Burnham tackles Britain’s poverty with aggression in Yemen
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 24, 2026
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has found a novel way of solving Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. By bombing Yemen.
Yes, you read that correctly. This week, Burnham authorized the deployment of British Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia for its war with Yemen.
Downing Street assured the British public that the deployment was for “defensive” operations only. The BBC and other British media outlets indulged this fantasy by repeating over and over that the Royal Air Force was being deployed for “defensive actions”. The RAF would not be engaging in attacking Yemen, it was claimed, and the British fighter jets were being sent to “protect” Saudi Arabia from “escalating” Houthi aggression.
Britain’s Minister of Defense Wes Streeting (a former health minister, please note) framed the RAF mission as necessary to counter instability in the Middle East and soaring energy prices. As if Britain was not the cause of instability and higher fuel costs by backing Trump’s aggression on Iran.
The Guardian reported: “The [British] military intervention [in Yemen] was partly justified because instability in the Middle East was driving up energy prices and affecting the cost of living.”
This logic is as absurd as it is gross deception.
Recall that Burnham was ushered into Downing Street in July to replace the hapless Keir Starmer as Labour prime minister. Burnham, formerly the Mayor of Manchester and posing with his working-class credentials, made a big public pitch that he would prioritize easing the cost-of-living crisis ravaging Britain.
However, since entering office, his most notable forays have been in foreign policy. For example, he has received the Ukrainian dictator Vladimir Zelensky in Downing Street with promises of more military aid in addition to the $20 billion that Britain has already provided (the second largest source of aid in Europe after Germany). Burnham has pledged to provide Ukraine with British blueprints for manufacturing cruise missiles.
Last month, Burnham announced that Britain was deploying an RAF in-air refuelling plane to “help” Saudi Arabia’s air strikes on Yemen. To allay public concerns about that move, Downing Street and the British media assured that the deployment was “defensive only” and for a limited period.
Ironically, Burnham made that announcement while travelling to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he hailed Britain for offering world leadership for peace and security.
Now, again this week, the RAF deployment is extended to sending Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. London is also providing a RAF A400M transport plane for troops and up to 100 military advisers.
This sounds like classic mission creep. Downing Street is aware of the exposure to public criticism. The prime minister’s office denied Britain was being dragged into the conflict. It said: “Our support for Saudi Arabia is considered, proportionate and focused on helping them defend themselves from relentless Houthi attacks.”
The British government and media are distorting the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen as one of “aggression” by the Yemeni forces of Ansar Allah, referred to as “the Iran-backed Houthis”. That description makes the Yemenis sound like crazy terrorists who are being directed by Iran.
Here’s the BBC’s creative reporting: “The UK will deploy RAF Typhoon jets to defend Saudi Arabia in response to escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks, the government has said.”
The BBC goes on: “The defensive mission will help defend Saudi cities and infrastructure – a move authorised by Prime Minister Andy Burnham – against aerial attacks by the Iran-backed group… Since September, Saudi Arabia has been struggling to defend its skies from Houthi attacks after a ceasefire of sorts in Yemen broke down.”
This is reality inversion by the British state-owned media outlet.
The ceasefire in Yemen was violated in mid-July when Saudi Arabia launched air strikes on the international airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, to target a delegation attending the state funeral of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, who was murdered in a U.S.-Israeli air strike on his family home in Tehran on February 28.
That ceasefire was called in 2022 to end a seven-year war of aggression by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. The war began in 2015 to reinstate a Saudi puppet regime that the Ansar Allah-led Yemenis ousted in 2014. The Saudis bombed Yemen relentlessly for seven years with support of the United States, Britain, and France. An estimated 20,000 Yemenis were killed in air strikes, and around 300,000 died from a humanitarian blockade that the Western-backed Saudi coalition imposed on the country.
Britain’s military minister Wes Streeting referred to recent Yemeni strikes on Saudi Arabia as “despicable”. He mentioned a ballistic missile attack on October 10 on King Khalid international airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. At least 13 people were killed in the strike, and over 300 were injured.
The Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces have also hit several other Saudi airports and key oil industry installations. The number of Saudi civilians killed in these attacks is relatively small, around 20, whereas Saudi warplanes have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians since it broke the ceasefire in July. This week, eight Yemeni fishermen were killed in Saudi strikes. What Yemen is doing to Saudi Arabia is self-defense, not aggression.
London and its media propaganda are making out that Britain is “defending” Saudi Arabia. The reality is London is assisting Saudi aggression and war crimes.
Significantly, Streeting flew to Washington, DC, last week, where he met the war secretary, Pete Hegseth. Their agenda was about how to respond to “Houthi escalation.” Obviously, the junior partner got the memo: send warplanes to Yemen; we’re too busy with Iran.
Meanwhile, in Britain, an unprecedented social crisis is unfolding from poverty and a crippling cost of living. Charities report that four million families are having to go without adequate food or home heating because of soaring bills. Oxfam estimates that 13.5 million Britons, or a fifth of the population, are suffering from poverty. More than six million people rely on food charities for a modicum of sustenance.
It tells you everything about a state whose government does nothing about its own people’s dire needs but finds the resources to send warplanes to distant countries to bomb other poor people.
Andy Burnham is just another puppet who is assigned to put on a show in Downing Street for public appeasement. The imperial deep state has its hand up his rear. That’s mission creep in Downing Street.
BRITAIN’S WARNING: PREPARE FOR WAR
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | October 22, 2026
From military speeches to civil-defense drills, Europe’s leaders are openly preparing their countries for conflict. Jefferey looks at the warnings coming out of Britain and the polling that suggests the public may not be ready to answer the call.
How the Cambridge Analytica scandal still haunts Mark Zuckerberg
RT | October 23, 2026
‘Cambridge Analytica’ is by now a byword for the social media Wild West of 2016, when regulations were non-existent and unscrupulous brokers sold personal user data to advertisers and political operatives. RT explores the scandal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still can’t dodge.
On October 22, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico judge to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over the collection of personal data from 44 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica more than a decade earlier.
The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest fines ever imposed on an American corporation.
Meta, operating at the time as Facebook, knowingly and systematically deceived users about how it managed their personal data and allowed its harvesting by third-party companies like Cambridge Analytica. The jury also found Meta’s senior executive team knew of, and lied about, deceiving users about how it planned to investigate data-harvesting companies after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public.
To understand how Meta ended up owing an eighth of its annual revenue in just one judgment, it’s necessary to go back to 2013, when Cambridge Analytica emerged from Britain’s shadowy private intelligence sector.
What was Cambridge Analytica?
Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a London-based private intelligence firm that has provided data analytics and “behavioural analysis” services to the British Defense Ministry and Foreign Office.
Cambridge Analytica CEO and SCL Group Director Alexander Nix has admitted under oath that his companies worked with American and British intelligence agencies, provided psychological warfare training to several Western militaries, employed multiple staff with security clearances in the UK and US, and hired former Israeli spies.
SCL Group’s work for NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and other governments and militaries was extensive, and Cambridge Analytica drew on its parent company’s experience in military psyops to become one of the world’s most effective election influence operations, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On the other hand, SCL insists that its military and political wings were separate entities. Whichever account is true, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by political candidates in 200 elections by 2018, according to company documents. These included parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, India, and Italy, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and most infamously, the 2016 presidential election in the US.
What did Cambridge Analytica do in 2016?
Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million by then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in the runup to the 2016 election. The company used its unprecedented access to Facebook user data to identify persuadable voters and potential donors, select effective markets for television ads, and target certain Hillary Clinton supporters for “deterrence” – adverts discouraging them from going to the polls on election day.
How did this become a scandal?
Cambridge Analytica did not break any laws to obtain this data. It was scraped from tens of millions of Facebook users who had, unbeknownst to themselves, given a third-party Facebook quiz application access to their messages, their profile data, and that of their friends.
Cambridge Analytica hired a Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to develop a personality quiz app, named ‘This is Your Digital Life’. Between 250,000 and 270,000 American Facebook users took the quiz in 2015, and by accessing their data, but crucially, under Facebook terms, accessing the data of all of their friends on the platform, Cambridge Analytica was able to compile detailed psychological profiles on roughly 87 million users.
Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the workings of the scheme to The Observer in 2018, telling the British newspaper that “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Was Cambridge Analytica the only data-scraper doing this?
“Facebook never cared,” Kogan told NBC News in 2018, explaining that “tens of thousands” of developers created apps like his quiz, and sold user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Among the developers were CubeYou, which used a “one-click personality test” app to gather information for commercial use, and LocalBlox, which scraped data from 48 million users, which it then sold to marketers.
