UK « Aletho News

The Blair Charge Sheet

By John Andrews | Dissident Voice | January 31, 2015

On the 21st January the UK’s Channel 4 news had a discussion about the fact that the long-awaited Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the illegal war in Iraq will not be released until after the general election in March. On the 29th of January a sizeable group of demonstrators protested outside the Houses of Parliament against the continuing suppression of the Chilcot Report — now five years late. Whilst this story was covered on Russia Today, not a single mention of it was made on the BBC’s six o’ clock news. None of this is surprising: both Labour and the Tories were complicit in authorising the unlawful adventure in Iraq, therefore neither will want the unhelpful publicity the inquiry might generate.

In the Channel 4 show, John Rentoul was appearing representing Tony Blair’s position. Mr Rentoul is apparently Blair’s biographer. If there’s one book that’s surely not worth the paper it’s written on, that must be it; because Mr Rentoul’s spirited defence of Blair suggested very strongly that impartial record-making is not likely to be much in evidence in his book. For Blair is surely the most evil person that Britain has produced in recent times, and anything that suggests otherwise is being very economical with the truth. The award for most wicked monster in modern times was undoubtedly held by Margaret Thatcher, until Blair came along. Let’s consider some of the more obvious charges against him.

When he was first brought to power in 1997, it was because the country was sick to death of years of Thatcherism (the “austerity” of its day). Margaret Thatcher was primarily responsible for starting the ruination of Britain, as it was she who began the plundering of public assets (selling-off public utilities such as British Rail and British Airways, British Gas and British Telecom), and the killing-off of Britain’s manufacturing base – the main source of the nation’s wealth. Thatcher was unquestionably a monster, but at least she never seriously pretended to be anything else: she was, after all, a Tory. If you vote Tory that’s the sort of thing you should expect to get. Blair, on the other hand, was quite different: he was also a traitor. In 1997 people voted for him in their millions expecting traditional Labour values to scrap the years of painful plundering, and a fresh start to rebuilding the country. What they got was yet more and more painful plundering. So that’s the first major charge against Blair: his utter betrayal of British voters in general, and Labour voters in particular.

Then, of course, came the illegal war in Iraq in 2003. We’ll possibly never know the full truth behind Blair’s involvement in this, but that he was hugely complicit in what was unquestionably a massive war crime is beyond doubt. So that’s the second charge against Blair: he’s a war criminal.

Those two charges are more than enough to ensure the man is forever reviled – on a par even with the worst of the worst Nazi war criminals. The Nazis could at least have pleaded that there was no historical precedent for such a thing as war crime. Nuremberg eliminated that excuse. In other words Blair, who is a trained lawyer, should have known full well he was committing a war crime. He just didn’t care. His hubris is such that he clearly deems himself above the law.

However, there’s something else that must not be forgotten, a charge that is arguably even more serious than the first two. When Blair ordered a country that was mostly opposed to war to subordinate itself to the American war criminal George Bush, he immediately signed the death warrants of 179 British military personnel and, which is even worse, ordered tens of thousands of British military personnel to become war criminals themselves, just like him. Although it’s highly unlikely that any British soldier will ever have to appear in a court of law to face such charges, the fact is that in theory at least they could. In theory, every man and woman who took part in Bush’s illegal war could be charged with committing a war crime; because Nuremberg ensured, rightly, that the plea of “just following orders” is no longer an acceptable excuse for taking part in the greatest abomination that human beings are capable of committing: war.

If there were such a thing as real justice Tony Blair should spend the rest of his days behind bars, and there are plenty of others who should join him.

February 1, 2015 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | BBC, Chilcot Inquiry, Tony Blair, UK | Leave a comment

Israeli False Flags and the Attack on Rev. Stephen Sizer

By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | January 31, 2015

The counterfeit hoopla surrounding the Charlie Hebdo ‘free speech’ saga was further undermined this week when a prominent British vicar posted an article on Facebook linking Israel to the 9/11 attacks, for which he is now ‘under investigation.’

Stephen Sizer, a well-known reverend of Christ Church, Virginia Water, posted the Wikispooks article “9/11: Israel Did It” on Facebook and subsequently asked, “Is this [research] anti-Semitic?”

“It raises so many questions,” he added.

Sizer eventually removed the post under mounting pressure from his Diocese and Britain’s Jewish lobby, but affirmed his right to freedom of speech and inquiry.

“It is essential the public become convinced of what happened before and after 9/11,” Sizer told Jewish News Online. “Inevitably the truth will upset many people if it is shown by further investigation that the official explanations are shown to be deficient.” Suppressing discussion of Israel’s role in 9/11 will only “fuel suspicion,” the outspoken preacher stressed.

Sizer is barking up the right tree, hence the frenzied reaction from Zionists and those under their sway.

Mainstream outlets such as the BBC, The Telegraph, The Daily Mirror as well as a number of overt Zionist sources piled on the principled man of god by running identical smear stories about this manufactured ‘scandal.’ The articles in question emphasize that Sizer is ‘being investigated’ for the posting, as if it is a crime to promote an article that calls attention to Israeli false flag terrorism. The hit-pieces also prominently quote a spokesman from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a thuggish Zionist hate-gang who have attacked Sizer as an ‘anti-Semite’ on numerous occasions. But none of the articles or the Israeli fifth columnists they champion addresses the evidence of Israel’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

Israel’s fingerprints do indeed appear to be all over the events of 9/11. And judging by the Zionist state’s past behaviour, it should not come as a surprise to learn that 9/11 was in some way organized by Israel’s secret agencies who have on plenty of previous occasions executed false flag attacks aimed at framing their Arab/Muslim adversaries, thereby inducing adverse reactions towards their foes from the West.

A History of Deception

At the time, Israel’s founding fathers were some of the most brutal terrorists around. Two former Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were leaders of Jewish terrorist militias which waged a merciless insurgency against the indigenous Arabs of Palestine as well as the British colonial administrators of the land in the 1940s. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was the personal secretary for Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brains behind the bellicose ‘Revisionist’ fold within the Zionist movement which formulated the ideological framework of the Zionist militant groups who eventually besieged Palestine, destroying more than 500 Arab villages and driving out a minimum of 750,000 Palestinians in a matter of two years, from 1946 to 1948.

In 1946, two years before Israel became a state, Irgun assailants carried out an attack on the King David Hotel which housed Britain’s administrative headquarters in the Mandate of Palestine. Jewish militants under the direction of Begin disguised themselves as Arabs and planted a number of bombs hidden in milk crates in the hotel’s basement, then detonated them causing a huge explosion which leveled a good chunk of the building. Ninety-one people were killed in the blast, including dozens of British personnel. “I’m glad to have been a terrorist for liberation,” said one Jewish Irgunist in a BBC documentary about the bombing. “We didn’t mind being called terrorists then,” another former Irgun militant confessed.

A competing Zionist terrorist faction, the Stern Gang (also known as Lehi), assassinated British soldiers as well as multiple foreign diplomats and mediators such as Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte. That group, originally headed by the Jewish supremacist Avraham Stern, even proposed a military alliance with Nazi Germany in 1941, viewing Britain as a greater roadblock to a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine than Hitler’s regime which was quite happy to expedite the re-settlement of Germany’s Jews to the Middle East.

Fast-forward to 1954 – Israel again initiates a false flag conspiracy in the region, this time in Egypt. A terrorist cell of Zionist mercenaries was discovered in Cairo and Alexandria after they tried and failed to detonate incendiary devices in British and American installations. The Israeli operatives were discovered after one of the conspirators prematurely discharged an incendiary device in his pocket, leading to his arrest and the capture of the whole cabal. The Israeli terrorists later confessed to Egyptian authorities that the provocation was planned, organized and directed by Tel Aviv. The operation was intended to stymie a burgeoning British-American-Egyptian rapport and derail ongoing negotiations between Egypt and Britain which would have seen the British relinquish control of the Suez Canal, much to Israel’s displeasure. It was later dubbed the “Lavon Affair.”

Analyst Richard H. Curtiss, writing in a 1992 article for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, observed that Israel had in the works an identical subterfuge against Jordan the same year, wherein Israeli intelligence “conceived a plan to attack British personnel seconded to King Hussein’s government in Jordan.” “The purpose,” Curtiss explained, “was to sour relations between Britain and Jordan [as well as turn] both Jordan and Britain [against] Egypt, which would be blamed for such attacks.” Curtiss cited a 1979 book, The Untold History of Israel, by Israeli journalists Jacques Derogy and Hesi Carmel which related the story.

