New York City, New York – Shock is a curious thing. The human mind is at its most susceptible when the proverbial rug has been pulled from under its feet. When a momentous, shocking event occurs we are thrust into an uncomfortable, unfamiliar, frightening place. We look for explanations, try to make sense of chaos whilst we are at our most vulnerable. Our malleable minds accept and subconsciously cling to the first narrative our ‘protectors’ offer, whether real or imagined, whether plausible or nonsensical.
The events of 9/11 were not only faithful to this rule, but they represented a paradigmatic example of this concept in play. The ‘shock therapy’ that has been unleashed on nations by means of bombs, bullets, and economic warfare, equally applies to the human psyche. It is not only nations but also people, that can be remade. While a shell-shocked America reeled over the most shocking, heinous, and dramatic terrorist attack the United States has ever suffered, the very architects of this attack moved to cement their ‘new world order’ narrative – ushering in the ‘War on Terror’. Before the toxic dust had even settled on Manhattan, the afraid, angry masses would be given their enemy and they would be given their saviours, as an equally toxic cloud of delusion descended on the American consciousness.
Ehud Barak, the BBC, and the birth of a pre-packaged lie
As the largest broadcaster in the world with over 20,000 employees, the Zionist-controlled BBC was the chosen outlet for the birth of the myth that is the ‘War on Terror’. As the attacks were unfolding, the BBC already had its pre-prepared propaganda agenda in hand. Later in the day the BBC would unwittingly expose this fact most obviously when they reported, ticker and all, the fall of WTC-7 over 20 minutes before it even happened. Former Prime Minister of Israel and former commander of the elite IDF intelligence unit ‘Sayeret Matkal’, Ehud Barak, would narrate the macabre theatre.
It is important to remember at this point, this is precisely how such events work; ‘false flag’ terrorism is a form of psychological warfare. In order for the operation to be successful, the perpetrator must be able to establish the intended narrative at the very outset – as soon as the minds of the subjects have been traumatised, dazed, and ‘blank-slated’. This is the fertile ground needed for the lie to take root, and the lie must be planted as soon as possible.
Relinquishing his post as Israeli PM to genocidal war criminal Ariel Sharon in March 2001, Barak was to travel to the United States and spend the months preceding 9/11 consulting for Electronic Data Systems and SCP Partners, which is a Mossad-run company specialising in security-related work. Within SCP Partners’ business portfolio are a number of firms which specialise in the creation of advanced niche specialty metals and complex metals products for industries such as energy, aerospace, infrastructure, and specialty metals and chemical industries.
Of course on the morning of the 9/11 plot’s gruesome conclusion, he would be miraculously present at the offices of the largest broadcaster on the planet. Literally as American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 hurtled towards the twin towers, Ehud Barak (born Ehud Brog) was backstage at the BBC World offices in London, preparing to forge the War on Terror’s Zionist narrative in the vulnerable shell-shocked minds of his global audience.
“We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
Within the BBC’s pre-prepared news report – immediately before Barak is given the stage – a peculiar thing happened. Yasser Arafat, proudly clad with his Keffiyeh – the ultimate symbol of resistance to oppression – is interviewed in what was on the face of it a bizarre display of the utmost irrelevance. What on god’s green earth did the Palestinians have to do with an ongoing terror attack halfway across the globe, the perpetrators of which were at the time a complete mystery? As the BBC report would indicate with increasing clarity, the purpose of this was very simple: the Zionist narrative of the ‘War on Terror’ was being pulled out of its box and the Cellophane removed. Palestine – the righteous resistance at the very epicentre of Israel’s expansionist, hegemonic, genocidal ambitions – was the threat. Israel, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ was the solution and here was its former Prime Minister with the answer.
As if presiding over a court case with a defendant and a plaintiff, the BBC reporter proceeds with his script, “That’s the view from the Palestinian side,” and Ehud Barak takes to the screen.
“This is an attack on our whole civilisation.” Who did it? “I believe we will know in twelve hours.” But that’s not important. What we need is a “globally concerted effort, led by the United States, the UK, Europe, and Russia.” Notice that Israel is conspicuously absent from the list; Israel doesn’t get its hands dirty unless it needs to.
“Bin Laden sits in Afghanistan,” the oracle tells us, but he’s not saying bin Laden did it. Yet. Ask him again in 11 hours, 59 minutes. “Within six or ten years,” Barak insists, Iran, Iraq, and Libya, the ‘rogue states’ must be taken down. Six or ten years on, and it’s two down, one to go.
