While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the “Temple Mount” was really the Roman fortress—the Antonia—that Herod built. The Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque are contained within these walls. The area is called the Haram Al-Sharif in Arabic.
The discovery that this area had once been the great Roman fortress came as a shock to the scholarly community, which had believed for many years that this ancient fortress was the place where the temple had been. This news was preceded by another shock, when the English archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered in 1962 that the entire City of David in the past had been only that little rock ridge on the western bank of the Kidron Valley. Less than 10 years later the historian Benjamin Mazar learned that the Haram had undoubtedly been the Roman fortress.
In biblical times the Haram was not a sacred place. Instead it was the place that Orthodox Jews considered defiled and the most despised place in the world. Within these walls were found no remnants of any of the earlier temples but rather an image of Mars, the Roman god of war. The 1st century Jewish Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus said the Romans always kept a whole legion of soldiers (5,000-6,000) there, and that there were stones in its walls that were 30 feet long, 15 feet thick, and 71/2 feet high. While excavating the area, Mazar found these very stones there in the Haram—not in the temple.
He and the local Muslims also discovered there three inscriptions, honoring the Roman leaders in the war of A.D. 66-72—Vespasian, Titus, and Silva—and Hadrian in the war of A.D. 132-135, for their success in defeating the Jews in the wars. Appropriate inscriptions for a Roman fortress, but impossible for a temple that had been destroyed in A.D. 70—65 years before the inscriptions had been made. Mazar shared these insights freely with other participants in the excavation, such as Herbert Armstrong and Ernest Martin.
Mazar also knew at once that the temple instead was stationed 600 feet farther south and 200 feet lower in altitude, on Mount Ophel, where the Spring of Siloam poured tons of water under the threshold of the temple every minute (Ezek 47:1), after which the water was distributed wherever it was needed. This marvelous little City of David was unique in having running water 3,000 years ago. Aristeas, Tacitus and 1 Enoch tell of the inexhaustible spring water system that was indescribably well developed, gushing tons of water into the temple area for sacrifices. Hezekiah’s tunnel directed water under Mount Ophel to the Pool of Siloam.
Herod’s fortress, on the other hand, was unequipped for sacrifices, because it had only 37 cisterns to provide water in the Haram.
After two violent wars with Rome, the City of David was so completely destroyed that it could not be recognized as a city. The Roman emperor Hadrian decreed that it would be used as an area where the Upper City could dump trash and garbage. It continued in that condition for hundreds of years. The Upper City developed, and people forgot what a marvelous little city this had once been. They simply guessed where strategic locations in the City of David must have been in the Upper City. Of course, this was a normal mistake.
Now, 50 years after Kenyon’s discovery, scholars like Leen Ritmeyer, Eilat Mazar and Hershel Shanks have recently written books as if no one knew that the Haram was the Roman Fortress and that Solomon’s, Zechariah’s and Herod’s temples all were located near the Spring of Siloam. Tourists are still mistakenly told that the Haram is the Temple Mount, that David’s citadel is near the Jaffa Gate, and that Mount Zion and the place where the Last Supper was held are all in the Upper City.
Israel’s antiquities authority has been digging a tunnel from under homes in the Arab East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan to the Western Wall Plaza. According to a recent “60 Minutes” interview, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat wants to create King’s Garden, a Bible-themed tourist park “adjacent to the City of David,” which requires demolishing 22 Arab homes in Silwan. The purpose of archeology is to provide archeological insights, of course, but excavations between the City of David and the old Roman fortress (the Haram) also have an anti-Arab political agenda.
It is not likely that a fourth temple will ever be constructed, either in the City of David or in the Haram. Israel already has diverted the water formerly used for sacrifices away from the former temple area and is making the City of David into a park. Orthodox Jews would oppose having a temple in Herod’s hated fortress. Jews had no interest in the Haram until after the Crusades, when they misunderstood that it was the Temple Mount. If the temple were ever built, it would have to be placed somewhere in the Upper City or a suburb of Jerusalem—not in its former site or in the old Roman Fortress.
Because innocent Evangelical Christians in America, under the guidance of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and John Hagee, have not been informed of these facts, they have thought there was some biblical or religious reason why it was necessary to destroy Islam’s third most sacred building in the world, together with the al-Aqsa mosque. It is my hope that, once Christians learn of this mistake, they will stop following Mars and Phineas (Num 25; Ps 106:30-31) and work as zealously for peace, following the teachings of Abraham, the 8th century prophets (Mica 6:8), Jesus, and Paul, as they once worked to promote war in the Middle East. This would make a tremendous difference to Jerusalem—and to the world.
George Wesley Buchanan has been a United Methodist minister since 1944 and a professor at a theological seminary since 1960, emeritus since he retired in 1991.
A damning White House memo has revealed details of the so-called “deal in blood” forged by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush over the Iraq war.
The document, titled “Secret… Memorandum for the President”, was sent by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell to President Bush on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas, Britain’s Daily Mail reported on Sunday.
The sensational memo revealed that Blair had agreed to support the war a year before the invasion even started, while publicly the British prime minister was working to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
The document also disclosed that Blair agreed to act as a spin doctor for Bush and convince a skeptical public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which actually did not exist.
In response, Bush would flatter Blair and give the impression that London was not Washington’s poodle but an equal partner in the “special relationship.”
Powell told Bush that Blair “will be with us” on the Iraq war, and assured the president that “”the UK will follow our lead in the Middle East.”
Another sensational memo revealed how Bush used “spies” in the British Labour Party to help him to influence public opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of the Iraq war.