The Lavon Affair was not the first, nor would it be the last Israeli covert operation aimed at framing Arabs for terrorism against the West. In 1967, during the Six Day War between Israel and several Arab states, the Israeli military attacked an American surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, in international waters. Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats besieged the vessel for hours, even shooting holes in the large American flag billowing in the wind. Having scoped out the ship hours beforehand, the Israelis were well aware it was American. As a result of Israel’s heinous attack, more than 200 American sailors were dead or wounded. The motive of the blitz was to sink the Liberty, thereby preventing it from relaying messages back to Washington which could have scuttled Israeli plans to seize land from Egypt and Syria during the six-day conflict. If the ship had been successfully destroyed, Israel would have most likely attributed the attack to its Arab foes. The Israelis later captured the Sinai and Golan Heights from Egypt and Syria respectively. Unfortunately for the Israelis, the Liberty did not sink and survivors revealed Israel’s hand behind the attack.

In his books By Way of Deception and The Other Side of Deception former Mossad katsa Victor Ostrovsky revealed a litany of Israeli covert operations. One clear example of Israeli chicanery that Ostrovsky exposed was a 1986 plot codenamed ‘Operation Trojan’ which saw Mossad agents plant a transponder device on Libyan soil that relayed false coded messages making it look like the Libyan government was coordinating terrorists from their embassies worldwide to attack American targets. Simultaneously a bomb explosion rocked a Berlin nightclub frequented by US military personnel, killing two US servicemen. The Mossad deception successfully coerced a hoodwinked US President Ronald Reagan into launching air strikes on Libya, who cited the fake ‘terrorist’ transmissions emanating from a Mossad device as proof of Libyan culpability in the nightclub attack.

The Israelis are also implicated in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. An investigative report on the World Socialist Web Site entitled “Questions mount in Kenya, Tanzania bombings” detailed US/Israeli foreknowledge of the attacks. The article, authored by Martin McLaughlin, cites reports from ABC News and Haaretz which affirmed that Israeli intelligence elements caused US officials to ignore warnings of an imminent attack against the embassies. US intelligence officials looked to their Israeli colleagues to diagnose the reliability of various warnings of looming danger, but the Israelis insisted they weren’t serious, resulting in no precautions being taken to defend against an assault.

“Four months worth of tips and alert signals that the Nairobi embassy was facing a potential disastrous explosives attack were sent to Washington,” wrote Warren Hough in a report for the American newspaper The Spotlight. “But nothing was done to protect this poorly shielded facility because, on the standard operating procedure inaugurated in the Reagan era, the FBI had to turn to the Israelis for a definite evaluation of these early warnings.”

“Ignore them, it’s just another false alarm,” Mossad told their counterparts in the CIA. The imprudent Israeli advice, Hough explained in the aforesaid article, “was the key factor in persuading the U.S. to let its guard down, resulting in the loss of life of at least 250 victims including 11 Americans.”

Israel didn’t seem to believe its own counsel. According to researcher Ralph Schoenman, the first soldiers at the scene of the crime in Kenya and Tanzania “were special units of the Israeli armed forces and high level agents of the Mossad” who quickly “took control” of the bombed out sites.

Israel’s penchant for coercing America to let its guard down indicates a more sinister fraud at work, beyond an equally damning ‘let it happen’ scenario.

September 11: Israel’s ‘Hanukkah Miracle’ & the Neocons’ ‘New Pearl Harbour’

Exploiting and outright manipulating fissures between the West and the Arab/Muslim world has been a key component of Israeli strategy from the outset. And it is this artificial divide, fostered by years of Zionist subterfuges and political scheming, that lies at the core of the agenda of those truly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, the primordial affair which kick started the bogus ‘war on terror’ and endless American war-making in the Middle East.

In a September 2001 interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, Osama bin Laden denied responsibility for the attacks, articulating that the real architects of 9/11 are “persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive.” The “civilization, nation, country, or ideology” bin Laden spoke of that prospered the most from 9/11 is undoubtedly Zionism as an ideology and Israel as a country. Israel’s pugnacious leaders made that fact abundantly clear in cavalier public statements made shortly after the disaster.

The 9/11 attacks were “good for Israel” and had the effect of “[shifting] American public opinion in our favour,” announced a jubilant Benjamin Netanyahu on two separate occasions following the attacks, as quoted in Haaretz and other Israeli papers. According to Israeli journalist Aluf Benn, Ariel Sharon and his top military-intelligence advisors had proclaimed 9/11 a ‘Hanukkah miracle’ of good fortune for Israel, “coming just as Israel was under increasing international pressure because of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.” The assault on the Twin Towers “placed Israel firmly on the right side of the strategic map with the U.S., and put the Arab world at a disadvantage,” Benn wrote in Haaretz. “That’s the impression left by the speeches given by Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and National Security Council chairman Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, at this week’s Herzliya conference on national security.”

“Since September 11, our leaders have been euphoric,” the former Israeli intelligence chief Ami Ayalon told France’s Le Monde newspaper. “With no more international pressures on Israel, they [the Israeli leadership] think, the way is open.” Ehuk Sprinzak, a founding Dean at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, reiterated the expressions of relief and delight amongst the Zionist leadership, telling the Israeli press that 9/11 was the “most important public relations act ever committed in our favour.” On the day of 9/11, Zionist commentator and Stratfor director George Friedman expressed the view that “[t]he big winner today, intended or not, is the state of Israel” because the attacks will foster a closer alliance between the US and Israel as well as lead America into “a massive covert and overt war against” the Muslim world. Even Israel’s former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, told a Canadian journalist that “one of the immediate results of 9/11 was clearly a very severe backlash of international approbation of Islam in general” and that Israel “obviously benefitted” from America’s response to the atrocity.

Years before 9/11, Zionists and neocons formed a number of think tanks to promote their militarist agenda in the Middle East. The most prominent one was called Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and was headed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two of Israel’s staunchest supporters in the US. In a September 2000 report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neocons pontificated about the need for a “New Pearl Harbour” to actualize their war plans against Middle Eastern regimes, particularly that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Four years earlier, in 1996, several prominent American neocons, notably Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, authored a strategy paper for an Israeli think tank called the ‘Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.’ In their paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the cadre of pro-Israel evangelists essentially called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which was an “important Israeli strategic objective” from their perspective. The Clean Break authors stipulated that ousting Hussein was needed in order to ultimately weaken Syria, and they further expressed a desire to do away with the Iranian regime, Israel’s foremost military rival in the region.

In April 2002, PNAC neocons sought to capitalize on the 9/11 attacks to expedite their agenda of Iraq’s destruction, calling on President Bush in a written plea to “support Israel” in its “war on terrorism” by accelerating “plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” Israeli citizens Perle, Feith and Wurmser effectively put their wet dreams of war into practice by entering senior policy-making positions in the US administration of George W. Bush, leading the drive for the war in Iraq alongside the Israeli fifth columnist Paul Wolfowitz who in turn was a high ranking Pentagon official under Bush. Researchers fingered Feith’s ‘Office of Special Plans’ in the Pentagon as the fountainhead of disinformation and propaganda about Iraq’s non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” a devious ploy also promoted in Neocon-Zionist literature throughout the 1990s.

And who devised the ‘war on terror’? Despite popular belief among leftists, that ominous philosophy’s birthplace was not in the dysfunctional brain of George W. Bush. Rather, it first emerged at the Jonathan Institute’s ‘Conference on International Terrorism’ held in 1979 in Jerusalem. That group was spearheaded by Israeli politicians of the Likudnik persuasion, principally Benjamin Netanyahu, who endeavored to export their propagandistic memes about ‘terrorism’ to the West, hoping Western governments would do Israel’s bidding in the region. The foundry of lies and untruths sponsored by Netanyahu and his neocon minions in Washington was ultimately calculated to delegitimize Arab/Muslim resistance to Israeli imperial expansion and aggression, hence the widespread dissemination via Zionist-owned media venues of the erroneous contention that ‘Islamic terrorism’ is a unique threat facing the West. In actual fact, the biggest perpetrators and patrons of terrorist violence in the world are the Zionists, the Americans and their allies.

Unsolved Mysteries and Unanswered Questions

Writing in his informative essay “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel,” Dr. Stephen Sniegoski asserts “the ‘war on terrorism’ was never intended to be a war to apprehend and punish the perpetrators of the September 11 atrocities. September 11 simply provided a pretext for government leaders to implement long-term policy plans.” Indeed, the ‘war on terror’ amounted to nothing less than a ‘war of terror’ against Israel’s opponents in the Middle East, with 9/11 serving as a very conveniently timed casus belli.

And what of Israel’s Mossad, that “ruthless and cunning” agency of terror that “has the capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act,” according to a group of US Army analysts? As the Army School of Advanced Military Studies acknowledged in the aforesaid study, Israel’s proclivity for ruthlessness and deception leads many to believe that 9/11 was yet another ‘false flag’ contrivance of the master manipulators in Tel Aviv.

What really happened on that fateful day?

There are many lingering questions about Israel’s role in the attacks. An oft-cited proof of Israeli involvement is the ‘five dancing Israelis’ incident, wherein a group of five individuals, later identified by ABC News, the Jewish Forward and FBI insiders as Mossad agents, were seen by witnesses video-taping the disaster from a New Jersey rooftop, and subsequently cheering, laughing and shouting with “joy and mockery” as 3000 innocents were suffocating in the burning Twin Towers.

