So You’re a Professor? Here’s What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide
By Steve Salaita | January 7, 2024
College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate.
People around the world are now witnessing a particularly gruesome event as the Zionist entity, armed by its U.S. sponsor and enjoying the support of capitalist institutions across the globe, commits one atrocity after the other in the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and at times further afield). The atrocities, anyone with a modicum of integrity agrees, add up to genocide. The depth of grief and suffering Palestinians now experience is indescribable, immeasurable.
Do professors and other campus workers have any ability to mitigate the grief and suffering? Not really. But we’re not entirely powerless, either. Higher education is an important sector for information and activism and an industry where participants like to contemplate the role of both exceptional and ordinary people in making a better world. Like anybody else, teachers and researchers can be most effective in their own communities, which are not inoculated from the genocide. Zionist groups have organized hundreds of defamation campaigns against Palestinian students and faculty, often resulting in employment termination and other serious forms of recrimination. These campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum. Targeting Palestinians and anti-Zionists is an extension of the genocide, or at least one of its attendant tactics. And then, of course, many of the campuses are somehow invested in the Zionist entity—financially, politically, or logistically. It does no good to say that “we” aren’t affected by what happens “there.”
The following is a list of suggestions for Western academics, with the understanding that not all professors are equal and each campus is different in terms of its cultural and economic composition. In turn, I have tried to be comprehensive, offering comments that I hope will be useful to everyone from contingent faculty whose employment is precarious to senior scholars with big platforms at elite institutions. (The latter are much more likely to be facilitating the genocide, either obliquely or explicitly, but nevertheless.)
One thing is clear: the world is now experiencing a moral crisis whose enormity will reshape political attitudes and alliances for generations to come. Pretending that life, no matter how sheltered or comfortable, can simply continue as normal is its own kind of moral crisis.
Try one or more of the following if you can:
Defend Palestinian Students: Be it from forces on or off campus, or be it individuals you know or don’t know personally, it is reprehensible that students should suffer doxing and harassment, whether it is orchestrated by skeezy has-beens like Michael Rapaport or hysterical faculty on their own campus. Speak on behalf of your students. It can be done publicly through the usual channels or in private communication with chairs, deans, and other administrators. Or keep it simpler: reach out to the students and offer yourself as a resource.
Defend Palestinian Colleagues: The same idea holds, but with a quick addendum. Being a Palestinian in Western academe can be deeply alienating, in no small part because shitting on Palestinians is a reliable method of upward mobility. I’m sure some of your Palestinian colleagues will appreciate any gesture that might make them feel slightly less alone.
Boycott: Up to this point, academic boycott of Israeli universities has been controversial, even in supposedly progressive quarters of the industry. The facts, however, are clear. Israel has destroyed every institution of higher learning in the Gaza Strip. It has murdered dozens of faculty and administrators, including university presidents, and an untold number of students. There is no academic freedom in Palestine. There is no academe at all in Gaza. Reluctance to boycott is no longer acceptable. It is the baseline of political decency. Anybody who continues to oppose or dissemble about academic boycott should be regarded as untrustworthy on everything else.
Divest: Start or join a local campaign to force your university to divest any holdings from the Zionist entity. Divestment can include study abroad programs in Israel, which inherently discriminate against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students. In the past decade, students have successfully passed divestment resolutions at numerous universities, but management simply ignores them. Faculty voices will help these efforts.
Invite People from Gaza: Surely the rank-and-file in academe are tired of the same few dozen big-name professors and celebrity activists saying the same three or four things in the lucrative lecture economy. Decisionmakers on campus invite speakers for prestige, for the brand, or else to network or be in the presence of fame. The habit needs to die and there’s no better time than now. Instead of summoning the usual Endowed Chair of Gobbledygook at Wealthy Private University to deliver radical affectations at a cost of multiple thousands, reach out to scholars and journalists from Gaza (and for God’s sake give them a proper honorarium). They will assuredly be more insightful than warmed-over relics of the pre-millennial theory craze. Likewise: recruit graduate students from Palestine. You can also look into bringing Palestinians as visiting writers/scholars or as researchers/consultants in any effort to document the genocide. Start with people who are currently outside of Gaza; when conditions are better, reach out to those still inside the territory. Gaza is filled with individuals of remarkable talent. You will be better off for having sought it.
Organize or Attend a Demonstration: You don’t need to be a seasoned organizer to raise hell about the abomination that is the Zionist entity.
