Dutch Set to Deliver Second EU Bombshell Referendum Over TTIP Deal
Sputnik | April 15, 2016
A Dutch petition demanding another referendum – this time on the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the European Union and the United State – has gone past the 100,000 mark and is rapidly gaining support.
People in the Netherlands delivered a blow to the European Union last week in a referendum over Ukraine’s accession to the EU, which developed into a vote of confidence in the EU. On a turnout of about 33 percent, 61 percent voted against the Approval Act.
Both petitions use the Dutch system, whereby 300,000 signatures are needed to force a referendum and, although the Ukraine one was started as a joke by a satirical magazine, the TTIP vote could prove more damaging and controversial.
The TTIP negotiations are due to create the biggest trade pact in the world, between the European Union and the United States. However, the talks have been beset by controversy — not least over the massive lobbying by multinational companies and worries that they are likely to be able to sue governments for loss of trade.
Critics of the TTIP deal point to the fact the European food regulations are different from — and some say more stringent than — those in the US.
They also fear strict European environmental regulations will be flouted under the proposed deal, which critics say has been dominated by big business lobbying. Concerns have also been raised that EU regulations in every sector will be rendered powerless, because multinational companies will hold more powers under TTIP.
States Sued
Crucially, at the heart of the TTIP is a controversial proposal for an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which would allow companies to sue governments if their regulations or laws affected their profits. Thus, if a US multinational company lost profits because their product or service was banned by law for health or other reasons, they would be able to sue a government — or the EU — for loss of earnings.
Under ISDS, in April 1997 the Canadian parliament banned the import and transport of MMT, a gasoline additive, over concerns that it poses a significant public health risk. Ethyl Corporation, the additive’s manufacturer, sued the Canadian Government for US$251 million, to cover losses resulting from the “expropriation” of both its MMT production plant and its “good reputation.”
Tobacco giant Philip Morris is currently suing Uruguay and Australia over tobacco packaging and the Dutch insurance company, Achmea, is suing the Slovakia for trying to reverse health privatization.
The Dutch petitioners say:
“Large companies can sue governments in special tribunal. Europe will have to accept the often poorer American standards for consumer protection, social rights and environmental protection. Then we will see the introduction of US legislation in Europe without citizens or parliaments having any say over it.”
Mexican Federal Agents Implicated in Students’ Disappearance
teleSUR – April 14 2016
Two Mexican federal police officers allegedly participated in the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students, the National Human Rights Commission said Thursday, implicating national agents in the 2014 case for the first time, Agence France-Presse reports.
Jose Larrieta Carrasco, a commission official investigating the case, said the authorities should now look into a “new route in the disappearance” of the students.
Prosecutors have already charged municipal police officers in connection with the mass abduction in the southern city of Iguala on September 26-27, 2014.
But the governmental rights commission said it found an eyewitness who saw two federal agents near Iguala’s courthouse, where municipal officers had stopped a bus carrying 15 to 20 students.
The commission also said another local police department, from the town of Huitzuco, had a previously unknown role in the disappearance.
Many in Mexico, including the families of the disappeared, suspect that the police force was ordered to kill the student protesters by high level members of a local cartel.
Tackling Child Labor in Latin American One Step At A Time
Two Approaches
teleSUR | April 14, 2016
April 16 is the International Day Against Child Slavery in South America. The day marks the death of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani child who was sold into slavery and murdered at the age of 12. El Movimiento Cultural Cristiano commemorated the young child’s life by vowing to bring awareness to the plight of children forced into labor, especially in South America.
teleSUR English looks at some innovative approaches the progressive governments of Ecuador and Bolivia are taking to combat forced child labor and improve working conditions.
Ecuador
In Ecuador, the government follows a strictly prohibitionist policy. The current Labor Code formally prohibits the employment of children under 15 years old, while the labor day for teenagers over 15 cannot exceed six hours per day and 30 hours a week, without interfering with his or her education.
The Ecuadorean state also implemented various measures and agreements with the production sector, in order to reduce child labor. As a result, both sectors that have employed the highest number of children – agriculture and trade – have reduced their figure by 66 and 15 percent respectively.
As a result, the number of working children under 15-years-old has dropped by almost nine percent since 2007 according to the government, which plans to eradicate child labor by 2017.
