Germany’s digital minister meets with Elon Musk, says Musk “agreed” to EU’s censorship laws
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | January 5, 2023
Germany’s Minister for Digital and Transport Volker Wissing said that he is less worried about Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership after meeting with the CEO in San Francisco.
“Thanks @elonmusk for a constructive conversation in San Francisco. My stance is clear: the platforms’ self-commitment against #disinformation must be strictly adhered to until the #DSA comes into force. Elon Musk agreed with me,” Wissing tweeted.
The DSA (Digital Services Act), expected to come into effect in February 2024, requires, among other things, platforms to remove “harmful” content immediately. The legislation aims to protect consumers from content considered harmful as well as illegal content.
In a December interview, Wissing, the General Secretary of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), expressed concerns about Musk’s leadership of Twitter and said that he was undecided on whether he would continue using the platform.
Since taking over in late October, Musk has made some changes that censorship-lovers some might deem controversial. He rolled back the COVID-19 misinformation policy and reinstated some previously banned accounts, including the account of former US President Donald Trump.
In a letter to the EU Commission, Sven Giegold, the State Secretary for the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, raised concerns about abrupt changes at Twitter and the relaxation of censorship policies.
Israel arrested 410 Palestinians for social media activity in 2022, report says

MEMO | January 5, 2023
Israeli occupation authorities arrested 410 Palestinians, including women, children, journalists, activists and community leaders, for expressing their opinion on social media, according to a report by the Palestine Centre for Prisoners Studies (PCPS).
The report, co-authored by the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Addameer Association for Prisoner Care and Human Rights and the Wadi Hilweh Centre highlighted Israel’s use of a new ‘Vigilance Unit’ to monitor Palestinian social media accounts and issue recommendations to the security authorities to arrest them on the pretext that their opinions and publications call for incitement and violence.
PCPS Director, Riyad Al-Ashqar, said the Israeli courts charged the detainees with “incitement” for simply expressing their opinion on social media, including posting a picture of a martyr or merely mentioning his/her name, or issuing an invitation to protect Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Palestinians have been sentenced to between several months and several years in jail by the occupation’s courts on charges of incitement, while some were being held under administrative detention without charge or trial.
Israeli authorities also forced detainees to sign pledges not to use social media platforms for several months, in addition to issuing financial fines and placing some under house arrest.
Al-Ashqar indicated that over the past few years, the number of Palestinians arrested for using social media platforms has increased from 145 arrests in 2018, to 184 in 2019, 220 in 2020, 390 in 2021, and 410 in 2022.
Name & Shame – Companies Discriminating Against The Unvaccinated
Time to boycott
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 5, 2023
Almost a year ago, I wrote about the companies discriminating against their employees just because they were unvaccinated against Covid-19. I suggested boycotting those companies until they changed their policies.
Hopefully some of this pressure made these companies see sense, as a lot of these discriminatory policies have now been removed.
However, a year on and some companies have found a loop hole, making them appear less discriminatory. Now, they can’t be seen to be discriminating against their unvaccinated employees because they will only employ vaccinated individuals in the first place!
So it’s time to name and shame again. If you know of any companies that are still treating their unvaccinated employees differently or only employing vaccinated individuals, then add their names in the comments sections below (please add a link to their policy for verification).
Below is a list of companies, that I have compiled, that require vaccination for employment. I have only included large companies but there are thousands of examples of small companies that also require vaccination. These are for jobs including administrators, care home workers, chefs, dentists, plumbers, nurses, software engineers and support workers to name but a few.
I find it amusing how many of these companies have equal opportunities sections in their job listing postings. Equal opportunities for anyone except the unvaccinated!
And if anyone from any of these companies reads this post, I would highly recommend that you remove your policies for two reasons. Firstly for discriminatory reasons connected to any future employment law issues and secondly, you don’t want to have pushed vaccination on employees, just in case it turns out that the vaccines weren’t as safe and effective as you thought.
I would also be interested in hearing from anyone who has been turned down from a job or interview if they are unvaccinated.
A selection of companies requiring or encouraging Covid-19 vaccination for employment.