Both documents were obtained and published by The Mail on Sunday. They are part of a number of classified emails stored on the private server of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton which courts have forced her to reveal.
Blair has always denied the claim that he and Bush signed a deal “in blood” at Crawford to launch a war against Iraq that began on March 20, 2003, that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The Powell memo, however, showed how Blair and Bush secretly prepared the Iraq war plot behind closed doors at Crawford.
Powell told Bush: “He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.”
The top US diplomatic official added that the UK premier has the presentational skills to “make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace.”
Powell wrote that Blair will “stick with us on the big issues” but he needs to show the British public that “Britain and America are truly equity partners in the special relationship.”
In March 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding WMDs. But no such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.
More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
The US war in Iraq cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, according to a study called Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?
If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.
More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats. I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in helping preserve our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible. Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.
Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.
2Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural. The earth is warming, but not quickly, not much, and not lately.
3There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved.
4New research shows fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, better than CO2 levels.
5CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
6There is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today.
9No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people, who eat them.
Could this possibly be right? Is it heresy, or critical thinking — or both? If I’ve upset or confused you, let me guide you through my journey. … continue reading
In 1992, Marc Ellis wrote an important article for the time, “Beyond the Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which appeared in The Link, published by Americans for Middle East Understanding. Ellis found that “the Jewish progressive consensus position is a form of oppression vis-à-vis the Palestinian people.” The consensus of the time emphasized the “two rights of Jews and Palestinians to the land,” Israeli atrocities as “aberrations,” and the anguish of “the Jewish soul.”
Ellis instead recognized the genocidal import of Zionism and the state of Israel. “What if… the Jewish character of the state makes expendable, in a terrifying sense, makes logical, the end of indigenous Palestinian culture and community in historic Palestine?” He found that the “ecumenical dialogue” of liberal Christians and Jews had turned into “what one might call the ecumenical deal: eternal repentance for Christian anti-Jewishness unencumbered by any substantive criticism of Israel.”
The ecumenical deal has broken down somewhat as Christian churches have discussed Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and sold investments in companies doing business with “the occupation,” often with great trepidation, against furious Jewish hostility. The interfaith outreach of Jewish Voice for Peace attempts to re-establish the ecumenical deal on more limited but defensible terms.
Sabeel arose in 1993, from the efforts of Reverend Naim Ateek and other Palestinian Christians “to interpret scripture in light of the Palestinian experience under occupation. As local Christians studied together, they forged a Palestinian version of liberation theology, which upholds the Gospel call for freedom from political, social and economic oppression.” (http://fosna.org/about/who-are-friends-sabeel) Sabeel is Arabic for “the way;” it has offices in Nazareth and Jerusalem and affiliates in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Outside Palestine its conferences, political travel and educational material promote awareness and activism on Palestine among Christians; it is the voice of the Christian left, experienced and committed.
For this audience Wise recounted her life of terror as a Jewish American. While traveling to Jewish day school on a Catholic school bus some children asked to see her horns. “I thought they were just being silly. Today I hope I know a bit more about the history of anti-Semitism in the Christian world.”
At her day school, “education about the Nazi Holocaust was a centerpiece of our learning.” In high school she visited Holocaust sites in Europe with her Jewish youth group. “We were told stories of how the Christian world was complicit in Nazism and their crimes. I sobbed and wailed at each visit to the camps, horrified and disturbed.”
In rabbinical school, she nonetheless “adopted as her spiritual mentor” Dietrich Bonhöffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian whose opposition to Nazism cost him his life. She was also inspired by the White Rose German student resistance group, who were likewise executed. The example of “those who benefit from the systems of power and oppression actively opposing and resisting it with their lives continues to feed me in this work.”
This work begins with anti-anti-Semitism. “I see you all working hard to get out from underneath the history of Christian violence against Jews.” She emphasizes “that there is nothing anti-Semitic about criticizing Israel and there is nothing anti-Semitic in the BDS call by Palestinian civil society.”
That being said, when I get asked how to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism I do caution people to ask themselves if they are in fact anti-Semitic. While there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic in critiquing Israel, that does not mean you do not also harbor anti-Semitic sentiments toward Jews. This is something worth exploring personally and perhaps also in your congregations or organizations.
Wise continues: while “anti-Semitism certainly does still exist… it has largely lost its power in the US…. Jewish people are not impeded in any material way from pursuing the life of our choosing.” Yet Wise spends three pages of a six-page text on a tour d’horizon of anti-Semitism, before deciding that “anti-Semitism is still real, if not very potent,” and we must “fight how accusations of anti-Semitism are being used as an effective weapon to silence debate on Israel.”
Wise then discusses the actions in the California legislature and the University of California system, to define anti-Semitism in ways that limit free speech, and sharply curtail criticism of Israel. She states that “those of us who are Jewish… strongly feel the obligation—strategically and morally—to speak out when false charges of anti-Semitism are used to tar the movement.” The privilege and strategic choice of Jewish people is not opposing injustice in the name of “the Jews” but opposing it on general terms, as injustice for all.