Two other factors have helped to make the difference in recent years: one, the improvement of the global employment situation in the country in recent years; and two, better and free access to school, reducing school desertion of children.
Nevertheless, according to a 2015 UNESCO report, rural areas remain the most affected, as children work five more times than in urban areas, while Indigenous children are fives time more affected than Mestizo children. Girls are also still employed to do household work without receiving any remuneration.
Bolivia
In Bolivia, the context is slightly different, as poverty affects more people than in Ecuador: an estimated 850,000 children work in Bolivia according to a 2012 UNESCO report, including 120,000 in the dangerous mining sector. This represents 17 percent of the total labor force, which makes Bolivia the country with the highest ratio of child labor per population.
First, following a prohibitionist approach similar to Rafael Correa in Ecuador, the progressive government of Evo Morales finally ceded to the pressure of a large movement of child workers, organized since the 2011 in a union called Unatsbo.
In December 2013, they protested strongly against a reform of the Labor Code prohibiting further child labor. As the protest turned violent with clashes against the police, their mobilization was largely covered in the media, and Morales finally agreed to hear their requests at the presidential palace.
After months of tough debates in Congress, on Aug. 6, 2014, lawmakers eventually approved the government’s proposal to allow children from 10-years-old to work, yet only if the activity is not “dangerous” and if it does not harm the child’s access to education. In Bolivia, children usually need to work if they want to continue studying, because their parents usually cannot afford the school expenses, even with the governmental help allocated since Morales’ government.
Many professionals working with children in Bolivia admitted that the measure represented a significant improvement for children, providing legal protection in the many cases where they are exploited, and access to health services, at least until Bolivia can totally eradicate poverty.
Since Morales has been in power, the extreme poverty rate declined from 38 percent to 21 percent, and the government has vowed to reach below 10 percent by 2020.
Turkish Delight in Washington’s Patronage
By Brian Cloughley | CounterPunch | April 15, 2016
On March 26 President Erdogan of Turkey “harshly criticized” foreign diplomats for being present at the trial of two journalists in Istanbul. At a meeting of businessmen he erupted in fury and expostulated that “The consul-generals in Istanbul attended the trial. Who are you? What business do you have there? Diplomacy has a certain propriety and manners. This is not your country. This is Turkey.”
President Erdogan had made it clear that “this is Turkey” by declaring, before the trial even began, that the accused journalists will “pay a heavy price” for reporting that his National Intelligence Agency (MİT) had been smuggling weapons to rebel groups in Syria. Naturally, there was international interest in such a judicial process and, as is usual around the world, foreign diplomats attended the hearing in order to report to their governments the facts of the case as presented in court.
But the President of Turkey informed the world that diplomats accredited to his country are not expected to be present in his country’s law courts to witness judicial proceedings. He went even further by telling foreign diplomats in Istanbul that they “can move inside the Consulate building and within the boundaries of the Consulate. But elsewhere is subject to permission.”
Mr Erdogan is telling the world that international law means nothing to him. He rejects with contempt the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations which lays down that in all countries foreign diplomats are to be granted “freedom of movement and travel” provided, of course that these should be “subject to laws and regulations concerning zones, entry into which is prohibited or regulated for reasons of national security.”
Prohibited zones do not include courts of law. And the trial of the journalists, who had been in solitary confinement for half their 90-day detention, has nothing to do with national security — only national dishonesty.
Western media reporting of Mr Erdogan’s violation of international rules and values has been low-key to the point of self-induced evaporation and there has been little condemnation of his open scorn for the basic principles of diplomatic conduct — and none at all from the Consul General of the United States in Istanbul, Mr Charles F Hunter, on whose website on the day of Mr Erdogan’s abusive outburst the main headline was:
WORLD ERUPTS OVER
RUSSIA’S UNJUST SENTENCE
OF UKRAINIAN PILOT
Mr Hunter wrote that “the global community has been quick to condemn the 22-year sentence handed out by a Russian court to Ukrainian pilot and parliamentarian Nadiya Savchenko,” which was absolute nonsense, because even the western media had not given the trial much cover. Not only that, but Mr Hunter omitted to mention that Savchenko’s status as a “parliamentarian” had been granted by the Ukrainian government after the prosecution had begun. Ms Savchenko had never set foot in Ukraine’s parliament, but Wikipedia, an easily manipulated online information site, describes her as “a Ukrainian politician and former Army aviation pilot in the Ukrainian Ground Forces.”
