paint Cuba as some member of an imaginary “axis of evil” in the world, Cuba has given selflessly of itself to better the world even despite the U.S.-imposed embargo which has brought the Cuban economy to a near breaking point. Cuba has sent more doctors throughout the world to minister to the poor than even the World Health Organization. In Haiti, Cuba’s medical aid through its doctors, who were on the ground years before the earthquake of 2010, has been critical in fighting the outbreak in cholera in that country. Even the New York Timesrecently acknowledged this in a November 7, 2011 article entitled, “In Haiti’s Cholera Fight, Cuba Takes Lead Role.” This is contrasted to the U.S. which, despite its puffery, has done little to aid Haiti with medical or humanitarian assistance after the earthquake, and instead sent about 14,000 troops to repress the restless population.
One could of course go on, but this at least gives a flavor of how the world is not as the U.S. and its media mouthpieces portray it. The U.S. is not the “world’s policeman” or the spreader of democracy and human rights that it claims to be. Rather, it has done much more to undermine democracy, human rights and even stability, than it has done to promote these conditions. This is a critical reality to keep in mind as the U.S. tries to start the next war based upon lies, usually premised on false claims that it is trying to protect human rights. Of course, if past is prologue, the U.S. will be allegedly attempting to promote human rights through the greatest violation of human rights a state can commit – the invasion of another country.
~
Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer living in Pittsburgh. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.
Debunking the Top Seven Myths on Iran’s Middle East Policies
By William O. Beeman | New America Media | 21 May 2011
This evening, I listened to the radio program Tehran Rising produced by America Abroad—a program distributed by Public Radio International—and I must say that I was deeply disturbed by the way the program was framed. The program centers on “spreading Iranian influence” in the Middle East.
Frankly, it is somewhat fatuous to try to hang a story about change and unrest in the Middle East on the Iranian bogeyman. Haven’t we had enough of this?
Since nations such as Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq (all covered in the reporting for this piece) are hugely different in their internal and external dynamics, to make this a story about Iran really obscures any nuance whatsoever in the politics of the region, and implies that nothing would be happening if it weren’t for Iranian machinations.
There are certainly a few people in Iran who would exult in this misperception, however, here are a few of the myths offered in the program which I would like to debunk.
Myth #1: A “cold war” between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
This is a completely fictional construction. Saudi Arabia has long been wary and disturbed by the Shi’a majority in Hasa, its eastern oil territory. This was true even under the Shah and long before. The fear of the uprising in Bahrain has little or nothing to do with confronting Iran–it is driven by fear that the Bahraini uprising will spread over the causeway to its own province.
Myth #2: Iran’s spurring on of the Bahrain uprising.
The implication in the program was that Iran is doing something to spur on the Bahrain uprising. The program’s own interviewee, Kristin Smith Diwan, denied this.
Moreover, I just participated in a seminar for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa. Two military intelligence agents –fluent in Arabic and Persian – and former students of Middle East experts Ray Motaheddeh and Juan Cole – flatly denied that there was any evidence that Iran had any agents on the ground in Bahrain, based on their own extensive investigations in February and March of this year.
Myth #3: The bulk of Lebanon’s Hezbollah funds come from Iran.
My position on Hezbollah and that of virtually every other observer of Hezbollah is that Iran has no effective control over Hezbollah’s political actions today (as opposed to 30 years ago).
The program documented clearly the charitable actions carried out by Hezbollah that were supported by Iran. Iran never denied this. At the same time, the program clearly pointed out the correct statement that the bulk of Lebanon’s redevelopment funds came from foreign remittances and from the Gulf States.
The program misleadingly implies that Hezbollah is not receiving funds from the same sources. In fact, the bulk of Hezbollah’s funds come from those foreign sources, not from Iran.
Of course the Sunnis such as the one interviewed on the program are opposed to Iran, but look at the welcome President Ahmadinejad got from both Shi’as and Sunnis in his recent trip.
Myth #4: Iranian influence is negative or evil.
This implication that Iranian influence is somehow negative or evil as opposed to being just what nations do was prevalent in the program.
Turkey is trying to increase its influence in Central Asia, but no one complains about that. Iran is being squeezed economically and of course is trying to develop economic and political ties. It’s behaving as nations operate normally.
Myth #5: Iran is exploiting weak democracies.
Ash Jain, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and former State Department staff member, and all those at the WINEP are dedicated to propagandizing against Iran. The idea that Iran is “exploiting weak democracies” is rather silly. Iran can’t exploit anyone unless they are able to promulgate messages and actions that are welcome to the populations of other nations.
In fact, Iran has made little or no headway in any predominately Sunni nation. Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment is quite right about the “self-limiting” nature of Iran’s influence. Case in point: Tajikistan. Persian speaking, culturally Iranian, the Tajiks should be susceptible to Iranian influence. Instead, they are extremely wary of Iran because Iranians are Shi’a and Tajiks are Sunni.
Myth #6: Iran has “won” because Hamas has gained power.
Ash Jain of WINEP claims that Iran has “won” because Hamas has stabilized and become a force in the Middle East. For heaven’s sake, one would think that the denizens of Hamas have no interest in their own affairs and future.
Does he think that Hamas lives only to fulfill some fantasy foreign policy influence on Iran’s part?
Myth #7: All Shi’a leaders agree with Iran.
Let’s be clear. No Shi’a religious leaders outside of Iran agree with Iran’s form of government or want to emulate it. Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani of Iraq is flatly opposed to Iran’s brand of clerical rule, and disagrees with the idea that the Iranian Revolution should be spread abroad. Not that there’s hope of that anyway.
Therefore, the flat answer to the question of Iranian influence is: Some in Iran would like to see Iran have greater influence in the region, but their “success” is largely a figment of the imagination of overwrought Westerners looking about for another “cold war” enemy, to echo the framework of this program.
Much of what is attributed to Iran in this radio program and elsewhere is actually the result of the natural dynamics of the individual communities of the region playing out their own local interests.
The fact that some in Iran may be cheerleading from the sidelines doesn’t mean that Iran is in control. Nor does it mean that what Iran is doing is any different than any other nation in the world trying to create favorable relations for itself.
~
William O. Beeman is Professor and Chair of Anthropology and specialist in Middle East Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota, formerly of Brown University.
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Neocon Max Boot: Legal and illegal aliens need to enlist in the US army and die for Israel
By Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today | October 16, 2107
In 1973 Irving Kristol, the godfather of the Neoconservative movement, made a stunning statement which is still relevant to understanding the Israeli influence in US foreign policy. Kristol said:
“Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel… Jews don’t like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States…
“American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”
Read the statement again very carefully. A big military budget, said Kristol, is only good for Israel, not America or much of the Western World. In other words, precious American soldiers who go to the Middle East to fight so-called terrorism are just working for Israel, not for America.
So, whenever the Neocons use words such as “democracy” or “freedom,” they are essentially conning decent Americans to support Israel’s perpetual wars. … continue
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