For those who missed it or chose to ignore it, there was a large demonstration in Washington on Tuesday the 14th dubbed the “March for Israel” with many posters and signs featuring “Israel We Stand With You.” I have no big problem with Americans “standing with Israel” as long as they go over to Israel to do it and in some cases at least put their own lives at risk in so doing, but that is not the way they operate. What I do have a problem with is the cause they are supporting, namely the ethic cleansing of an entire nation or even, if required to do that, a military style genocide of the inhabitants of an area that was entirely populated by an ethnic group called Palestinians before Israel’s mostly European immigrants entered the scene and used foreign provided force majeur to steal the land and property. While so doing they were also killing thousands of locals and forcing three quarters of a million more to abandon their homes and spend their lives in refugee camps, a process of ethnic cleansing that has continued and been expanded through the creation of illegal settlements since the founding of the Jewish state 75 years ago.
The rally was organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Federations of North America in solidarity with Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack. Apart from backing the Israeli government in its devastating counterattack on Gaza, the stated goals of the rally were to support Israel in general, to call for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas, and to combat antisemitism. “Rising antisemitism” allegedly followed the October 7th Hamas attack and the Israel reaction that marked the start of the war. The usually cited source the Anti-Defamation League has stated that antisemitism has increased 388% in the US since October 6, 2023. Now one must observe that the ADL is not a reliable source when it comes to antisemitism as its agenda is clearly to send the message that Jews as a group are threatened, which is just not true to anything near the extent that is being implied. The reason why antisemitism and holocaust denial are used so often against critics is to discredit them without having to provide any evidence. For ADL, a Jewish college student walking on campus and passing a pro-Palestinian poster and being upset by it is an antisemitic incident. What I am saying is that this is an entirely faked exercise to convince the audience that Israel and Jews are the victims in spite of the fact that many more Palestinians have been killed and dispossessed since the founding of Israel in 1948. If there is any real increase in actual antisemitism it is in response to the highly visible bestiality that the Jewish state has exhibited against the original occupants of what was once Palestine. Israel wants the Pals gone and these are the first steps in what might be termed a final solution, aided and abetted by American monsters like Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have made the United States complicit in war crimes.
Many participants in the Israel rally came by charter buses organized by Jewish houses of worship and schools. Most of the crowd appeared to be Jews but there was also a strong Christian Zionist component. Groups came from New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Boston, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia and Miami plus other domestic and even international locations. US college students were given $250 in travel and expenses money to attend as an incentive. The crowd was considerable though there is some confusion about how many were actually in attendance. The organizers predicted 60,000 which was the number initially accepted, but other estimates of the crowd were as low as 10,000 or 25,000. The numbers quickly grew in some news stories to uncorroborated estimates of 270,000 to 300,000. There is, of course, certain bragging rights in large numbers and the March was in competition with a Palestinian rally that attracted 300,000 the week before, so let’s just accept that there was a large group present on the Mall.
Joe Biden did not personally attend the rally but he said on the following day “[that] Israel’s military operation in Gaza would stop when Hamas no longer maintains the capacity to murder, abuse, and do horrific things to the Israelis.” He left out the part of continuous abuse of Palestinians, going back 75 years and clearly is not paying attention to senior Israeli government officials who are making comments that indicate that the grand objective is to remove the Palestinians from what will soon be Eretz or Greater Israel.
Speakers at the three-hour long rally included Israel’s self-described protector in Congress Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Joni Ernst, Pastor John Hagee, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog (via video from Jerusalem), who praised US President Joe Biden for his “moral clarity and bold actions…” Johnson predictably declared that “The calls for a ceasefire are outrageous!” while the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt also delivered on demand a plea “Do not cower, allow no one to make you afraid.” Meanwhile Donald Trump’s US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who served mostly as an apologist for the Jewish state while in office, roamed the Mall expressing his joy at developments. Other notable speakers included Natan Sharansky and actress Debra Messing. Speeches followed the predictable narrative, with descriptions of how Israel had been attacked by terrorists who sought to destroy the Jewish state, that Israel is America’s best friend and closest ally, and how Israel is only defending itself from attack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who did not speak, stated in an interview in Israel that if his country does not succeed in crushing Hamas, the next terrorist attacks would be directed against America, an evidence free claim to strengthen US resolve, but as Netanyahu hardly ever tells the truth it should be taken for what it’s worth.
