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Venezuelan State Reopens Investigations into Hundreds of Suspected Rural Activist Assassinations

By RACHAEL BOOTHROYD ROJAS | Venezuelanalysis | September 7, 2017

Bogota – Three hundred unresolved cases of rural land activists allegedly murdered at the hands of hired assassins will be re-opened by Venezuela’s Public Prosecution service in an effort to root out impunity for politically motivated crimes.

The measure was agreed in a high level meeting between the National Ombudsman’s office, the Public Prosecution service, the Public Defense, the Ministry of Eco-socialism and Water, the National Land Institute, and the Foundation for Victims of Politically Motivated and Rural Assassinations.

More than three hundred rural activists are estimated to have been killed at the hands of rightwing paramilitaries since 1999, when many land activists began to take collective action following the election of leftist president Hugo Chavez.

Most of the victims have been government supporters allegedly targeted for organizing in favor of the Land and Agrarian Development Law, passed by Chavez in November 2001. The legislation is aimed at breaking up the country’s centuries-old, privately-owned landed estates and allows rural workers to occupy unused land. While popular with rural communities, it has been strongly opposed by the country’s landowners.

Justice for murdered campesinos and activists has long been a demand of rural social movements such as the the Revolutionary Bolivar and Zamora Current. Despite the government’s official support for land reform, movements have strongly criticized state institutions for their lack of teeth in protecting social movement leaders from reprisals, as well as for failing to prosecute those responsible for political assassinations. To date, only a handful of cases have resulted in the successful prosecution of hired killers, while not a single landowner has been brought to trial.

The latest decision to reopen the cases means that some families will now have a second chance to win justice for their loved ones, after the majority of the cases were initially abandoned by the state prosecution, due to alleged lack of evidence.

Mate Garcia, a spokesperson for the Foundation for Victims of Politically Motivated and Rural Assassinations and daughter of murdered activist Armando Garcia, who was killed in 2002, welcomed the initiative as positive step.

“We are very hopeful about this work-group, where all of the cases of violence in our countryside are being taken up,” she said.

Garcia also confirmed that her organization had presented a series of recommendations to the National Constituent Assembly (ANC), which is currently holding session to draft up a new Constitution for the country.

Since being nominated as new Attorney General in August, Tarek William Saab has vowed to rid the state prosecution of impunity and combat classism in the Venezuelan justice service. He has accused his predecessor, Luisa Ortega, of having covered up violent political crimes and corruption during her ten year stint in office.

Ortega fled into self-imposed exile in August after an investigation was brought against her by the Supreme Court for “grave misconduct”. Ortega says she is the victim of political persecution due to her public break with the government of Nicolas Maduro earlier in March.

September 8, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights

By Denis Rancourt | Dissident Voice | September 7, 2017

SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.

*****

The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.

The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.

It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.

In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.

In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.

Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.

Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.

The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.

Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is push-back from individuals and groups — engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence — which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.

In historically recent human societies, essential push-back is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections of the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements, and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.

All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).

Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.

A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.

When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.

When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.

Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.

The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.

Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.

The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations — in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes — has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.

Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.

The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.

First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.

Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).

Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties.1

In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.

That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.

Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.

There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.

The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.

Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state — controlled by an elite class — effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence — otherwise known as “democracy” — must be allowed.

It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.

For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.

I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.

The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.

Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government2,3, freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions.4

Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law.5 They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.

The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:

  • being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
  • being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
  • being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
  • being induced to commit suicide
  • being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
  • being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage

The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.

No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.

For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail.5

These anti-speech laws, of course, are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation”.6

Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.

As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.

  1. “Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart”, by David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 2017-08-07.
  2. “Negroes with Guns”, by Robert F. Williams, 1962 (Martino Publishing, CT, 2013).
  3. “How Nonviolence Protects the State”, by Peter Gelderloos, 2007 (South End Press).
  4. “Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 2016-11-15.
  5. “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016-02-01. (And published in Dissident Voice: Part-1, Part-2).
  6. “Injurious Falsehood”, mcconchie law corporation (legal encyclopedia), accessed on 2017-09-06.

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism.