As part of the anti-Russian propaganda campaign about Savchenko, US State Department spokesman John Kirby stated that Russia has “blatant disregard for the principles of justice,” which is an absurd declaration, coming from the nation that for fifteen years has maintained a prison camp in a colonial enclave in Cuba in which not a single wretched captive has been permitted access to the process of international law. It’s a bit much, too, coming from a nation that refuses to release the thousands of photographs that were taken of torture by its soldiers.
Some photos were published in the media, but the really horrible ones have never been seen, except by some selected Senators and Members of Congress who were sworn to secrecy.
The US Supreme Court agreed with the “the judgment of the President and the Nation’s highest-ranking military officers that disclosure of the photographs at issue here would pose a substantial risk to the lives and physical safety of United States and allied military and civilian personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Given the policy of the US Establishment — the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court — concerning the importance of concealing disgusting and potentially embarrassing facts it is not surprising that there has been no criticism in Washington of President Erdogan for his persecution of journalists who revealed embarrassing facts about his illegal action in supplying Syrian-based terrorist groups with weapons, or about his insulting diatribe concerning the presence of a US diplomat at their trial.
On March 18 the UK’s Independent newspaper reported that “the President of Turkey has said democracy and freedom have ‘absolutely no value’ in the country after calling for journalists, lawyers and politicians to be prosecuted as terrorists.” But this means nothing to the US or British governments which both support President Erdogan without demur. While at the recent (and totally useless) summit on nuclear security in Washington on March 31, five days after he insulted their country, Mr Erdogan met with both the president and vice president of the United States.
Following the meetings, the Voice of America reported that President Obama “assured his Turkish counterpart of American commitment to the security of Turkey” and “extended condolences to Erdogan for a terrorist attack earlier in the day in the Kurdish-majority south-eastern city of Diyarbakir.” And Vice President Biden “reaffirmed the close alliance between the United States and Turkey . . [and] discussed ways to further deepen our military cooperation.” So Mr Erdogan felt free to continue his anti-democratic diatribes after he returned home.
Like many national leaders who have managed to get to a rank and position whose demands vastly exceed their modest capabilities, Mr Erdogan continued to justify his erratic behaviour by abusing “those who attempt to give us lessons in democracy and human rights.” On April 4 he said that the press was free in Turkey and claimed that some publications had branded him a “thief” and a “killer” without being shut down and that “Such insults and threats are not permitted in the West.”
Then he said that Turkey’s Constitutional Court had ‘betrayed its very existence’ because it had ordered release from pre-trial custody of the two journalists who, as noted above, he had declared would “pay a heavy price” for reporting that his Intelligence operatives had been smuggling weapons to rebel groups in Syria.
Turkey is in chaos. As Human Rights Watch records, its ruler “ has demonstrated a growing intolerance of political opposition, public protest, and critical media. Government interference with the courts and prosecutors has undermined judicial independence and the rule of law.”
When they met with President Erdogan, neither President Obama nor Vice President Biden offered the mildest criticism of him for his hysterical outbursts rejecting democracy and international law.
Perhaps their advisers pointed out to them that Mr Erdogan had a reasonable point to make, in that “those who attempt to give us lessons in democracy and human rights must first contemplate their own shame.”
Red-handed: UK military trained Saudis as they rained fire on Yemen, says Reprieve
RT | April 15, 2016
UK military personnel have delivered a series of three-week courses on “international targeting” to the Saudi forces currently engaged in pummeling Yemen, a Freedom of Information (FoI) request shows.
The revelations were made following a request by the human rights NGO Reprieve. The organization is now urging the UK government to stop providing military support.
While the MoD has long claimed its role is purely advisory, the revelations lay bare the closeness with which the two countries operate.
It now appears courses were being run by RAF officers as recently as 2015 on “international targeting” over three separate three-week blocks.
This included training on the Storm Shadow missile, which is launched from aircraft to destroy enemy bunkers.
Gunnery instruction on targeting and locating enemy gun batteries was also carried out by a seven-strong detachment of personnel from the Royal Artillery.
The artillery team delivered 52 hours of training to Saudi gunners and included a senior major, a captain, a sergeant major and a sergeant.
The MoD said the course had been delivered to “a mixed group of soldiers and officers” from the Royal Saudi Land Forces RSLF) field artillery.