- Accenture (Accenture requires all new employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as a condition of employment);
- Amazon (Workers in New York City who perform in-person work or interact with the public in the course of business must show proof they have been fully vaccinated against COVID or request and receive approval for a reasonable accommodation, including medical or religious accommodation);
- American Red Cross (As a condition of employment with American Red Cross, you are required to provide proof that you are fully vaccinated for COVID 19 or qualify for an exemption, except in states where it is prohibited by law);
- AstraZeneca (AstraZeneca requires all US employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 but will consider requests for reasonable accommodations as required by applicable law);
- Carnival UK (To keep everyone on board fit and well, colleagues who visit or work on our ships must be fully vaccinated, including boosters);
- CBS Studios (Must be fully vaccinated to work on-site. (To be considered fully vaccinated: 2 weeks after their second dose in a 2-dose series, such as the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or 2 weeks after a single-dose vaccine, such as Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine);
- Chainalysis (All employees are required to have or obtain a COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment at Chainalysis, unless an exemption has been approved. All employees shall be required to report their vaccine status);
- Citi (Citi requires that all successful applicants for positions located in the United States or Puerto Rico be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment and provide proof of such vaccination prior to commencement of employment);
- Coca-Cola ( all new employees must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide Coke Canada with proof of vaccination);
- Coles (As part of that commitment, you will need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before joining the team at Coles, unless you’re medically exempt);
- Fitch Learning (part of Fitch Group) (UNITED STATES ONLY: As part of its continued efforts to maintain a safe workplace for employees, Fitch requires that all employees who receive a written offer of employment on or after October 4, 2021 be fully vaccinated (as defined by the CDC) against the coronavirus by the first day of employment as a condition of employment, to the extent permitted by applicable law);
- Jefferies Group LLC (It is Jefferies’ policy that all employees and visitors be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to enter any Jefferies office or participate in any Jefferies or client event in person. Should an offer of employment be made, your acceptance of that offer means that you will comply with this policy);
- Levi Strauss (LS&CO requires proof of being fully vaccinated for COVID-19 as a condition of commencing employment, except in those jurisdictions where prohibited by law);
- Live Nation (Currently, we strongly encourage employees to be fully vaccinated or have received a negative COVID test within [24] hours of entering an office);
- Marella Cruises (Please note that all applicants must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19).
- Ministry of Defence (We therefore encourage all our employees and prospective ones to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 subject to any exemptions that may apply);
- NHS (Whilst COVID-19 vaccination is not currently a condition of employment, we do encourage our staff to get vaccinated. If you are unvaccinated, there is helpful advice and information available by searching on the ‘NHS England’ website where you can also find out more about how to access the vaccination);
- NSF International (NSF requires all employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment, with exceptions only as required by law);
- OmniAb (New hires based in the US will be required to demonstrate that they have been fully vaccinated and boosted for COVID-19 or qualify for a medical or religious exemption or accommodation to this vaccination requirement);
- Overseas Adventure Travel (All trip leaders are required to be double vaccinated and boosted (as are all of our passengers));
- Paypal (Depending on location, this might include a Covid-19 vaccination requirement for any employee whose role requires them to work onsite);
- Qantas Airways ( It is the intention of the Qantas Group to require employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and this is being explored in all our international locations);
- Universal Music Group (All UMG employees are currently required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or provide proof of a negative PCR or Antigen test before entering any Company offices unless they have been approved for an exemption or unless prohibited by applicable law);
- Visier (As part of this commitment, we require all employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 or qualify for an exemption);
- ZE UK (Accordingly, following with provincial and federal vaccination’s approach, we require that all of our employees to be fully vaccinated and provide their proof of vaccination or substantiated grounds for exemption);
Rep. Adam Schiff’s office asked Twitter to ban New York Post columnist Paul Sperry — Twitter Files

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 4, 2023
An internal Twitter email claims that the office of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, requested that Twitter ban New York Post columnist Paul Sperry and others and heavily censor information about House Committee Staffers.
The November 2020 email was published by journalist Matt Taibbi as part of a Twitter Files thread detailing censorship pressure and requests from the federal government and other elected officials.
According to the email, Schiff’s office had claimed that Sperry and “many” other accounts had “repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies,” accused these accounts of harassing an unnamed staffer, and requested that the accounts be banned from Twitter.