September 7, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

UK Police Test Facial Recognition Tech At Carnival, Rack Up 35 Bogus ‘Hits’ And One Wrongful Arrest

By Tim Cushing | TechDirt | September 5, 2017

UK law enforcement has proudly been using facial recognition for tech for a few years now. As is the case with any new law enforcement tech advancement, it’s being deployed as broadly as possible with as little oversight as agencies can get away with.

As of 2015, UK law enforcement had 18 million faces stashed away in its databases. Presumably, the database did not contain 18 million criminals and their mugshots. Concerns were raised but waved away with promises to put policies in place at some point in the future and with grandiose claims of 100% reliability. The latter, naturally, came from the police inspector who headed the facial recognition department. Caveat: this had only been tested on a limited set using “clear images.”

What works well in theory and/or with limited datasets doesn’t work especially well in practice. Here’s how things went down when the facial recognition program was deployed in the wild.

The controversial trial of facial recognition equipment at Notting Hill Carnival resulted in roughly 35 false matches and an erroneous arrest, highlighting questions about police use of the technology.

The system only produced a single accurate match during the course of Carnival, but the individual had already been processed by the justice system and was erroneously included on the suspect database.

Yeah, that’s going to keep UK citizens from being menaced by terrorists, drug dealers, and whatever else was cited to keep the facial recognition program from being derailed by concerned legislators and citizens. And, while the tech was busy failing to do its job, a few thousand photos of people engaged in nothing more than being criminally underdressed were added to the pot of randomly-drawn faces for the next round of facial recognition roulette.

Supposedly, this was a trial run. The false positives were apparently derived from a list of suspects’ faces wanted on rioting-related charges. Fortunately, those who were approached by officers as the result of bogus tech tip-offs had their identification documents on them. Nothing in the law requires you to carry them wherever you go, but if the law’s going to use tech as faulty as this, it may as well be a criminal offense to leave home without them. You’re going to get rung up — at least temporarily — if you can’t prove you aren’t who the software says you are.

Undeterred by this resounding lack of success, the Metropolitan police are planning to test the software again. This will give another set of UK citizens the chance to be wrongfully arrested at some point in the near future. Until the bugs are worked out — which means violating the rights and freedoms of UK citizens during the beta testing phase — UK law enforcement facial recognition tech will still be remembered as the thing that caught that shoplifter that one time.

September 6, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Atlanta cops run suspect over in case of mistaken identity

RT | September 5, 2017

An Atlanta police officer was placed on leave after he was accused of running over a man he wrongly thought was a suspect.

Warren Hill said he was run over in the parking lot of a mall last week. “It hurt bad,” he told WSBTV. “My head, my neck, my back, my whole body. You get hit by a car, what do you think is going to happen?”

Hill said he ran away from the approaching police because he was “scared of the cops.”

“They thought I was the suspect and ran me down like a dog or an animal,” he said.

Hill said after the police realized they had mistaken him for a domestic violence suspect, they arrested him for an outstanding warrant for failing to appear in court for a broken taillight.

The Atlanta Police Department told WSBTV the officer is now on leave and that its report or further details on the incident are not yet available.

“The officer has been relieved from duty pending the outcome of the OPS investigation,” Atlanta police spokeswoman Officer Stephanie Brown told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

READ MORE: ‘We only kill black people’: US cop reassures female driver during routine stop

September 5, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

Fadwa Barghouthi banned from visiting her husband in Israeli prison until 2019

Palestinian Fatah Movement leader Marwan Barghouti
Ma’an – September 5, 2017

BETHLEHEM – Fadwa Barghouthi, a Palestinian lawyer and the wife of imprisoned Fatah movement official Marwan Barghouthi, said that Israeli authorities have told her that she is banned from visiting her husband in prison until 2019.

Fadwa told Ma’an that after having being denied permission to visit Marwan since he led a mass prison hunger strike more than four months ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) facilitated a one-time permit for her to see Marwan last week.

However, after she left to visit her husband along with other relatives of Palestinian prisoners on Monday and waited outside the prison from between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Israeli forces eventually informed her that she would not be allowed to visit him until 2019, and that the permit issued to her had been a mistake.

Other reports said that the ban prevented her from visiting all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel as well.

Fadwa said that the decision to deny her the visits was a punishment directed at her, not at her husband, for her actions during the hunger strike that started last April, presumably referring to her own activism and participation in numerous solidarity protests throughout the 40-day strike.