After three-quarters of a page on the Jewish Zionist assault on free speech, Wise returns to anti-anti-Semitism, as if her empathy is exhausted. “What can you all do to confront and address Christian hegemony in the world, and in our work organizing for justice? I have frankly been surprised that I am often the person to raise this question, and hope to see organizations like Friends of Sabeel acknowledge, unpack and address Christian privilege, just as we at JVP… with Jewish privilege.” “Christian privilege” is not the force oppressing Palestine, rather Zionism is destroying Christianity in Palestine, and all else non-Jewish. The main sources of Islamophobia in the US today are Jewish, as a member of JVP’s board has attested in a book. (Elly Bulkin and Donna Nevel, Islamophobia and Israel)
Yet Wise calls for “study groups about the legacy of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Christianity.” Wise asks: “Have you ever been given a school vacation or paid holiday related to Christmas or Easter when school vacations or paid Holidays for Ramadan or the Jewish High Holidays were not observed?” Wise carries on for four paragraphs about holidays, the weekend, Christmas ornaments and calendars. This trivializes the threat to Muslims, who face discrimination, physical assault and legal persecution, not mainly problems observing their religion. Christians who support Palestine need no lectures about Christian Islamophobia.
Such gambits allow Wise to claim religious discrimination because public life isn’t based on the needs of the religious fraction of the Jewish 2% or so of the US population. “On top of these types of reflections, I can imagine your communities working to support and encourage each other to ensure that your work advocating for Palestinian human rights does not rely on anti-Semitic ideas.”
Wise offers examples that “help elucidate the differences between a clear criticism of Israeli policy and its backers and anti-Semitic ideas often repeated by activists with no anti-Jewish intentions and lines emerging from Neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic organizations.” Thus:
A clear criticism of Israel would be: “Israel has a repeated and ongoing record of human rights offenses.”
A way to say this same idea in a way that reflects anti-Semitic sentiment, even unwittingly, would be to say: “Israel is a worse human rights violator than most or all other countries.”
A way that anti-Semitic organizations or people say the same idea: “Israel is the root of the world’s problems.”
JVP tells Sabeel what is permissible to say, just like the Jewish commissars it opposed in California. JVP is somewhat more permissive, but equally intent on propaganda and manipulation. Israel does not merely have a “repeated and ongoing record of offenses.” It is the only state on earth that is constituted on a racialist basis; it is growing daily more fanatical and violent within historic Palestine. Israel has provoked increasingly destructive wars ever since its founding, directly and through its influence in the US. In 2003 an EU poll of 7500 Europeans found nearly 60% held Israel to be the leading danger to world peace. For JVP any argument about Israel’s radicalism and extreme menace (including to itself) is prima facie anti-Semitism.
Her final example is:
A clear criticism: “Many Israeli soldiers justify their actions toward Palestinians by saying they are just following orders.”
A way to say this same idea in a way that reflects anti-Semitic sentiment, even unwittingly, would be to say: “Israelis are just like Nazis.”
A way that anti-Semitic organizations or people say the same idea: “Israel is worse than the Nazis. This wouldn’t be happening if the Nazis were successful,” and so on.
In 1969 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, philosopher and scientist at the Hebrew University, “began to talk of the inevitable ‘Nazification’ of the Israeli nation and society. By the time of the [1982] Lebanon War he had become an international celebrity because of his use of the epithet ‘Judeo-Nazi’ to describe the Israeli army.”
In 1974 Israel Shahak, a faculty colleague of Leibowitz, and president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, stated:
I am not afraid… of the comparison with ‘that which befell the German people between the two world wars.’ I am not afraid to say publicly that Israeli Jews, and with them most Jews throughout the world, are undergoing a process of Nazification. [Jewish silence] includes – exactly as it did in Germany – not only those among us who are in my opinion real Nazis, and there are a lot of those, but also those who do not protest against Jewish Nazism, so long as they think it serves Jewish interest… I am trying to act before it is too late.
Hajo Meyer, a survivor of Auschwitz and an outspoken critic of Zionism and Israel, who passed away recently, gave a final interview in August.
“If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up and call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals,” Meyer said. The hate of the Jews by the Germans “was less deeply rooted than the hate of the Palestinians by the Israeli Jews,” he observed. “The brainwashing of the Jewish Israeli populations is going on for over sixty years. They cannot see a Palestinian as a human being.”
An analysis of Zionism and the Jewish people as Jewish race doctrine could doubtless be developed with academic rigor, though not by the luminaries on JVP’s advisory board, even as Ellis’s prospect comes to ghastly fruition: “the Jewish character of the state makes expendable, in a terrifying sense, makes logical, the end of indigenous Palestinian culture and community in historic Palestine.” Christian churches are burned within Israel; Palestinians are burned alive in their homes in the West Bank; Palestinians under occupation and Israeli citizens alike are gunned down without provocation; Muslims are banned from prayer in the Islamic holy site in Jerusalem, while Jewish religious fanatics who want to raze the site and build a temple swagger about guarded by Israeli soldiers. Wise and JVP refuse to fight back, rule out deeper analyses of Zionism as prima facie anti-Semitism.
Hajo Meyer was a self-proclaimed Reform Jew in the classical, anti-Zionist mold, who rejected the idea of the Jewish people and its state ,and accepted the status of Jews as a religious minority (or secular citizens) in modern liberal terms. That outlook belongs to the legacy of the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, from pre-modern Jewish religious society, as well as from gentile restrictions.
In late July Jewish Voice for Peace rolled out a new web site. The substantive “frequently asked questions” were reduced from eight to five. One omitted question was: “Are you Zionist, anti-Zionist, post-Zionist or something else?” JVP requires gentiles to condemn anti-Semitism, but Zionism is, or was, merely a “FAQ,”, while Jewish moderns condemned it on principle.
Commenting on this now-vanished public, and internal JVP material, New York University law student Amith Gupta argued that “JVP has taken at least 4 different positions on Zionism, implying a lack of any principle regarding racism and colonialism against Palestine in particular and the Middle East as a whole.” “JVP’s statements imply a lack of principled positions regarding racism against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, while taking a staunch position against perceived racism toward the Jewish community. This is a racist double-standard.”