The email also notes that Schiff’s office had requested that Twitter:
- “Remove any and all content” about House Intelligence Committee staffers from Twitter including quotes, retweets, and reactions to any content about them
- “Suppress any and all search results” about House Intelligence Committee staffers
- “Stop the spread of future misinformation” about House Intelligence Committee staffers and “other Committee staff who are not public figures and who were not central actors in impeachment inquiry or the 2020 presidential election”
- “Label and reduce the visibility of any content” about an unnamed staffer that isn’t removed

Twitter declined most of the censorship requests by stating “no” or “we don’t do this” and Sperry wasn’t banned at the time. However, in August 2022, Twitter banned Sperry after he criticized the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort.
Schiff made these purported censorship requests after Sperry had published several articles that named Eric Ciaramella, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower whose complaint started the first impeachment inquiry against former President Trump. In one article, Sperry reported that Ciaramella was overheard talking to Sean Misko, a staffer from former President Barack Obama’s administration, in the White House. Sperry also reported that Misko subsequently left the White House to join the Schiff-led House Intelligence Committee.
In a statement to the New York post, Sperry wrote: “I have never promoted any ‘QAnon conspiracies.’ Ever. Not on Twitter. Not anywhere. Schiff was just angry I outed his impeachment whistleblower and tried to get me banned. I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks to Twitter.”
Sperry also questioned whether Schiff’s office was behind his August 2022 Twitter ban.
“Looks like Schiff’s office initially got friction from Twitter gatekeepers. Still, I was banned just a few months after this ‘request,’” Sperry said. “Were there subsequent demands from Schiff? May explain why Twitter would never give me a reason for banning me.”
Transmission Denied
The perils of state-sanctioned censorship laid bare
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 24, 2022
How will we look back on 2022? For all but the most die-hard Zero Covid addicts (who had to wait until China punctured this illusion only a few weeks ago), victory was declared over Covid early in the piece when the government backed down from its obscene NHS injection mandate in February and ‘Plan B’ restrictions were also subsequently rescinded.
Yet peace, of course, was subsequently shattered by a confected – albeit shockingly deadly and costly – crisis in Eastern Europe, providing a helpful smokescreen for those that wished to obscure the obvious fallacies propping up the mainstream Covid narrative.
Of course, for most lockdown sceptics, Covid-19 should never have had a name, nor should it have been a ‘thing’. Had we had our way, the UK might now have the financial muscle to invest in schools, hospitals, updating creaking infrastructure, … this list feels endless, not dissimilar to the climb we face to reclaim the lost ground since society leaped off the cliff and into the abyss of draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions in March 2020.
These days, of course, it is fashionable to decry the harms of the over-zealous response, almost as if there had been no dissenting voices or opinions at the time. Unfortunately this is another convenient smokescreen, as the true scale of falsehoods shared by official information campaigns – or should we call them disinformation campaigns co-ordinated by officials – is now becoming impossible for even the most ardent Covidean Cultists to ignore.
We have previously reported on very strange goings-on in the upper echelons of the institutions co-ordinating various aspects of the ‘pandemic response’. Senior personalities and shadowy nameless characters that populated government committees such as SAGE – riven with conflicts of interest and serving many masters, the precise opposite of the ‘public servants’ they were portrayed as – favoured both corporate tyranny and crony capitalism. Actions speak louder than words: achieving good outcomes for people they are meant to be serving seem not to have been the top of their agenda.
This just replicated what happened across the Western world. Consider the treatment meted out on three ‘centrist’ senior academics (hailing from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard, no less) behind the Great Barrington Declaration, an attempt to promote a rational response to the grand panic so as to minimise collateral damage. A senior honcho within US National Institutes of Health smeared them as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ and stated that there “needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises”:

Various such rent-a-quote ‘take downs’ duly appeared in the following days, and a rival rallying flag – the John Snow Memorandum – was hastily erected, receiving the blessing of various official mouthpieces such as Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, as well being promoted in The Lancet. The John Snow Memo was merely a totem – a weak document that has laughably failed to stand the test of time – and it was correctly critiqued at the time. It is littered with hostage to fortune statements such as “Japan, Vietnam, and New Zealand, to name a few countries, have shown that robust public health responses can control transmission, allowing life to return to near-normal, and there are many such success stories”. Oops.
But despite these clangers, the ‘women and children last’ brigade were given a free pass by the mainstream press to use the John Snow Memorandum as a stick to beat — and silence — those that fought to limit collateral damage. Mission accomplished: pharma profits maximised.
This all came to light back in 2021… it is old news, though it is noteworthy that even lockdown sceptic Isabel Oakeshott recently mislabelled the centrist creed as the ‘Barrington Declaration’ (perhaps assuming the ‘Great’ was self-aggrandisement, rather than the more prosaic fact of being a geographical label referring to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the Declaration was signed).