By Tuesday evening, an IPS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment sent on Monday regarding the ban placed on Fadwa.

September 5, 2017 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Days after Israel stormed and shut down Hebron radio station, P.A. forces detain Director

IMEMC News | September 4, 2017

Just days after Israeli soldiers invaded and shut down a Radio station in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, Palestinian security officers arrested Ayman al-Qawasmi, the executive head of the al-Hureyia Media Network, who strongly denounced the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, for failing to protect their people.

Al-Qawasmi was taken prisoner, Sunday, apparently for his Facebook statement demanding President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, Hebron governor, Kamel Hmeid, and many other officials to submit their resignations for their inability to protect their people.

His statements came when Israeli soldiers invaded the radio station, and ordered it shut, after violently searching and ransacking it.

The invasion targeted al-Huriya Media Network, which runs Manbar al-Huriya Radio Station and Nawras TV, in Hebron.

During the invasion, the soldiers confiscated equipment from the media agency, and ordered it shut for six months.

The Israeli army said its invasion, and closure of the media network, was part of what it called “Israel’s campaign against incitement,” and claimed that the agency “encourages acts of terror.”

In his video statement after the army shut the station down, al-Qawasmi said the station is active in providing help to the needy, aiding the disabled, and giving a voice to the voiceless Palestinians, and does not engage in any forms of violence or incitement in any way shape or form.

September 4, 2017 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces shut down Palestinian radio station in overnight raid

Press TV – August 31, 2017

Dozens of Israeli forces have raided the headquarters of a Palestinian radio station in the occupied West Bank overnight and shut down the media outlet for six months.

Al-Hurria station in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron) was shut down “for content inciting violence and encouraging terrorism,” an army spokeswoman said on Thursday, without providing further details.

The Israeli forces also confiscated technical equipment during the raid, a source at the station said.

The station has been informed it would be closed until April.

“We thought it was related to the campaign of arrests but were surprised to see they were targeting the radio’s premises,” al-Hurria’s Director Ayman al-Qawasmi said.

“Unfortunately, they destroyed everything inside the building, there is nothing left. They confiscated broadcasting equipment, microphones,” he added.

An AFP photographer at the scene described the damage as “considerable,” with equipment and signs torn from walls and furniture upturned.

The Union of Palestinian Journalists slammed the measure as an “awful and heinous crime which reflects the (Israelis’) barbaric, criminal, terrorist mentality towards Palestinian media.”

Al-Hurria, which means freedom in Arabic, was previously closed for six months in November 2015 immediately after the outbreak of a fresh wave of conflicts in the occupied territories.

The Israeli army continues crackdown on Palestinian media outlets over allegations that they prompt young Palestinians to engage in armed clashes against Israeli forces in the West Bank.

In August 2016, Israeli officials stormed the office of Palestinian Arabic-language Radio Sanabel in the town of Dura, southwest of al-Khalil (Hebron) and took it off the air over what they described as its attempts to further escalate tensions in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli forces also ransacked the building, and confiscated the radio’s broadcasting equipment.

The occupied Palestinian territories have witnessed new tension ever since Israeli forces introduced restrictions on the entry of Palestinian worshipers into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem al-Quds in August 2015.

More than 300 Palestinians have lost their lives at the hands of Israeli forces since the beginning of October 2015.

August 31, 2017 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO attack on Serbian state TV wiped from record

By Shane Quinn | The Duran | August 31, 2017

On 23 April 1999, a NATO missile attack on Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) headquarters killed 16 employees of the state broadcaster. The forgotten war crime occurred during the Kosovo War (March 1998-June 1999), and was part of NATO’s aerial campaign alongside the US-backed Kosovo Liberation army, in opposition to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In the aftermath of the attack there were no great public campaigns launched for the 16 murdered journalists and employees, no outpouring of emotion for those killed, no calls for solidarity and togetherness in the face of aggression. On the contrary the West justified this grievous blow against freedom of expression, praised it even.

Tony Blair, Britain’s then Prime Minister, welcomed the killings when speaking at NATO’s 50th anniversary summit in Washington. Blair said the missile attack was “entirely justified… in damaging and attacking all these targets”, and that those murdered were part of the “apparatus of dictatorship and power of [Slobodan] Milosevic”.