Dehumanise the enemy: the ‘celebrating Palestinians’ propaganda
At four minutes and fifty-nine seconds through the video you see a Reuters feed flash up during the BBC’s live report. The dispatch alludes to: “Palestian [sic] celebrations” in Jerusalem. The next act of the script is being played out as Palestinians, and by extension Muslims, are dehumanised and portrayed as heartless, bloodthirsty animals.
Scenes of ‘Palestinians celebrating’ in occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem), filmed by Reuters and AP, were later broadcast on TV on the BBC, Fox, CNN, and several other corporate-Zionist controlled media outlets:
Ten days after the event, in a piece titled Die Macht der TV-Bilder (‘The power of TV images’), well-respected German paper Der Spiegelutterly exposed this pernicious anti-Palestinian propaganda as being staged and manipulated.
It transpired that the lady who can be seen cheering and celebrating in front of the camera was told to do so, and offered cake in return. She later told German reporters of this, and was absolutely horrified to learn of the fraudulent context in which the footage was broadcast to an information-hungry world in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Further to this, you can clearly see in the video that there is only a very small number of children and people celebrating. In the background, one can see several people standing around nonchalantly, or simply walking from one place to the next.
Also, notice that the footage consists of only close, narrow shots. Long, wide shots would have shown the entire scene on the street: small groups of children and a handful of people celebrating, who were being urged and provoked to do so by those filming.
This footage, consisting of no more than a few seconds and a few people, was repeatedly broadcast to global audiences, alongside the chilling footage of Flight 175 slamming into the South Tower. By the time the hoax was exposed (albeit only by a German-language paper), the damage had already been done.
The big lie: peppered with Israeli fingerprints from preparation to orchestration and narration
The ‘mainstream’ 9/11 truth movement exhibits an acute case of selective vision. Whether through fear of the dreaded ‘anti-Semite’ epithet, or through aversion to the ubiquitous (but not entirely unfounded) ‘Jewish power & conspiracy’ stereotypes, the obvious and central Israeli connections to 9/11 are ignored.
The 9/11 false flag, and the torrent of Israeli-prescribed propaganda that followed as the towers fell, was engineered to instigate the War on Terror. Without a doubt, the axis consisting of the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and the myriad of ‘disaster capitalism’ multinationals, benefited greatly from and colluded to differing degrees in 9/11. However, attributing the central role of planning and orchestration of 9/11 to these actors is born of short-sightedness. The BBC’s evidently pre-planned Zionist propaganda set-piece provided a clue to this, but this was merely the tip of the iceberg.
Not only did Israel benefit economically, politically, and militarily from 9/11 more so than any other nation on the planet, but ardent Zionists with close links to Israel, US-Israeli dual nationals, and even Israelis, are found at every pivotal nook and cranny of the plot.
The clues are abundant, and lay at the very core of the 9/11 conspiracy (how absurd it now seems to use that long-abused word in its proper context).
From the unprecedented privatisation of the WTC six weeks prior to the events, to the sophisticated hardware used to fly the remotely-controlled jets; from the missing trillions at the Pentagon, to the Israeli spies caught with explosives and subsequently released in New York, to the man who let them go – the same man who co-authored the Patriot Act and headed up the Department of Homeland Security; from the advance warnings received by Israeli communications company Odigo and part Israeli state-owned company ZIM (which terminated its WTC tenure one week before the event incurring a $50,000 bill), to the Israeli company that ran security at the 9/11 airports. This company, ICTS International, even ran security for the ‘shoe bomber’ airport, the ‘underpants bomber’ airport, as well as the 7/7 London bus service that was bombed in 2005. Yet another Israeli company, Verint Systems, ran the camera system in the London Tube network when it told the world that its cameras ‘weren’t working’, in an attempt to explain why there was no footage of any of the alleged bombers entering their respective tube trains. But I digress. The blue and white six-pointed star can be uncovered in all of the most obvious central aspects of the 9/11 game plan.
Six weeks before 9/11 the WTC ownership was transferred into private hands for the first time in history. Ronald Lauder lobbied for this to happen. Lewis Eisenberg, head of the Port Authority, presided over the deal. It was awarded to Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy. All of these men are staunch Zionists with close links to Israel; Silverstein – former IDF soldier – even speaks to Benjamin Netanyahu on a weekly basis. Billionaire Lauder is closely involved with several pro-Israel Jewish organisations including the JNF (which appropriates Palestinian land for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers). He even accompanied President Bush on his 2008 delegation to Israel, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Nakba.