And, of course, everyone’s openly stated or subliminal message was that the United States must stand by and do whatever it takes to help defend its good friend and ally, including rejecting a cease fire or negotiations and letting the slaughter of Gazan women and children continue. The discredited tales of torture and mass rapes of Israeli women and the killing by beheading of Jewish babies, which are still being replayed by President Joe Biden, were also part of the rally agenda and appeared as the messages on signs and posters. What was not mentioned however was the systematic Israeli bombing of hospitals, schools, churches, and infrastructure, all of which are war crimes, as are the attacks on high density civilian targets which have produced more than 11,000 deaths as of this writing, mostly consisting of women and children. Targeting civilians in that fashion in those numbers can and should be construed as genocide. Israel’s war on hospitals can also be regarded as part of a systematic campaign of genocide. The deliberate targeting of civilian populations, children, medical and aid workers has been elevated to an Israeli government policy to drive the Palestinians from what was once Palestine.
Official Washington was on parade and in lockstep to demonstrate its unshakable loyalty to Israel even as opinion polls suggest that the American public is tired of the charade. A couple of brave peaceniks dared to move on the fringes of the crowd with signs calling for a ceasefire to end the carnage, but they were openly derided and threatened so they kept their distance. One truly shocking attendee at the rally was former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who was present and spouting the straight Israel line about how it was the victim of terrorists. Tulsi said “It is inspiring to see how many people are flooding into Washington – understanding the seriousness of this moment, coming from all over the country. Many Jewish people [and] many people who are not Jewish . . . are coming and saying that we must stand up against antisemitism. We must stand up for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and we must take a strong stand against the Islamist terrorists who seek to not only exterminate the Jewish people but also to exterminate and kill anyone who does not adhere to their radical interpretation of Islam.” She sounded something like the State Department’s despicable number two Victoria Nuland looking for another country to attack. Now that RFK Jr has also obligingly rolled over for the Jewish state there is no genuine peace candidate anywhere on the horizon with the exception of the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the beat of the war drums will continue to sound.
More out of sync perhaps was the presence as an ally of convenience evangelical Pastor John Hagee of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) group which was well represented both at the rally and as the key largest Christian Zionist component of the Israel Lobby in the US. Hagee has said that Hitler was a “half-breed Jew,” created and sent by God as a “hunter” to drive European Jews on a divine mission to fulfill prophecy by creating the state of Israel to bring about the End Time and the Second Coming of Christ followed by the Rapture of all true believers into heaven. Jews will have to convert to participate. One brings someone as controversial as Hagee out of the woodwork only to send a message that this is not about making sure that Jews are safe. It’s about showing solidarity with Israel, no matter what it does. And what kind of rally against antisemitism includes racist signs calling for more war, more bombings, and the destruction of not just Hamas but also the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians? Or as one sign held by a masked protester read, “From the river to the sea, Israel is all you will see.”
The so-called holocaust was evoked a number of times by speakers, particularly when it came time to describe Gaza on November 7th as the biggest killing of Jews since the Second World War. Nor did anyone mention the fundamental dysfunction in the US-Israeli relationship, which is that Israel calls nearly all the shots, including the killing of 34 sailors on the USS Liberty in 1967 and the more recent shooting of American citizen journalists covering Palestinian protests by Israeli Army sharpshooters. Israelis who kill Americans are never punished unlike the demands or retribution being made by speakers in Washington at the rally to kill not only all of Hamas but also the Gazan voters who elected Hamas in the first place. Though it is somewhat repetitive to say so, lest there be any confusion, that is referred to as genocide which is regarded as the most serious crime against humanity. And no one spoke up at the rally against the involvement of the US military in the operation against Gaza, which Biden is lying about and which is opposed by a majority of the public. Nor did anyone cite recent comments by US General Richard Clark that American soldiers must be “prepared to die for the Jewish state.”