Yet Zionism is not only racism and settler colonialism in Palestine, but the Jewish people, eternally distinct, separate, unintegrable. As anti-Semitism has been driven to the margin, and all society opened to Jewish accomplishment, separatism has been deliberately cultivated. The Judaic scholar Jacob Neusner coined the term the “Zionism of Jewish peoplehood,” to describe Jewish attitudes in the United States. “The Jewish people is my homeland. Wherever Jews live, there I am at home.” Neusner described himself as “on the margins of the group,” and has few illusions about it. “I wonder if history can provide an example of a Jewish community more ethnocentric, and less religiously concerned, than our own.” (Stranger at Home, p. 31)
We who preach brotherhood so self-righteously to our fellow citizens preserve in our hearts the least edifying part of our heritage, the hostility to gentiles… One hears Jews speak frequently of all non-Jews as goyim… One sees the preservation of Jewish neighborhoods and social facilities as unwalled ghettoes in towns where Jews are freely accepted into the social life of the general community. (p. 32)
The “Zionism of Jewish peoplehood” is most crucially the “Israel lobby,” after the celebrated article and then book by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, about the lobby’s decisive, detrimental influence. JVP vilifies the “Israel lobby” critics as anti-Semites. The first article in JVP’s 2004 collection Reframing Anti-Semitism warned that “the relative success of Jews in the United States and some parts of Europe has spawned some reactionary rekindling of late 19th/early 20th century Jewish conspiracy theories, harkening back to the infamous Russian forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The publication of The Israel Lobby checked such talk, and JVP introduced the term guardedly in its work, but it dislikes the argument and its proponents, as shown by its attack on Alison Weir.
Weir’s short book Against Our Better Judgment. The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel has sold nearly 20,000 copies, extraordinary for a dry, factual, self-published work. Weir was denounced as an anti-Semite by JVP and the US Campaign to End the Occupation for granting interviews to far-right journalists whose work is full of anti-Semitic tropes. A petition in support of Weir gathered 2,000 signatures, including many prominent Palestine movement people, many Palestinians in Palestine, and many members of JVP and US Campaign member organizations.
As Weir pointed out, the same journalists had interviewed dozens of people in the Palestine movement, whom JVP and End the Occupation have not attacked. Clearly, the Israel lobby critique, in the form of Weir’s book and her public following, were the reasons for the attack, not anti-Semitism. The movement people interviewed by these journalists include many Jews, which suggests that the journalists’ anti-Semitism is a crude, ugly misapprehension of the real problem of the Israel lobby, not principled. In any case anti-Semitism has no more political prospects than Islamic religious law, is utterly marginal, as Wise admits.
Wise “personally, at least, finds [anti-Semitism] to be an extremely small problem, much smaller than the issues of Jewish privilege and Islamophobia issues.” But Wise devoted most of a talk to a Christian audience to this extremely small problem.
My work alongside Christians is an important challenge to those dangerous and disempowering messages I learned growing up. I no longer believe Jews are inevitably alone in the world, but in fact quite the opposite. I now see just how much we are there for each other.
Wise and JVP are “there” to impose the new ecumenical deal: no critique of Zionism, in Palestine or in the US Israel lobby, only of “the occupation;” and constant flagellation about Christian privilege and anti-Semitism.
For this Wise claims inspiration from Pastor Bonhöffer and the White Rose students, who gave their lives fighting Nazism. Such aggrandizement, extravagantly moralized, is a frank statement of Jewish superiority. Physicians, heal thyselves.
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has expressed support for President Barack Obama’s decision to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan.
On Thursday, Obama announced plans to keep 9,800 US troops in Afghanistan through 2016 and 5,500 in 2017, reneging on his promise to end the war there and bring home most American forces from the Asian country before he leaves office.
Clinton on Friday called Obama’s move an example of “a leader who has strong convictions about what he would like to see happen but also pays attention to what’s going on in the real world.”
Obama had originally planned to withdraw almost all US troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year. He just wanted to keep a small, embassy-based military presence in Kabul.
But the Pentagon has been arguing for months that Kabul needed additional US military presence in order to defeat a resurgent Taliban movement.
Clinton, who served as Obama’s secretary of state during his first term, said Washington wants to bring American troops home and “we certainly don’t want them engaged in on-the-ground combat.”
“We want them to help support and train the Afghan army,” she added.
“So I can’t predict where things will be in January of 2017. But I support the president’s decision,” Clinton stated.
According to US officials, Washington would also maintain a large counterterrorism capability of terror drones and Special Operations forces to fight militants in Afghanistan.
The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but after more than 14 years, the foreign troops have still not been able to establish security in the country.
“We have invested a lot of blood and a lot of treasure in trying to help that country and we can’t afford for it to become an outpost of the Taliban and ISIS [Daesh/ISIL] one more time, threatening us, threatening the larger world,” Clinton declared.
Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terrorism.
— Barack Obama, February 15, 2013.
Even to those who do not watch closely it has to be apparent that Washington’s vast disinformation machine is finally out of control, seriously awry, or desperate.
The latest foray in apparent media manipulation was the claim by US “anonymous sources” that four Russian missiles targeting terrorist groups in Syria, landed in Iran.
US Administrations are serial repeaters of untruths. However, talking of stray missiles after bombing a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan under a week before – when coordinates of the buildings had been confirmed to US authorities again just prior to the attack – then changing the story as to how it happened four times in less days, is skating on wafer thin ice.
As Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of MSF and former French Foreign Minister wrote: “Targeting a red cross drawn on the roof of a hospital is … unacceptable … a line has again been crossed.” Demanding an independent investigation he stated: “It is a war crime.” (Guardian, October 9, 2015.)
Former US Senate candidate, Mark Dankof, speaking to Iran’s Press TV regarding US claims of stray missiles in Iran, believes a full-blown psychops operation towards Russia is underway. President Putin’s Ministers stating that all terrorists terrorizing the people of Syria are targets – thus including the US backed ones – might be the reason.
Dankof points out: “ … two anonymous US officials (are) a basis for this claim, who in turn are quoting unspecified, uncorroborated, and unverified ‘military and intelligence information.’”
Moreover:
This is laughable … and underscores the blizzard of lies spun by the American government, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council, and Turkey, about what has been going on in Syria, and who is clearly responsible for the 250,000 Syrian deaths, one million wounded, and 9.5 million displaced citizens of that country”, he added.
The blame is clearly on the aforementioned states, who have financed, supported, and introduced the … extremists and terrorists into the sovereign state of Syria in an illegitimate attempt to overthrow the legitimate and recognized government … This is not simply evil, but illegal.
The lies being woven by Zionist corporate media in the West about Russia are an attempt to conceal the alliance of ISIL, al-Qaeda, and affiliates with American, Israeli, British, French, and Saudi intelligence, and to conceal the obvious fact that the Russian airstrikes are hurting these terrorist groups militarily, even as they take place legally because the sovereign government … of Syria has formally requested Russian assistance.
Dankov pointed out that on Thursday October 8, the “White Helmets” became CNN’s source for their reports on the stray missiles, the network citing them as “an independent medical team” in Syria. However:
The truth is that the White Helmets are an invention of state intelligence agencies and NGOs who seek the overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This organization has special links to the British government in particular, and (also) to the PR firm Purpose Inc., to lobby for military intervention against Assad.
They are closely linked to the Avaaz NGO which has the same agenda, and is linked to the Open Society Foundation of George Soros …
Australian born Jeremy Heimans, co-founder and CEO of Purpose Inc. (“We create new organizations and ventures to tackle issues where mass participation and collective action can unlock big change”; Purpose moves people to remake the world”) is also a co-founder of Avaaz.
However, back to “stray missiles”, a story speedily silent in the Western media. Russian General Musa Kamali told Sputnik News Agency on October 9, 2015: “We have no reports of any Russian missiles crashing in Iran … those media reports alleging that Russian missiles aiming at Syria hit Iran are blatant lies. If the people making those claims had any proof, they would have certainly presented it”, he said. Quite.
Of course, US expertise excels not alone in stray missiles, but in planned assaults on hospitals and other buildings protected under international laws. Hospitals are specifically protected under Article 20 of the Geneva Convention, amongst other binding international laws.
Intended indiscriminate destruction was demonstrated in 2003, when: “The scenes of downtown Baghdad in flames (made it) abundantly clear why US officials insisted on covering up a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ at the UN Security Council during Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation of the American case for war against Iraq.” Picasso’s painting commemorates a Basque town razed to the ground by a German aerial assault in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
At the onset of their illegal invasion US aircraft were making bombing runs on Baghdad at the rate of 1,000 a day with many parts of the city described as “an inferno.” Holocaustal war crimes of enormity. (Holocaust: “Great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire.”)
Further, the US is also no stranger to stray missiles. As Time Magazinereported in April 2003, just two weeks into America’s bombardment:
… in the past week, three U.S. Tomahawks have gone missing in the rocky plains of southeastern Turkey en route to Iraq, several hundred miles from the war zone. Five more went astray in Saudi Arabia, and a handful of others have broken up in Iran and reportedly, Syria.
Bombing in Iraq, as everywhere “liberated” by America was criminally indiscriminate. Edward S. Herman cites Fallujah as a chilling example and of war crimes of enormity:
According to Dr. Hafidd al-Dulzanni, head of the Commission for the Compensation of Fallujah Citizens, the U.S. assault (of 2004) destroyed some 7,000 houses, 840 stores, workshops and clinics, 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries, 59 schools, 13 government buildings, two electricity stations, three water purification plants, along with several railroad stations and sewage purification plants, among other things. Hospitals were an explicit target and weapons like white phosphorus and uranium-loaded projectiles were used, all adding up to massive violations of the laws of war. (Emphasis mine.)
Fallujah’s illegal destruction both targeted and indiscriminate was a metaphor for all Iraq.
On the day the US military entered Baghdad (April 8, 2003) they declared war on journalists, a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol 1 and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
First US troops directed a missile at the Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub and seriously wounding several others. It should be noted that: “The attacks came amid broadcasts showing some of the mounting slaughter being conducted by US troops throughout the Iraqi capital.”
The surviving Al Jazeera staff sought shelter in nearby Abu Dhabi TV which then also came under US attack. Abu Dhabi TV correspondent, Shaker Hamed, issued an on air call for help reporting: “Twenty-five journalists and technicians belonging to Abu Dhabi television and … Al-Jazeera are surrounded in the offices of Abu Dhabi TV in Baghdad.” Note the “surrounded”. These were seemingly no “stray” airborne missiles. The tanks were firing from near point blank range. “Kill the messenger” comes to mind.
Hamed called for relevant agencies “to intervene quickly to pull us out of this zone where missiles and shells are striking in an unbelievable way.”