A new development is that Anthony Fauci, head of the NIA, is now unable to recall these matters when providing an ‘on the record’ legal deposition, stating that he didn’t “have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration”… despite writing a few days after the above email from Collins that he had “come out very strongly against the Great Barrington Declaration”.
And following on from confirmation of the active suppression and censorship of the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, the new owner of a recently acquired social media company seems to have unearthed information that led to this exchange:

This is not merely playground politics – it is a matter of life and death. As fashionable as it is to subsequently admit that lockdowns – and the associated excesses which led to such terrible collateral damage – were a mistake, this was known before they were enacted. The shenanigans cost lives, livelihoods, and robbed families of last goodbyes.
It is tempting to see the debacle of recent years as a great misadventure – part of life’s rich tapestry that contributes to the furtherment of human knowledge. Lockdowns – ah, a failed experiment, but we didn’t know any better!
The sad – if unpalatable – truth is that not only should that experiment never have happened, it was known to very many powerful people that the experiment – and its compounding consequences and associated harms – should never have been promoted. It was a grand self-immolation that happened to enrich various characters that were not necessarily acting in your best interests. As more painful truths come to light, we owe it to our children and children’s children to continue to dissect these discredited lockdown policies, and those that promoted them. Watch this space.
The Net Zero death cult taking over ‘our’ NHS
By Stephen McMurray | TCW Defending Freedom | January 3, 2023
The climate change cult is insidious in every government department or institution it infiltrates. However, it is at its most dangerous when those people it infects are members of the medical community. When their apocalyptic hysteria starts affecting their decisions regarding patient care, urgent action is needed.
A disturbing document was recently published in the Lancet, entitled The Report of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death: bringing death back into life. It was written by numerous medical professionals in the palliative care sector. It is nothing less than a propaganda piece promoting the idea that people who are suffering from possible life-shortening illness should not be given any potential life-saving treatments but, to help reduce our carbon footprint, should be allowed to die and actively encouraged to do so.
The authors make their feelings clear when they say: ‘The commission believes it is healthy to die . . . We are embodied creatures who are ultimately no more important than lizards or potatoes.’
It soon becomes obvious that their Net Zero zeal is driving this agenda when they state: ‘Treatment at the end of life will be an important contribution to the carbon footprint of health care . . . Everything, and especially death, must be thought of in the context of the climate crisis . . . In the report we explore the many values of death.’
The article is replete with climate change apocalyptic rhetoric, saying humanity is near extinction, one of the reasons being overpopulation, so we had better change our ways and stop trying to cure patients with potentially fatal illnesses and let them die.
As is common with the climate change cult, the document is replete with extreme left-wing ideology, promulgating the idea that expecting to be treated in hospital with life-prolonging drugs is a concept founded in racism. As only rich Westerners can afford proper health care, it is an example of a colonialist mindset and to achieve equity we should abandon this idea and die willingly like poor people in less developed countries.
Throughout the report they state how important it is to die at home surrounded by friends and family rather than in a hospital bed. This is not out of compassion but out of their desire to reduce the carbon footprint of end-of-life medication. The same medical profession that ardently supported the closure of hospitals to relatives of dying patients during Covid now pretend to advocate for having loved ones at the dying patient’s bedside. Their hypocrisy is breathtaking.
The authors also have the temerity to infuse the document with references to religious practices and spirituality to convince the reader that death is nothing to fear and that, by medicalising it, we are not having our spiritual and emotional needs met. If this was coming from the head of a religious institution it would possibly be understandable, but this is from a medical establishment who vehemently adhere to the reductionist view that our bodies are mere machines of flesh and bone.
When extolling the virtues of other religions’ treatment of the dying, the report cites a ritual practised by some Indian sects, which ‘entails a person coming to the realisation that they have no responsibilities or desires left. With the consent of religious elders, the person enters a slow process of fasting, where they give up one item of food a time, so that hunger pangs are tolerable. Over a few weeks or months, the person dies, often amid chants’.
Here the commission are implying that once you have supposedly nothing left to offer society, it is perfectly reasonable to want to die. Moreover, they don’t object to the cruel method of causing death by slow starvation. One can only assume that the relatives of those who have starved to death in our own NHS hospitals would be outraged by this callousness.