The suspicious crew of Israelis were arrested on that day by the NYPD, and later questioned by the FBI about possible foreknowledge of the attacks. Considering they had shown up (with a video camera) in a very convenient spot at a very opportune time of the day, just as everything went down, and outwardly expressed signs of elation rather than fear and horror, it beggars belief to suggest they didn’t know exactly when, where and how the assaults on the Twin Towers would come to pass. In fact, FBI reports partially declassified in 2005 revealed that one of the arrested Israelis named Omer Marmari told authorities that he and his compatriots were acting in a celebratory manner because the attacks would help make the world “understand” Israel’s predicament vis-à-vis the Palestinians. “We’re Israelis. We’re not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem,” Israeli Sivan Kurzburg told the NYPD upon his arrest. While in custody, another of the five Israelis named Oded Ellner remarked: “the United States will [now] take steps to stop terrorism in the world.” How did any of them know for sure who did 9/11 before any investigation had been conducted or how the US’s response to the attacks would benefit their country? Did they not only know when and where the attacks would occur, but also who would be blamed for it and the consequent direction of US foreign policy? That’s way more information than a group of self-professed ‘furniture movers’ should be privy to. The five Israeli suspects were eventually deported back to Israel without charge. In an article about the incident, journalist Christopher Ketcham quoted an anonymous CIA insider close to the investigation into the five Israelis who said “the decision to close down the investigation into the Israelis came from the White House” and that “[i]t was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11.”

And what of those 200 Israelis that Fox News reported had been arrested shortly before and after 9/11, some of whom claimed to be ‘art students’ but were in actuality Mossad spies with expertise in eavesdropping and explosives? What of the mysterious ‘truck bomb’ or ‘explosive laden van’ which was reported to have been ‘packed with explosives’ as it approached the George Washington Bridge? Why were the identities of the apprehended suspects never revealed to the public? Was it because they were Israelis and not Arabs? Is it just a coincidence that the Mossad passed along a very vague and dubious ‘warning’ to the CIA a few months before the attacks, suggesting that 200 ‘Arab terrorists’ were present on American soil and were planning a ‘major operation’? And is it not amazingly conspicuous that the Mossad linked this ‘imminent attack’ of which they had no specific information to “Osama bin Laden and Iraq,” as the UK’s Telegraph reported?

What about the ‘mural van’ that police stopped between 6^th and 7^th on King Street near the World Trade Center on 9/11? Surely a van with a painting depicting a plane crashing into the Twin Towers that was rented to ‘ethnic Middle Easterners’ according to a Norman Y. Mineta International Institute for Surface Transportation Policy Studies (MTI) report is worthy of scrutiny. If the ‘ethnic Middle Easterners’ behind such an obvious display of foreknowledge were Arabs or Muslims, surely the Zionist-influenced mass media would have reported it, and surely the Zionist-influenced US government would have included it in official reports. But nary a mention of the incident can be found in media or government reports concerning the attacks.

How do we explain the mysterious acquisition of the entire World Trade Center complex by shady New York businessman Larry Silverstein six weeks before the attacks? The Jewish real estate magnate who weirdly “felt a compelling urge” to own the worthless, asbestos-laden Twin Towers happens to be a rabid Zionist with innumerable connections to Zionist lobbies, most notably the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) under whose auspices the Zionist neocons produced the “Clean Break” regime change manifesto. On top of that, Silverstein was a ‘personal friend’ of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, and had weekly conference calls with Netanyahu. Moreover, ‘Lucky Larry’ skipped out on a routine business meeting at the top of the North Tower (the first one hit) on 9/11, claiming a ‘miraculous’ intercession by his wife who insisted he attend a ‘doctor’s appointment’ instead. Silverstein’s business partner on the murky WTC deal, Frank Lowy, is likewise an ardent Zionist Jew who fought in Israel’s ‘war of ethnic cleansing’ and chairs multiple pro-Israel think tanks in Israel itself as well as in Australia where he acts as Tel Aviv’s pro-bono ambassador.

And what of the lack of any credible evidence tying Arabs or Muslims to the attacks? What about the ‘indestructible passport’ of alleged hijacker Satam al-Suqami which miraculously escaped the cabin of the exploded plane into the North Tower, falling hundreds of feet to the ground and emerging without so much as a blemish? Why even bring a passport on a domestic flight let alone a suicide mission? What of the plethora of other eyebrow-raising FBI ‘discoveries,’ such as the inexplicable Mohammed Atta luggage filled to the brim with incriminating ‘evidence’ including Atta’s ‘al-Qaeda plans,’ Arabic-language flight training devices/videos, a Koran, etc. It is the height of credulity to believe that this luggage, which a former FBI agent told Newsday amounted to the “Rosetta stone” of the investigation, conveniently did not get loaded onto the plane and fell right into the FBI’s lap. Does that not reek of a cheesy Hollywood stage-play for the gullible public’s consumption?

What about the markedly un-Islamic theatrics of the ‘19 martyrs for Allah’ who were witnessed cavorting with strippers, taking drugs and binge drinking in bars and clubs throughout Florida and Las Vegas months before the attacks? Why would dedicated ‘jihadists’ who we are told obsessively observed Islamic laws and edicts behave in this blasphemous way shortly before a ‘martyrdom operation’? Isn’t the obvious answer that these folks weren’t real Muslims and were just pretending to be in order to create a phony ‘evidence trail’ for an equally bogus ‘al-Qaeda plot’?

Has it ever been sufficiently explained why several of the named ‘9/11 hijackers’ turned up alive and well in the Middle East, protesting their innocence, as the BBC reported? Could the fact that their passports had been lost and/or stolen in the years preceding the attacks indicate a frame-up at work? Are the CIA and Mossad not experts at stealing identities of innocent people for use on covert ops? Doesn’t Mossad have a ‘special unit’ for crafting fake passports to be used on foreign missions?

Has there ever been a credible explanation as to why most of the ‘19 hijackers’ gained entry to America through a CIA ‘fast-tracking’ VISA program run out of a US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as J. Michael Springmann revealed?

Can we explain how America’s multi-billion dollar military, intelligence and defence apparatus, which consists of a dozen or so intelligence agencies and the most sophisticated defence and spy equipment and networks the world has ever seen, was astoundingly ‘asleep at the wheel’ and ‘unable to detect’ this plot and its rather clumsy progenitors? As the former Pakistani spy chief Hamid Gul mused with bewilderment, “a man living in a cave inside a mountain or a peasant’s hovel” was able to orchestrate 9/11 and thereby outfox the combined military might of America and its powerful allies? “I don’t believe it,” Gul retorted.

Has it ever been properly explained how shoddy pilots who never flew commercial aircraft in their lives were able to precision guide three planes into their targets without a hiccup? How could a plane enter the Pentagon’s highly-protected and watched airspace without fighter jets intercepting it? Is it not odd that whoever was at the controls of Flight 77, or whatever actually hit the Pentagon, decided to not dive into the roof of the building, which would have been a much safer and easier-to-hit target than the façade? Is it just a coincidence that the very side of the building which was hit had just been ‘recently renovated’ with blast-walls and other upgrades so that it could endure explosive impacts with minimal damage? Is it also mere happenstance that all of the Pentagon’s top brass including Donald Rumsfeld were on the opposite side of the building, safely out of harm’s way?

Can we explain how two giant skyscrapers can collapse to the ground at nearly free fall speed, hurling hundred-ton chunks of steel structure hundreds of feet horizontally, simply from the impact of planes and a few scattered fires? Has there ever been a sufficient explanation as to how gravity can pulverize into dust large portions of two 110-story buildings? How did WTC Building 7 – the 47-story high-rise that was not hit by a plane – collapse neatly and symmetrically like a controlled demolition into its own footprint at free fall speed? Does it not defy logic, common sense and even basic laws of physics that no explosives were involved in the gravity-defying collapses of these enormous structures?

These are merely a few of the hundreds of enduring questions that have haunted the US government and its apologists for years.

It is safe to say that satisfactory answers to these very valid and logical inquires will not be forthcoming. Truth cannot prevail so long as the Neocon-Zionist clique which usurped the Bush administration and instigated the calamitous ‘war of civilizations’ by way of monstrous lies and deceit is running the show in Washington and other epicenters of power that effectively dominate the world at the present time.

Brandon Martinez is an independent writer and journalist who has written extensively on Zionism, Israel-Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. He is the co-founder of Non-Aligned Media (http://nonalignedmedia.com) and author of Hidden History and Grand Deceptions. Readers can contact him at martinezperspective[at]hotmail.com or visit his blog at http://martinezperspective.com.

Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez

February 1, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance | 9/11, Israel, UK, Zionism | Leave a comment

Fiji compensates victims of 1950s UK nuclear tests

RT | January 30, 2015

Fiji’s prime minister said his island nation would compensate soldiers exposed to radiation during British nuclear tests in the Pacific more than 56 years ago.