In a now chillingly familiar story, also reminiscent of the MSF hospital in Kundiz: “Al-Jazeera had written to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on February 23 giving the precise location of its office so as to avoid being targeted.” Giving co-ordinates to the US military is, it appears, literally the kiss of death.
Al Jazeera was also attacked by the US troops in Afghanistan at the time of the US invasion, as Iraq, destroying their offices.
Having targeted Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV, the US troops turned their attention to the Palestine Hotel, where two hundred journalists and world wide media were based. They killed Reuters correspondent Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso of Spanish Telecinco TV. Three other journalists were injured, and the hotel was extensively damaged. The US military had, of course, been informed that the Palestine was the media’s base.
The previous day in Basra, Al Jazeera offices were targeted by two US missiles which failed to explode and outside Baghdad on the highway both Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV cars, clearly marked as such on roof, sides and hood, were targeted. Miraculously no one was hurt.
ITV journalist Terry Lloyd was murdered near Basra by the US within four days of the invasion – also in a clearly marked car. Cameraman Fred Nerac and their Lebanese assistant Hussein Osman in an accompanying car were also killed. French cameraman, Daniel Demoustier, injured in the attack said the US were firing on media vehicles: “to wipe out troublesome witnesses.” Given the examples above and the continuing litany of such attacks by US troops (and British) during the occupation, he seems to have hit the nail on the head.
When it comes to war crimes the US is a serial offender. In the 1991 assault on Iraq all water purification plants were deliberately destroyed on the orders of US Central Command, as were clinics, schools, separate Education Ministry stores. Media centres and radio stations were obliterated across the country. Over fifty percent of all livestock was destroyed, farms and herds, chicken farms a special target. Iraq was the world’s largest exporter of dates – the US clearly regarded date palms as an enemy and bombarded great ancient, majestic groves too.
The women and children who nightly went to the great, reinforced Ameriyah Shelter on the outskirts of Baghdad were also incinerated – the US had satellites over the Shelter which recorded the women and children entering as dusk fell and leaving at first light.
The factory that made baby milk powder was reduced to rubble and described as a “chemical weapons factory.” The machinery was provided, installed and maintained by a company in Birmingham, England – and could only have been used to provide baby milk.
Also destroyed were plants which produced basic medical supplies as syringes, pain killers, antibiotics, a well worn path followed in other US bombings as a civilian pharmaceutical factory, Al-Shifa (“The Cure”) Sudan in August 1998 when missiles also rained down on Afghanistan. Two US embassies in East Africa had been attacked, so as ever, proof-free Judge, jury and executioner, the US randomly bombed.
Barely noticed have been the numerous US attacks on ancient Yemen (population just 24.41 million) before their ongoing proxy attack by current Chair of the UN Human Rights Council, Saudi Arabia.
Ninety eight US missile and drone attacks struck Yemen between 2002 and 2015; 41 in 2012, 26 in 2013 and 14 in 2014, with other attacks in 2009, 2010 and 2011. The cost in human life is hidden and shaming. In May 2010 alone an “errant” US drone killed five people. In December 2009 a US Cruise missile killed 41 souls.
In 1999 former Yugoslavia was decimated – with stray US missiles landing in Macedonia, hitting Belgrade’s media centre, the Chinese Embassy, markets, obliterating train passengers, all “liberated” from life the American way.
2011 brought involvement in Libya’s destruction – another metaphor for the monstrosity of lawless might presented as benevolent saviour.
Let us hear no more phony allegations of stray missiles before the hell of the real ones have been accounted for.
Rabbis have declared the killing of Palestinian resistance fighters “a religious duty”, Israeli media reported.
Israeli news website Walla reported that right-wing rabbis replied to questions including: “Am I allowed to kick the insurgent, hit him or shoot him in order to kill him after he has been arrested or is this prohibited?”
Rabbi Rav Benzion Mutzafi replied: “It is not only desirable to do so, but it is a religious duty that you hold his head down to the ground and hit him until his last breath.”
Mutzafi expressed anger towards Rabbi David Staph’s response. Staph said it is prohibited for people to attack a Palestinian perpetrator of an operation after he has been injured or when he is posing no danger. Mutzafi responded: “Do not listen to Staph because those who have mercy on the cruel will end up being cruel toward the righteous.”
Chief Rabbi of the city of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu called on all Israeli police officers and soldiers who allow Palestinian resistance fighters to live after their arrest:
“It is prohibited to keep the vandal alive after the operation, because if he is left alive, there is a fear that he would be released and then he would kill others,” Eliyahu wrote on Facebook.
A group of journalists and a human rights watchdog in the UK have put forth an unprecedented array of data on the CIA’s notorious secret detention centers, where terrorist suspects were kept and tortured in the early-2000s.
The investigation reveals the real names of detainees for the first time, as well as the locations they were kept in at the behest of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) around the world and the exact dates of events connected to their detention and torture.
In late 2014, a 480-page-long summary on the CIA detention centers was published by the US Senate Intelligence Committee after having been heavily redacted by the secret service. It is only a prelude to the original 6,000-page report, which remains secret.
It took nine months for the independent UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in cooperation with The Rendition Project to reveal what was cut off from the government report using open sources and investigative techniques. All the data they discovered is available online.
“Although many published accounts of individual journeys through the black site network exist, this is the first comprehensive portrayal of the system’s inner dynamics from beginning to end,” the Bureau of Investigative Journalism stated.
The testimonies of former prisoners, flight records, commercial contracts, court cases, declassified government documents, information leaks and NGO reports, along with media coverage, were put together and compiled into accessible interactive databases and maps revealing the locations of the CIA black sites.