The document encourages carers to implant a sense of hopelessness in their patients so they more readily accept the idea of dying. ‘There is evidence that the will to live can keep people alive. But the tyranny of “positive thinking” can lead to ambivalence, guilt, and bad decisions . . . Hope increases the likelihood that people will believe that their illness is less serious than objective data might support, allowing patients to hold on to a low possibility of a favourable outcome and disregard the much greater probability of an unfavourable outcome.’ Clinicians sometimes ‘recommend additional treatments as a way for the patient to maintain hope, despite the clinical futility’.
What if treatment is not futile? Cases where patients are wrongly diagnosed with a terminal illness do occur. If we have learned one thing from the Covid era, it is that medical experts are far from infallible.
Their obsession with Net Zero and their disdain for human life is even focused on the patient after death: ‘While the dead consume no carbon, the disposal of bodies does. About three quarters of people in Britain are cremated after death, releasing carbon into the air. Alkaline hydrolysis, in which the body is dissolved, has about a seventh of the carbon footprint of cremation, and the resulting fluid can be used as fertiliser.’
The writers try to justify withholding treatments from patients who are potentially dying by saying the money could be better spent on treating others. This is totally disingenuous. Given vast sums of money for patient care, the NHS chose to spend it instead on pursuing the climate cult’s agenda of Net Zero.
They are going to spend £492million on changing all NHS light bulbs into LED ones. To put that into perspective, take the current outbreak of Streptococcus A infections spreading amongst children. We are being told there is not enough penicillin to go around. The cost of a 14-day course of amoxicillin is £0.18. There are approximately 12.7million under-16s in the UK. Therefore, it would cost under £2.5million to make sure there is enough antibiotics available to protect the entire childhood population.
It will come as no surprise that the report is in favour of legalising ‘assisted dying’. One of its main authors, Richard Smith, chairs the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. In 2017 he wrote an article in the British Medical Journal which began: ‘We should accept that humanity is dying and switch from cure to palliation – just as wise patients do at the end of their lives.’ Smith agrees with another palliative care physician who finds ‘acceptance of our mortality, unimportance, ephemeral nature, infinite ignorance, and futility to be very liberating’. Do we really want people who suffer from existential nihilism and think human life is unimportant and futile, treating anyone, let alone people who may be dying?
The fact that the climate hysteria with its accompanying left-wing, extremist ideology has infected the NHS could have serious consequences for people with potentially life-shortening illnesses. What criteria would the doctors use to decide which patients, if any, are worthy of receiving treatment? Would their decision be based solely on medical grounds or their ideology?
Most people who are diagnosed as being near the end of life are the older generation. It is exactly this demographic that the eco-zealots blame for the so-called climate crisis. What if the doctor or nurse was so indoctrinated by the climate crisis propaganda that their decision to withdraw treatment was based on their radical views rather than purely medical reasons?
Last April, an Extinction Rebellion activist called for the baby boomer generation to be euthanised. A sick joke, maybe, but the UK Health Alliance for Climate Change which is promoting this agenda acknowledges it works with Doctors for Extinction Rebellion.
The Lancet report highlights how deeply the Net Zero cult has infiltrated our health system. The obsession with reducing our carbon footprint is now such an integral part of many medical professionals’ mindset that they openly promote death as a healthy outcome. Do we really want anyone who thinks human life is unimportant and futile, least of all doctors in whom we are meant to put our trust, treating anyone, let alone those who may be dying? Surely such declared inhumane intent, running directly counter to the Hippocratic Oath, should automatically be grounds for being struck off by the General Medical Council.
Documents reveal how ‘Russiagate’ was used for Twitter censorship
RT | January 4, 2023
Internal documents from Twitter made public on Tuesday show how the social media platform was pressured to follow the US intelligence community’s lead on censorship back in 2017. Key Democrats in the US Congress, a British university and two media outlets – Politico and BuzzFeed – played a major role in the process, which revolved around the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory, according to research by Matt Taibbi.
In a pattern established in just six weeks, from August to October 2017, Twitter went from being on nobody’s radar to agreeing to take orders from US spies as to whom to censor, Taibbi wrote on Substack.
“Threats from Congress came first, then a rush of bad headlines (inspired by leaks from congressional committees), and finally a series of moderation demands coming from the outside,” he added.
In a 30-tweet thread, Taibbi showed emails and other internal documents he obtained, thanks to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.