The British government has refused to pay any compensation, but Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama said Fiji could wait no longer.

“We are righting a wrong. We are closing an unfortunate chapter in our history,” Bainimarama said at a ceremony recognizing the suffering of the veterans.

“We are bringing justice to a brave and proud group of Fijians to whom a great injustice was done.

“Fiji is not prepared to wait for Britain to do the right thing. We owe it to these men to help them now, not wait for the British politicians and bureaucrats.”

Veterans and their families have campaigned for decades to get payouts for their health problems. More than 70 Fijians were stationed on Kiritimati, then known as Christmas Island, during the 1957 and 1958 nuclear tests during the Cold War.

As a result, they suffered serious health problems, including leukemia and other blood disorders, due to the radiation they were exposed to.

The 24 survivors who attended the ceremony each received Fiji$9,855 (£3,181) from a compensation pool of Fiji$2.95 million (£950,000).

“We were only told that we will go there to test some weapons, but when we got there we found out that we were brought there to be part of the British test of weapons of mass destruction,” survivor Naibuka Naicegulevu, 76, whose job was to clean and repair vehicles on the island, told AFP.

“My two sons, now in their early 30s, get sick suddenly and they can be ill for one week, sometimes more, this is all because of the radiation that we were exposed to,” he added.

Bainimarama said Fiji, which was a Crown colony until 1970, could no longer afford to wait for Britain to take the lead on compensation.

“The ranks of these survivors are rapidly thinning. Too many men – our fellow Fijians – have gone to their graves without justice. Those who remain deserve justice and Fiji as a nation is determined for them to finally get it,” he said.

January 30, 2015 Posted by aletho | Militarism, War Crimes | Fiji, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

Legacy of Endless Afghan War Includes Nation Plagued by Unexploded Bombs

By Jon Queally | Common Dreams | January 29, 2015

As seen in other abandoned battlefields in the anals of U.S. wars overseas, new reporting out of Afghanistan shows that among the other deadly legacies left behind by foreign troops are tens of thousands unexploded munitions dropped from the sky or left in the ground that will continue to kill and maim civilians long after the “official” fighting has stopped.

Reporting from the Afghan city of Khost, Guardian foreign correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen reviewed data and spoke with members of the UN’s Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan (Macca) to learn that unexploded bombs and shells in Afghanistan “are killing and maiming people at a rate of more than one a day”—the vast majority of whom are children.

Citing MACCA statistics from 2014, Rasmussen reports “there were 369 casualties in the past year, including 89 deaths. The rate rose significantly in October and November when 93 people were injured, 84 of them children. Twenty died.”

Offering a tragic account of siblings from a single family, Rasmussen relays the story of 10-year-old Mohammad Yunus and his eight-year-old sister, Sahar Bibi. “The grenades that killed Mohammad and Sahar, as they were combing through dry branches to collect firewood for their family, should have detonated long before they were picked up. Instead, the shells exploded in the children’s hands and ripped through their bodies, killing them instantly. The blasts also injured their two brothers, aged five and 12.”

In a war that has spanned more than twelve years—with no end in sight—it is not surprising that the number of unexploded ordnances (UXOs) has risen to alarming rates, but as was true in the U.S. war in southeast Asia—where the nations of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia continue to suffer the consequences of years of carpet bombing by the U.S. military—the problem will not go away just because the war is at some point declared over.

As the Guardian reports:

Though first steps have been taken to tackle [UXO], agencies complain the US-led forces are withholding information about where they may have dropped explosives.

“We ask for information about battlefields that may have UXO, but we have received coordinates for only 300 locations. It’s not enough,” said Mohammad Sediq Rashid, director of Macca.

Colonel Calvin Hudson, Nato’s Combined Joint Task Force chief engineer in Kabul, says Nato gives as much information to mine-clearing agencies as possible without compromising operational operational security – coordinates for areas where Afghan forces continue their operations are withheld.

Much of the fighting in Afghanistan has taken place in and around residential areas, increasing the risk of civilian casualties in the aftermath of the war. UK and US diplomats emphasise that international law does not give their countries a responsibility to clear battlefields. But that does not absolve Nato countries of their duty to clean up after themselves, said Rashid.

January 30, 2015 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Afghanistan, Human rights, NATO, UK, United States, UXOs | Leave a comment

Winston Churchill: the Imperial Monster

By Michael Dickinson | CounterPunch | January 28, 2015

This week Britain is commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill. Millions of people worldwide watched his state funeral on television in 1965, and thousands of people lined the streets of London to pay their last respects as his cortege slowly passed. But I somehow doubt that President Obama will be adding his own warm words of remembrance for the iconic British wartime leader.

After all, his own paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was one of 150,000 rebellious Kikuyu “blackamoors” forced into detention camps during Churchill’s postwar premiership, when the British government began its brutal campaign to suppress the alleged “Mau Mau” uprising in Kenya, in order to protect the privileges of the white settler population at the expense of the indigenous people. About 11,000 Kenyans were killed and 81,000 detained during the British government’s campaign to protect its imperialist heritage.

Suspected Mau Mau insurgents were subject to electric shock, whippings, burning and mutilation in order to crush the local drive for independence. Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured for resisting Churchill’s empire. He never truly recovered from the ordeal.

Africa was quite a playground for young Winston. Born into the privileged British elite in in 1874, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, brought up believing the simple story that the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation, he set off as soon as he could to take his part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples,” whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill”.

In Sudan, he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages”.

In South Africa, where “it was great fun galloping about,” he defended British built concentration camps for white Boers, saying they produced “the minimum of suffering”. The death toll was almost 28,000.

When at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”.

(On his attitude to other races, Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, once said: “Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin.”

Churchill found himself in other British dominions besides Africa. As a young officer in the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, Churchill one day experienced a fleeting revelation. The local population, he wrote in a letter, was fighting back because of “the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own,” – just as Britain would if she were invaded.

This idle thought was soon dismissed however , and he gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops, believing the “natives” to be helpless children who will “willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown”.

But rebels had to be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, Churchill unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians, making a hypocritical mockery of his comment:

“Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination.”

His fear-mongering views on Islam sound strangely familiar:

“But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.”

“On the subject of India,” said the British Secretary of State to India: “Winston is not quite sane… I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance against British rule in India, Churchill raged that Gandhi:

“ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.”

In 1931 he sneered: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer of the type well-known in the East, now posing as a fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”

As Gandhi’s support increased, Churcill announced:

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

In 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused by the imperial policies of the British. In reply to the Secretary of State for India’s telegram requesting food stock to relieve the famine, Churchill wittily replied:

“If food is scarce, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?”

Up to 3 million people starved to death. Asked in 1944 to explain his refusal to send food aid, Churchill jeered:

“Relief would do no good. Indians breed like rabbits and will outstrip any available food supply.”

Just after World War I, approximately one quarter of the world’s land and population fell within the spheres of British influence. The Empire had increased in size with the addition of territories taken from its vanquished enemies.

As British Colonial Secretary, Churchill’s power in the Middle East was immense. He “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon”, allegedly drawing the expansive boundary map after a generous lunch. The huge zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze”.

He is the man who invented Iraq, another arbitrary patch of desert, which was awarded to a throneless Hashemite prince; Faisal, whose brother Abdullah was given control of Jordan. Sons of King Hussein, Faisal and Abdullah had been war buddies of Churchill’s pal, the famous “T.E. Lawrence of Arabia”.

But the lines drawn in the sand by British imperialism, locking together conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders were far from stable,and large numbers of Jordanians, Iraqis, Kurds and Palestinians were denied anything resembling real democracy.

In 1920 Churchill advocated the use of chemical weapons on the “uncooperative Arabs” involved in the Iraqi revolution against British rule.

“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas,” he declared. “I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.”

As Colonial Secretary, it was Churchill who offered the Jews their free ticket to the ‘Promised Land’ of ‘Israel’, although he thought they should not “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.” He dismissed the Palestinians already living in the country as “barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung.”

Addressing the Peel Commission (1937) on why Britain was justified in deciding the fate of Palestine, Churchill clearly displayed his white supremacist ideology to justify one of the most brutal genocides and mass displacements of people in history, based on his belief that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph”:

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

In fact, many of the views Churchill held were virtually Nazi. Apart from his support of hierarchical racism, as Home Minister he had advocated euthanasia and sterilisation of the handicapped.

In 1927, after a visit to Rome, he applauded the budding fascist dictator, Mussolini:

“What a man! I have lost my heart!… Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world… If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism.”

(“The Bestial Appetites and Passions of Leninism”, eh? Where can I get a copy?)

But years later, in his written account of the Second World War (Vol. 111), fickle-hearted Winston applauded the downfall of his erstwhile hero:

“Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.”

Britain’s American allies saw to that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they dropped their atomic bombs and killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Churchill had ordered the saturation bombing of Dresden, where, on February 13 1945, more than 500,000 German civilians and refugees, mostly women and children, were slaughtered in one day by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), who dropped over 700,000 phosphorus bombs on the city.