Direct Action: Why should students always be the ones to shut down administrative offices or gum up the machinery of genocide? Professors can participate, as well. I’m not saying you need to do it. I just want you to bear in mind that nobody, no matter how urbane or well-published, is too good to get fired or sit in jail for a few hours in solidarity with a people whose heroism is known and admired around the world.
Teach Palestine: Hundreds of Palestinian poets, novelists, and essayists write in English or are available in translation. Consider including them on your syllabus. So what if your courses don’t focus on Palestine or the surrounding region? If you’re a modernist, then assign Fadwa Tuqan or Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re in gender studies, look up Fatima Bernawi or Rasmea Odeh. If you teach novels, try Susan Abulhawa, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Sahar Mustafah… on goes the list. If you’re an Americanist, there are numerous options. Same for Latin Americanists. A critical theorist? No problem: there’s Elias Sanbar and Bassel Al-Araj and Ghassan Kanafani. And if you’re, say, a medievalist? That’s no problem, either.
Stop Pandering to Customs of Civility: You don’t need to condemn “Hamas.” You don’t need to “affirm Israel’s right to exist.” You don’t need to bang on about “democratic values.” You don’t need to be “nuanced.” You need to defend the people suffering a genocide. Not a single one of them is asking for anything else. (“Who is my audience?” keep asking yourself. If the answer is anything other than “the dispossessed,” then recalibrate your ethics and try again.)
Shun the Genocidaires: Those rationalizing or cheering on the genocide are personae non grata from here on out. No co-authoring articles with them. No sitting together on conference panels. No buddy-buddy bullshit on the networking circuit. Sure, sometimes circumstance will force you onto the same committee or whatever, but, if the association is voluntary, then decline the opportunity and find colleagues who don’t celebrate mass murder.
Speak: [speak]
Or better still: Listen.
While Gaza Burns, Media Zionists Still Portray Israel as Victim
By Niall McCrae | 21st Century Wire | January 7, 2024
In words often wrongly attributed to Voltaire, Kevin Alfred Strom asserted that ‘to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise’.
Since the Hamas attack on 7th October, this has been made very clear. Influential Zionist activists, who exert phenomenal influence on western politics, governments, and media, have ensured that only the one version of events, the Israeli version, is socially acceptable. This political reality was demonstrated in grave detail in Al Jazeera’s multi-part investigative documentary, The Lobby -Britain and The Lobby – USA. Of course, a different truth is known by any objective observer, especially millions of Palestinian people, and also by the millions who march worldwide against the brutal military bombardment and massacre of civilians in Gaza. But the BBC and The Daily Mail still refuse to broadcast or publish the widespread and justified disgust at the actions of the Israeli government.
Disturbingly, the British mainstream media have been actively shilling for the Israeli government, as their Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists on continuing the annihilation of Gaza. A prime asset of the campaign to cast Israelis as the oppressed, and the Palestinians as the oppressor is British media pundit Douglas Murray. Writing in the Spectator, Why I’m considering a life of crime, Murray denounced posters at Heathrow Airport inviting travellers from the ‘Israel/Palestinian territories’ who have ‘witnessed or been a victim of terrorism, war crimes or crimes against humanity’ to report to it police, in potential pursuance of a case by the International Criminal Court. This call for international justice deeply offends Murray, who asserts that ‘there is no country called Palestine’. Why not, Douglas? My old atlas from the 1930s clearly shows a land of this name, on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea and bordering on Trans-Jordan.
Curiously, Murray is not sure what status to give the remaining Palestinian area. As he explains, ‘there is the disputed territory of the West Bank and there is Gaza, which was handed over to the Palestinians in 2005 and which promptly became a ‘terror state’. Hold on, Douglas, don’t you deny such statehood? It seems that Murray wants Gaza to have responsibility without any sovereign recognition or power, and the inverse for Israel.
But their journalists and commentators are not only concerned with what’s happening in a narrow strip of land invaded by Israeli troops. They portray all Jews living in Britain as victims of hate, because supporters of the Palestinian cause are railing against the murderous exploits of a state that claims to represent Jewish people worldwide. Meanwhile our police and judiciary appear bent on protecting a foreign jurisdiction two thousand miles away; for example, arresting UK protestors with placards likening the Knesset to the Third Reich.