Saudi personnel have also visited the UK for training.
The military said their personnel were not involved in “carrying out strikes, directing or conducting operations in Yemen or selecting targets, and are not involved in the Saudi targeting decision-making process.”
They stressed, as they have on numerous occasions, that the UK military “provide guidance on best practice techniques, including advice to help continued compliance with international humanitarian law.”
Reprieve case worker Omran Belhadi said: “Claims by ministers that Britain is helping the Saudi government abide by the law are disingenuous.”
He pointed out that legal training on rules of engagement and the laws of war did not seem to have sunk in if, indeed, it was delivered.
“Extensive British ‘targeting training’ has done nothing to prevent the bombing of schools, hospitals and weddings, and the deaths of thousands of Yemeni civilians,” Belhadi told the Guardian.
Activists were preventing war crimes by blockading world’s biggest arms fair – judge
RT | April 15, 2016
Eight activists standing trial for disrupting the world’s biggest arms fair, held in London last September, have been found not guilty. The court ruled they were acting to prevent a greater crime, according to an anti-arms trade group.
In his ruling, the judge said there was clear, credible and largely unchallenged evidence of wrongdoing at Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI), according to Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT).
He said there is “compelling evidence” that arms sold at DSEI are used for repression and human rights abuses.
Ham & High reporter Rachel Roberts said the judge dismissed the argument, put forward by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), that a not guilty verdict will “open floodgates” to anarchy in the UK.
Instead he accepted that all eight defendants acted reasonably and proportionally to try and prevent the sale of illegal arms and war crimes, Roberts tweeted.
The ruling is a victory for anti-arms trade activists, who sought to highlight the UK’s complicity in war crimes committed by repressive regimes around the world.
The eight activists issued a statement through CAAT in which they called on the public to join the campaign to shut down DSEI.
“Over the week, we have put DSEI and the arms trade on trial and we have proven them to be illegitimate. Our only regret is that we didn’t succeed in shutting down DSEI,” they said.
“Our thoughts are with the people who suffer as a result of the arms trade and the survivors of repressive regimes, torture, war and conflict. We call on more people to join us in our efforts to shut down DSEI 2017 and take collective action to end the arms trade.”
The campaigners were arrested after blocking the road leading to the arms fair last September, preventing tanks and weaponry from entering.
The activists used the defense of necessity, insisting their actions were justified because they intended to prevent greater crimes taking place around the world.
CAAT said the trial highlighted UK complicity in war crimes in Yemen, where the British military is offering support to the Saud-led coalition waging war against Houthi rebels.
It also raised awareness about British complicity in human rights abuses in Bahrain and the slaughter of Kurdish civilians by Turkey, according to the group.
2015’s DSEI event featured stalls from more than 1,500 exhibitors, including arms giants Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Finmeccanica and others.
Customers included representatives from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Bahrain and Egypt.
Three More Russian TV Channels Banned in Ukraine
Sputnik – 14.04.2016
KIEV – Ukraine’s National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting added three Russian cable channels to its list of banned outlets, the regulator said Thursday.
“The national council’s April 14 decision removes Russian television channels RTG TV (Russian Travel Guide), Retro and Kinoclub from the list of foreign programs, whose content meets the standards of the European Convention on Transfrontier Television and Ukrainian laws,” it said.
The ban comes after the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, which includes the Sputnik news agency, has been included in the list of 15 media outlets blacklisted by the regulator on February 18. An additional 14 news services have had their licenses revoked in March.
The Ukrainian national council noted that RTG TV lost its license for a “this film was created before the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol joined Russia” caption in some of its programming. The other channels have been banned for broadcasting films and programs with the participation of artists blacklisted by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture.
The ministry unveiled its blacklist of 14 Russian artists in early August 2015 that Kiev perceived as creating a “threat to the national security” of Ukraine. French actor Gerard Depardieu, who holds a Russian passport, was among prominent singers and actors named.
In December that year, Kiev added 43 more people to the blacklist, including Limp Bizkit rap-rock frontman Fred Durst and US boxing great Roy Jones, Jr.
Freedom of the media in Ukraine has been repeatedly violated since the start of the military conflict between the Kiev authorities and Donbas militia in April 2014. Several international journalists have been abducted, tortured and killed during the hostilities, including Rossiya Segodnya photojournalist Andrei Stenin.