AggregateIQ, Global Science Research, and Eunoia Technologies all used data gleaned by Kogan for political ends. However, long before these companies existed, Blue State Digital, an American political consultancy, surreptitiously harvested Facebook data, including friends’ data, for use by Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Cambridge Analytica, however, had its work for the Trump campaign exposed at the height of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax, at a time when Democrats and liberal media outlets were convinced that Russia intervened in the election on behalf of Trump. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping dovetailed neatly into a narrative of “Facebook bots” and “Russian military hackers” working with the Trump campaign, and the company became a whipping boy for an industry that transcended partisan lines.
US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee eventually investigated claims that Cambridge Analytica helped the Russian government target political ads at American voters, but both determined that these claims were untrue, and neither investigation found any proof of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Has Facebook been punished?
At the time that the information was collected, Facebook had stopped allowing third-party apps to access friends’ data. However, a loophole allowed apps active on the platform before this change to continue harvesting information through 2015. Within days of Wylie’s revelations hitting the headlines, SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook. Two months later, both companies ceased operations, leaving Facebook to handle the fallout.
Facebook initially went into damage control mode, insisting that “People knowingly provided their information” to Kogan’s app, and that “everyone involved gave their consent.”
However, the US Federal Trade Commission determined that Facebook made its privacy settings deliberately opaque, spreading them out over 20 separate screens and opting users into sharing data with third-parties by default. Facebook settled with the FTC for $5 billion in 2019, setting the stage for a series of similar payouts in the following years.
In 2018, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook was aware that user data had been transferred from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica (this transfer was in breach of its policies) since 2015, but opted not to inform users. He said that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but never followed up and made sure the company did. “We considered it a closed case,” he told Congress.
The following year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Facebook of misleading investors by presenting “the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical,” when it knew since 2015 that “a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.” Facebook settled the case with the SEC for $100 million.
In 2022, Meta settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Facebook users, who alleged that the company violated privacy and consumer protection laws by misrepresenting its data-sharing laws and failing to protect their personal information.
Meta attempted to shut down further legal action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal this August, when it reached an $18 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Although the cases concerned the addictive design of Meta’s platforms and their effect on children’s mental health, the settlement included a clause resolving a multistate investigation into Facebook’s sharing of user data with third parties “whether known or unknown,” including Cambridge Analytica.
Even if participating states were to discover new facts about the data sharing, they have now waived their right to sue Meta. New Mexico was one of two states that was not party to this agreement, hence the $25 billion penalty.
Did Cambridge Analytica get Trump elected?
Ten years after the fact, it remains unclear how prominent a role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump’s victory over Clinton. The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook and X (then called Twitter) is widely cited as instrumental in his win, but the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has since said that he stopped using the company’s data several months before election day, considering it inaccurate.
What about Brexit?
Cambridge Analytica worked with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU organization in late 2015 and early 2016, and carried out some preliminary data analysis for the campaign. However, the data was never used, and the UK Information Commissioner’s (ICO) office concluded in 2020 that the company had no impact on the referendum. As in the US, the ICO found no links between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, and no evidence that Russia interfered in the vote.
Is Zuckerberg in the clear?
The $25 billion judgement handed down on October 22 may be the largest fine ever imposed on Meta, but it does not mark the end of Zuckerberg’s legal woes. In addition to a Washington DC lawsuit holding him personally responsible for the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg’s company is being sued by investors in California over Facebook’s alleged efforts to conceal the misuse of user data by the company.
Meta will likely settle the latter case, just as it did with the similar SEC case in 2019. However, should Zuckerberg fight the lawsuit, he could find himself in the dock, as the plaintiffs have sought recorded depositions from him, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former CFO David Wehner – all of whom could be forced to shed more light on just how much Facebook knew about the scandal, and when.
British Government Employees Were Fact-Checking the News at the BBC. Nobody Told You.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 19, 2026
In the UK, the BBC has been taking in public employees from government departments, and letting them work on news content, specifically “fact-checking” and drafting material for BBC News and its “fact-checking” arm, BBC Verify.
The secondments came from the Government Statistical Service, and took place over the past eight years, with 39 civil servants spending three or six months at the BBC, while their salaries were still paid by their own departments.
The Government Statistical Service is now advertising more of these secondments for 2027.
This was first reported by The Telegraph on October 17.
Meanwhile, the BBC is the same public service broadcaster that the government wants to give more money by introducing a “YouTube tax” – a plan to extend the license fee to streaming services.
And the same BBC is the one the government wants to push up people’s feeds on YouTube and other platforms, by making those platforms give it prominence in their algorithms. A green paper, “Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media,” is proposing this.
In the past, Reclaim The Net has reported about this plan, and how the US government said that this would mean “mandating that platforms algorithmically amplify government-preferred media.”
So, to sum it up: the government wants people to fund the BBC, wants the algorithm to favor the BBC, and has its own staff inside the BBC writing the fact-checks.
The subjects they worked on were “small boat” crossings of migrants, Covid, crime, migration, and life expectancy. The work of these civil servants, whose salaries were still paid by their respective government departments, was published under the bylines “BBC News” and “BBC Verify.”
This is how some of the secondees described their work on the Government Statistical Service blog.
One from the Home Office said she worked as “BBC Verify’s consultant statistician, fact-checking claims in heated election debates, ‘filing copy’ on interesting stories, and advising journalists.”
She also worked on “small boat arrivals and visa applications” and did “quality assurance on copies and charts before they were published to the online live page.”
Another from the Department for Business and Trade said, “One of my first tasks was drafting ‘copy'” on annual population statistics, “This was because they related to migration, which was always a topic of interest.” And: “My lines were then quickly pulled into a full article on the main site.”
That post, however, “was taken down after The Telegraph contacted the BBC” – and the BBC “has since insisted that those on secondment do not write copy.”
But the civil servant had just said that he did.
This secondee also worked on “fact-checking claims about crime rates among different nationalities that were dominating news cycles.”
Another civil servant seconded to the BBC analyzed data on “small boat migration” to see if the weather in 2022 meant fewer crossings: “In probably my proudest moment, this made it into an article on the front page and a TV piece.”
The job advert says that “Your salary for this professional development opportunity will continue to be paid by your parent department.”
The person they are looking for should have “the ability to influence decision making, working with credibility and proactively with customers to share knowledge and information.” They will also “be representing their department and the Government Statistical Service.”
The BBC’s own rules, however, say that “Our audiences must be able to trust the BBC and be confident that our editorial decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures, or any personal interests.”
And: “External activities of individuals working for the BBC must not undermine the public’s perception of the impartiality, integrity, independence and objectivity of the BBC.”
A spokesman for the BBC said that “All BBC journalism and editorial decisions are made by BBC journalists and editors, in line with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, so these statisticians never make editorial decisions.”
But the corporation has also said it will now amend the bylines of the articles written by the civil servants to show their true jobs – something it will do only now, after The Telegraph asked.
Opposition politicians and others have been scathing in their criticism of the scheme, with Mike Wood, shadow Cabinet Office minister, saying that the BBC “must never allow a political agenda to influence BBC coverage via the back door.”
Danny Kruger, of Reform UK, was even more direct: “This is scandalous and looks dangerously as though the BBC has breached its own rules on impartiality.”
Oxford professor Carl Heneghan said, “If you have people writing for you with competing interests, it won’t be impartial. It is the government organisation you will be partial to. You will want to toe the line.”
The arrangement is so absurd that people would probably laugh at it if they heard it was happening in North Korea.
But it’s happening in the UK, and it’s not funny. The “journalists” in question were never identified as government employees to the readers, and the change of heart in that regard comes only now, after a newspaper investigated and reported about it.
UAE and Saudi Arabia move toward renewed coordination against Sanaa
Al Mayadeen | October 18, 2026
The United Arab Emirates has reportedly agreed to resume funding selected forces in southern Yemen fighting the Yemeni Armed Forces, while Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide air cover for those forces, according to sources in Yemen.
The reported arrangement signals a possible thaw in relations between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi after months of disagreement over the scope of each other’s political influence in Yemen.
The renewed coordination comes as the Yemeni Armed Forces continues to make gains and Saudi Arabia faces repeated drone and missile attacks targeting its territory, airports, and energy infrastructure.
Gulf rivals reconsider their positions
Southern forces, particularly the Giant Brigades, were previously trained and funded by the UAE and are considered among the more effective formations in the fragmented coalition opposing the YAF. Abu Dhabi withdrew its involvement in Yemen in January, cutting off financial support to forces it had backed, following pressure from Saudi Arabia.