Democrats had accused Russia of helping Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. Their claim that Trump had ties with Moscow was a “dossier” fabricated by a British spy. From there, they insinuated that WikiLeaks publishing internal DNC documents and personal emails of Clinton’s campaign had something to do with Moscow, while “Russian bots and trolls” posted “misinformation” on social media that somehow undermined the elections.
By August 2017, Facebook was purging accounts accused of being “linked to Russia.” Unconcerned, Twitter sent over a list of 22 “possible” Russian accounts to the Senate Intelligence Committee, only to be denounced by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat.
By the end of September, Twitter VP for Public Policy Colin Crowell was warning that “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and [the] rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” Crowell also noted the Democrats were “taking cues from Hillary Clinton,” and that only Warner and his House counterpart Congressman Adam Schiff were seeking any comments from social media companies.
Meanwhile, as Taibbi put it, “a torrent of stories sourced to the [committee] poured into the news,” while several Senators – including Warner but also John McCain, an anti-Trump Arizona Republican – proposed bills that would have cracked down on social media.
A “Russia Task Force” set up by Twitter on October 2 found “no evidence of a coordinated approach” by October 13. The final report on October 23 found “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia.” Of those, only two spent anything close to $10,000 on advertising – and one of them was RT.
Policy Director Carlos Monje admits in an October 18 memo that “our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight.” One of these changes was the October 26 ban on advertising by RT and Sputnik.
A November 22 internal email accuses the Senate Intelligence Committee of leaking Twitter’s internal report to the media. A Politico story accusing Twitter of deleting files is followed by a BuzzFeed article alleging a German-language bot network with “signs of being connected to Russia.” The committee demands a report based on the story, which Twitter’s Yoel Roth dutifully writes up.
“You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions,” Taibbi wrote.
All of this results in the internal instructions to ban anything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” It was the first step in the process that would eventually lead to the FBI and the Biden White House telling Twitter exactly whom to censor.
Jordan Peterson threatened over political tweets
RT | January 3, 2023
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson said on Tuesday that may lose his license unless he submits to mandatory “social-media communication retraining” by the College of Psychologists of Ontario, his home province’s licensing authority.
“I face public disgrace, mandatory political re-education, disciplinary hearing and potential loss of my clinical licensing for agreeing with [Conservative MP] Pierre Poilievre and criticizing our standing [Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau,” Peterson said on Twitter.
According to Peterson, “about a dozen people from all over the world” submitted complaints to the CPO, alleging his views and comments “harmed people.” None of them were actual clients of his, but lied about it so their complaints would be accepted, he added.
The CPO demands that Peterson undergoes the “retraining” and submits “progress” reports, or face an “in-person tribunal” and suspension of his license to operate as a clinical psychologist.
“If I comply, the terms of my re-education and my punishment will be announced publicly,” he said.
“Canadians: your physicians, lawyers, psychologists and other professionals are now so intimidated by their commissar overlords that they fear to tell you the truth. This means that your care and legal counsel has been rendered dangerously unreliable,” Peterson tweeted.
Peterson was reinstated on Twitter in November, after Elon Musk bought the company and reversed many prior bans that he thought unjust. He had been locked out of his account in July 2022, for refusing to use a transgender actor’s new name and pronouns.
On December 27, Peterson tweeted that Trudeau “appears to me to be perpetually 14 yrs old,” referring to the concept of “psychological age” in his field of expertise.
The psychologist first gained national and international attention in 2016, when he was subjected to similar “re-education” pressure over his criticism of a bill that declared “gender identity and expression” to be protected categories. More recently, he has denounced the “totalitarian” lockdowns and vaccine mandates embraced by many countries – including Canada – in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Israel was never a democracy, so why is the West lamenting the end of a ‘liberal’ state?
MEMO | January 3, 2023
Even before the new Israeli coalition government was officially sworn in last week, angry reactions emerged, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s allies in the West. As early as 2 November, top US officials told Axios that the administration of US President Joe Biden is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.
In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own courts in 2007 for supporting a terrorist organisation and inciting racism. US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly “hinted” that Washington will also boycott “other right-wing extremists” in Netanyahu’s government.
However, such concerns looked to be absent from the statement made by the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, on the following day. Nides explained that he had “congratulated [Netanyahu] on his victory and told him that I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond” between the two countries. In other words, this “unbreakable bond” is stronger than any public US concern regarding terrorism, extremism, fascism and criminal activities.