Perhaps the politicians in Washington should ask US soldiers whether they are “prepared to die for the Jewish state.” Or maybe there should be called a national referendum asking the public whether it wants to continue arming and sending billions of dollars to Israel and to Ukraine as well. Evidence suggests that a clear majority would oppose both policies, which have hardly been debated at all in any serious way. Americans who want to “stand with Israel” should be allowed to go there with a one-way ticket in exchange for which they have to turn in their US passports as another major issue is “Who are they actually loyal to?” I’ll bet I know the answer to that one!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
November 24, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Joe Biden, Palestine, Tulsi Gabbard, United States, Zionism |
1 Comment
It’s time to courageously stand up to the self-serving politicians, corporate media, and Big Tech who are weaponizing our tax-payer funded institutions against us, undermining our freedom and democracy. Our love for America can give us the strength to win this battle.
Press TV – February 11, 2023
Former Democratic US Representative Tulsi Gabbard has said Hillary Clinton is a “dangerous character” who is “envious” of President Joe Biden because she believes Biden is “channeling her warmongering ways.”
Gabbard made the remarks following the ex-secretary of state’s recent visit to India where she visited salt pan workers in Gujarat where and announced a $50-million initiative aimed at empowering women and communities to fight against climate change.
Gabbard told Fox News that the trip served little purpose and said that Clinton’s visit to drum up support for alternative clean energy shows that she still covets diplomatic authority and is “envious” of Biden’s presidency.
“Her desire to be commander-in-chief that she’s had for a very long time has nothing to do with ensuring the safety and security of the American people,” Gabbard said. “It has everything to do with the fact that if there’s a war to be fought, she wants to be the one with her finger on that proverbial trigger.”
She added that she believes Biden to be “channeling her warmongering ways.”
Clinton has previously called Gabbard a “Russian asset,” which incited the former Hawaii Democrat to launch a defamation lawsuit.
Gabbard also stated that Clinton’s visit to India did nothing to address India’s more pressing issues and that its only purpose was to increase her own public profile.
“This is what makes her such a dangerous character,” Gabbard said. “She feels that she’s not accountable to anyone because she’s not suffering those consequences.”
The 42-year-old Gabbard served as a congresswoman in the US House of Representatives between 2013 and 2021, and as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) between 2013 and 2016. She quit DNC’s vice chairwomanship to protest the Democratic Party’s presidential primary process, blaming then-DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schulz for rigging the vote in favor of former Obama secretary of state Hillary Clinton against Vermont’s progressive Senator Bernie Sanders.
She quit the Democratic Party in October last year, blasting its leadership for being an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.”
Gabbard said that today’s Democratic Party is “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers.”
“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party,” she tweeted.
Gabbard also served two tours of war in the Middle East, including a tour in Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard, and ran for president in 2020, where her evisceration of former California Attorney General – and current US Vice President — Kamala Harris by pointing to the latter’s record of incarcerating African Americans on petty drug offenses forced Harris to drop out of the presidential race before any primaries or caucuses were held.
She has long been among the top critics of US military interventions across the globe. She traveled to Syria in 2017 and censured Washington’s attempts at regime change there, and also slammed US military aid for Ukraine, pointing to the risk of the conflict escalating into a Third World War with Russia.
Gabbard has called Clinton the “embodiment of corruption” and “the queen of warmongers.”
Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran, has repeatedly spoken against neoconservative war hawks with a history of supporting regime change wars. On the contrary, Clinton has supported America’s imperialist wars.
American writer Stephen Lendman once said Clinton is “a war goddess” who has supported all of the United States’s “imperial wars from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Libya, to Syria.”
February 12, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | Hillary Clinton, Human rights, Tulsi Gabbard, United States |
Leave a comment
Conservative internet personality Steven Crowder has accused YouTube of suppressing search results for 2020 Democratic hopeful Tulsi Gabbard during her recent spat with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Following Clinton’s suggestion last Friday that Gabbard (D-Hawaii) was being “groomed” by foreign election-meddlers, the dovish congresswoman shot back with a harsh rebuttal labeling Clinton the “queen of warmongers,” but in a lengthy video posted on Tuesday, Crowder says YouTube concealed her content amid the dispute.