Lowy fought in the Nakba as a member of the Golani brigade and, like Silverstein, miraculously steered clear of the WTC on that fateful Tuesday morning. All four men are intimately involved in the abhorrent Anti-Defamation League.
On September 10, 2001, the very day before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld announced $2.3 trillion in missing funds at the Pentagon. The Bush-appointed man responsible for the Pentagon’s finances at that time was staunch Zionist and Rabbi Dov Zakheim – a man who had been the Chief Executive of Systems Planning Corporation for the previous fourteen years – since 1987. SPC manufactures advanced aviation technology used for the remote piloting of large jet aircraft.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, residents of Bergen, New Jersey, saw five men stood atop a white van. These men had set up a camera to record the twin towers before the first plane had hit. Upon the impact of Flight 11 and the instantaneous, hellish death of hundreds of innocent people, these men celebrated and cheered together. The horrified residents reported the men, who were later apprehended by police. The Israeli men tested positive for explosives, but were not charged with anything and were later released.
A second van was found later that day in even more suspicious circumstances. By the George Washington bridge, which connects New York City to New Jersey, two Israeli men were caught driving the van containing a truckload of explosives. Dan Rather, news anchor for CBS, would report:
“Two suspects are in FBI custody after a truckload of explosives were discovered around the George Washington Bridge. That bridge links New York to New Jersey over the Hudson River. Whether the discovery of those explosives had anything to do with other events today is unclear, but the FBI, has two suspects in hand, said the truckload of explosives, enough explosives were in the truck to do great damage to the George Washington Bridge.”
All of these Israelis were subsequently released ultimately by Michael Chertoff – ardent Zionist and son of a Talmudic Rabbi and the first hostess for El Al Airlines, a suspected Mossad front. Chertoff also co-authored the Patriot Act – legislation used to spy on Americans and stifle dissent in the name of ‘national security’.
It cannot be denied that politically and militarily, Israel benefited from 9/11 more than any other nation on the face of the earth. The false flag terror attacks afforded the Zionist entity endless political capital to pursue and accelerate its genocidal ambitions against Muslims in Palestine, and its goals of regional hegemony in coaxing the U.S. to invade Iraq.
In addition to this there is the important element of economic benefits; even the Israeli government admits that its economy is centred around the homeland security and weapons industry.
As a direct result of 9/11, the homeland security industry has boomed to astronomical proportions, eclipsing Hollywood and the music industry. Unprecedented security paranoia, war, and conflict are racking the planet. An ever-growing number of U.S. and Israeli-made drones (and Israel is considered the leading player whilst five NATO countries are using Israeli drones in Afghanistan) are patrolling the skies of the Middle East and Central Asia. Is it any wonder that Israel is one of the few nations on the planet that has largely avoided the post-9/11 economic slump?
The Zionist-controlled BBC’s pre-prepared ‘kick-off’ propaganda set-piece ‘hosted’ by Israeli Zionist heavyweight Ehud Barak, erected the ‘War on Terror’ before the events of 9/11 had even come to pass. The former Israeli Prime Minister’s appearance in what was a uniquely Zionist and anti-Palestinian news report as Manhattan burned provided a telling clue as to the perpetrators of the 9/11 psychological warfare operation. While real Israelis cheered in Manhattan, the world’s TV screens showed manipulated footage of Palestinians ‘celebrating’ 9/11.
Not only are Israel’s fingerprints all over 9/11 (something which is apparent even from the incomplete break-down above), but the new global paradigm that was forged on that day, empowered and benefited Israel in every conceivable way.
Your cause may be the Palestinian struggle, waged in the occupied holy lands of the Middle East. Your cause may be the fight against the unstoppable, destructive free-market neoliberal economic doctrine. Your cause may be the battle against fear, struck into our hearts by the ‘al Qaeda’ ghost – kept alive by psychological warfare outfits such as the Zionist-run SITE group. Your struggle may be against the decade of wars now expanding into Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Perhaps your cause is all of the above. In any case, what cannot be denied is that 9/11 is the seminal event, inextricably and intimately linked to almost every major problem the world faces today. Only through establishing the whole truth about this Zionist deception can we even begin to glimpse peace.