The reported agreement suggests that advances by the YAF are prompting rival Gulf powers to reconsider their differences. However, neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE has responded to a recent demand by southern separatists for an independence referendum that would restore the borders in place between 1967 and 1990, when Yemen was divided into two states.
The Southern Transitional Council (STC) has also yet to agree to deploy its forces beyond the boundaries of the former South Yemen. Saudi approval of a referendum could potentially remove that restriction, although no such agreement has been announced.
Attacks on Aden intensify pressure
The Aden government announced a counteroffensive last week aimed at retaking Sanaa. The campaign achieved limited gains around Majzar near Marib and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, but was met with a sizeable retaliation by Sanaa’s forces.
On Friday, two missiles struck Aden airport; Information Minister Moammar Al-Eryani said the missiles landed about 500 meters from the Yemenia Airways aircraft and roughly 100 meters from the runway’s midpoint. No casualties were reported.
The attack followed a strike on a presidential palace in Aden that killed at least five people and wounded 16, further underscoring the risks facing the Gulf-backed south.
Relations between the STC and Riyadh remain strained. STC leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi fled to Abu Dhabi in January after an unsuccessful attempt by the council to assert control across southern Yemen and announce a referendum on independence within two years.
Saudi Arabia subsequently bombed UAE arms shipments intended for STC forces. Abu Dhabi then announced its withdrawal from Yemen, while the Saudi-backed government said it would seek to prosecute Zubaidi for treason.
Egypt and UK face decisions over military support
Regional involvement is also expanding beyond the Gulf rivals. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has called for an emergency parliamentary session to authorize possible military action to “defend” Saudi Arabia if requested, while emphasizing that Egypt would not undertake offensive operations.
Sanaa’s Parliament Speaker Yahya Ali al-Ra’i warned Egypt against a potential involvement in the Saudi military aggression against Yemen, urging Cairo not to allow itself to be drawn into a confrontation that serves Riyadh’s policies.
In an urgent letter to Egyptian Parliament Speaker Hisham Badawi, al-Ra’i expressed serious concern that developments could lead to Egyptian military participation alongside Saudi Arabia, stressing that such a move would contradict Egypt’s historical role in defending Arab causes.
In the UK, discussions continue over a Saudi request for additional military assistance. London has deployed an RAF Voyager aerial refueling aircraft, but some Arab officials are pressing for further support.
The prospect of deeper British involvement raises legal concerns. In 2019, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the government had acted unlawfully in granting arms export licenses during the previous Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen in 2015–2016. The Campaign Against Arms Trade argued that officials had failed to properly assess potential violations of international humanitarian law, prompting revisions to export licensing procedures.
Sanaa’s resistance against Saudi aggression followed a brutal, years-long siege that caused one of the worst famines in modern history. The Ansar Allah government has made clear that their fight against Saudi Arabia will not cease so long as Riyadh continues to escalate it even further.
The Yemeni Armed Forces forces have remained firm in their resistance under the banner of a military equation: blockade for blockade and escalation for escalation.
Ongoing tales of Syrian chemical weapons
OPCW Inspector Ian Henderson responds regarding alleged newly-found, un-declared chemical weapons.
By Ian HENDERSON | Consortium News | October 11, 2026
If Douma, one of the highest-profile “proven” chemical attacks attributed to Syria’s former Bashar Assad government, has been shown to be fake, what does it say about new, undeclared Syrian chemical weapons that have supposedly been found?
It says we should be extremely skeptical about news of such discoveries.
I spent years compiling an insider’s analysis of the evolving Western narrative of Syrian chemical attacks while I was at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as well as afterwards.
My conclusion was it is nigh impossible to prove a negative in this situation; to say there had never been a chemical attack by the Syrian government forces.
However, when it came to high-profile allegations of such attacks in the Syrian towns of East Ghouta, Khan Sheykhoun, Ltamenah, Saraqib and Douma, there were fatal flaws in the official narratives.
There were unmistakable signs, clear to us on the inside, of fabrication.
The Douma attack eight years ago appeared to be the last of a series of chemical allegations against the regime.
Yet the saga continues. The OPCW sent a new mission to Syria this May to try to find alleged, undeclared chemical weapons from the government of Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted in 2024.
Before examining the intentions and results of this mission, it is useful to review how the Western-backed OPCW handled its investigation into the 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus.
I was an OPCW inspector on that mission and this is why I blew the whistle.
The Establishment Narrative
Just how much of the establishment narrative that blamed Assad for using chemical weapons be believed ?
Devised during the early part of the Western and Gulf-backed jihadist war to overthrow Assad a decade and a half ago – and built upon steadily by Western belligerents throughout the crisis – the story that Assad had “gassed his own people” was widely believed with mainstream media fully on board.
Doubters were glibly dismissed, including “official” dissenters such as some senior inspectors at the OPCW. I was among them.
The chemical allegations followed a well-oiled procedure. Armed opposition groups – who were seeking direct Western military intervention to support their effort to overthrow Assad – would raise the alarm online by posting slick images and videos of an alleged chemical attack.
These opposition groups, sometimes assisted by Western NGOs, would then bring supposed witnesses of these alleged attacks to Gaziantep in Turkey, where the OPCW would send fact-finding missions to interview them.
The OPCW would generally believe the opposition groups and their witnesses and accept items of supposed “evidence” handed over to them, sometimes months after the alleged attack. Until the Douma allegation in 2018, the fact-finding mission never got to the scene of any Syrian chemical attack after an initial attempt in 2014 went awry.
The fact-finding report would be secretly drafted under the direct control of OPCW top management, bypassing any procedural or technical oversight, and would conclude that it was “reasonable to believe” that a chemical attack had indeed taken place.
The follow-up investigations by the heavily politicized Joint Investigative Mechanism (J.I.M.), or by the later Investigation and Identification Team (I.I.T.), would suggest that “a reasonable person would believe” that the Syrian Armed Forces were responsible for the attack.
OPCW inspectors are not fools. Many of us saw what was going on, seeing the tight political control that the U.S. and to a lesser degree the U.K. exerted over anything to do with the Syrian file. But the draconian confidentiality regime in the OPCW kept everyone subdued.
The breakthrough came after the April 2018 Douma allegation.
For the first time, an OPCW team actually got to the scene of an alleged chemical attack, at the town of Douma, in southwestern Syria, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) northeast of Damascus.
We did our job thoroughly, and in doing so we identified serious flaws in the allegation.
OPCW Extreme Measures
The OPCW resorted to ever-escalating measures to bring things back on track. After trying to secretly modify the interim report by withdrawing it from publication and sneaking in the preordained conclusions that were required by influential delegations, senior OPCW officials went to extremes.
They removed all the team members who had gone to Douma and produced a flawed Fact Finding Mission report written by persons unknown, none of whom had much knowledge of what the Douma team had done.
The fact-finding report predictably found that “it was reasonable to believe” there had been an attack with chlorine in Douma. This was followed much later by the OPCW’s inevitable I.I.T. report that blamed the Syrian regime for the attack.
In reaching its conclusions, the drafters claimed, as usual, to have been informed by anonymous experts. The context in the reports was usually along the lines of the fact-finding mission (F.F.M.) “asked an expert about this and the expert said it was possible.” Many qualified experts and commentators, including me, consider this laughable.
The OPCW were going too far, and ultimately this led to the ongoing dispute where the two most senior and experienced inspectors in the F.F.M. team objected.
The drafter of the team’s interim report, Dr. Brendan Whelan (“Inspector B”), was one. I was the other. In my case I had also led the politically-mandated inspections at two facilities of the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre (S.S.R.C.) suspected of harbouring illicit chemical weapons activities.
Here again, we did our work thoroughly and in drafting the S.S.R.C. inspection reports I made clear that there was nothing amiss in either of the facilities.
This didn’t stop the U.S., U.K. and France from conducting punitive missile strikes on Barzah S.S.R.C., on the basis of social media postings on the Douma allegation, even before the OPCW team had arrived at the incident scene.
Rather than another detailed analysis of the Douma scandal, suffice it to say, the official Douma narrative has been clearly and scientifically picked apart by many credible observers, including by Dr. Whelan and myself.
This has been widely reported, although predictably not much in the mainstream media.
The OPCW and Western delegations have been in crisis management mode ever since the first leak, that of an internal engineering summary that cast doubt on the allegation that chlorine cylinders had been dropped from aircraft, raising the possibility that militants had placed the cylinders to stage the scene of a chemical attack.
I was the author of that report.