University used $175,000 to bury ‘pepper spray’ cop internet searches
© Brian Nguyen / Reuters
RT | April 14, 2016
Officials at University of California at Davis have reportedly spent $175,000 trying to digitally suppress the memory of the time campus police indiscriminately pepper sprayed Occupy protesters – to no success.
The university, with a student population of just over 35,000, wants people to forget that in November 2011 campus police lost the run of themselves when responding to a sit-down protest.
Footage from the scene, showing campus police Lt. John Pike discharging military-grade pepper spray into the eyes of student protesters sitting on the ground, caused outrage around the world.
It quickly became a social media meme, with the incident resulting in a number of legal cases, including an agreement by UC Davis to collectively compensate victims to the tune of $1 million.
According to freedom of information documents requested by The Sacramento Bee newspaper, UC Davis paid two separate consultant firms to try to clean the internet of bad publicity.
Some $92,970 out of the university’s communications beefed-up budget was paid to Maryland state PR firm Nevins & Associates in 2013, report the Sacramento Bee.
Meanwhile, a year later an $82,500 contract was signed with ID Media Partners to design a “search engine results management strategy.”
A document by Nevins & Associates details the plan to filter out “venomous rhetoric” concerning UC Davis and its chancellor, Linda Katehi.
“Nevins & Associates is prepared to create and execute an online branding campaign designed to clean up the negative attention the University of California, Davis, and Chancellor Katehi have received related to events that transpired in November 2011,” it reads.
A list of objectives by the public relations firm reveals a plan to launch an “aggressive” campaign to dilute negative search results and eradicate references to the pepper spray incident on Google.
The company advised optimizing the use of Meta tags and feeding local media “content with positive sentiment.”
Chancellor Linda Katehi was roundly criticized for her reaction to the Occupy Wall Street protest at the time, with students demanding her resignation.
“We have worked to ensure that the reputation of the university, which the chancellor leads, is fairly portrayed,” a UC Davis spokesperson said.
“We wanted to promote and advance the important teaching, research and public service done by our students, faculty and staff, which is the core mission of our university.”
US Representative Kevin McCarty (D-California), who serves and chair of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Education Finance, said that the PR expenditure was “troubling” given the increase in university tuition.
“It is troubling that the administration chose to spend scarce public dollars and to nearly double its PR budget when tuition soared, course offerings were slashed and California resident students were being shut out. These findings just raise more questions about university priorities,” he posted on Facebook.
Why was the Nakba Tour Canceled at Stanford?
Palestinian Refugee: Stanford students censored me over condemnation of Israel
Free Palestine Movement | April 11, 2016
In an interview, Amena El-Ashkar, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, states that she refused to speak at Stanford University after students told her she could not express her views about Israel.
I’m coming here to say that Israel has no right to exist. [The students] said we could discuss this kind of thing with each other, but not in front of American people…
Ms. Ashkar’s talk is one of several on a national “North America Nakba Tour,” a tour designed to educate Americans about the enduring effects Israel’s mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. Ms. Ashkar and Mariam “Umm Akram” Fathallah, an 86-year-old survivor of the expulsion, had planned to speak at Stanford University on 6 April 2016. Ms. Ashkar was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, where her ancestors were banished during the expulsion, or Nakba, of 1948.
Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which was hosting the talk at Stanford, told Ms. Ashkar that their existence as a campus organization depends on not challenging Israel’s “right to exist,” and told her not to address the topic. Ms. Ashkar refused to censor herself and was shocked that an organization named “Students for Justice in Palestine” would insist on such a requirement. Although some of the students admitted to sharing Ms. Ashkar’s views, the students cited the hostile administrative climate at Stanford to justify censoring their guest.
I told them, it is a fight, and any fight is going to have sacrifices. In Lebanon, we have Palestinian clubs… which do not take funds from the University. We pay it ourselves.