Blair felt that, “the responsibility for every single part of this action lies with the man [Milosevic] who has engaged in this policy of ethnic cleansing and must be stopped”. Apparently Milosevic “must be stopped” by wiping out state journalists or what Blair describes as an “apparatus of dictatorship”.

According to one of the main leaders of the Western world, Milosevic must bear full responsibility for a NATO fighter plane firing a US-made missile on a state broadcasting service’s headquarters. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by Blair’s visions of justice, particularly when examining his key role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the following decade.

Blair was not alone in praising this violation of international law. His Secretary of State for International development, Clare Short, said afterwards that, “the propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it’s a legitimate target”. Short is a Labour Party member and her official title today is The Right Honourable Clare Short. Defending these killings was neither right nor honourable one can assume.

NATO themselves commended the deliberate attack afterwards. NATO’s military spokesperson Air Commodore David Wilby declared RTS, “a legitimate target which filled the airways with hate and with lies over the years”. This followed on from a number of other NATO attacks on radio and television outlets in the country.

In the build up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, Cardiff University revealed that the BBC adopted the most pro-war stance of any British network. The official reasons for invading Iraq were based entirely on lies and misinformation. In this case was the BBC “the propaganda machine”, had it become “a legitimate target” too?

Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon also legitimised the war crime saying that, “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is”. Not to be outdone, the respected US diplomat and magazine editor Richard Holbrooke described the bombing of RTS as, “an enormously important and, I think, positive development”.

In the build up to the Iraq invasion American networks like Fox News were styling the illegal intervention as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, with its correspondents and news anchors compelled to repeat that phrase. In addition a permanent American flag was fluttering in the top corner of the screen, and during the invasion itself the banner “war on terrorism” was unfurled.

Did this make Fox News and others like it, “a legitimate target which filled the airways with hate and lies”? Judging by the standards of Western elites, one would have to suggest so.

Meanwhile, a single person was charged for the attack on RTS: Dragoljub Milanovic, the Serbian network’s general manager, who received a 10-year jail term for failing to evacuate the building in time. Yet the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded that NATO’s bombing of RTS was not a crime, noting that deaths were “unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate”. Clearly disproportionate to the overall number of civilian deaths inflicted by NATO perhaps.

However, in January 2015 the Western reaction was somewhat different when 12 journalists from the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper were murdered by Islamic extremists – along with four Jewish men killed at a kosher supermarket shortly afterwards.

The British Prime Minister on this occasion, David Cameron, did not justify the killing of journalists and said, “We stand absolutely united with the French people against terrorism and against this threat to our values – free speech, the rule of law, democracy”. Cameron went on, “we should never give up the values we believe in… a free press, in freedom of expression, in the right of people to write and say what they believe”.

About two weeks later Blair, now a Middle East peace envoy, said of the thinking behind the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “this extremism is not natural, it’s taught and it’s learned and you have to un-teach it in the school systems”. Blair seems further unaware of his own role in creating “this extremism” by playing the junior partner role in invading Iraq, a crucial factor in the rise of ISIS.

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, millions marched to honour the dead with the slogan “I am Charlie” becoming famous. When the Serbian journalists and employees were killed just over 15 years before, there was no international motto of “I am RTS”.

New York civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams described the Charlie Hebdo shootings as, “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory”. The perception of “living memory” appears to be a remarkably short one.

August 31, 2017 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Harvard Crimson ad asks if anti-BDS Harvard profs “only care about certain lives”

Harvard Crimson ad asks if anti-BDS Harvard profs “only care about certain lives”

If Americans Knew | August 30, 2017

A full-page advertisement in today’s Harvard Crimson asks, “Do some Harvard Professors only care about certain lives?” (View ad here and at the end of this post.)

The ad refers to a statement signed by 71 Harvard professors in the health, medical, and life sciences fields that opposed the international academic boycott of Israel.

Their statement was subsequently featured in a full-page Boston Globe advertisement in May paid for by the New England Chapter of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

The AJC ad featured the headline “Could an academic boycott of Israel put a child’s life at risk?” accompanied by a photo of a small child in an oxygen mask. The AJC ad and professors’ statement opposed the boycott on the ground that it could interfere with potentially life-saving collaborative research and then indirectly lead to loss of life.