The investigation into Monday’s deadly bombing at the Boston Marathon has officially gone international: law enforcement officials from Israel have been sent to the United States to assist in the probe.
Israel Police Chief Yohanan Danino says he has dispatched officials to Boston, Massachusetts, where they will meet with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other authorities, the Times of Israel reports.
Citing an earlier report published by the newspaper Maariv, Times of Israel writes that Danino has dispatched police officers to participate in discussions that “will center on the Boston Marathon bombings and deepening professional cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of both countries.”
The paper reports that Israeli law enforcement planned the trip before the deadly pair of bombings on Monday that has so far claimed three lives, but the discussions will now shift focus in order to see how help from abroad can expand the investigation.
In an address made Tuesday, Israel President Shimon Peres said that tragedies such as this week’s incident in Boston, sadly, bring people together from across the world.
“When it comes to events like this, all of us are one family. We feel a part of the people who paid such a high price. God bless them,” Peres said. “Today the real problem is terror, and terror is not an extension of policy: Their policy is terror, their policy is to threaten. Terrorists divide people, they kill innocent people.”
Around 20 hours after two bombs detonated near the finish line of the annual race, United States President Barack Obama went on record to condemn the tragedy as a terrorist attack.
“This was a heinous and cowardly act,” said Obama from the White House, “and given what we now know the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism.”
But even as officials come to assist from as far away as Israel, authorities are still in the dark as far as finding any leads in the case. Pres. Obama has directed the FBI and US Department of Homeland Security to assist in the investigation, but no agencies have identified suspects or motives at this time.
Pres. Obama has also said that his administration has been directed to implement “appropriate security measures to protect the American people,” but details as to what that could mean remain scarce. Meanwhile, at least one leading lawmaker is asking for the US to respond to the terrorist attack by increasing the scope of the ever-expanding surveillance program already growing across the United States.
“I do think we need more cameras,” Rep. Peter King (R-New York) told MSNBC after Monday’s attacks. “We have to stay ahead of the terrorists and I do know in New York, the Manhattan Security Initiative, which is based on cameras, the outstanding work that results from that. So yes, I do favor more cameras. They’re a great law enforcement device. And again, it keeps us ahead of the terrorists, who are constantly trying to kill us.”
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also confirmed that he has dispatched law enforcement officers from the Big Apple to assist in the investigation by meeting with agents at a Boston fusion center, one of the DHS-funded data facilities that collects surveillance camera footage and other evidence in order to analyze events like Monday’s attack.
“We are certainly engaged in the information flow with the FBI through our Joint Terrorism Task Force. We have two New York City police officers, police sergeants, who are in the Boston Regional Intelligence Center,” Bloomberg said on Tuesday. “They’re up there, they’ve been up there since last evening.”
But in a study conducted last year by the Senate’s bipartisan Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, lawmakers found that those fusion centers have been more or less unhelpful in assisting with terrorism probes.
The Department of Homeland Security’s work with state and local fusion centers, the subcommittee wrote, “has not produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts.” Instead, they added, so-called “intelligence” shared between facilities consisted of tidbits of shoddy quality that was often outdated and “sometimes endangering [to] citizen‘s civil liberties and Privacy Act protections.”
“More often than not,” the panel added, information collected and shared at DHS fusion centers was “unrelated to terrorism.”
According to a new report published by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., the President and CEO of biometrics firm SmartMetric posits that the industry will be worth $10 billion by 2018.
SmartMetric, of course, “stands to capitalize significantly on this very large and fast growing market,” so perhaps that projection should be taken with a grain of salt.
But specific figures aside, the industry is undoubtedly booming, and in large part due to US military and law enforcement biometrics programs.
If you are worried about how powerful biometrics technologies might be used in your city or state, click here to find out how to get involved at the local level to ensure police transparency and democratic accountability.
Tom Hurndall was shot through the head by the Israeli army. We follow his grieving family who came to Gaza to see what their son was doing. Five-year-old Salamah was one of three children Tom was attempting to rescue when he was shot. He had frozen in fear when soldiers began firing at him. Another young peace campaigner, Brian Avery, is lucky to be alive after a burst of machine gun fire ripped off half his face. He now lies in hospital with horrific scars barely able to talk. The Israelis are cracking down on foreigners entering the Gaza Strip.