Stanford SJP released a false statement attributing the cancellation to concerns about Alison Weir, a pro-Palestinian commentator who was in the audience. Ms. Weir was subject to widely disputed — and widely rejected — accusations of anti-Semitism by other Palestinian rights organizers last summer, revealing deep-seated divisions within the Palestinian rights movement. Although Tour organizers had informally asked Ms. Weir to give Ms. Ashkar public speaking advice, and Ms. Weir had offered the Tour some generic informational materials — none of which are authored by Weir — Ms. Weir is not one of the national organizers of the North America Nakba Tour and was not a planned speaker. Weir offered to sell copies of her own writings at the event to raise money for the Tour, but complied when Stanford students asked her not to sell them. The statement alleges that Ms. Weir refused to leave when asked, which Weir and Tour organizers deny. No security personnel were called to remove Weir or anyone else from the audience; instead, the speaker herself felt alienated and called off the event.
Ms. Ashkar explains that disagreements about who was in the audience were not why the talk was canceled. Instead, Ms. Ashkar says that she herself called off the talk when the organizers demanded that she censor herself.
The existence of Israel, as I told the SJP, means that I have no right to exist. Because I am a refugee in a Palestinian camp inside Lebanon. The Lebanese government doesn’t want me, and we cannot return. So what are we? Are we going to stay stateless refugees generation after generation?
One of the informational flyers provided by Weir, but authored by former PLO legal advisor John V. Whitbeck apparently sparked the feud with similar arguments. The flyer states, in part,
To demand that Palestinians recognize “Israel’s right to exist” is to demand that a people who have been treated as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans. It would imply Palestinians’ acceptance that they deserve what has been done and continues to be done to them. Even 19th-century US governments did not require the surviving native Americans to publicly proclaim the “rightness” of their ethnic cleansing by European colonists…
North America Nakba Tour organizers call on Stanford SJP to retract its false explanation and issue a public apology for their behavior to Ms. Ashkar. They have also asked concerned citizens to consider donating to the Tour and attending Tour events in lieu of the cancellation. Paul Larudee, a Tour organizer, and Ms. Weir have separately authored their own accounts of the incident.
Paul Larudee | April 7, 2016
Last night, Mariam Fathalla and Amena Elashkar were scheduled to speak at Stanford University, sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine. The previous day, I had asked Alison Weir, who has been giving talks on Palestine for 15 years all over the country, to meet with Amena and give her advice on reaching American audiences since this is Amena’s first trip to the U.S. It was an excellent, fruitful meeting.
I then said it would be valuable if Alison could hear Amena’s presentation to see if she would have any suggestions. Alison is extremely busy but agreed to come down to Stanford with us for that purpose.
When Alison learned we did not yet have any written materials along to provide the audience, she brought some along with her for us to use and also gave us some of her books that we could sell to help raise money for the tour. We had already discussed that IAK would supply their excellent written materials for the tour.
We had no idea that Alison would turn out to be an issue, or that the Stanford SJP would object to what Amena might wish to say.
Alison is an extremely committed and popular antiracist writer, speaker, and activist, and people even follow her work in refugee camps in Lebanon. While some groups oppose her and If Americans Knew, most people working for justice in Palestine feel she is one of the top writers and speakers on this issue.
In any case this should not be an issue for the Nakba Tour; Alison is not one of the national organizers of the tour, and she was not intended to be one of the speakers or to have any role in the presentation at Stanford. She was simply there as a favor to us, as described above.
However, some members of the SJP immediately objected to Alison’s presence, perhaps assuming she was going to speak, and also to the presence of her book and the If Americans Knew materials. We immediately explained that Alison was not to be a speaker and was just there to sit in the audience, and that we had invited her to come with us. We also agreed to remove the books, but said we were disturbed that they also wished to censor the materials we could make available on our own tour. In all my years of activism, I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Amena then began discussing the situation with the students, and was extremely upset when they told her that she could not speak truthfully about her feelings and the feelings of the thousands of dispossessed Palestinian refugees living in camps about their situation, about the Nakba, and about whether or not Israel has “the right to exist” that Israel partisans claim. This was not an issue at the two previous talks.
When it became clear that they wished Amena to censor her excellent talk, she refused to do so and the event was canceled.
We think it is extremely important that people hear from Amena and Mariam. They represent millions of Palestinian refugees whose rights and views have been trampled upon and who are often ignored. Thank you for helping us bring their voice to the discussion. It is long past time that they are heard.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
– Paul Larudee, Tour Coordinator
End free speech and save the minorities! (will anyone really fall for this?)