INFOGRAPHIC: Latest number in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the native Palestinian population in Gaza (Source: EuroMed)
The lead opinion piece in the Daily Express (4th January 2024), by the chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, shows the way that the wind is blowing. According to Sammy Stein, anti-Zionism is nothing but rebranded anti-Semitism. Although Stein acknowledges the right to criticise Israel and its leaders (as do many Israelis), he smears the regular large pro-Palestinian rallies in Glasgow as “anti-Semitic,” based on his experience in running a market stall in the city centre adorned with Israeli flags. He believes that flying a national flag (of a country that is clearly committing crimes against humanity) is somehow defending the rights of Jews. Within reasonable limits, criticism of his stall is an expected and justifiable act of free speech, a fundamental right in a free society.
Stein confines the concept of anti-Semitism to dislike of Jews, despite the broader meaning of Semitic peoples (including the Semitic Palestinian people, the targets of Israeli bombs and bullets). He claims that this ‘is a term established specifically for the hatred of the Jewish people and not, as some believe, hatred against people who can be described as Semites, such as Muslims’. The expanding scope of anti-Semitism, as determined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), is now sufficiently wide enough to quell any opprobrium towards Israel, while there is no equivalent protection for the native Palestinian people and their diaspora. Shamefully, nearly all major Western political parties have signed up to this blatantly one-sided censorship.
Despite the efforts of these Western institutions to impose an arbitrary definition of what constitutes a ‘hate crime,’ the fact remains that Jews are not the same as the state of Israel, and both of which is not the same as the ideology known as Zionism. But the distinction between Zionists and the Israeli leadership is becoming blurred. As the Palestinians and their supporters chant of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, treated by many Western authorities as a potentially hateful message, Netanyahu’s administration seems to be aiming for that very same outcome – capturing the whole land for Israel and evicting the Palestinians from their homeland. Stein notes that ‘today, Zionism refers to support for the continued existence of Israel, in the face of regular calls for its dissolution’. The Israelis have a right to self-determination, Stein believes, but not the Palestinian inmates trapped in the world’s largest concentration camp.
Stein also reminds us that ‘Jesus was a Jew,’ who, ironically, was persecuted by the Jews, leading to his crucifixion under the aegis of Roman authority at the time. But for Stein and Zionists, the land of historic Palestine belongs to the Jews because some Jews have continuously inhabited the area for thousands of years, after having first established their presence thousands of years ago. Also, they believe that this homeland was supposedly promised to them as a fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham. This is a simplistic and convenient reading of history. There is no straightforward link between Judah of the Bible and present-day Zionists. Regardless, should Israel really be allowed to run an exclusionary ethno-nationalist and inhumane Apartheid state (as Western societies simultaneously promote multiculturalism, diversity, equity and inclusion)?
Stein regards anti-Zionism as ‘unique in demanding the dismantling of an existing state after over seventy years of independence.’ Palestinians would splutter over such hypocrisy. For Stein, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are now the same thing, being slightly different ‘ways of saying that Jews have no right to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as other humans’. Perhaps Stein should spend a few days on the Gaza strip to learn whose hate is most powerful – that of desperate, bombed-out Palestinians or that of the American-backed Israeli branch of the military-industrial complex.
***
Niall McCrae is a researcher and educator, and author of ‘The Moon and Madness’ (Imprint Academic, 2011), and ‘Moralitis: a Cultural Virus’ (Bruges Group, 2018).
Green Billionaires Fund Large Backbench Tory Net Zero Parliamentary Caucus
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 3, 2024
Almost half the Conservative Party’s backbench MPs in the British Parliament belong to a Caucus promoting extreme Net Zero ideas that is funded by a small group of green billionaire foundations. The Conservative Environment Network (CEN), which acts mostly as a lobby group, receives over 80% of its funding from the European Climate Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, Oak Foundation, WWF-UK and Clean Air Fund. As regular readers will recall, these paymasters crop up regularly whenever anyone of influence, be they journalists, academics or politicians, requires help and guidance in promoting the insanity of removing hydrocarbon energy from industrial societies within less than 30 years.
The CEN relies on ‘peer reviewed’ research to lobby for Net Zero policies at both Parliamentary and local council levels. It counts over 150 MPs and Peers in its Parliamentary caucus, over 500 local councillors, along with “international declaration signatories” numbering 300 legislators from 45 countries. The billionaire-funded operation is said to support a network of ‘Net Zero champions’ inside Parliament “to make the positive case that Net Zero is an economic opportunity as well as moral responsibility”.