Using a virtual private network (VPN) to observe search results in different countries, Crowder claims to have found evidence the platform demoted Gabbard’s official campaign videos for searches conducted in the US.
The first VPN test was carried out last Friday and compared search results from the US and Spain, showing Gabbard’s channel and videos were buried far below other content in American queries at the height of her feud with Clinton.
A second test two days later, after the Clinton quarrel had calmed down, had a much different outcome, showing similar results between searches attempted in the two countries.
Crowder, who ran afoul of YouTube earlier this year and had his own channel demonetized, claims the platform deliberately throttled Gabbard’s content to limit her message in an attempt at “election meddling.”
Over the summer, Gabbard filed a lawsuit against YouTube’s parent company, Google, alleging the tech giant intentionally blocked her campaign ads on the heels of a Democratic presidential debate that – as shown by Google’s own search analytics – generated intense interest in her candidacy.
A number of conservative commentators weighed in on the allegation, noting the “chilling effect” such suppression could have on anyone challenging “establishment politicians” and the Washington swamp.
“We all knew, now we have proof,” another commenter said.
Some in Crowder’s camp took issue with the claim, however, with New York congressional candidate Joey ‘Salads’ Saladino arguing the comedian failed to prove what he alleged.
Another critic similarly challenged Crowder’s accusation, stating his tests did not show any manipulation of search results, but rather a new feature on YouTube which prioritizes news items curated by its partner “fact checkers” over other videos. While YouTube says the feature was rolled out to combat “misinformation,” it nonetheless raises questions about how the platform chooses which stories to serve up to viewers, at the expense of other content.
October 23, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | Google, Hillary Clinton, Tulsi Gabbard, United States, YouTube |
3 Comments
When US President Donald Trump cited a report on Google’s election manipulation last week, Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media attacked both the study and its author as inaccurate. However, the author told Sputnik not only is his research “rock solid,” its damning indictment of Google includes Clinton and the Democrats, too.
“I have concerns about three big areas: one is surveillance, the second is censorship, and the third, which is the one I focus on in my research, is manipulation,” Dr. Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines [Interview begins at 132:30] Thursday. His findings were cited in August 19 tweets by both Clinton and Trump in their continuing spat over the results of the 2016 election, when they found themselves at odds over who would become the 45th US president.
“Both of those assertions are completely false; my work is rock solid,” he told Sputnik, referring to Clinton’s claim that his work was debunked and had relied on a tiny data selection. “It adheres to the very highest standards of scientific research; it always has.”
“We have this false impression that Google provides a bunch of free services and that that’s all Google is,” he said. “They’re not free services! Those services are all just … gussied-up surveillance platforms. And then they take the information and they sell it to advertisers, and that has produced almost 90% of their revenue for almost 20 years. They’re an advertising company.”
Epstein first sought to dispel the idea that he had it out for either Clinton or Google.
“I’ve been a supporter of the Clintons, period, for decades,” he clarified to hosts Garland Nixon and Lee Stranahan, also noting, “I admire Google. They’re an amazing, amazing company.”
Remarking about his research into the impact of search result placement on the opinions of the information-seekers, Epstein said, “I’ve learned not just about search results but about all kinds of new ways in which these big tech platforms, particularly Google, can shift opinions about anything, can shift millions of votes, without anyone knowing they’re being influenced and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.”
“My first big, big report, on what I call SEME – Search Engine Manipulation Effect – the power that search results have to shift opinions and votes massively around the world, that report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” he said, noting it was ranked in the top 1% of the academy’s papers.
Epstein said Clinton got the assertion that his study had been debunked and that it relied on 21 people, instead of tens of thousands, “from Google,” noting that she obviously didn’t look into his research.
“I kinda get it: she has a very cozy relationship with Google. I could talk for an hour about just that issue: I mean, her number 1 donor in 2016 was Google; her chief technology officer, Stephanie Hannon, was a former Google executive; the head of Google, Eric Schmidt, offered to run her tech campaign in writing,” Epstein said. “And he set up a secretive tech company called ‘The Groundwork,’ that he ran and he financed, as the head of Google, the sole purpose of which was to put Hillary Clinton into office.”