By Blackcatte | OffGuardian | April 14, 2016
The current – and frankly bizarre even by recent standards – Guardian campaign “the web we want” seems to be driven by two main agendas. The first, and probably the major one is the long-simmering plan to “regulate” (i.e. control and censor) free speech on the Web. That the Graun’s effort is part of a coordinated new offensive in that department is pretty conclusively illustrated by the fact the ex minister for “equality”, Maria Miller delivered her own diatribe against the “problem” of internet “abuse” just days after the Guardian’s new campaign took off. The similarity between her invective and that employed by the Guardian’s tame journos puts it beyond question that this is an Establishment-wide move. A concerted plan to use exaggerated claims of “abuse” and its alleged impact on minorities, to mobilise well-meaning liberals in support of internet censorship.
In fact, unlike the feeble Apologists at Graun HQ, Miller at least has the guts to pretty much say so out loud:
“We need better laws and we need better enforcement. Government needs to stop allowing internet providers from(sic) hiding behind arguments about the protection of free speech,”
Right there we have it. The plan they formulated in their focus groups and policy committees. The best way to get the internet censorship they have wanted for so long is to pretend it isn’t censorship at all, but protection! And most particularly protection of those sections of society we all know need it most. The ethnic minorities, the LGBT communities – and women. The mere mention of these groups will be enough to rally many well-meaning but naive liberals to support their own gagging. “I’m happy to have my right to anonymity abolished if it helps stamp out racial abuse” they’ll say. “I’m happy to see comments sections closed if it helps women columnists avoid harassment”, they’ll say. There’ll probably be a social media campaign with a catchy soundbite and the same soft focus unthreatening images of “diversity” they pull up at the Graun. And people will sign up to be silenced.
But of course it won’t end racism or sexism or homophobia. Because it’s not intended to. The people behind this couldn’t give a flying feck for the well being of minorities or anyone else beyond their own narrow class of super-privilege. That’s just window dressing. A lure for the gullible. It’s the Child Catcher prancing about in borrowed gaudy, his cage draped in pictures of candy.
The truth is they want to kill the internet and all its unparalleled power to monitor them and their variously greedy, stupid, paranoid antics. And they know they can’t do that unless they can persuade most ordinary people it’s a good idea.
This is why over the coming weeks and months you’ll see Owen Jones and other unscrupulous hacks (yes, we’re sorry, but Jones deserves no better descriptor after his recent ghastly display), trying to repackage free speech as “elitist” and using tortured pseudo-logic to “prove” that censorship is the only way to have truly open debate.
* * *
The second part of the Guardian agenda is to try to roll back the massive damage being done to its reputation by the current CiF debacle.
Since its inception in 2006, CiF (“Comment is Free”) was hailed as the Guardian’s flagship of credibility, their pledge of openness and inclusiveness. And for a while it was. Most stories were open for discussion. Moderation was decorous. If it was politically motivated sometimes, it was discreet enough to have only minimal impact (mostly on stories about Israel). By and large CiF at that time was a real place for the sharing of information and opinion. All was reasonably well.
But somewhere around 2012-13 things began to change. Did the Government losing the Syria vote and the widespread opposition to a war against Assad signal to the PTB that open discussion of vital news stories was beginning to have unexpected consequences for their control of the narrative? Did the Snowden issue persuade people they’d rather get in line than risk their pension plans?
In any event moderation became more insistent. Not – whatever the official line may be – because the trolls were more prolific or persistent. They weren’t. Trolls are to the internet what rats are to cities. They are always there, but their impact on most of us is minimal. Civilised discussion proceeds above and around them. Trolls are trolls and never really change. No, what changed was that for maybe the first time there was a noticeable tendency to censor for opinion. Not racist opinion, or sexist opinion. Just anti-government opinion. Or minority opinion. At first it was relatively minor. – But then in February 2014 the West decided to go insane and provoke WW3 in Ukraine and everything changed forever.
News outlets like the Guardian and the BBC stood by and vaguely cheered this act of insanity, as if too lobotomised to even understand what was going on. We saw Shaun Walker making facile jokes about vodka and potatoes. Luke Harding, off his meds and off his leash squealing Russophobic paranoia. We saw crazed old NATO generals foaming at the mouth for war, and slick intelligence types citing reams of easily disproven statistics to “prove” Russia was the problem. What we didn’t see – anywhere – in the Establishment media was any voice of sanity, warning that this was a new Cuban Missile crisis and that more was required of us than xenophobia and soundbites.