It is noted by CEN that when Russia invaded Ukraine “we helped promote the narrative that reducing dependency on fossil fuels through renewable energy and insulation would help defeat Putin”. Quite how fossil fuel dependency is reduced by intermittent renewables that rely on back-up hydrocarbons is not immediately clear. It’s unlikely that Putin quaked in his boots at the thought of the widespread mobilisation of loft insulators in the U.K.
The biggest CEN paymaster seems to be the European Climate Foundation, which is heavily supported by the Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. The CEN is run by Ben Goldsmith who is one of five trustees of Hohn’s fund, The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. He is the brother of Lord Goldsmith, the former Conservative Environment Minister who served under Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Interestingly, Johnson’s father, Stanley, a long-time green activist, is listed as a member of the CEN steering committee.
The Clean Air Fund is also funded by Hohn along with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the green vehicle used to promote the political agenda of Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York. Bloomberg has a track record of funding the activities of politicians, again as regular readers will recall. He is one of the main backers of C40, a group of local civic leaders around the world, chaired by London Mayor and fireworks impresario Sadiq Khan. Removing cars from cites – and a form of rationing, whereby city dwellers are limited to a daily food quote of 2,500 calories with just 44g of meat – are just some of the proposals suggested in internal reports.
Of course targeting politicians is not a new game and lobbying legislators has long been a massive international enterprise. But the new breed of green promoters is particularly aggressive and the sums of money on offer are eye-watering. It has been reported that Hohn gave £46 million to C40. Jeremy Grantham, like Hohn a hedge fund billionaire, funds British academic institutions and journalists, but he also seems to have politicians in his sights. Speaking in 2019 to a group of business people in Copenhagen about the approaching apocalypse, he asked rhetorically, “What should I do, you say“? His suggestion: “You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.”
All of this, it might be argued, has led to the British Parliament donkey-nodding through some of the most restrictive and potentially most disastrous Net Zero legislation in the world. The actual target of 2050 Net Zero was rushed through in 2019 via secondary legislation by a Prime Minister without any considered debate. A green activist legal unit within Government called the Climate Change Committee keeps feet to the fire with demands for industry-destroying cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. Over £12 billion a year is lifted from the pockets of electricity users to pay for hopelessly inefficient power from the breezes and sunbeams that accounts for barely 5% of total energy use. In the cities, the cars of the less well off are penalised, while empty cycle lanes, road closures, 20 mph speed limits and sky-rocketing parking charges proliferate. Meanwhile, there are not enough children in the Congo to mine all the cobalt needed for spontaneously combusting electric cars, while heat pumps spell catastrophe for the life chances of old and frail people in the depths of a cold British winter.
“We’re very grateful to all those who have supported CEN financially and made our work possible,” says the Conservative Environment Network.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Amal Clooney Accuses a French Company, but Ignores the Crimes of the US and UK
By Steven Sahiounie | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 5, 2024
Amal Clooney, the international human rights lawyer, is representing victims of mass atrocities, including genocide and sexual violence, from the Iraqi Yazidi community who are seeking accountability for crimes perpetrated by ISIS.
The case alleges French conglomerate Lafarge SA conspired to provide material and funds to support ISIS terrorist campaigns against the Yazidis.
“Lafarge has admitted to a conspiracy that aided ISIS by providing millions of dollars in cash to ISIS, and is alleged to have provided ISIS with cement to construct underground tunnels and bunkers used to shelter ISIS members and hold hostages, including captured Yazidis,” a news release stated.
Clooney has focused on the French cement company which supported ISIS in Syria in order to remain in business during the war.
The crime committed by Lafarge is serious, but it is just one small incidence of western entities supporting terrorists in Syria following Radical Islam. Clooney is singling out a French company, and France is allied with both the U.S. and UK. While the crime affected hundreds of Yazidis, the same crime carried out by the U.S., UK and EU has affected millions of Syrian citizens.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces were caught selling arms to the ISIS.
Weapons sent to terrorists in Syria from the U.S. directly allowed ISIS to obtain substantial amounts of sophisticated supplies which they used against civilians.
A study by Conflict Armament Research found that anti-tank weapons given to the ‘rebels’ in Syria by the U.S. ended up in the possession of the ISIS within two months of leaving the factory.
The U.S. provided extensive lethal and non-lethal aid to many terrorist groups fighting against the Syrian government. The CIA ran a covert program Timber Sycamore to arm, fund and train terrorists in Syria. U.S. President Trump shut the program down in 2017.
ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra and the FSA fighting in Syria all shared the same political platform: to remove the Syrian government in Damascus, and replace it with a Islamic governing system. In March 2011, the U.S. and NATO began a war in Syria for the purpose of regime change. It was not successful, and the same government in Damascus has remained. However, the U.S.-NATO war was very successful in destroying the country, ruining the economy, killing thousands and sending the largest Syrian migrant wave to Europe in history.
U.S. President Barak Obama praised the FSA as ‘moderate’ rebels fighting for freedom and democracy. But, early on the FSA demonstrated that they were fighting to kill Christians and non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and had no interest in lofty ideals of freedom and democracy. They wanted to over throw the Damascus government with the support of the Obama administration, and realize the dream of a Sunni Muslim governing system which was based on Islamic Law, not civil codes.
In April 2014, investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh exposed the Obama-Clinton “Rat Line”, which was a CIA weapons highway into Syria, serving the terrorists fighting for Obama’s regime change goal. Weapons and ammunition was sent from Libya to Syria via southern Turkey, and the terrorists on the receiving end were affiliated with Al Qaeda, and later aligned with ISIS.
Hersh revealed a 2012 agreement by Obama, and supported by the UK spy agency, MI6, which was responsible for getting weapons from Libya into Syria.
In 2013, Clooney was appointed to a number of United Nations commissions, including as adviser to Special Envoy Kofi Annan on Syria. The U.S. and UK involvement in supporting the terrorists who would later fight alongside ISIS was not any secret.
In 2016, Obama signed into law a defense policy bill which led to U.S. weapons provided to ‘rebels’ ending up in the hands of terrorists following Radical Islam, who became brothers in arms on the Syrian battlefields.
The Yazidis have suffered greatly and should receive justice. Clooney has focused on this one small incidence of ISIS benefiting from a French business. Clooney has ignored that the U.S., UK and their western democratic allies supported, funded, trained and weaponized terrorists in Syria which directly benefitted ISIS.
Where is the international court case to serve justice for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead, maimed, raped, kidnapped and made homeless by the FSA and their allies Al Qaeda and ISIS?
Clooney chose an easy win with the case against Lafarge. Clooney said she hopes to get a financial award for the Yazidis from her case so they can rebuild their lives.
The U.S. has prevented the Syrian people from rebuilding any hospital, school or home because of the U.S. imposed sanctions which prevent importing any products for reconstruction. The U.S. sanctions against Syria prevent any wealthy Arab country, or investor, from developing any reconstruction project to benefit the Syrian civilians, such as the repair of the water infrastructure in Aleppo. Last summer, Aleppo suffered cholera because the water plant is in need of repair.
The Syrians have no court case pending, and have no hope of any recovery from their suffering caused by the U.S.-NATO attack on the Syrian people for regime change.
Britain’s Neocolonial Actions Must End – Russian Foreign Ministry
Sputnik – 06.01.2024
MOSCOW – London, which accuses Moscow of violating UN Security Council resolutions, should remember its neocolonial actions, including aggression against the population of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and military aid to Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stressed.
The official made a statement commenting on British Defense Minister Grant Shapps’ assertions that “the world has turned its back on Russia.”
The British minister made the remarks in connection to unsubstantiated allegations regarding the use of “DPRK missiles.” Shapps also accused Russia of violating multiple UN Security Council resolutions, despite Moscow’s stern denial of such innuendos.
“Here is just a short list of London’s neocolonial actions of recent times: the participation of British land and air forces together with the Americans in the aggression against Yugoslavia, in the destruction of Iraq and its population, Libya, Afghanistan, the bombing of Syria, and now – supporting the Kiev regime, which in violation of all resolutions on non-delivery of weapons to conflict zones the Anglo-Saxons are supplying with lethal weapons. But Shapps is right about one thing: ‘This must end,'” Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel.
Earlier, Pyotr Ilyichev, the director of the Department of International Organizations of the Russian Foreign Ministry told Sputnik that UN experts monitoring possible violations of Security Council sanctions refute the allegation that Moscow is violating these restrictions.
According to Ilyichev, Russia treats its international obligations responsibly, while accusations are being made by those who are fixated on the task of discrediting Russia.
Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, with Russian President Vladimir Putin noting the goal is to ensure “the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.”
According to the Russian president, the “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine” is of utmost importance in order to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for “bloody crimes against civilians” in the Donbass.
They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 4
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | January 2, 2024
Happy New Year, dear readers! As always, this series of headlines is presented without commentary. It’s everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you.