Prime Minister Churchill had said earlier:

“I do not want suggestions as to how we can disable the economy and the machinery of war, what I want are suggestions as to how we can roast the German refugees on their escape from Breslau.”

In Dresden he got his wish. Those who perished in the centre of the city could not be traced, as the temperature in the area reached 1,600 degrees Centigrade. Dresden’s citizens barely had time to reach their shelters and many who sought refuge underground suffocated as oxygen was pulled from the air to feed the flames. Others perished in a blast of white heat strong enough to melt human flesh.

Instead of being charged with being responsible for ordering one of the most horrific war crimes of recent history, in which up to half a million people died screaming in his firestorms, Churchill emerged from the war as a hero. An unwavering supporter of the British monarchy throughout his life, he was made a knight of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of knighthoods, by Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

“The monarchy is so extraordinarily useful. When Britain wins a battle she shouts, “God save the Queen”; when she loses, she votes down the prime minister,” he once said.

Shortly after the Second World War was won, however, Churchill’s Conservative government was voted down by a Britain tired of battle, austerity, and hungry for change.

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,” said Churchill, and to a certain extent he succeeded. ‘Winnie’ became Britain’s great national icon, with his trade-mark cigar and V-sign, remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour (we won’t mention his eccentric habit of pacing about the office in the nude while dictating to secretaries!) The fat cigar clamped in his mouth a symbol of cocky British defiance, Churchill was a genial courageous Big Brother figure, revered by the media. His stirring wartime speech:

“We shall fight them on the beaches! We shall never surrender!” makes no mention of “We shall bomb them in their cities! We shall make them suffer!”

Churchill’s brutality and brutishness have been ignored, but he never reckoned on the invention of the internet, or its power to allow authors to question his view of history and expose the cruelty and racism of the man.

When George W Bush moved out of the White House he left a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval office. He’d used it to inspire him on his ‘war against terrorism’. Barack Obama had it removed. I wonder if he found the bust offensive? Was it out of respect for the pain and distress his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, suffered on Churchill’s orders?

Removing a bust is a fairly simple matter, but toppling a statue is quite another. In Westminster Square in front of Parliament in London there are several statues of deceased politicians and dignitaries, one of which I find particularly distasteful. Hands clasped behind back, the jodphur-clad figure striding purposely forward is that of Jan Christian Smuts racist forefather of the Apartheid system in South Africa.

As for Churchill, who, as Home Secretary, said:

‘I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race.’

His hulking toadish statue stands tall on a granite plinth, clutching a walking stick, his unblinking bulldog gaze on the Houses of Parliament where he reigned twice as a Conservative Prime Minister.

If I were Prime Minister of Great Britain, one of the first things on my list would be the removal of memorials to facist-minded racist imperialists. The statues of Smuts and Churchill in Parliament Square would be the first to come down.

Michael Dickinson can be contacted at michaelyabanji@gmail.com

January 28, 2015 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | UK, Winston Churchill | Leave a comment

God Promised Antisemitism to the Zionists

My personal reflections on the Campaign Against Antisemitism survey, by Aaron Dover – January 25, 2015

In order to say what some might consider the un sayable I first need to deconstruct some mythical terms so let me just wade into some taboo territory as though I don’t even see the no-entry signs.

What is anti-Semitism?

“Antisemitism” is a word and a political construct. It has been loaded with meaning and importance like no other word in the English language. This is no exaggeration, it is not meant as hyperbole, if you want evidence of this you need look no further than the UK National Curriculum. I had a look at the core curriculum for secondary school History, and have quoted a section of it below.

– challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day
In addition to studying the Holocaust, this could include:
Examples (non-statutory)
women’s suffrage
the First World War and the Peace Settlement
the inter-war years: the Great Depression and the rise of dictators
the Second World War and the wartime leadership of Winston Churchill
the creation of the welfare state
Indian independence and end of Empire
social, cultural and technological change in post-war British society
Britain’s place in the world since 1945

Now take a look closely at it. It does not say that the Holocaust is a mandatory subject, but it is implied, which is interesting in itself; the optional subjects follow and are clearly marked as such. The Holocaust is the only mandatory subject in this area. Not just any holocaust; there are so many to choose from by now; with new ones happening frequently; this is the Holocaust and is a proper noun with a capital.

The most important things being said here are those that are unsaid. What is unsaid? The Holocaust is the important holocaust i.e. the Jewish one. The Holocaust is exceptional. Not just important; nobody is here to argue with that; but exceptional. The other ideas suggested are important, and many, many ideas that would never appear on that list at all are also very important. The Holocaust is unique, and all students must know about it, and laws in place that criminalise Holocaust denial ensure not just that the topic is covered, but that it will be covered with the broadly accepted narrative. Every child educated in UK schools will be told about the Holocaust and they will be told the same things you were told.

Other holocausts might match it in terms of any particular respect; the brutality of the methods; the nature of the target population; the body count; the ideals of the perpetrators; their propaganda; their moral failings; and so on. But irrespective of any of those things, the proper noun Holocaust retains an exceptional and unique position in the prevailing historical narrative of all Western society.

As a result, a fully-educated Brit will certainly know that Hitler ran the Nazi party in Germany, unless he skipped class a great deal and his parents and friends never mentioned it, but may well be unaware that the British royal family are of German origin.

One of the implications of this is that every child in the UK will learn about Jew-hatred, termed anti-Semitism. No child will be left behind on this subject. They may not hear about other racial prejudices, other holocausts, they may not know how they got what remains of a welfare state around them, but they will know about anti-Semitism and Holocaust. This then becomes the common currency in discussions as the high water mark of evil throughout history, and this is the explanation for the existence of Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies).

The reason people reach for Nazi analogies so frequently is a result of it being this global common currency of an ultimate evil narrative. People wouldn’t write articles in the global press saying “so-and-so is behaving like Ceaucescu” the way they say so-and-so is behaving like Hitler. They know they would lose the majority of their readers on that remark, because no matter how nasty Ceaucescu is, he is just not as famous. Obviously there are countless other examples. This is quite simply because everyone knows about Hitler, and – crucially – everybody knows that everybody knows about Hitler. It’s a given. The Nazis are the one-stop-shop for evilness yardsticks.

The Nazi Holocaust of the Jews (and other victims of that same holocaust) therefore enjoys the same educational status as, say, basic math. In the same way you expect people to be able to do a bit of arithmetic, you can be confident that they have covered these educational subjects. They will know that 6×7=42 and also that the Jews have always suffered persecution throughout their history and were brutally slaughtered at the hands of a maniacal German tyrant who we stopped. They will not necessarily have heard of Zionism, nor have any awareness of the Nakba in Palestine that followed the war. Nor, for that matter, will they necessarily have any knowledge of any holocaust in Armenia for example.

So it follows that you can go and do a survey of people’s views about attitude towards Jews, and that isn’t weird to anyone, because of the Holocaust. They will know the various tropes and stereotypes associated with antisemitism, if they were listening in class, the hook noses, the greed, the blood libels and so on. Therefore if you ask someone in a survey or focus group do you think people perceive Jews to be more interested in money than other people? What will happen is that they will recognise that this view is a view that was held by antisemites, such as the Nazis. You will also know that these tropes have persisted over the ages, because you were taught that. These are ideas about Jews that wax and wane across time and society but never vanish; that is what we are taught. So to enquire as to whether these tropes that you may have first heard about during Holocaust lessons are present today and to be asked if you agree with them is a fair question, if we accept the previous fact.

Hitler was a maniac. But he was not a maniac for his antisemitic views, because these were things he found already lying around him in German society to repurpose to his ends. The antisemitism was there, it is there now, it is here, it is all around us, always, like a field. The field is stronger and weaker in places, but nowhere in space and time is it absent.

A survey therefore is simply a way to measure the field strength at a specific location and time. The questions will reflect the set of tropes that we understand to comprise antisemitism. We don’t ask, in a survey; what do you think about Jews? Open questions are not suited to surveys. So instead we must create a survey based on a set of preconceptions of how to measure the antisemitism field. We ask people about their own feelings in respect of the attitudes we suspect they may hold. This method is fundamentally flawed if we seek an objective answer, because the questions are leading.

If I ask; do you think Jews are more interested in money than most people? I might also ask; do you think Jews are more interested in motorsports than most people? But I do not ask the latter. Of course, you can only ask a limited number of questions so you have to stay focused; and that means discarding anything which could be used as a control for any other questions you are asking. What if we asked that second question and 99% of people responded positively? Thinking “bloody Jews, all into bloody motorsports” would not be the kind of antisemitism we are probing for. It does not fit our preconceived opinion-fingerprint of an antisemite. That’s not to say a dedicated Hasbarist wouldn’t try to make capital of such a statement, but it isn’t one of the statements that sets off a buzzer.