US President Barak Obama has presented congress an almost 4 trillion dollar budget plan: Amongst his requests: more funds, in the billions, to modernize US’s nuclear weapons. This is while he will cut payments to Medicare not to mention cutbacks to its Social Security pensions and other government programs.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Mark Dankof, a political commentator from San Antonio, to further examine why the US – who has the lead in the possession of nuclear weapons and has advocated nuclear non-proliferation – feels the need to modernize its weapons of mass of destruction, which also goes against the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The video also offers the opinions of one additional guest: Charlie Wolf who is a writer and broadcaster from London.
The following is a partial and approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: Do you not think that we have our guest there Charlie Wolf thinking that the Iranian government is pursuing weaponization of its program; Iran has clearly come out and said we want a Middle East free of nuclear weapons and at the same time, countries like the US are coming out and using nuclear weapons as, they claim to be deterrent but really to use and enforce power. What is your reaction there?
Dankof: A couple of things. One, I am not a nuclear expert but let me simply say this. If we take the director of National Intelligence of the United States James Clapper at his word, if we take the 16 intelligence agencies of the United States that produce the national intelligence estimate at their word, Iran is in fact not pursuing a weaponized nuclear program.
And I add it to that of course is the situation where the United States’ chief ally in the region Israel is a nuclear power and going back to something that the Times of Israel published earlier this week back in the 1970s, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yigal Allon then the foreign minister of Israel were repeatedly lying to the president of the United States and the senator Howard Baker of Tennessee and Mac Mathias of Maryland in regard to their Dimona Operation, in regard to their weaponized nuclear program and in regard to the fact that they already were in the 1970s in possession of nuclear weapons.
When you look at that Times of Israel’s report and then consider that Israel is the chief driving force behind what the United States is presently doing in the Middle East and what President Obama and John Kerry are insisting that Iran do in the Middle East and with their nuclear research program, I think the word hypocrisy does apply.
Press TV: Eight billion dollars for this most recent upgrade; Mark Dankoff, the UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron just recently came out and he called the ownership of nuclear weapons, in response to North Korea threats ‘the ultimate insurance policy’. This is the kind of feeling that generally some people are feeling when it comes to the US president coming out with 8 billion dollars for what he calls upgrades. I mean, one nuclear bomb should be enough unless there is different types of bombs with lesser degrees or higher degrees. Again I know you said that you are not a nuclear technician. It does not give much merit to the president’s claim that it is for nuclear nonproliferation.
Dankof: That is right and I will say something again and this gets back to something Charlie [Wolf, the other guest on the show] was commenting on because I am not a nuclear expert, I do not know the extent to this budget upgrade by the president represents an attempt to merely keep the present stockpiles safe and workable and to keep it from being involved in some sort of accident or malfunction and to what extent it actually represents an upgrade in the expulsive capacity of these so-called weapons of mass destruction. I simply do not have that knowledge of my disposal.
But it does seem to me that when we look at the president’s actions, at least symbolically, when you look at what has happened since 9/11 with American foreign policy, the draconian increases in defense spending across the board, the ongoing military intervention of the United States and NATO and all kinds of circumstances around the globe of which Libya and Syria are only the latest and when you look at the kinds of things that the US is clearly doing in regard to the deployment of the aircraft carrier, Task Force Groups, black operations inside Iranian borders, draconian economic sanctions and so forth and so on, the Iranians could well be forgiven for interpreting all of these actions on the part of the United States as particularly bellicose.
I would like to say one other thing that Charlie commented on that I do disagree with. President Ahmadinejad is often quoted as saying that either he or Iran would wipe Israel off the map. That is not what the man said. That is what an Israeli translation service called MEMRI said that he said.
President Ahmadinejad’s remarks, properly translated as I understand it, indicated that he simply thought that the Zionist state would eventually fade from history because of all of the internal contradictions within it. That is more than a slight shift in nuance in regard to meaning. I do not think that the president of Iran said the things that had been repeatedly said that he said about wanting to annihilate Israel militarily.
I think that is a bad translation and a false translation and one that again was offered by a Middle East research institute that has no links to the Israeli intelligence community.
Press TV: I am trying to steer this debate to focus on Obama’s proposal to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. We seem to keep going back to the Middle East and Iran. So Mark Dankoff, let’s go along the line of why the US president feels for this upgrade and one deduction has been the US military industrial complex: companies such as GE of which there has been lots of money to be made here. Could this be part of the push by them?
Dankof: I think when you look at the American defense posture generally, it is hard to get away from this perception. After all, when you look at the power of these defense contractors, the amount of money that is involved, the influence that they have on Capitol Hill with people in both of the major political parties, certainly this has to factor into this without question.