Nose of chlorine cylinder alleged to have smashed through a steel-reinforced concrete roof, April. 21, 2018. (OPCW, courtesy former Syrian government)
Worse still for the prevailing Douma narrative, Dr. Whelan recently won a legal case against the OPCW for their charges against him of confidentiality breaches.
In their submissions, the OPCW inadvertently admitted to suppressing the key toxicology assessment (incidentally by NATO specialists) that dismissed chlorine as the likely cause of death of deceased victims shown in images posted from the scene.
[See: OPCW Inadvertently Admitted Burying Critical Evidence on Syria Chemical Weapons Investigation]
The OPCW has refused to engage in any discussion on the facts and scientific substance of the case, ever since concerns were first raised by Dr. Whelan and myself.
This intransigence to re-open the file is likely dictated by the needs of the three belligerent governments that subjected Syria to punitive missile strikes in retaliation for the supposed Syrian chemical attack even before the Douma F.F.M. had started work.
Any updated or corrected findings on Douma would be inconvenient.
The New OPCW Mission
Still apparently seeking to prove its case, the OPCW formed a new Syria mission in May aimed at “finding” alleged missing, un-declared chemical weapons.
At the end of May the mission reported finding 42 empty chemical weapons munitions; a launcher; bomb-mixing units; precursor-type containers; a facility whose contents were not revealed and thousands of pages of documents that are still being reviewed.
The mission also found 650 kg of “a chemical compound known to have been used by the former government for the production of nerve agents,” which the report does not name. It says an unknown quantity of hexamine, a legal chemical with wide industrial use, was found but it is not clear if this is the same compound as in the 650 kg.
In September, the Syrian government, now under the leadership of a former al-Qaeda and ISIS leader, began destroying the empty bombs, but not any of the chemicals that were found, presumably meaning none were banned.
Despite all the fanfare of these results being presented at a U.N. Security Council meeting last month, it appears that the new OPCW mission came up as empty as those bombs.
None of these discoveries does anything to prove that Assad ever used a chemical weapon, in other words, nothing to prove that I, along with other OPCW officials and countless observers and commentators who challenged the Assad chemical weapons narrative were wrong.
Presumably after all the effort in creating that narrative, Western governments and mainstream media that promoted the Iraq war and then the Syrian conflict to achieve regime change in that country, require a tidier ending than the mess they made of the Iraqi WMD story.
An early press release from the OPCW is telling. It shows what they were attempting to prove with this May mission, in particular two rather flimsy suggestions.
They report the discovery of some of the empty munitions,
“including the same type of aerial bombs that were used in chemical attacks in Ltamenah in March 2017 and Khan Shaykhun in April 2017.”
This refers to empty M4000 aerial bombs, declared by the Syrians as part of their stockpile.
Aside from the questionable Douma-like irregularities surrounding “evidence” used by the OPCW to conclude that sarin-filled M4000 bombs were used in those attacks, it’s important to mention something else.
The Syrians had clearly explained to us that 2,000 of these bombs, never filled, had been set aside to be “repurposed,” in other words to be filled with high explosive to turn them into conventional munitions. These could turn up anywhere.
A second questionable statement in the press release is,
“Rockets were also found, of the same type as those that were used in the Ghouta chemical weapons attack in August 2013.”
This relates to artillery rockets crudely modified with a large cylindrical payload container added at the front.
For a start, the U.N./OPCW report of Ghouta did not attempt to identify the perpetrators of that sarin attack, since it was not part of their mandate. The accusations against the regime have always been political, something the mainstream media happily took up.
The Most Credible Analysis So Far
The Ghouta sarin attack took place on Aug. 21, 2013 and according to Western sources killed more than 1,000 people in the Damascus suburb.
The most serious investigation of the Ghouta incident to date points to the attack being launched from opposition-occupied positions, and remains the most credible analysis of the attack.
The opposition forces allegedly responsible were from the al-Nusra Front, which conducted joint operations in 2013 in the Damascus area with the Liwa Al Islam opposition group. Al-Nusra were known to be in possession of sarin, according to reporting by Seymour Hersh, who wrote:
“In the months before the [Aug. 21, 2013] attack [in Ghouta], the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.”
Indeed the U.N./OPCW team was in Damascus at the time of the attack in Ghouta because it was responding to an earlier request from the Syrian government to investigate chemical attacks against their forces.
The OPCW release also mentions a typical catch-all referring to “quantities of separately stored chemicals and related equipment, the nature of which is currently under technical analysis.”
There will always be suggestions of vague bits and pieces, rusty remnants that “may have been a part of” alleged undeclared elements of a chemical weapons program.
And, keep in mind, it’s been 22 months since the Assad government was ousted and their enemies in the opposition group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have been running the country.
So far as I can see, the OPCW hasn’t found anything remotely close to the desired smoking gun. Anything real, I should say.
Partners in the Anti-Assad Chemical Narrative
Syrian President Ahmaad Al Shaara, former Al Nusra/HTS fighter, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in New York City, September 2025. (State Department Photo, Wikimedia)
We need to keep in mind how this is working. There are three partners in this latest endeavour on the anti-Assad chemical narrative.
First, we have the Western governments, belligerents in the Syrian conflict, which worked hard on building the chemical narrative to delegitimise the regime.
The U.K. government offered specialists to check out suspected sites in Syria to prepare them for the May mission in order to “assist” the current government in finding evidence of hidden chemical weapons.
That leads us to the second group, the government in Syria, reportedly eager to please their Western sponsors in return for economic favours. They are the Al-Nusra/HTS extremists who, in the case of Douma, fabricated the scene to raise a chemical false flag allegation against the Assad.
The third partner is the OPCW.
That means the various groups who have been on this mission are a) those who staged scenes of chemical attacks; b) those who directed them to do so (including Western intelligence agents who allegedly coached and assisted them); and c) the organisation that went along with the narrative and dutifully produced reports damning the Assad regime.
It may appear to the reader that I’m suggesting that the OPCW reports on Syrian chemical weapons will continue to be little more than propaganda, the usual sexed-up nonsense. Perhaps so. In disputing this, these assertions will be dismissed as conspiracy theories.
However, this argument is weakened because the source of the alternative narrative is the scientists and senior inspectors (many “Western”) from within the OPCW teams, including the Douma fact-finding mission and Scientific Studies and Research Centre inspections.
This is why Douma remains a key element in the debate. If they did it once (and doggedly stuck to their guns), they probably did it before.
Many serious and eminent observers are imploring the OPCW to conduct a review of the Douma case, including by the OPCW’s own Scientific Advisory Board.
I see this being done by credible, independent and neutral experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, metallurgy and engineering, overseen by the relevant professional institutes.
These experts would report their findings transparently, putting their names and reputations behind their analysis. This will clear up the Douma controversy, either demonstrating that it could have actually happened as alleged, or demonstrating the flaws in the OPCW reports.
Exposing a clear and deliberate fraud would seriously weaken the Western narrative on alleged Syrian chemical attacks. Therefore, in my view, it is not going to happen under the purview of the OPCW.
Ever.
I don’t mean to suggest that those calling for a review are unrealistically hopeful. But the risks of such a review are perhaps too high for it ever to be envisaged by the Western group that was aligned with the efforts on regime change in Syria — chiefly the U.S., the U.K. and France.
This does not mean it can’t happen. There is more than enough open-source material, as well as now-unclassified facts, images, analysis results and information available from the OPCW itself, from former OPCW officials and inspectors, and held by Member States, that would support a credible in-depth review.
The basis for expert analysis would be the material used in the fact-finding mission and I.I.T. reports themselves.
By now we know there isn’t any “smoking gun” evidence. If there had been, it would have been cited in the mission and I.I.T. reports.
Trust me, this study will bear clear results. My hope is that someone sufficiently curious and responsible will commission and fund it.
Ian Henderson served as an OPCW inspector from the establishment of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, and was appointed as one of the first Inspection Team Leaders. An experienced chemical engineer with military experience, he led many of the more complex missions to more than 55 countries. After returning to a career in the chemical industry for 10 years he rejoined the OPCW in 2016 as part of the “rehire” scheme aimed at bringing back experienced inspectors. It was during this time that he became involved in the Syrian chemical weapons operations and, along with others, objected to the apparent influences of political control in the organization. He was suspended from the OPCW in May 2019 after the leak (by unknown others) of his dissenting engineering report on the Douma cylinders.
Saudi Arabia under fire… Yemen is burning down the House of Saud
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 16, 2026
The Saudi kingdom is facing the danger of collapse from soaring war costs as Yemeni air strikes ramp up, hitting its northern neighbor’s capital and industrial centers with impunity.