The CiF sections – naturally – erupted in shock and incredulity that the Guardian – the Guardian – could possibly be fielding such stupid, dangerous, and low-grade propaganda. The comments were something like 10-1, if not more, in opposition to the hardline editorial stance and pleading for some realisation of what madness our governments were engaged in. And that’s when the Great Cull began.
As the official Western narrative on Ukraine unraveled in the face of the Odessa massacre, the black farce of the ATO and multiple revelations of how close the new government’s ties to neo-nazis really were, so the Guardian’s own line became increasingly nakedly propagandist. It set up a network with publications such as the Kiev Post and Radio Free Europe, and disseminated their dishonest hit pieces and fake propaganda stories without question or demur. In a matter of months it had become unrecognisable to those who had formerly respected it. Either it fundamentally changed at this time, or, maybe more likely, it simply stopped pretending. Either way, it stopped being the Guardian in any sense that meant anything.
At the same time moderation in CiF became for the first time overtly politicised, if not draconian. As people reacted more and more to the changing tone ATL, so more and more censorship was required BTL to keep that reaction in check. Comments that asserted a Russian perspective, or that simply called for some sort of middle ground were many times more likely to be blocked than those that supported the NATO position. Extreme racism toward Russians became more and more acceptable both ATL and BTL, while even minor critique of the Guardian’s own authors became punishable by not just blocking but outright banning.
But even the most intense efforts to control the debate proved futile. Whenever they opened a story for comments on Ukraine, Syria, or any other NATO war zone, it would be flooded with people opposing the warmongering of our governments, or questioning the veracity of the article, or linking to different versions of the story or to other stories the Guardian was choosing not to run. Try as they might to take down links, block comments, ban accounts, they couldn’t stop this tide.
And worse, people were now commenting on the censorship of comments, requiring even more censorship in turn. They developed zero tolerance for anyone questioning why a given comment had been taken down. If you dared ask why, you were blocked or banned. They began pre-emptively banning certain accounts for a given period when sensitive news stories were broken, un-blocking them again after a decent interval. They seem to have added certain websites (including this one) to lists of URLS that would be immediately removed whatever content they contained.
But the more they censored, the more they were called out for their censorship, and the harder it became to pretend – even to themselves – that they were still the lovely liberal Guardian embracing free speech. They might tell each other they were censoring “trolls” or “Putinbots”, but in their hearts they knew, and knew that their readers all knew, what was really going on.
CiF is now one of their major problems. They need to preserve it – their once proud flagship – in order to cling to the remnants of their self-image as leaders of free thought. They can rename it “Opinion”, as if that makes the absence of Free Comment somehow less real. They can censor it to the point of destruction. But they can’t close it down. Because that would be admitting what they are and admitting defeat.
“The web we want” is their own, strangely pathetic, attempt at squaring that circle. You can look at it almost like the inner dialogue of a deeply troubled psyche. Self-soothing with repetition and over-assertion.
Those bizarre and strained attempts at “explaining” their comment policy with graphs and “research” so openly bogus it proves nothing beyond their own desperation. Those weird photoshoots of confused but smiling “Best CiF Commenters” (chosen by “cross-referencing a list of the commenters who had the highest average of “recommends per comment” with a list of those with the highest percentage of “staff picks”), designed to show how comfortable they really are with their own readership, but being about as convincing as a kidnap victim reading a scrawled note to camera about how well he is being treated.
Hysterical. Hopeless. And deeply sad. Because even if this new agenda of cuddly censorship to help minorities does get enough of a claw hold to make a difference, and even if we all do lose our remaining freedoms, the Guardian is dead to most of its old readers. Its moral base has been destroyed, its reputation is irreparably shredded. It’s now just a glorified mag for clickbait and badly written agitprop. Its readership is shrinking, its income is vanishing. It’s propped up now by its bosses in Washington and London, existing on their life support until it’s been drained of all possible use, when they will turn off the machines and let it die.
The “journalists” who work for it won’t much care when that happens of course. If they cared about such things they wouldn’t be doing what they do. They’ll just be paid off and move on to different positions, where they can enjoy expense account lunches and spurious feelings of security while it lasts. But many old readers will care quite a lot. Even though it will also feel like putting a suffering animal out of its misery.
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New Book
The silver that medicine dropped — four thousand years of clinical use, four decades to erase.
Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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