There is an additional political context to all of this however that I think does go back to 1945. It is noteworthy that the United States is the only nation on earth that has ever used these weapons in wartime. It used them against two Japanese cities, as we all know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to me the most chilling aspect of all of this is that my father’s old boss, General Curtis Lemay, the father of the Strategic Air Command said after the war that the American utilization of all those weapons against those cities had nothing to do with ending the war or getting Japan to surrender which is what we were always taught in American schools growing up for years after 1945.
But that had everything to do with simply showing the Soviet Union what we had and that using the Japanese as the victims of the demonstration. So with that as a beginning to this whole tragedy of nuclear weaponry, it seems that over the course of the last 70 years or so that we cannot get away from the political context of all of this and the perception on the part of most of the people of the world that when it comes to issues of nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation that the United States will play by one set of rules; the other nuclear powers will play by one set of rules and everyone else gets to play by the rules and guidelines that are said done by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
This is perceived as inherently unfair and I do not think that we can separate the technical issues involved in this debate and the budgetary issues from the issue of the profit motive of these armament companies and also the whole question of the fact that some people want to have their cake and eat it too in terms of possessing these weapons and denying the right to these weapons to other people. It is a vexing situation.
Press TV: What is your response to Charlie Wolf’s remarks?
Dankof: As a matter of fact, we now know through a series of things that have been declassified that the Japanese had already agreed to surrender that Truman would not allow them to surrender because of his so-called unconditional Surrender Doctrine. What all the Japanese were asking for was that we kept our hands off of the emperor.
In fact, we went ahead and used these weapons and then turned around and basically agreed to the back channel demand that the Japanese had made after the destruction of both of those cities. So I would take issue with that.
I also in terms of Mr. Ahmadinejad would compare him with the current leadership of the nation of Israel. It is also a fact. Why do we not go back and take a look at what General Lemay and Admiral Nimitz and General Eisenhower had to say on this subject years after the war and a series of the things that have subsequently been declassified.
Press TV: Obama’s nuclear vision or is it an illusion?
Dankof: I think it is an illusion and it is interesting to me again that we are talking about a man of the Democratic Party and a man who is perceived on the left end of the Democratic Party spectrum who has been involved in a series of things and making him look to me like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ranging from the drone strikes to agreeing to put out the war through his secretary of state that the United States is prepared to take preemptive military action against Iran or allow Israel to do so.
Under Obama’s presidency, the United States and Israel have been using the Mujahedin-E-Khalq or the MEK to conduct these assassinations of these Iranian nuclear scientists. With what all of that implies – and of course the president was very much involved in getting NATO to intervene in Libya – the president is now clearly involved as the United States is and as the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation States are in financing the attempted overthrow of this government in Syria with all of these al-Qaeda elements in it. This does not sound like liberal to me.
In the last ten years, the expansion of corporate sugarcane and oil palm plantations in northern Guatemala has encroached on the lands of Maya Q’eqchi’ indigenous people—many of whom fled to this region during the country’s 36-year genocidal war. These plantations have already displaced hundreds of families—even entire communities—leading to increased poverty, hunger, unemployment, and landlessness in the region. The companies grabbing land are controlled by European-descendent Guatemalan oligarchs who are benefitting from rising global commodity prices for food, animal feed, and fuel (biodiesel and ethanol). In the face of violent expulsion and incorporation into an exploitative system, peasant families are struggling to access land and defend their resources as the basis of their collective identity as Q’eqchi’ peoples or R’al Ch’och (“sons and daughters of the earth”).
Hours after the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the history books are being re-written and the beatification of the Iron Lady is well underway.
Current British premier David Cameron praised Lady Thatcher for having “saved Britain” and for making the has-been colonial power “great again”.
Tributes poured forth from French and German leaders, Francoise Hollande and Angela Merkel, while US President Barack Obama said America had lost a “special friend”.
Former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev also lamented the loss of “an historic world figure”. Polish ex-president Lech Walesa hailed Margaret Thatcher for having brought down the Soviet Union and Communism.
Such fulsome praise may be expected coming from so many war criminals. But it is instructive of how history is written by the victors and criminals in high office. Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel should all be arraigned and prosecuted for war crimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Mali, among other places. Kissinger has long evaded justice for over four decades for his role in the US genocide in Southeast Asia during the so-called Vietnam War in which over three million people were obliterated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The British state is to give Thatcher, who died this week aged 87, a full military-honours funeral. The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times.