What are these tropes? The stereotyped view of a Jew by an antisemite, we learn, is made up from a number of parts. The hook nose. The evil, the clasped hands, the leering grin, the rubbing of hands in glee at either massive financial gain or the death of Christian babies. That’s your antisemitic stereotype. There’s plenty more to it than that, it extends from this to encompass more. The blood libels, the Jew hungry for the blood of Christians; that’s a blood libel.

What do each of these tropes provide to the ever-eager antisemite hunters? A wealth of opportunity for allegations.

What is antisemitism? Antisemitism poses a very real and very present danger in the UK and Europe, and around the world. On that I will agree with CAAS and their ilk. That is by now one of the most politically powerful ilks in human history. That ilk has made it on the one hand compulsory to learn the Holocaust; but on the other hand has made it criminal to deny or belittle the Holocaust. It has achieved this dual success in many of the developed nations.

Antisemitism is a danger not to the purported victims of said antisemitism, but to the actual victims; those accused of it. Everyone lives in the antisemitism minefield. It is not necessary for me to spell out the consequences for anyone who falls foul of the various bodies of antisemite-hunters that span the globe. Socially, professionally, step on an antsemitism mine, and you’re toast. You could be anyone; you can be the President of the United States, you are in the same minefield. You can even be a Jew, in which case the antisemite-hunter reaches into the bag for a self-hater label instead, it’s not a great substitute but it’s all they’ve got to work with. I’m not going to go into the self-hating Jew mythology here, there are more worthwhile subjects to address.

How do we fight antisemitism? In terms of containing antisemitic sentiment, we gag people and ban things from being said, and we keep everyone in fear of stepping on an antisemitism mine by making examples of public figures on a frequent basis. If people keep seeing careers destroyed by a misplaced remark on Gaza or similar, others will not become too emboldened, even if they harbour such antisemitic thoughts, to vocalise them.

To fight antisemitism, do we also stop the large scale killing of Jews by a monstrous machine of fascist brutality? No. Why? Because we did that decades ago.

How do we fight Islamophobia? In terms of containing Islamophobic sentiment, not very well at all, that’s how. We could try to restrain the media from trying to link individual incidents to all Muslims, through their overt and covert propaganda. But we don’t.

To fight Islamophobia, do we stop the large scale killing of Muslims by a monstrous machine of fascist brutality? No. Why? Because we are the machine. The Western killing machine has run on a fuel of Islamophobic sentiment for over a century.

But the media are focused more on the rise of antisemitism, or a perception of a rise. A survey of this kind signals simply by the fact that it is done, let alone the results, that antisemitism is something we should fear. The minefield is something we should fear.

But the fear of antisemitism is unrelated to incidents of antisemitism. The fear-to-incident ratio has never been higher; the perception of antisemitism and fear of that antisemitism has been boosted as hard as possible by the scaremongers of CAAS. They don’t even care if their survey methodology is a joke. If they send out their survey so literally anyone can fill it in and question 1 is “are you Jewish” and question 2 is “are you British” and you fill it in from any web browser… and take the answers in good faith… allowing literally anyone to contribute to the results… well then you cannot be taking the methodology very seriously. But CAAS doesn’t need to, because they know with their network they can churn out the intended results infographic and get the whole world media singing their song. It’s a song of victimhood that’s had so many re-heatings and re-releases that even Bob Geldof would blush.

It’s a song about the poor Jews feeling scared. Not being actually murdered or gassed or blown to pieces but worrying that they might at some point. Whereas the Muslims victimhood song doesn’t even chart, when they are being massacred day in day out by our stormtroopers and hired guns.

The world is tired of the Jewish victimhood song, and tired of this victimhood being used as a weapon, as a means to bully people into observing Zionist taboos.
Antisemitism is a terrorist weapon. It is used to terrify the world into observing Zionist taboos through fear of losing social standing, being labeled a racist, being fired, exiled, diminished, hounded. This terror is being escalated by CAAS and all the other antisemite-hunters.

I’m Jewish; It takes Jewish privilege to be able to say this. It should not. But to actually question the dogma around antisemitism itself, is one of the ultimate taboos. It’s at the very foundations of the Zionist enterprise.

I don’t think there is any special exceptional Jew-hatred, a special antisemitism field existing all around us throughout time. People are really very pissed off with Israel though.

That’s why the public perception of antisemitism has to be cranked up now, because the gagging needs to be cranked up, because people are waking up, smelling the bullshit and calling out Israel for its actions. Now that is the kind of antisemitism emergency that calls for a total propaganda war. Expect more assaults on free speech, the mines in the minefield are going to be increasingly sensitive. Expect increased casualties of public figures. Expect people to become more reticent about saying stuff; expect media and social media to clamp down on any anti-Israel sentiment.

Because otherwise, you know at this rate, we European Jews will all be going to the gas soon. Yawn.

January 28, 2015 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular | UK, Zionism | Leave a comment

Foreign Secretary refused to intervene for Brit rendered to Ethiopia

Reprieve | January 25, 2015

The Foreign Secretary refused to contact the Ethiopian government to protest its abduction of a British man, it’s emerged, despite warnings from Foreign Office (FCO) staff that the man was at risk of execution.

Andargachew ‘Andy’ Tsege, a father of three from London, was abducted in Yemen and rendered to Ethiopia seven months ago today. Mr Tsege, who is a prominent critic of the Ethiopian government, remains in incommunicado detention. The Ethiopian government has refused to reveal his whereabouts, or confirm whether it plans to carry out a death sentence imposed in absentia in 2009.

Internal FCO emails obtained through subject access requests by Mr Tsege’s family show that UK officials were extremely concerned that he would be mistreated or executed – but that despite this, nearly a month after the incident, the Foreign Secretary declined requests to intervene in his case.

An internal email sent by senior FCO staff several days after Mr Tsege’s disappearance says: “I think we should be aiming for a Ministerial call asap, given concerns about welfare and the DP [death penalty]… we should be raising at senior levels and getting in Ministerial follow-up (letter or call) asap to make clear how unhappy we are about this.”

A separate message suggested there should be consequences at “a UK citizen being kidnapped and returned against his will to a country which has passed two death sentences on him. A country which is in receipt of vast quantities of UK development assistance. Don’t we need to do more than give them a stern talking to?”

A number of urgent internal FCO messages asked the incoming Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond to contact the Ethiopian Foreign Minister in the days following the incident, the documents show. However, Mr Hammond’s office rebuffed the requests, saying: “we’ve also had a request from [Foreign Minister] Tedros’ office for an introductory call with the Foreign Secretary, but I don’t think we are going to be able to find time for that at the moment. […] On this letter, I’m nervous about asking the Foreign Secretary to sign something so negative in his first correspondence”.

The FCO has told lawyers for Mr Tsege’s family at human rights charity Reprieve that the UK Government has no grounds to challenge the legality of his removal from Ethiopia.

Maya Foa, director of Reprieve’s death penalty team, said: “It is clear that those working for the Foreign Secretary know how perilous the situation is for Andy Tsege. They know that Andy has committed no crime, that his extradition was probably unlawful, and that there are grave risks to his safety. What’s shocking is that the Foreign Secretary appears time and time again to have blocked any meaningful action that could potentially bring this British father home to his family, unharmed. Andy has now been held in solitary and incommunicado detention for over seven months, under sentence of death. One has to question what interests the Foreign Secretary is putting above the life and safety of his citizen, when all those around him are calling for him to do more.”

January 25, 2015 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance | Ethiopia, Human rights, Phillip Hammond, UK | Leave a comment

StandWithUs an Agent of Foreign Power?

By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | January 24, 2015

The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) declares that U.S. citizens in this country who work or lobby on behalf of foreign countries must register as its agents. Because doing so would significantly diminish the credibility of such individuals in the eyes of the American public, lobbyists go to great lengths to avoid doing so. For decades, critics of the Israel Lobby have complained that Aipac is such an entity, but the group cleverly articulates its programs and activities to avoid the necessity.

One of the main criteria in determining whether someone is violating FARA is if they are receiving funding directly from a foreign government. Aipac carefully avoids any semblance of such activity.

There are however newer members of the Lobby who are more impetuous, more overtly aggressive, and more eager to do the bidding of the Israeli government. They are less cautious about their activities and more eager to collaborate directly and publicly with the government. One of these is StandWithUs. It is clear to careful observers of the Lobby that groups like SWU, The Israel Project, and others are agents of the Israeli government. In fact, then-deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon told Israeli TV that the government was funding efforts by groups like SWU, involved in the Olympia food coop lawsuit (a final appeal of SWU’s loss in that suit was heard before the Washington State supreme court this week).

israeli hasbara war room

Israeli on-campus hasbara war room.

Most of the time, government officials and the groups themselves are careful to conceal the tracks of such collaboration. But recently another door was opened into the ways in which such projects and funding mechanisms are developed by both parties. SWU’s press release announcing the initiative was dutifully picked up by the Likudist Jerusalem Post. The democracy watchdog media outlet, 7th Eye also reported that the group was joining with a government agency carrying a 1984-like name, the National Information Directorate (based in the prime minister’s office). Together, they would create a social media war room project that would aggressively disseminate the government’s point of view during times of crisis when Israel’s reputation needed a boost.