However, Clinton’s criticisms of Epstein soon grabbed the attention of the mainstream media, and through a mix of ‘telephone game’ and dramatic amplification soon reached absurd proportions. “I mean, everywhere, I’ve been slaughtered, I’ve been crucified,” he said.
“My research has opened up a Pandora’s Box, because my research shows that if the platform itself – Google – if the platform itself wants to favor one music service or one comparative shopping service or one candidate or one party, guess what? There’s no way you can counteract that. And it turns out that those search rankings are so powerful in shifting opinions that they can easily flip elections,” he said.
A recent Google casualty might be anti-monopolist presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who has opened a $50 million lawsuit alleging that Google arbitrarily suspended her presidential campaign’s advertising account during a key fundraising period following the first Democratic debate in late June, when she was the most-searched among all candidates in the debate. Now that she has failed to qualify for the third debate, for which one of the key requirements was meeting certain fundraising goals, the damage done to the candidate by Google’s suspension is palpable.
Epstein admitted that Google’s “ephemeral” search results, uniquely generated for each person, were impossible to track – at first. That made it hard to prove in practice that such a biased influence exists. “In 2016, I built the first-ever system for monitoring search results, and I captured 13,207 election-related searches – not just on Google, [but on] Google, Bing and Yahoo – and the 98,000 web pages to which the search results linked, analyzed the data, found tremendous pro-Hillary Clinton bias on Google, but not on Bing or Yahoo.”
“I believe in democracy and our country and the free and fair election more than I believe in any particular candidate or party, period,” Epstein told Sputnik, noting he’d said the same in his testimony before Congress earlier this month. “So I am reporting what I have found, and it’s very disturbing, and it’s a serious threat to the free and fair election, to democracy, to human autonomy … I’m just speaking the truth about what I have found, and what I have found is rock solid and extremely, extremely frightening.”
“And it’s affected not just the United States: Google, and to a lesser extent Facebook, are impacting the opinions, attitudes, purchases, beliefs, votes, of more than 2-and-a-half billion people in virtually every country in the world,” he said. “That number will soon be over 4 billion people.”
August 30, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Google, Hillary Clinton, Tulsi Gabbard |
Leave a comment
© Reuters / Brian Snyder
US Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is being accused of “flip-flopping” on her Syria stance and “caving” to mainstream media pressure after a combative interview on The View.
Questioned aggressively by panelist Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late Senator John McCain, Gabbard said there was “no disputing the fact” that Syrian President Bashar Assad is a “brutal dictator” who “used chemical weapons against his people.”
The comments stand in stark contrast to previous statements made by the Hawaii congresswoman, who in the past said she was “skeptical” about allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on citizens and called US efforts to overthrow Assad an “illegal war.”
She faced a major backlash from both the media and her colleagues in congress for taking a trip to Syria and meeting Assad himself in 2017.
While Gabbard tried to offer a balanced view of the situation in Syria, it was the antagonistic questioning from McCain that immediately grabbed headlines, with many framing the interviewer in a heroic light for “confronting” Gabbard, the “Assad apologist.”
During the interview, Gabbard also said that US military interventions are often “begun and waged from a place of humanitarianism” despite having previously taken a tougher stance on “military adventurism” and the reasons behind it.
Gabbard did push back many times against the panel of hostile hosts, saying repeatedly that US interventions have historically made bad situations worse and increased suffering, some of her supporters accused her of folding in the face of “bullying” from McCain.
Others acknowledged that Gabbard might have been trying to appease the panelists to get her wider point about the human costs of US interventions across, but argued that she risked alienating the people who already supported her in the process — and said that if she starts making concessions now, she will be forced to make more.
When the conversation turned to Venezuela, Gabbard angered the panel again, saying that the US trying to choose the leader of that country was “not something that serves the interests of the Venezuelan people,” despite co-host Ana Navarro’s hailing Donald Trump for “leading the solidarity and support of freedom-loving Venezuelans.”