Today’s Crimson ad, placed by the nonprofit organization If Americans Knew, says that since the professors cared about potential loss of life, they expected that the professors would also be willing to sign a statement against the direct, ongoing loss of life caused by Israel.

Accordingly, If Americans Knew sent each professor who had signed the AJC statement a letter documenting the ongoing harm being done to Palestinian children by Israeli policies and asked them to sign a statement urging Israel “to engage in active measures to support the safety of Palestinian children.”

The letter to the professors included information with clickable links documenting Israeli actions harming children. The information is also included in today’s Crimson ad:

  • Palestinian children are being shot, imprisoned by the thousands, and subjected to what amounts to torture by the Israeli military (Human Rights Watch, Defence for Children International)

  • Israeli military incursions, occupation and blockade are depriving Palestinian children of basic necessities of life, making hundreds of thousands homeless and tens of thousands orphans (United Nations Relief & Works Agency, Al-Amal Institute for Orphans)

  • Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering severe psychological trauma, malnutrition, stunting, and depression due to Israel’s 10-year blockade and bombing attacks (UNICEF)

  • Palestinian children are being denied desperately needed medical care, with Israel at times preventing children in Gaza suffering excruciating and sometimes fatal health problems from traveling to outside hospitals (Physicians for Human Rights – Israel)

The Crimson ad names all 71 Harvard professors who signed the anti-boycott statement, and reports that none would sign the statement asking Israel to support the safety of Palestinian children.

The ad concludes:

In the 80s, many Harvard faculty members supported campus boycott and divestment initiatives aiming to pressure companies to cut ties with apartheid South Africa, so it’s disappointing that some can’t see the urgency of the boycott movement today.

​We hope these professors will take the time to look into Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children and reconsider where they stand.

The ad refers readers to iakn.us/globe-ad to see citations for the statements regarding Israeli actions.

(An additional 31 professors from other universities also signed the AJC anti-boycott statement.)

Text of the statement concerning Palestinian children that the professors declined to sign:

We, the undersigned, urge Israel to engage in active measures to support the safety of Palestinian children, including ending the practice of imprisoning and torturing Palestinian minors, allowing medical supplies and life necessities into Palestinian areas, permitting Palestinian children to leave those territories to seek necessary medical treatment, desisting from military invasions in which large numbers of children are killed and injured, and adhering to international conventions regarding the rights of children, noncombatants and populations under occupation.

August 30, 2017 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

UN Secretary General arrives in Gaza, refuses to meet families of prisoners

Palestine Information Center – August 30, 2017

GAZA – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres arrived Wednesday morning in the besieged Gaza Strip after he visited Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as part of his first regional itinerary.

According to the Palestinian Information Center in Gaza, Guterres and his entourage were allowed by Israel into Gaza through the Beit Hanoun (Erez) border crossing.

Meanwhile, families of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have been rallying since the morning near the Beit Hanoun crossing in protest at Guterres’s refusal to meet with them upon his arrival in Gaza.

The UN chief had held several meetings with officials from the Palestinian Authority and Israel after he arrived last Sunday in the occupied territories, coming from Kuwait.

Guterres, who refused to meet with relatives of Palestinian prisoners, met last Monday with families of Israeli captives being held in Gaza and expressed his sympathy with them.

The Prisoner Committee in Gaza slammed Guterres for refusing to talk and listen to the families of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and ignoring their suffering, calling on him to reconsider his “inhumane position,” especially since the occupied Palestinian people are “the true victims of Israel’s terrorism.”

According to the UNRWA, the UN secretary-general will read today a statement in one of its schools in Beit Lahia city, north of Gaza, before leaving soon on the same day.

August 30, 2017 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ukrainian security services snatch Russian journalist from street to deport her

RT | August 30, 2017

Russian television correspondent Anna Kurbatova has been detained by the Ukrainian security services in Kiev. The journalist, who works for Russia’s Channel 1, will be deported for “smearing” Ukraine, according to a security services spokesperson.

The incident occurred in the city center of the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday. Kurbatova was “grabbed by unknown assailants, forced into a car and driven away,” according to Channel 1.

The Russian authorities are closely monitoring the situation to learn more about the fate of the journalist.

