Google Executive Allegedly Says Only Big Tech Can Prevent 2020 ‘Trump Situation’
Sputnik – June 25, 2019
While Big Tech has consistently brushed off accusations of discrimination and political bias, a new investigative report by Project Veritas provides new insight into Google’s alleged internal practices.
Project Veritas has published a new report on Google along with an undercover video of the company’s head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai, and leaked docs by an alleged insider that purportedly expose the tech giant’s plans to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential elections in the United States and “prevent the next Trump situation”.
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that”, she appears to be saying in the footage, which was filmed at a restaurant on a hidden camera.
Gennai was referring to a statement by Massachusetts Senator Warren to break up tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook as the companies face mounting backlash ahead of the 2020 vote.
The executive, whose “Responsible Innovation” sector monitors and evaluates the implementation of AI technologies, said in the video that Google has been working to reprogramme its systems and algorithms.
“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again. We’re also training our algorithms, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”
According to Project Veritas, Gennai as well addressed the anti-conservative bias accusations the company has recently faced and explained that “conservative sources” and “credible sources” didn’t always overlap in line with Google’s editorial practices.
“We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources…”
As part of the report, the video also contains snippets of an interview with an alleged Google whistleblower, who provided information on the alleged “algorithmic unfairness” and Machine Learning Fairness, which he claimed was “one of the many tools the company uses to advance a political agenda”.
“They are going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda”.
Gennai has already read the Project Veritas report and penned a Medium post to explain what happened, claiming that the outlet had edited the video “to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election”.
She dismissed the report as an “unadulterated nonsense” and reiterated that the company “works to be a trustworthy source of information, without regard to political viewpoint”.
“In a casual restaurant setting, I was explaining how Google’s Trust and Safety team (a team I used to work on) is working to help prevent the types of online foreign interference that happened in 2016. I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done”, she wrote.
YouTube has already removed the video of the interview with Gennai from the platform, while Reddit has suspended Project Veritas’ account following the release of the report.
This isn’t the first time Project Veritas has had its accounts or content removed after publishing an investigative report which exposes the internal practices of big tech firms. One of its reports, which shed light on Pinterest’s internal blacklists, was censored heavily as a result of questionable privacy complaints.
Aside from being taken down from YouTube, Project Veritas was also suspended on Twitter and other journalists who talked about the report in their videos had them removed.
In the past few weeks, Google and its video-sharing platform YouTube have faced multiple accusations of political bias against conservative views and independent media sites, as well as suppression of free speech.
The tech giants have, however, always denied the allegations.
Trump: War President or Anti-Interventionist?
By Patrick J. Buchanan • Unz Review • June 25, 2019
Visualizing 150 Iranian dead from a missile strike that he had ordered, President Donald Trump recoiled and canceled the strike, a brave decision and defining moment for his presidency.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the strike on Iran as the right response to Tehran’s shootdown of a U.S. Global Hawk spy plane over the Gulf of Oman.
The U.S. claims the drone was over international waters. Tehran says it was in Iranian territory. But while the loss of a $100 million drone is no small matter, no American pilot was lost, and retaliating by killing 150 Iranians would appear to be a disproportionate response.
Good for Trump. Yet, all weekend, he was berated for chickening out and imitating President Barack Obama. U.S. credibility, it was said, has taken a big hit and must be restored with military action.
By canceling the strike, the president also sent a message to Iran: We’re ready to negotiate. Yet, given the irreconcilable character of our clashing demands, it is hard to see how the U.S. and Iran get off this road we are on, at the end of which a military collision seems almost certain.
Consider the respective demands.
Monday, the president tweeted: “The U.S. request for Iran is very simple — No Nuclear Weapons and No Further Sponsoring of Terror!”
But Iran has no nuclear weapons, has never had nuclear weapons, and has never even produced bomb-grade uranium.
According to our own intelligence agencies in 2007 and 2011, Tehran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, the only way Iran could have a nuclear weapons program would be in secret, outside its known nuclear facilities, all of which are under constant U.N. inspection.
Where is the evidence that any such secret program exists?
And if it does, why does America not tell the world where Iran’s secret nuclear facilities are located and demand immediate inspections?
“No further sponsoring of terror,” Trump says.