So, here is a people’s history of Thatcher’s legacy.
She will be remembered for colluding with the most reactionary elements of Rupert Murdoch’s squalid media empire to launch a war over the Malvinas Islands in 1982, a war that caused hundreds of lives and involved the gratuitous sinking of an Argentine warship, the Belgrano, by a British submarine.
By declaring war, rather than conducting political negotiations with Argentina over Britain’s ongoing colonial possession of the Malvinas, Thatcher salvaged her waning public support in Britain, and the bloodletting helped catapult her into a second term of office in Downing Street. Her political “greatness” that so many Western leaders now eulogize was therefore paid in part by the lives of Argentine and British soldiers, and by bequeathing an ongoing source of conflict in the South Atlantic.
It wasn’t just foreigners that Thatcher declared war on. Armed with her snake-oil economic policies of privatisation, deregulation, unleashing finance capitalism, pump-priming the rich with tax awards subsidised by the ordinary working population, Thatcher declared war on the British people themselves. She famously proclaimed that “there was no such thing as society” and went on to oversee an explosion in the gap between rich and poor and the demolition of social conditions in Britain. That legacy has been amplified by both successive Conservative and Labour governments and is central to today’s social meltdown in Britain – more than two decades after Thatcher resigned. Laughably, David Cameron, a protégé of Thatcher, claims that she “saved” Britain. The truth is Thatcher accelerated the sinking of British capitalism and society at large. What she ordered for the Belgrano has in a very real way come to be realised for British society at large.
During her second term of office in the mid-1980s, the Iron Lady declared war on the “enemy within”. She was referring to Britain’s strongly unionised coal-mining industry. Imagine declaring war on your own population. That is a measure of her pathological intolerance towards others who did not happen to share her obnoxious ideological views – ideological views that have since become exposed as intellectually and morally bankrupt.
For over a year around 1984, her Orwellian mindset and policies starved mining communities in the North of England into submission. Her use of paramilitary police violence also broke the resolve and legitimate rights of these communities. Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill would later be vindicated in the eyes of ordinary people, if not in the eyes of the mainstream media. Britain’s coalmines were systematically shut down, thousands of workers would be made unemployed, and entire communities were thrown on the social scrap heap. All this violence and misery was the price for Thatcher’s ideological war against working people and their political rights.
The class war that Thatcher unleashed in Britain is still raging. The rich have become richer, the poor decidedly more numerous and poorer. The decimation of workers’ rights and the unfettered power given to finance capital were hallmarks of Thatcher’s legacy and are to this day hallmarks of Britain’s current social decay. But that destructive legacy goes well beyond Britain. The rightwing nihilistic capitalism that Thatcher gave vent to was and became a zeitgeist for North America, Europe and globally. The economic malaise that is currently plaguing the world can be traced directly to such ideologues as Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan.
A final word on Thatcher’s real legacy, as opposed to the fakery from fellow war criminals, is her role in Ireland’s conflict. Her epitaph of “Iron Lady” is often said with admiration or even sneaking regard for her supposed virtues of determination and strength. In truth, her “iron” character was simply malevolent, as can be seen from her policies towards the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. In 1981, 10 Irish republican prisoners, led by a young Belfast man by the name of Bobby Sands, died from hunger strikes. The men died after more than 50 days of refusing prison food because they were demanding to be treated as political prisoners, not as criminals. Thatcher refused to yield to their demands, denouncing them as criminals and callously claiming that they “took their own lives”. No matter that Bobby Sands had been elected by tens of thousands of Irish voters to the British House of Parliament during his hunger strike. He was merely a criminal who deserved to die, according to the cold, unfeeling Thatcher.
As a result of Thatcher’s intransigence to negotiate Irish rights, the violence in the North of Ireland would escalate over the next decade, claiming thousands of lives. As with Las Malvinas dispute with Argentina, Thatcher deliberately took the military option and, with that, countless lives, rather than engage in reasoned, mutual dialogue. Her arrogance and obduracy blinded her to any other possibility.
As the violence gyrated in Ireland, Thatcher would also embrace the criminal policy of colluding with pro-British death squads. Armed, funded and directed by British intelligence, these death squads would in subsequent years kill hundreds of innocent people – with the knowledge and tacit approval of Lady Thatcher. It was a policy of British state terrorism in action, sanctioned by Thatcher. One of those victims was Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane, who was murdered in February 1989. He was shot 12 times in the head in front of his wife and children by a British death squad, after the killers smashed their way into the Finucane home on a Sunday afternoon.