Expansion of UK Investigatory Law to Force Tech Companies Into ‘Surveillance State’
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 03.01.2024
King Charles III announced No.10’s decision to expand the powers of the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act last year, adding that threats to national security are currently “changing rapidly due to new technology.”
The UK government’s drive to update the country’s controversial Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) is prompting “a fresh outcry” among both industry execs and privacy campaigners, a US news outlet has reported.
According to the outlet, Downing Street’s actions to expand what is known as one of Europe’s toughest surveillance laws could hobble efforts to protect user privacy.
In a letter to Home Secretary James Cleverly, industry body TechUK warned that the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill threatens technological innovation, undermines the sovereignty of other nations and leads to far-reaching consequences if it causes a domino effect overseas.
TechUK insisted that combined with pre-existing powers, the IPA changes would “grant a de- facto power to indefinitely veto companies from making changes to their products and services offered in the UK.”
“We stress the critical need for adequate time to thoroughly discuss these changes, highlighting that rigorous scrutiny is essential given the international precedent they will set and their very serious impacts,” the letter reads.
The document points out that TechUK is concerned that the the proposed changes are presented by the Home Office as minor adjustments and as such are being downplayed.
Director of thecampaign group Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, argued that with CCTV footage or social media posts people may not have an expectation of privacy, but that “data taken together and processed in a certain way, can be incredibly intrusive.”
“What we’re seeing across these different bills is a continual edging further towards […] turning private tech companies into arms of a surveillance state,” Carlo said.
A No.10 spokesperson in turn underscored that the government has always been clear that it supports technological innovation as well as private and secure communications technologies, including end-to-end encryption. “But this cannot come at a cost to public safety, and it is critical that decisions are taken by those with democratic accountability,” the spokesperson warned.
On June 5, the Home Office opened consultations to discuss “possible outcomes for revised IPA notices…intended to improve the effectiveness of the current regimes” amid new challenges to national security.
The Home Office in particular wants companies offering messaging services, including Apple behind FaceTime and iMessage, and Meta behind WhatsApp, to seek government approval around these messaging tools’ security features.
The 2016 IPA, commonly known as the “snoopers’ charter”, contains a spate of provisions, such as requiring broadband internet service providers and mobile operators to log internet connection records (ICRs) for up to 12 months.
Russia thwarts Ukrainian attack on border area
RT | January 3, 2024
Russia’s Belgorod Region, which borders Ukraine, has come under fresh attack after Kiev’s forces launched a barrage of a dozen missiles, the Russian Defense Ministry has announced, adding that its air defenses had shot down all incoming projectiles.
The ministry wrote on its Telegram channel on Wednesday that “another attempt to carry out a terrorist attack by the Kiev regime on facilities on the territory of the Russian Federation, using multiple launch rocket system ‘Olkha’ missiles and ‘Tochka-U’ tactical ballistic missiles, was thwarted this morning.”
According to the statement, the shelling involved six rockets of each type.
Local residents reported seeing explosions in the skies early on Wednesday morning.
The Ukrainian military also shelled the region on Tuesday evening, using the same type of rockets, the defense ministry said, adding that all incoming missiles had been intercepted.
Earlier in the day, Kiev’s forces launched 17 ‘Olkha’ missiles toward Belgorod Region in three separate attacks. Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on his Telegram channel that one civilian had died and two were injured as a result of falling debris as the missiles were shot down.
The Russian Defense Ministry estimated that its air defenses brought down a total of 32 Ukrainian drones over Bryansk, Oryol, Kursk and Moscow regions on Monday night and Tuesday morning.
On Saturday, the city of Belgorod came under attack, with a massive Ukrainian barrage killing 25 people and wounding more than 100 others.
Kiev described the strike as retaliation for a previous Russian attack on major Ukrainian cities, including Kiev.
According to an anonymous Russian security source, Saturday’s shelling was personally ordered by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Moscow has also claimed that the UK and the US also bear responsibility for the death of Russian civilians in Belgorod.
Ukraine and Russia have since engaged in daily tit-for-tat bombardments.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday that its missile strikes had obliterated a number of military industry facilities, repair shops, and ammunition warehouses in the neighboring country. Ukrainian authorities claimed that most of the projectiles ended up hitting civilian infrastructure and apartment blocks, killing multiple civilians.
Ukraine to decide how to use US missiles – ambassador
RT | January 2, 2024
The decision on how to use the American-supplied missiles for HIMARS launchers will be up to the Ukrainian military command, US Ambassador to Kiev Bridget Brink said on Tuesday, according to the Ukrainian outlet Strana.