Yemeni journalist Hussein al-Bukhaiti says the corruption and arrogance of the “House of Evil” is culminating in historic defeat. Its U.S. patron seems unable to avert the coming collapse.
Despite decades of the U.S. selling weapons worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the Saudi rulers, the regime seems shockingly exposed, with no viable defenses. Yemen’s missiles are striking Saudi Arabia at will. The panicky rulers are pleading with the United States and Europe for help.
Yemen’s armed forces are taking the war to Saudi Arabia, striking its airports, imposing a no-fly zone over the entire state and shutting down its vital oil industry.
“The Saudis cannot stop our drones and hypersonic missiles… we are taking the war to them,” says Sanaa-based Hussain al-Bukhaiti.
With no oil exports, Al-Bukhaiti reckons the Saudi rulers are facing an existential nemesis. Many observers have long predicted that the autocratic Saudi kingdom, created by the British Empire, is awaiting downfall from its ossified and family-run power structure.
Speaking from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, Hussain al-Bukhaiti described the Saudi monarchy as “a house of glass” that is now being shattered by air strikes that cannot be defended against.
“Yemen did not want this war, but we are bringing the fire back to Saudi Arabia.”
Western politicians and media are portraying the conflict between the two Arab Peninsula countries as being caused by recent aggression from the Ansar Allah-led Yemeni government.
Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid international airport was attacked on October 10 with ballistic missiles that killed several people. Other Saudi airports have also been hit. This has led international airlines to suspend flights.
The state-owned Aramco oil industry has also been blasted with missiles. Fires are raging at major facilities, including at the main base of operations in Dammam on the Persian Gulf coast.
Following the missile strike on Riyadh airport at the weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump and all European leaders condemned an “act of terrorism” by Yemen.
Hussain al-Bukhaiti pointed out the gross hypocrisy of European governments not condemning the thousands of Saudi air strikes on Yemen that have occurred since 2015. These governments still remain silent about the ongoing Saudi atrocities against Yemeni civilians. The European Union even declares “solidarity” with Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarchy, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, started the war with unprovoked attacks in March 2015. The aggression was enabled by the United States, Britain, and France supplying warplanes, bombs, and intelligence.
These Western powers continue to arm and direct the Saudi regime in its war against Yemen.
Since 2015, there have been thousands of Western-backed air strikes on Yemen, resulting in more than 20,000 mainly civilian deaths.
“They hit everything, schools, hospitals, water-treatment plants, farms, homes, wedding and funeral halls,” says Al-Bukhaiti.
In addition, over 400,000 Yemenis have died from starvation and diseases caused by a blockade on the country imposed by Saudi Arabia and its Western backers for over 10 years.
He says the war reignited in July 2026 after the Saudis broke a four-year truce signed in 2022 by bombing Sanaa international airport. There was no condemnation by Europe of the Saudi violation then.
What Yemen is doing to Saudi Arabia now is but a taste of what the House of Saud inflicted on Yemenis since 2015 with Western support.
The Yemenis this week rejected a reported Saudi proposal for a short-term truce because they see it as just a ploy by the Saudis for rearming and regrouping in a losing situation.
For the war to end, Saudi Arabia must respect Yemen’s sovereignty and stop interfering in its internal affairs.
However, Hussain al-Bukhaiti thinks that the United States will double down and escalate its military involvement in Yemen with a full-blown war. This is not primarily to support the Saudi monarchy, he believes, but rather to prop up the Israeli regime.
Yemen has inflicted huge damage on the Israeli state since it intensified the genocide against Palestinians in October 2023. Yemeni air strikes have repeatedly struck Tel Aviv despite American air defenses.
An expanded U.S. war in Yemen might seem surprising given that Trump has made such a mess of his reckless aggression against Iran and may not have the military forces at his disposal.
But Al-Bukhaiti believes the issue is beyond Trump’s choice. Washington is locked in with the Zionist regime and will do whatever it takes to salvage Israel from defeat. Yemen represents the biggest threat to Israel from the cutting off of its shipping in the Red Sea.
“We are ready for the war that is coming,” he warns.
Sally Rooney’s books pulled from UK over support for Palestine Action
Al Mayadeen| October 15, 2026
Irish novelist Sally Rooney has agreed to the withdrawal of her books from the UK market after her support for Palestine Action created legal obstacles to the payment of royalties under British terrorism legislation.
Rooney, the bestselling author of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, said her publisher, Faber, had concluded that continuing to distribute her work in the UK could expose those involved to criminal liability. The decision was made with her agreement following consultations over the legal implications.
Palestine Action was designated a “terrorist organization” by the UK government in July 2025. The following month, Rooney publicly declared that she intended to continue supporting the group and direct proceeds from her book sales towards it. The organization remains legal in the Republic of Ireland, where Rooney is based.
Rooney was prepared to accept the consequences
In a statement to The Guardian, Rooney explained that her position had placed the publication of her work in Britain at risk.
She said that after expressing her intention to support Palestine Action, fulfilling contracts to publish her books in the UK could constitute a serious criminal offence. Rooney added that she had been transparent about her convictions and was prepared to accept the consequences.
The novelist had previously cancelled a planned UK visit to collect an award over concerns that she could face arrest because of her stated support for the banned group.
Terrorism legislation threatens publishing arrangements
Rooney warned in a statement supporting the legal challenge against the ban that the proscription could prevent her existing books from remaining available in British shops and block the publication of future titles in the country. Her submission to the High Court raised concerns about the consequences for freedom of expression.
The restrictions also extend to royalties from television adaptations of her work. Last year, Rooney said the independent producer behind the BBC adaptations of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends” had advised her that paying her could breach terrorism legislation if it knew or suspected she would use the money to finance Palestine Action. Both series aired before the group was banned.
Section 15 of the UK’s Terrorism Act criminalizes providing money or other property when a person knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect that it may be used for terrorist purposes. A conviction can carry a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
Faber, which publishes Rooney in the UK and Ireland, said the legislation had left it unable to transfer earnings from British sales to the author.
The publisher said selling a writer’s work without being able to pay them was unacceptable. It confirmed that, with Rooney’s full agreement, it would stop supplying her books in Britain in every format, while continuing to publish and sell her work in other markets.
Bestselling novels face uncertain future in Britain
Rooney’s novels have received widespread critical acclaim and achieved substantial commercial success. She has been hailed as a voice of her generation.
“Normal People” has sold more than one million copies in the UK, while “Conversations With Friends” and “Beautiful World, Where Are You” have each exceeded 500,000 sales.
The BBC adaptations also attracted large audiences. “Normal People” accumulated 62.7 million views, making it the broadcaster’s most-streamed series of 2020.
Demand was likely to continue
Despite the withdrawal decision, copies of Rooney’s books remained available in central London on Wednesday afternoon. Waterstones said retailers could continue selling copies already in stock.
Booksellers also indicated that they intended to keep offering the novels while existing supplies lasted.
Gian Carlo, a bookseller at Henry Pordes Books, said the shop could sell its copies without generating royalties for Rooney. He added that he understood her position.
At London Review Bookshop, bookseller John Clegg said he had ordered additional copies after learning of the development. He said demand was likely to continue, although the shop would no longer be able to replenish its stock through Faber. Clegg also criticized the legislation and said he hoped the case would encourage the Home Office to reconsider it.
Thousands arrested following Palestine Action ban
The dispute comes amid a wider legal battle over the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action.
More than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested in the UK since the ban took effect in July 2025 on suspicion of supporting the organization. Many arrests involved people holding placards bearing the message: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
Approximately 2,500 people have been charged. However, trials have not proceeded while the legal challenge to the proscription remains unresolved. The case is scheduled to reach the Supreme Court next month.
Effect of the ban on freedom of expression
Most arrests and charges have involved Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, which carries a maximum prison sentence of six months.
Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action leading the legal challenge, said Rooney’s inability to publish her work in Britain demonstrated the effect of the ban on freedom of expression.
Ammori said Rooney had maintained her position despite the personal and professional consequences. She argued that the author’s books should remain widely available rather than disappear from British shelves because of her refusal to abandon her support for Palestinians.
She added that writers should not have to choose between their political convictions and their ability to publish their work.
Declassified UK exposes British man who fought for ‘Israel’ in Gaza
Al Mayadeen| October 14, 2026
A four-month investigation by Declassified UK has identified a British man who fought with the Israeli occupation army in Gaza and found evidence linking him to a unit involved in the destruction of residential buildings and an incident involving a school that was set on fire.