The countries that participated in the CIA’s terrorist detainee interrogation and transfer program had full knowledge of what was being done within their borders, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told Sputnik earlier this year.
In May, the European Court of Human Rights forced the government of Poland to pay approximately $250,000 in reparations to two terrorist suspects who had reported being tortured at a CIA black site in Poland.
According to reports, the United States gave Poland and other countries millions of dollars to allow the CIA to operate a detention center within their borders in 2002 and 2003.
Morell noted that the countries hosting CIA sites supported the program “”because they thought that we would be able to keep all of this secret.”
“This was facilitated, supported and was very closely monitored at the highest level of the United States government, up to and including the White House,” former senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) and whistleblower Thomas Drake commented to Sputnik earlier.
The 2014 report produced by the US Senate provided official documentation of numerous incidents of torture, and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against enemy combatants in US-controlled detention facilities. Little has been revealed about the foreign sites or the practices there.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, then the chair of the Intelligence Committee, released the report’s 480-page executive summary, over objections from CIA and White House officials.
After the release in December, the US government publicized 27 pages of interview notes compiled by lawyers for Guantanamo detainee Majid Khan in which he described his torture.
Khan said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his “private parts” – details which were not described in the Senate report.
A month after the summary’s release, in January 2015, the government said it had issued new classification rules that permitted only the release of “general allegations of torture,” and “information regarding the conditions of confinement.”
But, they said, the names of CIA employees and locations of secret CIA “black sites” could not be released.
Later, the US government blocked the release of 116 pages of notes detailing the torture another Guantanamo Bay detainee, Abu Zubaydah, says he endured while in CIA custody, defense lawyers said in September.
Zubaydah, a 44-year-old Saudi national, has been held in Guantanamo for nine years despite not ever being charged with a crime.
The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up.
This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into the fight against ISIL.
And as is generally the case with posers caught with their pants down, the US policy elites are not happy about it.
You see, the US strategic goal in Syria is not as your faithful mainstream media servants (led by that redoubtable channeler of Neo-Con smokescreens at the NYT Michael Gordon) might have you believe to save the Syrian people from the ravages of the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to heighten the level of internecine conflict in that country to the point where it will not be able to serve as a bulwark against Israeli regional hegemony for at least another generation.
How do we know? Because important protagonists in the Israelo-American policy planning elite have advertised the fact with a surprising degree of clarity in documents and public statements issued over the last several decades.
The key here is learning to listen to what our cultural training has not prepared us to hear.
In 1982, as the Likud Party (which is to say, the institutional incarnation of the Revisionist Zionist belief, first articulated by Jabotinsky in the ”Iron Wall” that the only way to deal with “the Arabs” in and around Israel was through unrelenting force and the inducement of cultural fragmentation) was consolidating its hold on the foreign policy establishment of Israel, a journalist named Oded Yinon, who had formerly worked at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, published an article in which he outlined the strategic approach his country needed to take in the coming years.
What follows are some excerpts from Israel Shahak’s English translation of that text:
“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon….”
“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”
“If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan, or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their present form and will join the downfall and dissolution of Egypt.
“There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time, and Israel’s policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority.”
Yinon’s vision reappeared in the now infamous “Clean Break” document from 1996, authored by a consortium of US and Israeli “strategic thinkers” that included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David and Meyrav Wurmser, which was meant to serve as a foreign policy blueprint for the first administration of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The text is nothing if not obsessive regarding the need to seriously debilitate Syria’s ability to act in any way is a pole of regional influence in the in the area .
“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”
“Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.”
And as Dan Sanchez has recently shown, David Wurmser went into even greater detail about the need to balkanize Israel’s northeastern neighbor in articles published in approximately the same time period, talking quite openly in one essay about “expediting the chaotic collapse“ of Baathist Syria.
Then there is Wesley Clark’s famous interview, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true strategic aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was “to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years”.
Those countries, according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iraq. In the same speech, he explicitly ties the hatching of the plan to Richard Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote in the “Clean Break” document of the paramount importance of putting Israel in position to “shape its strategic environment”.
On September 5th, 2013, Alon Pinkas, the former Israeli Consul General in New York and well-connected member of Tel Aviv’s conservative policy elite described the Syrian conflict in the following terms in theNew York Times :
“This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win – we’ll settle for a tie,….Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”
I don’t think it can get much clearer than that. The US-Israeli plan in Syria has never been about helping anyone in that country, but rather insuring its effective dismemberment so as to further the perceived “strategic interests” of the Jewish state.
As Tomás Alcoverro, the longtime Mideast correspondent of Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper wrote on 9 October 2015, in reference to the combined Russian and Syrian government attacks carried out during the previous week: “If this joint offensive is successful, the US plan for continuing the war of attrition until both sides are exhausted will lie in ruins”.
Yes, the US and Israelis, have been “faking it” in Syria for a good long time now. And Putin has come along and called their bluff.
And they are not happy about it. Which is why the ongoing campaign of demonization against the Russian leader is being ratcheted up – if that’s possible – to still higher levels of intelligence-insulting hyperbole.
Venezuela’s government erected a statue, in central Caracas, in honor to Guaicaipuro, the Indigenous chief who led the resistance against the Spanish colonialism 500 years ago.
The sculpture replaced a Christopher Columbus statue that stood there for over a century, until it was torn down in 2004 by a popular movement led by supporters of then President Hugo Chavez.
The statue was unveiled in a ceremony headed by President Nicolas Maduro and attended by top officials of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela and dozens of Indigenous leaders.