“At the moment we don’t have information, but, undoubtedly, we’ll do our best to clarify the situation,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry is also trying to clarify the situation around the correspondent’s detention.

“The Russian Foreign Ministry and Russian diplomatic institutions abroad are looking into the disappearance of a Channel 1 journalist in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told TASS.

The Russian embassy in Kiev has sent requests to the Ukrainian security services as well as a note to Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, urging them to clarify the incident and immediately release the journalist, RIA Novosti reported.

A spokesperson for the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) confirmed that the journalist was detained by the organization’s operatives. Kurbatova will be deported from Ukraine to Russia and the SBU is currently preparing the paperwork, according to the spokesperson.

“Russian propagandist Anna Kurbatova will be forcibly returned to the Russian Federation. Ukraine is a constitutional state, its security services operate strictly within the legal framework. All necessary documents for her deportation are being prepared at the moment. It will happen to everyone who dares to smear Ukraine,” the spokesperson said in a Facebook post.

Russian Commissioner for Human Rights Tatyana Moskalkova has contacted her Ukrainian counterpart following the incident to determine whether the security services are following legal procedures.

“I’ve just sent a request to my colleague Valeria Lukyanova asking her about the location [of the journalist], her health condition and the consular visit, i.e. whether all the conventions are being observed if she has been detained by law enforcement,” Moskalkova told Interfax.

“I’m outraged and deeply worried about the treatment of journalists. Freedom of speech is protected not only by states’ constitutions, but also by international legal acts, journalists worldwide are independent and have immunity.”

Ahead of the incident, the journalist received threats in connection with her reporting on Ukraine’s Independence Day, according to Channel 1. Following her report, Kurbatova was placed on the list of “enemies of Ukraine” on the notorious Mirotvorets (Peacemaker) website. The website accuses the journalist of “anti-Ukrainian propaganda” and “manipulating socially-important information.”

Just before the incident, Kurbatova had prepared a new report on the ill-treatment of journalists in Ukraine, which has not yet been aired.

It’s not the first time a Russian journalist has become a target for the Ukrainian security services. Earlier in August, a journalist for the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), Tamara Neresyan, was deported following an apparently similar incident.

“I was detained in the street and promptly brought to the main SBU office, where I was questioned for three hours. They confiscated my phone, it was done very roughly, nearly breaking my arms. Following the questioning they read me a resolution of the SBU that I would be deported and barred from re-entry for three years,” Neresyan told Rossiya 24 TV channel.

August 30, 2017 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Tillerson Caves, Will Appoint Special Anti-Semitism Envoy Who Monitors Criticism of Israel

Tillerson Caves, Will Appoint Special Anti-Semitism Envoy Who Monitors Criticism of Israel

Anti-Semitism Envoy Hannah Rosenthal adopted a new Israel-centric definition of anti-Semitism and used it to train American diplomats.
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | August 29, 2017

After continuing pressure, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has announced that he will name a special envoy and maintain an office to monitor alleged anti-Semitism.

All three previous anti-semitism envoys have been fervent Israel partisans, two of them working for AIPAC. The first envoy endorsed a new definition of the word “anti-Semitism” to include criticism of Israel; the second adopted the new, Israel-centric definition; and the third helped to disseminate the definition world-wide.

This was part of an international campaign to expand the definition of anti-Semitism and embed this in governments and law enforcement agencies, potentially criminalizing support for Palestinian rights.

When it appeared in June that Trump might eliminate the office in a cost-cutting measure, he and Tillerson came under immediate attack by Jewish organizations and some others, including the Southern Poverty Law Center.

According to a letter from Tillerson to the Senate released yesterday, a number of similar special envoys and ambassadorships will be maintained, including the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations (currently filled by Frank Lowenstein), the Special Envoy as well as the Special Advisor for Holocaust Issues (which, among other things, works with Israel and supports the anti-Semitism envoy; currently the Special Advisor is Stuart E. Eizenstat), and the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom; Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, a strong supporter of Israel despite its record of religious discrimination, has been nominated for the position.

Dozens of other special envoy positions are being eliminated or combined, including ones concerned with Tibet, disabilities rights, global food security, cyber issues, global youth issues, conflict diamonds, the closing of Guantanamo, and a number that focus on the environment.

August 29, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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