Jonathan Burman, a Manchester native in his mid-20s, posted photographs on his private Instagram account showing himself serving with the Israeli occupation army in Khan Younis early in the Gaza war, according to the exclusive investigation published by Declassified UK.
Newly obtained photographs show Burman standing beside another soldier in front of a burning primary school in Gaza. The images were posted in January 2024, around six weeks after Israeli forces entered and took control of the school.
The investigation comes after a UN commission said Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza after October 2023 should be considered potential suspects in war crimes investigations.
An analysis of Israeli occupation army documents linked Burman to a unit that repeatedly destroyed residential buildings in Gaza. A former Israeli soldier who served in the same battalion told Declassified UK that the conditions in Gaza amounted to an “absolute apocalypse”.
“You could just go and do whatever you want… You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever,” he said, as per Declassified UK.
Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which “Israel” has ratified, “extensive destruction…of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitutes a war crime.
An Israeli occupation military spokesperson told Declassified UK that weapons had been found at the school shown in Burman’s photographs but provided footage from a different school as evidence.
Burning school in Khan Younis
According to six witnesses and experts interviewed by Declassified UK, the school shown in Burman’s photographs was Al-Farabi Primary School in the Bani Suheila area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
Palestinian civilians who sheltered there told Declassified UK that they had sought refuge because the school was operated by UNRWA. Satellite imagery from November 2023 showed white tarpaulins covering the playground and the initials “UN” visible on its roof.
The civilians said they were forced to leave in December 2023 as Israeli forces advanced into the area.
Ayman Sahmoud, 56, told Declassified UK that he and his family sought refuge at the school after being forced from their home by Israeli bombardment and evacuation orders.
“We left our home with nothing,” he recalled. “We abandoned everything behind us. When we arrived at the school, it was already overflowing with displaced families… We could barely find a place to sleep.”
Sahmoud said repeated attacks on an area adjacent to the school shook the building and that the surrounding area was systematically demolished.
“After some time, the Israeli military bombed the school’s main gate,” he said. “Two people were killed right before our eyes. At that moment, we understood the message was clear: we had to evacuate the school completely.”
He said Israeli aircraft then dropped leaflets ordering displaced Palestinians to leave, forcing his family and others to flee toward Rafah.
Randa Abu Assi, 42, also told Declassified UK that she remained at the school until December 2023 as bombardment intensified.
“My foot was struck by shrapnel,” she said. “My son, Bahaa, 21 years old, was also wounded by shrapnel that remains lodged in both of his legs to this day.”
“We fled under fire and survived by a miracle,” she added.
Abu Assi later learned that Israeli forces had entered the school on December 12, 2023. Arabic-language reports cited by Declassified UK also documented Israeli troops entering the school and detaining Palestinians there.
Geolocation links photographs to Al-Farabi school
The school lies beyond the “Yellow Line” in Gaza and remains under Israeli military occupation following last year’s ceasefire agreement between “Israel” and Hamas, according to Declassified UK.
Three witnesses identified the building in Burman’s photographs as Al-Farabi School. Declassified UK also submitted the photographs to three geolocation experts, who independently identified the location as the same school.
Ryan Geitner of Airwars compared Burman’s photographs with Reuters footage filmed in April 2024 showing a destroyed school in Khan Younis.
“Reviewing footage from Reuters and the photos posted to social media, we have a high level of certainty that this is the same location.
“Satellite imagery indicates that the school suffered major damage in the months after November 2023, signs of which are visible in both sets of material.”
The Hind Rajab Foundation’s analysis of Israeli occupation army documents further suggested that Burman may not have been stationed at the school until January 8, 2024, weeks after Israeli forces had removed Palestinian civilians.
‘Erase them, their families, mothers and children.’
Another photograph posted by Burman and captioned “Khan Yunis” shows him kneeling with a rifle among destroyed residential buildings, with an overturned bed and a child’s bicycle visible in the rubble.
The Israeli occupation military indicated to Declassified UK that Burman served in the 55th Reserve Paratrooper Brigade, while the Hind Rajab Foundation found evidence suggesting he served in its 66th Battalion, B Company.
Yuval Green, a former medic in the same battalion, described the atmosphere among soldiers before and during the Gaza operation.
The battalion commander, Ofir Adani, reportedly told soldiers before they entered Gaza, “I want you to be angry. I want you to rage. I want you to have a deep sense of revenge. Anyone who messes with us should die. He and his family. And his relatives. And everyone who supported him.”
Green also recalled a speech by Ezra Yachin, who had been involved in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians.
“This guy comes to us, a group of soldiers, and he’s just telling the story of how he massacred villagers… and no one blinks an eye. And I think this shows you very very well what type of atmosphere we’ve had before we went into Gaza. The writing was on the wall.”
Footage from another event shows Yachin telling soldiers, “Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”
Asked about Burman’s photographs in front of the burning school, Green said he “felt awful. [It] really takes me back to one of the worst times of my life.”
“Look at their smiles. It’s just, you know, that’s the first time they’re burning down a building. For them, it’s some type of a crazy experience. And they don’t think about the consequences because it’s a place without rules.”
Green also described the destruction of residential properties during his deployment. “Fifty days after we went into Gaza, they’re telling us to burn down the houses we were at.
“And I go to my commander and ask him, why are we burning down those houses? And he has no good answer. Absolutely no good answer. If you were to destroy a house in London, you live in a country of law. You live in an organized country. No one can just go and burn down the house.”
“But this war zone is a wild west. No rules. Absolute apocalypse. So you could just go and do whatever you want. You can go and steal whatever you want from those houses. You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever. And I went to him and I told him, if we’re burning down those houses, I’m leaving the next day. I’m not willing to be a part of it. This is the last straw. And, that’s what happened. They burnt down the houses. I went back, and this was it.”
Burman later served in Lebanon and Syria
Burman’s Instagram photographs also show him relaxing with fellow soldiers during his deployment, including a December 31, 2023 photograph of him in occupation military uniform sitting inside the ruins of a house. He captioned it “happy new year” and identified the location as the “Gaza Strip.”
On January 31, 2024, he wrote, “I’ve been out of Gaza for a few days now.”
Israeli Army Radio reported that the 55th Brigade had withdrawn from Gaza on January 28.
Declassified UK also found evidence suggesting Burman later served in Lebanon and Syria. In November 2024, he posted photographs identifying his location as Lebanon, including one showing him with his weapon beside him. A post dated October 6, 2025, showed him in Syria.
Burman later returned to Britain, where his social media showed him attending a Manchester United match at Old Trafford on May 17.
According to Declassified UK, Burman grew up in Manchester, attended Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, and moved to “Israel” in 2019, where he joined the Israeli occupation army.
UN investigator calls for further investigation
Burman is among more than 2,000 British nationals who served in the Israeli occupation army during the Gaza genocide, according to a previous Declassified UK investigation.
The British government does not track British nationals serving in the Israeli army, while returning soldiers have not been routinely questioned about their activities. The Metropolitan Police previously declined to investigate 10 British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza before reopening probes into four of them.
More than 25,000 people have signed a letter calling on the British government to track British nationals who have served in the Israeli army, screen them at ports of entry, and support investigations into alleged war crimes.
Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and member of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told Declassified UK that its investigative methodology was consistent with that used by the commission.
“We have found that there are very large numbers of digital material published by Israeli soldiers or soldiers serving with the Israeli forces about their exploits.
“The boastfulness of these soldiers is quite incredible but they produce material like the material that you describe that put themselves at places where war crimes have been committed or at least serious events have occurred that give rise to the possibility of war crimes, crimes against humanity and post it openly on social media accounts.
“So that information is important information, it’s almost confessional information and in many cases it is confessional. I note that you’re not saying this person is guilty of war crimes, we don’t say that either, we say that the evidence is sufficient to support further investigation and prosecution where warranted. I think that’s exactly correct.”
Sidoti said the Metropolitan Police’s war crimes unit should examine Burman’s activities, adding, “There is the obligation that when this person is within the jurisdiction of that state there should be an investigation and prosecution when warranted.”
West’s death cult in a theater near you
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 14, 2026
It’s hard to know whether to break the TV set or throw up when listening to the European governments rushing to condemn the air strike by Yemeni forces on Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid international airport.
The blast from a ballistic missile that slammed into the airport at the weekend, October 12, killed at least 13 civilians and injured scores of other travellers. Horrific video footage shows the moment the missile explosion ripped through a terminal lounge.
European leaders immediately in a coordinated fashion trotted out condemnations of Yemeni “terrorism” and vowed solidarity and support for Saudi Arabia. U.S. President Donald Trump called it “a terrible thing.” (As if bombing schoolchildren is not quite a terrible thing.)
Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and Spain all issued strident denunciations of the Yemeni attack.
The strike on the Saudi capital came after the Ansar Allah-led Yemen Armed Forces had given ample warning to the Saudis that their airports would be targeted and for civilians to avoid the areas. The airports were kept open for business as usual. The Yemenis have said that the attack on Riyadh and other Saudi airports are retaliation for weeks of multiple air strikes by the Saudis on Yemeni civilian centers.
Hundreds of Yemeni civilians have been killed since Saudi Arabia broke a four-year truce with an air strike on the international airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, on July 13. Saudi warplanes, U.S.-supplied F-15s and European Typhoon jets, have been continously bombing homes across Yemen. This week, two days after the Riyadh strike, at least nine people including five children were killed in air raids on houses in Taiz city and in northern al Jawf province. Al Masirah TV footage showed a distraught father holding up a child’s shredded body amid rubble. There was no condemnation of that atrocity from any European leader.
As Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, former Irish Members of the European Parliament, point out in their podcast this week, the official European reaction is utter hypocrisy and a cynical distortion of the conflict on the Arabian Peninsula.
Britain and France in particular, along with the United States, have backed the Saudi aggression against Yemen beginning in 2015. Over seven years, that aggression killed up to 400,000 Yemenis through air strikes and a blockade on humanitarian needs.
The European Union remained largely silent for seven years. No protests were made to Washington, Paris or London. Ambassadors were not summoned, sanctions were not imposed.
The return to hostilities that began with Saudi air strikes on Sanaa in July have been enabled by U.S. and Britain supplying warplanes, military advisors and intelligence.
None of the European governments have bothered to condemn this recent U.S. and UK-backed slaughter.
So, it is nauseating when one hears British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband saying he is “appalled” by the strike on Riyadh airport. And other European leaders vowing “full solidarity with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul condemned Yemen’s “terrorist act.”
His French counterpart said France stood with Saudi Arabia “in defending its territory and infrastructue.” (No mention of what the Saudis have been doing for years to Yemen’s territory.)
Referring to the strike on Riyadh without any context, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni said: “Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are unacceptable and must cease.” (Yes, indeed, so why not tell that to the Saudis who are doing it deliberately on a massive scale with support from Washington and London?)
What is instructive here is not just the sickening hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. It is the manifestation of a systematic corruption and criminal responsibility. This is not just one more example of a flawed European political class whose judgement is suspect. What is increasingly apparent is the totality of the corruption.
The same European supporters of Saudi monarchs waging a genocidal war on Yemen are also contemporaneously supporting the Israeli Zionist regime in its extermination of Palestinians. They are complicit in enabling the U.S. aggression against Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. They are sponsors of the NeoNazi regime in Kiev to keep fighting a proxy war against Russia despite more than one million Ukrainian military casualties and the risk of nuclear conflagration.
The death cult of Western capitalism is on full display in multiple theaters, exposing the organic evil at work. There is sense that all of Western imperialist history is now on display in one final orgy of barbarity.
In previous times, the death cult operated discreetly in seemingly disparate conflict scenarios. Wars on different continents seemed somehow unconnected. The Western media would in the past reliably cover up the crimes by distorting the motives and objectives with false narratives and (laughable) claims of noble purpose. The West was “defending democracy,” “fighting communism,” “protecting human rights,” or “waging war on terrorism,” or some other pretext that in isolation and with loads of media propaganda managed to fool a lot of people as somehow plausible.
What’s happening now, it seems, is a concatenation of wars that ultimately exposes the essential system that drives the violence, and its insatiable lust for human suffering.
It is impossible to work for such a vile system, the death cult of capitalism, without also being oblivious to its evil ways. To remain oblivious necessitates denial or lies. That deception might be tenable for occasional and seemingly disparate scenarios. But not when the system is exposed in its infernal entirety.
American and European wars in the past might have succeeded in being sold to the Western public as one-off wars and misadventures. We think of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Latin American, Africa, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more recently Libya.
In more recent years, as consciousness evolved, the public began discerning and decrying “endless wars”.
But now the world is witnessing a totalizing of the war machine that goes by the name of “Western democracy”.
What’s happening in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Yemen is not coincidence. It is the death cult on display and unable to hide itself. It manifests too in attacking and locking up Western citizens who condemn genocide or who simply call for peace.
Capitalism, fascism, wars, the Epstein class, endemic poverty and suffering – it’s a death cult in a theater near you.
The politicians, governments, media and pundits who promote it or serve it are seen for what they are.
How the Yandex ‘Russian bots’ lie fell apart
RT | October 14, 2026
Did Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers destroy the Kremlin’s pro-MAGA bot army? Or are Vladimir Zelensky and his European patrons insulting their citizens with remedial-grade propaganda? RT takes a trip down the rabbit hole.
Ukrainian forces hit three Yandex (Russia’s equivalent to Google) data centers with long-range drones between October 8 and 11. Yandex confirmed that operations were “completely halted” at the facility struck on October 8, and temporarily halted at the center struck on October 11. This much is true, but the story that followed veers into NAFO fiction.
How did the ‘Russian bots’ story begin?
On October 8, American cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler posted a Cloudflare graph showing a dramatic drop in “bot traffic” after the first Yandex center was hit. As Yandex is primarily a search company, its bots crawl the internet indexing content for users. All search engines function in this way, but Fowler – either through malice or ignorance – conflated this search bot activity with social media bot activity, claiming that the drop in traffic could “disrupt the midterm elections in the US.”
The story spread, hitting the mainstream media on October 11 when Tom’s Hardware published an article claiming that “Russian disinformation bot traffic” had been “nearly eliminated” after the strikes. The word “disinformation” was later pulled from the headline, but the tale had already taken on a life of its own.
That same day, an AI-created graph began circulating, claiming that “Russian bots” were making 56% fewer posts in support of Germany’s right-wing AfD party in the aftermath of the strikes. The graph, which was unsourced and had one axis unlabeled, measured the “decline in activity of Russian bots” up to October 15, four days in the future at the time it appeared online.
Regardless, the graph was shared by a Green Party councillor in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, and by Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky. “This is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets,” Zdechovsky wrote on social media. “So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down.”
Who spread the lie?
By October 12, the story had been reported by Germany’s Der Standard and Focus. That morning, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky spread it further, claiming at the Warsaw Security Forum that his strikes on Yandex data centers had made it “a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.”
“A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” Zelensky continued. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from. If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems,” he added.
Speaking on the sidelines of the forum, Polish minister Tomasz Siemoniak claimed that the country’s domestic intelligence agency was “observing a significant, radical decline in Russian bot activity online,” while Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius said that “we should ask Mr. Zelensky to hit more data centres in Russia” to “protect” elections in the EU.
Anti-Kremlin activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov weighed in, claiming that “the Russian troll bots” in his X feed had “dropped dramatically,” while former US ambassador Michael McFaul thanked the Ukrainian weapons industry for granting him reprieve from “daily” harassment by “armies of Russian bots.”
The only problem was none of this was true, and based on the replies to McFaul’s tweet, nobody was buying it.
How was the bots story debunked?
The story didn’t take long to fall apart. Common Consultancy, a Scandinavian NGO that has previously accused Russia of orchestrating social media influence campaigns, concluded that there was “no visible effect” on pro-MAGA or pro-AfD social media posts after the Yandex strikes. Leonid Volkov, an anti-Kremlin activist associated with deceased opposition figure Alexey Navalny, slammed Zdechovsky for spreading “nonsense and falsehood.”
CeMAS, a liberal German think tank, stated that it was “not seeing a drop in the number of posts that could be explained by an attack on data centers.” The Hasso Plattner Institute and Polisphere, two tech nonprofits, concurred, and German newspapers began quietly editing their articles on Monday night.
Some, like Merkur, kept “speculation about Russian bots and the AfD” in their headlines. Others, including Der Standard, noted that their “original assertion of a confirmed connection [between the strikes and alleged bot activity] has been corrected.” The Verge, a tech-focused American news site, admitted that “the Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots.”
Is this hybrid war?
By the time the story was debunked and corrected, the damage was done. In the public’s eye, the strikes were tied to a drop in “Russian bot” activity, and none of the speakers at the Warsaw Security Forum, including senior Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian officials, bothered to correct the record.
These same leaders have spent the last two months amping up their accusations of “hybrid war” – acts of sabotage, disinformation, and cyber-harassment that do not rise to the level of actual war – against Russia, with Berlin’s foreign intelligence chief warning last week that Moscow’s supposed “shadow war” against the West could see Germany “becoming embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia.”