With the government and SWU contributing $500,000, they would select students in the UK and the U.S., who would come to Israel for hasbara training. SWU would recruit the students and the government would train them in conducting social media warfare on Israel’s behalf. They would then return home to cities like New York, Los Angeles and London (specifically referenced as places the project would like to target).

A headline in 972 Magazine about it raised a red flag:

StandWithUs to take cash, messaging from Israeli gov’t

If this were true, it would be the smoking gun that might prove SWU had finally crossed a red line many of us have known they crossed long ago. Though the contents of the article didn’t quite support the claims advanced in the headline, I decided to read the minutes of the government meeting at which the project was approved. They raise some intriguing questions about the project and SWU’s role. In fact, the officials discussion of the project debated what the nature of SWU’s involvement would be. Was the government purchasing the services of SWU? Or is Israel supporting of the organization? And they (conveniently, as far as FARA is concerned) came to the conclusion that the GOI (Israeli government) would be purchasing services from SWU, and not supporting SWU as such.

But U.S. officials who examine such an arrangement might take a different approach to this question.

Below I’ve paraphrased (and at times quoted) the meeting minutes (Hebrew) at which the government representatives approved the joint project:

The need for this project arose in the wake of interactive campaigns in the course of Operation Protective Edge and Pillar of Cloud, which united Israeli hasbara officials with organizations and volunteers in a collective effort.

In light of this [previous success], it was decided to continue this activity with the goal of combating negative programs intended to damage the State of Israel by channeling truthful, balanced information to social media at normal times and times of emergency and military conflict.

The project is modeled on similar efforts involving Israel university students who participated in media war rooms during Operation Protective Shield. Often the war rooms were located at the universities and students received course credit for participation.

Those participating in the new initiative would attend multiple training sessions including a preparatory meeting at their home campus. There they would receive the needed hasbara materials and undergo training in how to use social media in order to disseminate the appropriate message. They would then learn how to create and manage a situation room and then launch it.

The Israeli students would be brought to the central situation room located in StandWithUs’ Jerusalem office. There, after receiving briefing materials, assignments would be given and they would be trained by officials of the PMO.

The student units would be activated during periods of emergency and would gather on their campus to take action. They would communicate and take direction from the central situation room in Jerusalem.

Three times a year, students designated as leaders of their respective campus groups would travel to Israel, where they would conduct “educational meetings” and training that would be later conveyed to the other student participants in their home campuses.

PMO officials would develop messaging for the foreign students. It will direct the subjects which they will promote on social media platforms and the talking points that should be emphasized. The ministry would have a direct, active and hands-on role, thus guaranteeing the students stay “on message.”

The government turned specifically to SWU, according to the minutes, because it is widely known as an effective communicator of the pro-Israel message on the internet and social media. The group is seeking to increase its pro-Israel advocacy on American campuses in response to the rising tide of anti-Israel activism there. SWU’s purpose here is to present a true, authentic and appropriate image of Israel on campuses, in the media, and in different constituencies. Information SWU uses in its advocacy is known for being sound and well-prepared, including facts about different aspects of the State of Israel.

Participants in the government meeting were told that SWU reaches 1.2-million viewers each week (a figure I would strongly dispute) through various forms of new media. And customized content is created specifically for various target audiences, which include positive facts about Israel.

SWU was also chosen specifically for its reputation for battling the BDS movement through various media platforms like Buzzfeed, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Graduates of its training programs use what they learned on the internet. They employ the information and techniques taught them in order to advance a positive message about Israel online.

When asked how students would be chosen to join the project, an Israeli official told the government committee that a group, composed of representatives of the PMO and SWU would determine the best students to participate on the basis of criteria they established.

There was some debate within the project committee whether students would receive payment for their services (coyly named “scholarships”). Those in this program would not (those in the earlier Israeli student programs I mentioned above did receive compensation). They would suffice with certificates of appreciation which would add luster to their resumes.

Committee members were told that the government would not buy equipment or build out space for the project. Rather this would be the responsibility of SWU, whose Jerusalem offices would house it.

Among other interesting phrases to consider in analyzing the nature of the project and collaboration between SWU and the Israeli government is this:

The initiative for the project and operational responsibility for it lie essentially with the National Information Directorate, assisted in carrying it out by the organization (SWU). This project could not be carried out by the organization alone without official government involvement.

The level of involvement of the NID will be quite high, including determining the strategy and the hasbara messaging which would be disseminated. A committee, most of whose members would be government officials, will create systems of review and oversight of the project.

According to the determination of the government specialist, members of the committee are convinced that this funding request is classified as a purchase of services and not as [organizational] support…

My guess is that the issue about building out the situation room space in SWU’s office was a sensitive one. Perhaps the minutes included a reference to the government’s non-participation in this aspect of the project as a way of distinguishing between purchase of services and funding the organization. But the intense level of oversight the government is offering and its control of almost all key aspects of the project indicate that SWU is not really a partner in the project in the full meaning of the word, but rather taking direction from the Israeli government. The funding provided by the government will advance the goals of SWU. There is an utter seamlessness between the two entities. You could not really tell where the government’s involvement ended and SWU’s began. As such, SWU is an agent of the Israeli government.

January 24, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, UK, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

UK Police officer who kicked mother tending to sick child cleared

RT | January 23, 2015

A police officer accused of repeatedly kicking and hitting a mother looking after a sick child in hospital has been cleared of actual bodily harm (ABH).

The woman was left with over 40 injuries after Warren Luke, a Metropolitan police officer, kicked and hit her after hospital staff told him she was refusing to leave.

Luke was cleared on Thursday of any crime at Wood Green Crown Court.

The mother, who remains unnamed for legal reasons, was looking after her daughter when the incident occurred in 2013. Hospital staff asked the woman to leave, the court heard. When she refused, four police officers were called.

A video played to the jury showed the mother explaining the incident.

“‘You’ve got to leave, you’ve got to leave,’” she reported Luke as saying.

“I kept playing with my daughter and then I saw him moving towards me. He was kicking me and kicking me. He had one hand on my head. When I fell on the bed he grabbed my hair and banged my head. I was screaming. I couldn’t defend myself. My ex-husband ran in and shouted, ‘why are you kicking my wife?’”

Luke, however, protested that the mother’s behavior had been “escalating” and he believed the child was in danger.

Rather than use a baton or gas, he told the court that he decided to strike the mother on her bicep, and then use what he referred to as a “distraction strike” to her face, using his boot.

He claimed his actions were in accordance with his training.

“I did kick out at the left side of her face as trained to do. My footwear was a boot but it’s light,” he said.

“I can’t say exactly where and how her injuries were sustained, I can only say what I did,” he replied, when asked how she sustained so many injuries.

The women was reported to have needed plastic surgery after the incident, and is said to have taken a year off work to recover.

He denied using full force on the woman, saying: “I wouldn’t say that I used full force, but I do remember hitting harder because it had no effect.

“I used police tactics with good reason that were absolutely necessary. I didn’t go too far. Whenever a police officer uses force you need to be accountable for it,” he added.

Witnesses described with horror the clash between the two, and said they were “appalled.”

Two police officers, who were called to attend to the woman, also gave evidence. One, Laura Riley, was seen crying as she gave evidence for the prosecution. Her colleague Mary Clark said it was “just horrific.”

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said Luke would undergo a misconduct review following the incident.

January 23, 2015 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Crime, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

Austria to sue EU over UK nuclear plant subsidy approval

RT | January 22, 2015

Austria plans to take the European Commission to court over its approval of state subsidies to the $24-billion nuclear power plant Hinkley Point C, which is set to become the UK’s first new nuclear reactor in two decades.

Last October, the EU approved a UK state subsidy request for the project, a deal between French-owned nuclear developer EDF and the UK government.

Though the project was met with skepticism by some commissioners, four of whom voted against the decision, the commission decided that the UK’s plans to subsidize the construction and operation of the plant are in accordance with EU state aid regulations.

Construction has already begun on the plant, which is expected to replace a fifth of Britain’s aging nuclear power and coal plants, and provide 7 percent of the UK’s electricity by 2023.

Austria, a fully non-nuclear nation, considers nuclear energy to be both economically and environmentally unsustainable. The country will launch its appeal within two months after the publication of the official Hinkley decision in the EU journal, Austria’s environment ministry director Andreas Molin told the Guardian. The journal is to be released in two weeks.

The appeal will argue that the UK’s loan guarantees for the project constitute illegal state aid.

“Austria strictly rejects any kind of direct or indirect subsidies to nuclear power, arguing for the complete internalization of all external costs based on the polluter pays principle,” Austrian environment ministry Julia Puchegger told Interfax Energy.