February 21, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | Tulsi Gabbard, United States |
5 Comments
The sky may have been clear in Hawaii when Tulsi Gabbard read her speech promising to fight “greed and corruption,” but she enters her bid under a cloud of negative media coverage and accusations of being Russia’s darling.
At first glance Gabbard would seem almost too perfect for the Democratic candidate to face Trump in 2020: a 37-year-old part-Samoan woman, who previously broke off a promising career in local politics to volunteer for combat zone service in Iraq, and is unfailingly popular with voters on her home island.
“What our country needs now more than ever is the spirit of Aloha. That spirit of respect and love for one another and for our country,” she said in a launch speech that the 2008 Barack Obama, himself, might have found too idealistically bland.
Hours earlier, in a two-author NBC investigation an entirely different picture had been painted of the “controversial” Gabbard – the centerpoint of “the first stirrings of an upcoming Russian campaign” in which the Kremlin “propaganda machine” would seek to inject pro-Russian positions into the Democratic Party’s discussions and debates with help from “inauthentic accounts.”
I’m Not With Her
To understand why Gabbard is not treated as a customary feel-good story of a woman breaking multiple glass ceilings, but as a tool of the Kremlin, several pages of her biography need to be revisited.
The first, her resignation from the senior post of Vice President of the Democratic National Committee in protest at the lack of scheduled debates between frontrunner Hillary Clinton and the rising Bernie Sanders, whom she subsequently went on to endorse.
The second, a now-famous meeting with Bashar Assad in 2017, and Gabbard’s insistence that Washington should not engage in “regime change” or sponsorship of radical militant organizations in Syria or anywhere else.
Those two incidents alone have pitted Gabbard against two major establishment forces, and that is before one gets into the details of her socialist-tinged platform from healthcare for all to anti-Wall Street policy proposals. Or her support of stronger border control, which puts her at odds with her party’s official position.
Friendly fire
None of Gabbard’s stances are beyond debate, but she may not even get as far as debating them in public with the other Democrat nominees, if her campaign is dead on arrival. And the media hasn’t been her friend.
All candidates face scrutiny and an airing of their skeletons, but not only has she received less airtime than fellow relative novices Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, but the overall coverage of Gabbard has been uncharacteristically toxic, perhaps comparable only to the Democratic ostracism of Howard Schultz, following the former Starbucks CEO’s unbidden decision to enter the race.
The favored genre has been the expose.
In the past month alone: CNN has dug up Gabbard’s activism and comments, some dating back to the late 1990s, when she was a teenager, against same-sex marriage, for a campaign backed by her legislator father. The Intercept has accused her of associating with Hindu Nationalists, while the Daily Beast has published an article under the title ‘Horseshoe theory: Why Conservative Media and the Far Right Love Tulsi Gabbard for President’, in which it was emphasized that the “enigmatic” Gabbard had “earned substantial praise” from, among others, white nationalist David Duke. Huffington Post accused her of hypocrisy for accepting money from arms manufacturers in the past, even though she never concealed that fact, and is in reality one of just several members of the House who explicitly refuse campaign donations.
Politico published a detailed dissection of her campaign being “in disarray” based on detailed unattributed revelations from the inside, while Daily Kos, the Democrat politics blog, has already endorsed her rival for the 2020 Congress run, which equates to the real election in a district where the Democrats have never lost against the GOP.
‘Defended’ her in an article – how dare they?
On Friday, came NBC’s coup de grace.
“An NBC News analysis of the main English-language news sites employed by Russia in its 2016 election meddling shows Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is set to make her formal announcement Saturday, has become a favorite of the sites Moscow used when it interfered in 2016,” wrote the authors, one of whom Ben Popken, concluded that the Kremlin “has a crush” on Gabbard when he posted his article to Twitter.
The “analysis” – which appears to have been a name search – found that 20 articles have been published on Gabbard by RT (is it 21 now?), Sputnik and Russia Insider, twice as many as Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. And not just that, but in these articles Gabbard was not mentioned “perfunctorily” but “celebrated” and “defended” despite her “lack of voter recognition.”