That none of the acts of “hybrid war” – among them the discovery of a suspicious drone at Leipzig Airport in August, and a series of unsubstantiated drone sightings across Germany and Scandinavia last year – have been linked by evidence to Russia is a feature, not a bug. “Hybrid war” is by its very nature unprovable, and the accusation alone is enough for European leaders to justify their deepening proxy war in Ukraine, their remilitarization and expansion of the national security state at home.
Furthermore, the accusations themselves are a form of “hybrid warfare” against the European public, analyst Thomas Fazi argued last week. “Europeans,” he wrote, “are being subjected to a sustained campaign of cognitive or psychological warfare aimed at conditioning them to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia.”
Who stands to gain?
For Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats (CDU), accusations of ‘hybrid warfare” and “AfD bots” serve a much more petty and venal political end. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is less popular now than at any point in his political career, and with the AfD trouncing the CDU in state elections and leading his party by ten points in opinion polls, Merz has taken every opportunity available to tie his opponents to Russia.
“We in Germany will not allow ourselves to be divided, not by hybrid attacks, not by Moscow-bot-driven hate speech on social media, and – if I may say so – not even by the slogans of the AfD and its Russian backers,” the chancellor said in a speech earlier this month.
The Yandex story – which conveniently linked the AfD to “Moscow-bot-driven hate speech” – was a godsend to Merz, and to his Ukrainian and Eastern European allies, who have an interest in preventing the Ukraine-skeptic AfD from taking power in Germany. Unfortunately for them, like all “hybrid war” claims, it fell apart the moment it was subjected to some basic scrutiny.
Burnham’s ‘Russia did Brexit’ ruse crumbles
RT | October 14, 2026
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s attempt to blame Russia for the Brexit vote is a crude attempt to undo the referendum and tie the UK back to Brussels. It’s also imploding dramatically.
In an appearance on the ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast on Sunday, Burnham said that he sought answers about alleged meddling in the 2016 Brexit referendum after taking office this summer.
“I asked the question coming to Downing Street: Well, was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”
Burnham did not identify who had provided the assessment or present any evidence to back it up. Nor did he say whether the alleged interference actually affected the result of the referendum. However, he insisted that anti-establishment movements in Britain, France, and Germany – where Chancellor Friedrich Merz has claimed that the right-wing AfD are “Russian-backed” – are “instigated via our enemies, namely Russia.”
Haven’t we heard this all before?
On June 23, 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU by a margin of 51.89% to 48.11%. The vote was largely driven by a public desire to reclaim sovereignty, control immigration, and humiliate the country’s political elites, the majority of whom favored continued EU membership.
Six months later, Labour MP Ben Bradshaw announced in parliament that Russia “probably interfered” in the vote. Bradshaw conceded that “we do not have the evidence for that yet, but it is highly probable.” His claims were picked up by media outlets in Britain and the US, where the ‘Russiagate’ hoax was taking root in Washington.
A parliamentary committee stated in April 2017 that the collapse of a voter-registration website in the runup to the referendum could have been the work of a Russian or Chinese denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. In November of that year, City University alleged that 13,000 bot accounts – some of them Russian – were tweeting about Brexit before and after the referendum.
X, then called Twitter, rejected the City University study, stating that it found no evidence linking the bot accounts with Russia; separate research tying Russia to the ‘leave’ campaign was found to be fabricated by an anti-Brexit group funded by liberal billionaire George Soros; and in 2020, a parliamentary report found “no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum.” At the time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that “a retrospective assessment of the EU referendum is not necessary” in light of the report.
All of this begs the question: ten years after the Brexit vote, why is Burnham conjuring up the specter of “Russian interference” again?
Burnham’s big break
Burnham’s political maneuvering is obvious here. The British PM has repeatedly said that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU, and two weeks before appearing on ‘The Rest is Politics’, he opened his speech at the UN General Assembly with a reference to Brexit, lamenting that “my country has lived through the disruption it brought.”
Speaking at his Labour Party’s annual conference a week later, Burnham argued that “Brexit has done more harm than good.” The following day he pledged to forge closer relations with Brussels and, if politically feasible, “go all the way” and rejoin the union.
Burnham has refused to say whether he intends to run his next election campaign on a platform of EU membership. However, he has promised to have “a serious dialogue about the different options for our relationship in the long-term” when he meets EU leaders in Brussels next month.
With the UK and EU both embroiled in a proxy war with Russia, there is no more effective way to delegitimize the Brexit vote at the moment than by tying it to Moscow. Burnham made this explicit in an address to Parliament on October 12, arguing that it would be “a dereliction of duty” not to pursue closer relations with the EU, given Russia’s alleged interference in the referendum.
The hoax crumbles
The prime minister’s confidence began to crumble under questioning. Asked by Conservative MP Julian Lewis “exactly how he thinks Russia was able to alter the result of the referendum,” Burnham replied that Moscow’s interference in British elections was “a matter of record,” without elaborating further.
Responding to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Burnham claimed that he never implied that the result of the referendum was invalid, before repeating the same “matter of record” line.
Burnham’s lack of evidence became clear when his foreign secretary, Stephen Doughty, appeared on ITV’s ‘Good Morning Britain’ the same day.
“What did Russia do during that Brexit referendum?” host Susanna Reid asked Doughty, who responded that he was “not going to get into the specifics.”
“Why are you not getting into specifics when the Prime Minister has just got into the specifics on the podcast?” Reid pressed.
Asked repeatedly about Russian interference in the Brexit vote, Doughty gave a variation on “Russia attempts to interfere in all of our democratic processes. They’ve been doing this for many, many years” every time.
“This is embarrassing,” co-host Ed Balls interjected. “It’s really bad for politics when you just blatantly don’t answer the question on something so important and go back to a nonsensical line, which is contradicted by what the prime minister just said.”
The final nail in the coffin came from MI5 Director Ken McCallum. McCallum is no stranger to anti-Russian opportunism, having pushed for mass internet surveillance to prevent Russia causing “mayhem on British and European streets.” However, he warned on Tuesday against exaggerating “Russian influence” on Brexit, arguing that debating the influence of “Russian trolls” on the vote “play[s] into our adversaries’ hands by making these trolls look 10ft tall.”
The Burnham playbook
Burnham has a habit of making extraordinary claims without the extraordinary evidence to back them up. After five Londoners were arrested outside RAF Fairford in an apparent terror bust last month, the British PM told the BBC that there are “strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened.”
The five men – plus two more suspects arrested afterwards – have all been released on bail. No explosives were found in their vehicles, and no link between the men and the Iranian government has been established, according to all available information. However, Burnham told the BBC that “we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part,” before telling Parliament that the supposed terror plot was “almost certainly” directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Tehran has described the incident as “a clumsy false-flag operation,” aimed at “advancing an anti-Iran campaign and evading accountability for Britain’s involvement in the US-Israeli military aggression against the Iranian people.”
Likewise, Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the Brexit referendum. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described Burnham’s allegations as “the latest baseless accusations made without any proof.”
One final irony
Burnham’s claim would never have been torn apart in parliament, in the media, and by his own domestic intelligence agency had ‘The Rest is Politics’ host Alastair Campbell [not] pushed back and demanded evidence or elaboration. However, Campbell has a track record of embellishing facts to suit political narratives, with disastrous consequences.
Campbell was serving as then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications adviser in 2002 when he ordered a dossier on “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction” to be “sexed up” in order to make a stronger case for joining the US-led invasion, according to Defense Ministry expert Dr David Kelly.
An inquiry found that Campbell changed multiple lines within the dossier to make Iraq appear more threatening. Among them was a line stating that Iraqi forces “may be able to deploy” chemical weapons against British troops within 45 minutes of receiving an order, which became “are able to deploy.”
Campbell then compiled a second dossier, now known as the “Dodgy Dossier.” This document contained plagiarized and fabricated claims about Iraq’s intelligence services, alleging that they were concealing weapons of mass destruction and “supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes.” None of these claims were true.
The second dossier was published in February 2003. Five weeks later, Parliament held a vote to join the invasion, with Burnham one of 139 Labour MPs voting in favor of the war. Burnham has since said that, if he could go back to 2003, he “wouldn’t have voted for it.”
More than two decades later, Burnham is once again making “dodgy dossier”-tier accusations in service of two foreign conflicts, and in aid of his own political ambitions.
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TV Drama Review
Japanese drama projects Japan’s wartime atrocities onto Chinese characters
Global Times | October 25, 2026
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue
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