Indigenous people represent about 1.5 percent of the total population of Venezuela, there are at least 26 nationalities, including the Ya̧nomamo, Pemon, Warao people, Baniwa people, Kali’na people, Motilone Bari, Ye’kuana, and Yaruro. In 2002, the South American nation began to celebrate October 12 as the Day of Indigenous Resistance.
Guaicaipuro is seen by Venezuelans as a symbol of the Indigenous resistance against the Spanish conquest, he is also well known because he formed a powerful coalition of different tribes which he led during part of the 16th Century against the Spanish troops in the central region of the country, specially in the Caracas valley.
“[W]e should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is certainly the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history,” marine chemist Ken Buesseler said last spring.
Instead, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency halted its emergency radiation monitoring of Fukushima’s radioactive plume in May 2011, three months after the disaster began. Japan isn’t even monitoring seawater near Fukushima, according to a Sept. 28 story in The Ecologist.
The amount of cesium in seawater that Buesseler’s researchers found off Vancouver Island is nearly six times the concentration recorded since cesium was first introduced into the oceans by nuclear bomb tests (halted in 1963). This stunning increase in Pacific cesium shows an ongoing increase. The International Business Times (IBT) reported last Nov. 12 that Dr. Buesseler found the amount of cesium-134 in the same waters was then about twice the concentration left in long-standing bomb test remains.
Dr. Buesseler, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, announced his assessment after his team found that cesium drift from Fukushima’s three reactor meltdowns had reached North America. Attempting to reassure the public, Buesseler said, “[E]ven if they were twice as high and I was to swim there every day for an entire year, the dose I would be exposed to is a thousand times less than a single dental X-ray.”
This comparison conflates the important difference between external radiation exposure (from X-rays or swimming in radioactively contaminated seawater), and internal contamination from ingesting radioactive isotopes, say with seafood.
Dr. Chris Busby of the Low Level Radiation Campaign in the UK explains the distinction this way: Think of the difference between merely sitting before a warm wood fire on one hand, and popping a burning hot coal into your mouth on the other. Internal contamination can be 1,000 times more likely to cause cancer than the same exposure if it were external, especially for women and children. And, because cesium-137 stays in the ecosphere for 300 years, long-term bio-accumulation and bio-concentration of cesium isotopes in the food chain – in this case the ocean food chain – is the perpetually worsening consequence of what has spilled and is still pouring from Fukushima.
The nuclear weapons production complex is the only other industry that has a record of deliberate whole-Earth poisoning. Hundreds of tons of radioactive fallout were aerosolized and spread to the world’s watery commons and landmasses by nuclear bomb testing. The same people then brought us commercial nuclear power reactors. Dirty war spawns dirty business, where lying comes easy. Just as the weapons makers lied about bomb test fallout dangers, nuclear power proponents claimed the cesium spewed from Fukushima would be diluted to infinity after the plume dispersed across 4,000 miles of Pacific Ocean.
Today, globalized radioactive contamination of the commons by private corporations has become the financial, political and health care cost of operating nuclear power reactors. The Nov. 2014 IBT article noted that “The planet’s oceans already contain vast amounts of radiation, as the world’s 435 nuclear power plants routinely pump radioactive water into Earth’s oceans, albeit less dangerous isotopes than cesium.”
Fifty million Becquerels of cesium per-cubic-meter were measured off Fukushima soon after the March 2011 start of the three meltdowns. Cesium-contaminated Albacore and Bluefin tuna were caught off the West Coast a mere four months later; 300 tons of cesium-laced effluent has been pouring into the Pacific every day for the 4 1/2 years since; the Japanese government on Sept. 14 openly dumped 850 tons of partially-filtered but tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific. This latest dumping portends what it will try to do with thousands of tons more now held in shabby storage tanks at the devastated reactor complex.
Officials from Fukushima’s owners, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., have said leaks from Fukushima disaster with “at least” two trillion Becquerels of radioactivity entered the Pacific between August 2013 and May 2014 — and this 9-month period isn’t even the half of it.
The fact that Fukushima has contaminated the entirety of the Pacific Ocean must be viewed as cataclysmic. The ongoing introduction of Fukushima’s radioactive runoff may be slow-paced, and the inevitable damage to sea life and human health may take decades to register, but the “canary in the mineshaft,” is the Pacific tuna population, which should now also be perpetually monitored for cesium.
Last November Buesseler warned, “Radioactive cesium from the Fukushima disaster is likely to keep arriving at the North American coast.” Fish eaters may want to stick with the Atlantic catch for 12 generations or so.
Watch as former Senator Timothy Wirth, (D-CO) speaking on a PBS interview about the June 1988 Senate hearing on global warming, gleefully describes his loss of integrity and respect for his office.
A Review of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass Sunstein (based on an earlier paper co-authored with Adrian Vermeule); In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business by Charlan Nemeth; and Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski
On January 25 2018 YouTube unleashed the latest salvo in the war on conspiracy theories, saying “we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”
At first glance that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants YouTube or anyone else to recommend bad information. And almost everyone agrees that phony miracle cures, flat earthism, and blatantly false claims about 9/11 and other historical events are undesirable.
But if we stop and seriously consider those words, we notice a couple of problems. First, the word “recommend” is not just misleading but mendacious. YouTube obviously doesn’t really recommend anything. When it says it does, it is lying. … continue
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A Review of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass Sunstein (based on an earlier paper co-authored with Adrian Vermeule); In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business by Charlan Nemeth; and Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski
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