Thus whether in her dealings with the Las Malvinas row with Argentina, the British working people or Irish republicans, Margaret Thatcher was an intolerant militarist who always resorted to demagoguery, violence and starvation to get her political way. She was a criminal fascist who is now proclaimed to be a national hero.
Reports this week say that Thatcher died with Alzheimer’s, the brain-degenerating disease in which the patient loses their faculty for memory. Western leaders, it seems, would also like to erase public memory of Thatcher’s criminal legacy.
In an October 21, 2001, speech before the convention of the American Jewish Congress, Daniel Pipes stated: “I worry very much from the Jewish point of view that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims…will present true dangers to American Jews.”
Daniel Pipes Supports Internment of Japanese-Americans:
“Yes, I do support the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.” From Daniel Pipes’ website, 12/28/04
Flames have enveloped all floors of the highest building in the North Caucasus, southern Russia. All people have managed to leave the building. The Grozny-city complex in the Chechen Republic includes luxury apartments and a 5-star hotel.
The local emergency service said the call about the fire on between the 4th and 5th floors was received at around 18:00 PM local time (14:00 GMT).
According to witnesses’ pictures that immediately started to appear on Twitter, all stories of the building are covered with flames.
At the same time there have been reports suggesting that the fire started on the top floor and the bottom floor was on fire as well.
All people have managed to leave the the 145-meter skyscraper ; one woman was seen to be supported by others, witnesses said. Local police confirmed no one was injured.
Fire units and ambulances have arrived at the scene. Nearly 300 people are involved in extinguishing the fire. The area around the Grozny-City complex has been cordoned off.
In two hours the fire has completely engulfed three sides of the skyscraper from the top to bottom as the flames spread rapidly due to the plastic trimming on the building. It has also reached the world’s largest clock face, located near the apex of the building.
Firefighters have managed to extinguish the flames on the lower floors. However, the fire has spread very quickly, making it difficult to tackle the blaze from the ground. Helicopters have been sent from the southern city of Pyatigorsk to help out, but have not received the go-ahead for lift-off.
“We are ready, but the helicopters won’t be able to maneuver between the buildings, which are packed tight,” said emergency ministry official Aleksandr Barsuk.
A criminal case has been launched in connection to the violation of fire safety rules. According to the initial version the cause of the fire was a short circuit, LifeNews tabloid reported citing a local police source.
“According to preliminary information, the cause of the fire in the skyscraper was a short circuit. A more concise report will be done after experts examine the building,” the source told the tabloid.
In the burning skyscrapers called “Olympus” is an apartment belonging to French film star and tax exile Gerard Depardieu. LifeNews tabloid reports local administration confirmed the Frenchman’s apartment is on the 27th floor, facing the so-called “heart of Grozny”- central mosque.
“The fire has completely enveloped the right-hand side of the skyscraper. Both the wall and the window of the actor’s apartment have been damaged,” the tabloid quoted a local police source as saying.
The head of Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov granted the actor the status of “Chechen’s honorable resident” and presented an apartment in Grozny-City shortly after the Frenchman was granted Russian citizenship.
The Grozny-City complex was partly open in 2011. It consists of seven skyscrapers both condominiums and a hotel: one 40-storey (currently on fire), one 30-storey, three 28-storey and two 18-storey buildings. The completed complex would boast 1000 apartments.
“We will reconstruct the building, and make it more beautiful with help from Allah,” said Kadyrov on his Instagram account.
During the Six-Day War, Israel attacked and nearly sank the USS Liberty belonging to its closest ally, the USA. Thirty-four American servicemen were killed in the two-hour assault by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats. Israel claimed that the whole affair had been a tragic accident based on mistaken identification of the ship. The American government accepted the explanation.
For more than 30 years many people have disbelieved the official explanation but have been unable to rebut it convincingly. Now, Dead in the Water uses startling new evidence to reveal the truth behind the seemingly inexplicable attack. The film combines dramatic reconstruction of the events, with new access to former officers in the US and Israeli armed forces and intelligence services who have decided to give their own version of events.
Interviews include President Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, former head of the Israeli navy Admiral Shlomo Errell and members of the USS Liberty crew.
By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021
As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.
One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue
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