Ben-Gvir is not the only convicted criminal in Netanyahu’s government. Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was convicted of tax fraud in early 2022 and, in 2000, he served a prison sentence for accepting bribes when he was interior minister. Bezalel Smotrich is another controversial character. His anti-Palestinian racism has dominated his political persona for many years. While Ben-Gvir has been assigned the post of national security minister, Deri has been entrusted with the interior ministry and Smotrich has the ministry of finance.
Palestinians and Arab countries are angry, and rightly so. They understand that the new government is likely to sow the seeds of more violence and chaos. With many of Israel’s sinister politicians in one place, Arabs know that Israel’s illegal annexation of large parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories is back on the agenda; and that incitement against Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem, coupled with raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque, will increase exponentially in the coming weeks and months. Moreover, it is expected that the push for the construction and expansion of illegal settlements is also likely to grow.
These fears are not unfounded. Aside from the very racist and violent statements and actions by Netanyahu and his allies in recent years, the new government has already declared that the Jewish people have “exclusive and inalienable rights to all parts of the Land of Israel”. It is promising to expand settlements, while distancing itself from any commitments to establishing a Palestinian State, or even engaging in any “peace process”.
Palestinians and their Arab allies have been largely consistent in recognising extremism in successive Israeli governments, but what excuse do the US and the West have in failing to acknowledge — or even recognise — that the latest Netanyahu-led government is not only the occupation state’s most extreme administration ever, but also the most rational outcome of the West’s blind support for Israel over many years?
In March 2019, Politico branded Netanyahu as the creator of “the most right-wing government in Israeli history,” a sentiment that was repeated countless times in other western media. This ideological shift was, in fact, recognised by Israel’s own media years earlier. In May 2016, the popular Israeli newspaper Maariv described the Israeli government at the time as the “most right-wing and extremist” in the country’s history. This was, in part, due to the fact that far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman was appointed as defence minister.
The West, then, also expressed concern, warned against the demise of Israel’s supposed liberal democracy, and demanded that it must remain committed to the peace process and the two-state solution. None of that was seen in practise. Instead, the terrifying figures within that government were rebranded as conservatives, centrists or even liberals in the following years.
The same is likely to happen now. In fact, signs of the US’s willingness to accommodate whatever extremist politics Israel produces are already visible. In his statement last week welcoming the new Israeli government, Biden said nothing about the threat of Tel Aviv’s far-right politics to the Middle East. Instead, he opted to highlight the “challenges and threats” posed by the region to Israel. In other words, Ben-Gvir or no Ben-Gvir, unconditional US support for Israel will remain intact.
If history is anything to go by, future violence and incitement in Palestine will also be blamed mostly, if not squarely, on Palestinians. This knee-jerk, pro-Israel attitude has defined the apartheid state’s relationship with the US, regardless of whether Israeli governments are led by extremists or supposed liberals. No matter what, Israel is maintaining its false status as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
If we are to believe that Israel’s exclusivist and racist “democracy” is in any sense a democracy at all, then we are justified also in believing that Netanyahu’s new government is neither less nor more democratic than the state’s previous governments. And yet, western officials, commentators and even pro-Israel Jewish leaders and organisations in the US have warned against the supposed danger facing Israel’s “liberal democracy” in the run-up to the formation of Netanyahu’s new government.
This is an indirect form of whitewashing, as these views accept that what Israel has practiced since its creation in 1948 until today has been some kind of real democracy; and that Israel remained a democracy even after the passing of the controversial 2018 Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as a Jewish state, completely disregarding the rights of 20 per cent of the country’s citizens who happen to be non-Jews.
It is only a matter of time before Israel’s latest extreme, far-right government is also whitewashed as proof that Israel can strike a balance between being exclusively Jewish and democratic at the same time.
This happened in 2016, when warnings about the rise of far-right extremism in Israel following the Netanyahu-Lieberman pact disappeared quickly, and then vanished altogether. Instead of boycotting that government, in September 2016 the US government finalised its largest ever military aid package to Israel, amounting to $38 billion.
In truth, Israel has not changed much since 1948, either in its own self-definition or in its treatment of Palestinians. Failing to understand this is tantamount to tacit approval of Israel’s racist, violent and colonial policies in Occupied Palestine over the past 75 years. So why is the West lamenting the end of a “liberal” state that has never, in truth, existed?
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