Even supposing that all that is correct, does RT have to cover Joe Biden every time it mentions Tulsi Gabbard? Elizabeth Warren? Julian Castro? Should CNN stop putting Kamala Harris in almost every piece about the race? As a non-US news outlet is RT allowed to find her non-interventionist views more interesting for its international audience than those of a status quo Democratic runner? What about as an alternative media outlet? Should covering a candidate who “lacks voter recognition” be considered suspicious? How much of this is sufficient to justify accusations of meddling and being branded a “Russian troll” and presumably sanctioned? Does all of this apply when the US media writes about Juan Guaido in Venezuela?
But wait, there are also “experts who track inauthentic social media accounts” who back this up.
“A few of our analysts saw some chatter on 8chan saying she was a good ‘divider’ candidate to amplify,” New Knowledge’s director of research Renee DiResta told NBC. 8chan? Chatter? Also New Knowledge? The establishment Democrat tech outfit that has just been caught planting and creating fake Russian bots in the Alabama election as part of a false flag operation. They are your experts, NBC?
Even much of Dem-voting Twitter was appalled at such a ham-fisted smear job.
Incompetent, threat or victim of smear campaign?
The media are now fulfilling their own prophecies, as they publish pieces about the “rocky” or “chaotic” start to Gabbard’s campaign. As she keeps going on the defensive – apologizing for the gay marriage remarks, standing firm on Assad meeting – the Hawaiian representative may survive or wilt.
But two questions remain: Is Gabbard just a stumbling novice with odd views, or is the media trying to systematically bury her, as opposed to informing their readers, all because she presents a threat to accepted positions? And secondly, is it doing so at the behest of and with help from a network of influence, be it DNC operatives, or Washington insiders? If the answer to the first question is “the latter” or to the second is “yes,” perhaps instead of spending so much time on our website, investigative reporters should have a look at the provenance and motivations behind some of their own coverage.
February 3, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Video | NBC News, Tulsi Gabbard, United States |
13 Comments
Two weeks after Donald Trump’s shocking upset of Hillary Clinton, the imperious and imperial neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist understudies may finally be losing their tight grip on U.S. foreign policy.
The latest sign was Trump’s invitation for a meeting with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, on Monday. The mainstream media commentary has almost completely missed the potential significance of this start-of-the-work-week meeting, suggesting that Trump is attracted to Gabbard’s tough words on “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii.
Far more important is that Gabbard, a 35-year-old Iraq War veteran, endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries because of his opposition to neocon/liberal-hawk military adventures. She starred in one of the strongest political ads of the campaign, a message to Hawaiians, called “The Cost of War.”
“Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq War,” Gabbard says. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend our country and take the trillions of dollars that are spent on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home.”
In the ad, Gabbard threw down the gauntlet to the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks, by accusing them of wasting trillions of dollars “on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars.” Her comments mesh closely with Trump’s own perspective.
So, the surprise election results on Nov. 8 may have represented a “trading places” moment for the neocons and liberal hawks who were eagerly counting the days before the “weak” President Barack Obama would turn over the Commander-in-Chief job to former Secretary of State Clinton who had made clear that she shared their hawkish agenda of escalating the war in Syria and ratcheting up the New Cold War with Russia.
There was even speculation that one of Clinton’s neocon favorites within the State Department, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, might be rewarded with State’s top job for her “regime change” in Ukraine that sparked the start of the New Cold War in 2014.
Nuland, the wife of arch-neocon Robert Kagan, sabotaged President Obama’s emerging strategy of collaborating with Russian President Vladimir Putin on sensitive global issues. In 2013-14, Putin helped orchestrate two of Obama’s brightest foreign policy successes: Syria’s surrender of its chemical weapons arsenal and Iran’s guarantee that it would not develop nuclear weapons.
But those agreements infuriated the neocons who favored escalating both crises into direct U.S. bombing campaigns aimed at Syria and Iran – in accordance with the desires of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi monarchy. Yet. there was perhaps even greater alarm at what the next move of the Obama-Putin tag team might be: demanding that Israel finally get serious about a peace deal with the Palestinians.
So, the neocons took aim at Ukraine, which neocon National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman identified as “the biggest prize” and an important stepping stone to an even bigger prize, a “regime change” in Moscow removing Putin.