“Austria also doesn’t consider nuclear power to be eligible for the European Fund for Strategic Investments [EFSI],” she added.

The lawsuit could delay an investment decision for over two years “as this is going to be a more complicated and fundamental case,” Molin said.

The EU’s 2014-2020 environment and energy guidelines don’t include specific rules for nuclear energy subsidies, which are to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Though the EDF had planned to sign a funding agreement with its Chinese partners in March, an essential step for securing a final investment plan, an Austrain lawsuit may put these plans on the backburner.

January 22, 2015 Posted by aletho | Nuclear Power | Austria, European Union, UK | Leave a comment

Keeping the Chilcot Inquiry Under Wraps

By JONATHAN WOODROW MARTIN | CounterPunch | January 22, 2015

24-hours after a report claiming the UK government is the most transparent in the world, the 6-year wait for The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War to be published was extended until after the general election in May this year.

I was present for one of the eyewitness-sessions of the enquiry when former Prime Minister Tony appeared, back in 2010. Whilst he blathered on about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran (which still hasn’t happened, even after decades of neo-con doom-mongering) I wondered how difficult it was to completely wrap yourself in an ideology to protect your being from the glaring mis-truths you have to speak and actions you carry out. It obviously takes a high degree of a certain kind-of-intelligence to do this, no-one doubts that Blair was and is an intelligent man, in this way. However, that intelligence was completely consumed by the Iraq invasion and subsequent set of disasters that have beset that country and region since. He looked like a haunted man that day, let alone today.

It wasn’t JUST Blair though. He was the prime minister at the time and he certainly set the tone and action for the UK joining the US politically and militarily on this mis-adventure. I do doubt that the ever-cautious Gordon Brown (at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer) would have been so hasty to join the lunatics in the Pentagon and Oval Office if he had been prime minister at the time. However, it was Parliament which made the final decision to join the invasion, overwhelmingly, 412-149. (This final vote took place one-day before the invasion began).

Were the Members of Parliament, who voted for the invasion, blinded by the intelligence (or lack of) coming from the UK and US security forces? Were they too busy being whipped in to frenzy by the media (Murdoch) and party whips? Was there a sense of left-over imperial pride in re-entering the scene of previous British conquests in the early 20^th century in the then named Mesopotamia? I don’t know. It must have been a tricky time for many, and many still carry the scars of their terrible decision-making today, most notably Tony Blair. It is easy to conclude that it was the faulty (made-up) intelligence that fooled these members of parliament, but even if the intelligence had been 100% correct, that Saddam Hussein had a large WMD programme and was potentially looking to build nuclear weapons, were those reasons, based on old assumptions and half-truths that had been known for decades, reason-enough to commit your armed forces to a hasty assault on a sovereign nation? If so, we in the UK should prepare for invasion as our government pushes ahead in replacing our nuclear “deterrent”.

You will have heard and read a lot about how what is happening in Iraq and the wider-region has nothing to do with the US-UK led invasion. Or will you? Most reports I have seen on the likes of BBC television news offer very little context on how Islamic State (IS) came to exist and how, most importantly, they are accepted or at least tolerated as an alternative by Sunni populations in Syria and Iraq in comparison to their sectarian governments who are seen as waging war on them. In the aftermath of the invasion, the American and British systematically destroyed the Iraqi state as existed under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist and Sunni-led dictatorship and turned the country completely over the previously persecuted Shia majority of the country, without any real thought or concern for the consequences this would have on the citizens of Iraq. If the invasion was illegal under international law (which to this laymen, it clearly was) these actions were tantamount to the prolonged torture of an entire country and its people (not to mention Abu Ghraib).

When The Chilcot Inquiry is eventually published, clearly at a time which best suites those under the microscope and wider establishment and not the British public, who were, it should be remembered, overwhelmingly against the invasion, what will we discover that we do not already know? The invasion was an utter disaster for the people of Iraq, yet not one of the decision-makers has ever felt any justice for this. History books, enquiries and public anger are not enough. Where is the International Criminal Court (ICC) when you need it?

Jonathan Woodrow Martin can be reached at jwoodrowm@gmail.com

January 22, 2015 Posted by aletho | Deception, War Crimes | ICC, Iraq, Iraq War, UK | Leave a comment

UK government accused of sponsoring human rights abuses in Ethiopia

RT | January 21, 2015

A development project funded by the UK government and run by the World Bank could be facilitating a violent resettlement program in Ethiopia that has been dogged by allegations of forced displacement, physical assaults and rape, a leaked report suggests.

Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) is the primary sponsor of the World Bank’s foreign aid initiative, supposedly set up to improve basic health, education and public services in Ethiopia. It has attracted over £388 million in UK taxpayer’s money to date.

According to a leaked report, obtained by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, the seemingly benign aid program is facilitating a controversial resettlement scheme driven by the Ethiopian government.

The scathing report, carried out by the Bank’s in-house watchdog, warns of poor oversight, inadequate auditing and a failure to adhere to its own regulations which has bred links between the development program and the forced displacement of the Anuak people.

The Anuaks are a marginalized minority Christian group in Ethiopia.

Severe human rights abuses

The Ethiopian government’s resettlement program has been condemned by human rights groups worldwide who warn it has led to the destruction of thousands of Ethiopians’ livelihoods.

The initiative, known as ‘villagization’, aims to relocate 1.5 million rural families from their homesteads to villages across Ethiopia.

Since its launch in 2010, the program has been the centre of allegations of rape, physical assaults, forced evictions and disappearances.

Many of those who are uprooted from their homes and resettled elsewhere are forced to reside in substandard living conditions in refugee camps in Southern Sudan.

While the World Bank’s top brass have long denied any links to the Ethiopian government’s villagization program, an inquiry conducted by the Bank’s internal watchdog indicates otherwise.

The inquiry’s leaked findings, which surfaced this week, said the Bank’s inadequate auditing controls created a situation whereby over £300m of the DfID’s foreign aid funding could have been siphoned directly into the contentious resettlement scheme.

The report did not examine allegations the resettlement program is responsible for human rights abuses in Ethiopia, however, stressing that such an inquiry was not within its remit.

Nevertheless, it uncovered a slew of failures in the planning and implementation of the World Bank’s foreign aid program, particularly the Bank’s failure to carry out risk assessments.

The watchdog also found the Bank did not adopt necessary safeguards to protect marginalized indigenous peoples.

Uneven economic development

Anuradha Mittal, founder of the Oakland Institute, a Californian development NGO that is active in Ethiopia, said the DfID participated in the World Bank’s development initiative, and should therefore take responsibility for the scheme’s failings.

“Along with the World Bank and other donors, DfID support constitutes not only financial support but a nod of approval for the Ethiopian regime to bring about ‘economic development’ for the few at the expense of basic human rights and livelihoods of its economically and politically most marginalized ethnic groups,” she told The Guardian.

David Pred of Inclusive Development International, an NGO that works to defend the rights of the Anuak people, said the World Bank has facilitated the forced displacement of “tens of thousands of indigenous people from their ancestral lands.”

“The Bank today just doesn’t want to see human rights violations, much less accept that it bears some responsibility when it finances those violations,” he told the Guardian.

A spokesman for the World Bank declined to comment on its internal watchdog’s leaked report.

Probed on the watchdog’s findings, the DfID also declined to comment.

A marriage of convenience?

In March 2014, an Ethiopian farmer secured legal aid to sue the British government following his claim UK taxpayers’ funds were sponsoring Ethiopia’s resettlement scheme.

He said murder, rape and torture were employed by Ethiopian authorities, as part of the forced displacement program.

The 34 year-old farmer, known as Mr. O, had been forced to flee Ethiopia after he was tortured and beaten for trying to protect his land.

He said the British government were contributing to the devastation of some of Ethiopia’s poorest people rather than assisting them.

In June, Britain’s DfID faced a judicial inquiry over its alleged funding of human rights abuses in Ethiopia.

A High Court judge ruled at the time that Mr. O had a case against the British government, and his legal challenge was upheld. His lawsuit is still ongoing.

Ethiopia’s single-party government is a core ally in the West’s war on terror.

It is also a leading recipient of UK aid, despite human rights groups’ repeated allegations the funding is used to crush dissent in the troubled state.

January 21, 2015 Posted by aletho | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Africa, Development, Government Spending, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

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The run up to the Iran war exposes inner workings of the US/Israeli deep state

By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | June 9, 2026

Taking a careful look at the run-up to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran exposes the inner workings of the U.S./Israeli deep state and the covert operations that the CIA and Mossad carry out around the world to lay the groundwork for war.

In this article, I will detail how the U.S. and Israel astroturfed protests in Iran, infiltrated them with rioters, and ran an atrocity propaganda campaign about Iran massacring protestors to manufacture consent for war.

This article will be an examination of the deep state’s war on Iran, prior to the full-scale U.S. invasion.

This article will be specific to Iran, but should be seen as a case study for how American, Israeli, and often British intelligence lay the groundwork for targets of empire around the world. … continue

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