The US has sent Ukraine around 30 high-mobility artillery rocket systems since mid-2022. The projectiles Washington officially supplied to Kiev have a range of up to 160 kilometers (100 miles). Ukraine has repeatedly demanded longer-range missiles.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces command will “independently decide on the range of strikes delivered” using the HIMARS projectiles the US plans to deliver “in the near future,” Strana reported Brink as saying on Tuesday afternoon.
Brink made the identical announcement in June 2022. It was reiterated by the Pentagon in February 2023, when the US announced it would send Ukraine Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB) munitions.
According to a Washington Post article at the time, Ukraine carries out HIMARS launches using “specific coordinates provided by US military personnel,” but chooses the targets itself. The US provides coordinates and targeting information “solely in an advisory role,” an anonymous American official insisted.
Russia has said that this is a distinction without a difference, and repeatedly warned that US and British officials involved in Ukrainian attacks on civilians will be brought to justice.
In October, Kiev boasted about using longer-ranged ATACMS missiles “secretly” supplied by the US. As it turned out, the White House sent over a small number of the rockets armed with the controversial cluster munitions.
On Saturday, Ukrainian long-range rocket artillery struck the main town square of Belgorod city with cluster bombs, killing 25 civilians – including children – and injuring 100 more. Czech-supplied weapons were reportedly used in the attack. Russia has retaliated by targeting Ukrainian command posts, weapons warehouses and military factories in a wave of missile and drone strikes.
Speaker on BBC Verify Correspondent’s Six Month Sabbatical Course Has Called for Jailing Climate Contrarians
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 1, 2024
Further and better particulars have emerged about the green billionaire-funded course run by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), which has to date attracted over 400 participants from around the world. It recently signed up Marco Silva, the climate ‘disinformation’ specialist employed by BBC Verify. To “hit closer to home”, course participants are told to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it wasn’t as tasty as the year before due to the impact of climate change. Noted climate hysteric Saffron O’Neill has been a past speaker and she is on record as speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science. There is something very disturbing about a climate activist from a State-reliant broadcaster attending a course funded by narrative-driven billionaires with a speaker who has suggested that sceptical climate scientists and writers be locked up in prison.
As the Daily Sceptic disclosed, the OCJN six-month course is run by the Reuters Institute, which is funded by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Direct funding for the course, which started last year, has been provided by the Laudes Foundation and the European Climate Fund, the latter heavily supported by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. Immersion in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called ‘settled’ science, and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the cost, is the order of the day. It would appear that the aim of the OCJN is to insert constant fearmongering messages into media stories, as global elites press ahead with a collectivist Net Zero political agenda.
In a recently published essay, two OCJN organisers give chapter and verse as to how this is being directed on the course. It is designed to allow climate journalists to “move beyond their siloed past” into a strategic position within newsrooms “combining expertise with collaboration”. The “pick your mango” strategy is designed to make climate change “less abstract” and delegates are told to pick a “beloved fruit or activity that everyone in your country or region seems to care about, and seems to capture attention when impacted by climate change”.
“Less abstract” is one way of summing up this pseudoscientific hogwash. ‘Infantile’ might be better. None of it is based on a scintilla of scientific proof. Much the same can be said for a presentation by Dr. Friederike Otto who uses computer models to claim her green billionaire-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) team can attribute individual bad weather events to human-caused climate change. Following Otto’s presentation, attendees are reported to have shown a “massive jump in self-confidence” when attributing individual weather to the long-term climate change.
The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jnr. is scathing about weather attribution calling it a new “cottage industry”, adding that the need to feed the climate beast leads to a knock-on effect of creating incentives for researchers to produce studies with links to climate – “no matter how tenuous or trivial”. At the BBC, weather attribution has always been very popular. Writing in a WWA guide for journalists, the former BBC Today editor Sarah Sands says attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horseman of the climate apocalypse”. Former OCJN attendee, Ben Rich, the BBC’s lead weather presenter, has used the “science” of climate attribution “to help explain to audiences when and how scientists can link extreme weather to climate change”.