While Gershman’s NED funded (with U.S. taxpayers’ money) scores of projects inside Ukraine, training anti-government activists and journalists, Nuland took the point as the key organizer of a putsch that removed elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014, and replaced him with a fiercely anti-Russian regime.
Given the geopolitical sensitivity of Ukraine to Russia, including its naval base on the Crimean peninsula, Putin had little choice but to react, supporting a referendum in Crimea in which 96 percent of the voters favored leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia – and assisting ethnic Russian rebels in the east who resisted the violent ouster of their president.
Of course, the mainstream Western news media presented these developments as simply a case of “Russian aggression” and a “Russian invasion.” And, faced with this new “group think,” Obama quickly abandoned his partner, Putin, and joined in the chorus of condemnations.
Nuland emerged as a new star inside the State Department, a hero of the New Cold War which was expected to funnel trillions of tax dollars into the Military-Industrial Complex.
Trump’s Heresy
But Trump surprisingly adopted the position that Obama shied away from, a recognition that Putin could be an important asset in resolving major international crises. The real-estate-mogul-turned-politician stuck to that “outside-the-mainstream” position despite fierce attacks from rival Republicans and Democratic presidential nominee Clinton, who even mocked him as Putin’s “puppet.”
After Trump’s upset victory on Nov. 8, many pundits assumed that Trump would fall back in line with Washington’s hawkish foreign-policy establishment by giving top jobs to neocons, such as former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, or Netanyahu favorites, such as former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney or ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
So far, however, Trump has followed a different course, more in line with the libertarian thinking of the Koch brothers – not only the more famous ones, Charles and David, but also their long-estranged brother William, who I’m told have become behind-the-scenes advisers to the President-elect.
Though Trump did offer high-profile meetings to the likes of Romney and Giuliani, he has yet to hand over any key foreign-policy job to the Republican neocon wing. His one major announcement in that area has been naming as National Security Advisor retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency when it produced a prescient warning that U.S. policy in Syria would lead to the creation of an “Islamic State.”
Though Flynn is regarded as a hardliner in the fight against Islamic jihadist terror, he is seen as an independent thinker regarding how best to wage that war. For instance, Flynn has objected to the notion that drone strikes, i.e., killing off individual jihadists, is a route to success.
“We’ve tended to say, drop another bomb via a drone and put out a headline that ‘we killed Abu Bag of Doughnuts’ and it makes us all feel good for 24 hours,” Flynn said. “And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It just made them a martyr, it just created a new reason to fight us even harder.”
That leaves open the possibility that a President Trump might eschew the “whack-a-mole” approach that has bedeviled the “war on terror” and instead go after the “mole nest” – if you will – the Saudi monarchy that has long financed Islamic extremists both through the fundamentalist Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam and by supplying money and weapons to jihadists dating back at least to the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s, the origin of modern Islamic terrorism.
Traditional U.S. politicians have recoiled from facing up to the hard reality that the Saudi monarchy is the real “terror central” because of Saudi Arabia’s enormous riches and influence, which is now enhanced by its quiet alliance with Israel in their joint campaign against the so-called “Shiite crescent,” from Iran through Syria to Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Taking on this Saudi-Israel nexus has long been regarded as political suicide, given Israel’s extraordinary lobbying power and Saudi Arabia’s exceptional wealth. But Trump may be assembling a team that is “crazy” enough to take on that mission.
So, while the fight over the future of U.S. foreign policy is far from over – the neocons will surely flex their muscles at the major think tanks, on the op-ed pages and inside the halls of Congress – the Trump transition is showing some creativity in assembling a national security team that may go in a very different direction.
Much will become apparent in Trump’s choice of Secretary of State. If it’s someone like Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, or Rep. Gabbard or a libertarian from the Kochs’ world, that would be bad news for the neocons. If it’s someone like Romney, Giuliani, Bolton or Woolsey, then that will mean that President-elect Trump has blinked and the neocons can breathe a sigh of relief.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
November 21, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Donald Trump, Israel, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Tulsi Gabbard, United States |
1 Comment
Aletho News 