None of this ludicrous propaganda can be questioned since the science is deemed to be ‘settled’. Geography lecturer Dr. Saffron O’Neill has taken climate hysteria to a new level with a demand that journalists should not use photos of people enjoying themselves on beaches during summer heat waves. She recently told theGuardian that such images “can hold the same power” as photos of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. After a session with O’Neill, audience members said that “news outlets and photo agencies can and should think ahead of time about how they photograph the risks of hot weather”. And of course if anyone disagrees with O’Neill and her version of the “well supported” science, it is time for fines and prison. The last suggestion was published in Carbon Brief, the activist blog financed by the European Climate Fund. As it happens, Carbon Brief is represented on the OCJN Advisory Board through its editor Leo Hickman.
The OCJN is far from the only billionaire foundation-funded operation trying to spread climate alarm and hysteria throughout the general population. Climate Central targets local media with ready-to-publish stories about significant landmarks disappearing beneath rising sea levels. It recently gulled the Mirror into running a notably silly story about much of London disappearing beneath the waves within 80 years. Covering Climate Now (CC Now) is an off-shoot of the Columbia Journalism Review and is backed by the Guardian. It claims to feed over 500 media operations with pre-written climate stories. Both these operations rely on heavy financial support from a small cluster of green billionaire funds.
The links between these operations spreads far and wide. One of the partners of CC Now is Reuters, the news agency connected to the OCJN through its Reuters Institute. Not everyone is happy with Reuters’ connections to operations such as CC Now that make no secret of a desire to promote a hard-line Net Zero narrative and suppress opposition to it. Neil Winton worked for 32 years at the agency covering science in his time. Politicians and lobbyists are in the process of dismantling our way of life, he notes. If we are going to give up our civilisation, at the very least we ought to have an open debate. “Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is this requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom,” he said.
And, he might have added, avoiding the naughty step of Dr. Saffron O’Neill.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Are EV Fires Stories Being Covered Up?
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 1, 2024
On Boxing Day, we passed this house on our way up to the common where we take the dogs. We go there most days, so were shocked to see this fire damage (photos taken today). On Boxing Day, there was a totally burnt out car on the drive, and also a gas van outside, presumably checking the mains were safe. The last time we went past was, I believe, Saturday, so the fire must have happened between then and Tuesday.
We could not identify the burnt out car at the time, as we did not stop. But there is often a Tesla parked on the driveway.
The fire obviously has all the classic trappings of an EV fire. Note how the right side of the house is hardly affected. The garage door must have been subjected to extreme heat, because it is hopelessly buckled out of shape.
This is not why I am making this post however.
For some reason, there seems to be no record or news at all of this locally. The South Yorkshire Fire Service keep a daily log of all incidents they have been called to, even down to wheelie bin fires. Yet they have no record at all of this fire. I have requested any information they have, but they have so far not responded.
The local newspaper, the Sheffield Star, also appears to have ignored the story, and there is no trace of the news on Google.
Is there some policy afoot to cover up stories of EV fires? It seems far fetched, but I can think of no other explanation.
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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
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran is not the one using Lebanon as its bargaining chip
- Iranian media reveal details of potential Iran-US draft MoU
- Iranian Media Publishes 14-Point Iran-US Deal Draft, Revealing Tehran’s Key Conditions
- EU court adviser delivers another ‘Pfizergate’ blow to von der Leyen
- 88 attacks against Palestinian Christians recorded since start of year
- Secretary of War Crimes
- Palestinian factions submit response to mediators, reject disarmament proposal
- US ‘limited war’ strategy against Iran deepens its strategic quagmire as Tehran’s deterrence grows
- Arab Powers Mull Regional Security Alliance – Jordan’s Ex-Minister
- A New Economic Front: Yemen’s Entrance to Regional War against US-Israeli Alliance
- If Americans Knew
- Tucker Carlson and John Mearsheimer on Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Russia & a Potential Nuclear Strike
- 88 attacks against Palestinian Christians recorded since start of year
- US administration investigating Iran war critic Trita Parsi, says report
- Congress members beg Israel to give Gaza cancer patients a chance at survival – Daily Update
- Senate wants to force US to share sensitive intel with Israel
- ‘They used dogs’: New Al Jazeera film exposes Israel’s use of rape in jails
- Israel is abducting ordinary Syrians and seizing their land in Quneitra
- Piro Inc Promotes Israel Government Ad Agency’s push to sway US Public Opinion
- Israel has US on the brink of war with Iran, stirs up chaos around the world – Daily Update
- Welcome to the 60th Year of Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
- Real-World Observations Do Not Support The Position That Climate Change Is Human-Caused
- Germany’s AfD Party Calls Debunked Climate Scenarios “Greatest Fraud In Human History”
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