But what does that mean?
As the major Shiite power in a Middle East divided between Sunni and Shiite, Iran backs the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s civil war, Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Alawite Bashar Assad in Syria, and the Shiite militias in Iraq who helped us stop ISIS’s drive to Baghdad.
In his 12 demands, Pompeo virtually insisted that Iran abandon these allies and capitulate to their Sunni adversaries and rivals.
Not going to happen. Yet, if these demands are nonnegotiable, to be backed up by sanctions severe enough to choke Iran’s economy to death, we will be headed for war.
No more than North Korea is Iran going to yield to U.S. demands that it abandon what Iran sees as vital national interests.
As for the U.S. charge that Iran is “destabilizing” the Middle East, it was not Iran that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, overthrew the Gadhafi regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Assad in Syria, or aided and abetted the Saudis’ intervention in Yemen’s civil war.
Iran, pushed to the wall, its economy shrinking as inflation and unemployment are rising, is approaching the limits of its tolerance.
And as Iran suffers pain, it is saying, other nations in the Gulf will endure similar pain, as will the USA. At some point, collisions will produce casualties and we will be on the up escalator to war.
Yet, what vital interest of ours does Iran today threaten?
Trump, with his order to stand down on the missile strike on Iran, signaled that he wanted a pause in the confrontation.
Still, it needs to be said: The president himself authorized the steps that have brought us to this peril point.
Trump pulled out of and trashed Obama’s nuclear deal. He imposed the sanctions that are now inflicting something close to unacceptable if not intolerable pain on Iran. He had the Islamic Revolutionary Guard declared a terrorist organization. He sent the Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and B-52s to the Gulf region.
If war is to be avoided, either Iran is going to have to capitulate, or the U.S. is going to have to walk back its maximalist position.
And who would Trump name to negotiate with Tehran for the United States?
The longer the sanctions remain in place and the deeper they bite, the greater the likelihood Iran will respond to our economic warfare with its own asymmetric warfare. Has the president decided to take that risk?
We appear to be at a turning point in the Trump presidency.
Does he want to run in 2020 as the president who led us into war with Iran, or as the anti-interventionist president who began to bring U.S. troops home from that region that has produced so many wars?
Perhaps Congress, the branch of government designated by the Constitution to decide on war, should instruct President Trump as to the conditions under which he is authorized to take us to war with Iran.
Copyright 2019 Creators.com.
$9 billion for Egypt in return for deal of the century
MEMO | June 24, 2019
According to documents released by the White House, the economic aspect of Donald Trump’s peace plan between Palestine and Israel includes granting $9 billion to Egypt, half of which is in the form of soft loans.
The documents revealed that $50 billion will be dedicated to the economic part of the deal of the century, which will be invested in the revival of the Palestinian territories, as well as Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.
The US President’s advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner will announce the details of the first phase of the peace plan during the workshop on “Peace for Prosperity” in Manama, Bahrain, on 25 and 26 June.
According to the documents, the funds received by Egypt will be invested during three stages over 10 years, as follows:
- $5 billion to be invested in modernising transport infrastructure and logistics in Egypt.
- $1.5 billion to be invested in supporting Egypt’s efforts to become a regional natural gas hub.
- $2 billion to be dedicated to the Sinai Development Project ($500 million for power generation projects, water infrastructure, transport infrastructure and tourism projects).
- An additional $125 million to be directed to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which will direct this fund to small and medium-sized enterprises in Egypt.
- $42 million to repair and modernise electricity transmission lines from Egypt to the Gaza Strip.
- The commitment to discuss ways to enhance trade deals between Egypt, Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank through Qualifying Industrial Zones in Egypt within the QIZ Agreement.
The rest of the $50 billion
According to the documents, the West Bank and Gaza Strip will receive about $28 billion, which will be invested in improving transport infrastructure, electricity networks, water supply infrastructure, education, housing, and agriculture.
$5 billion will be spent on transport infrastructure linking the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and another $1 billion on the development of the Palestinian tourism sector.
The remaining part of the $50 billion will be divided between Jordan, which will receive $7.4 billion, and Lebanon, which will be granted $6.3 billion. The totality of funds will be raised through an investment fund managed by a Multilateral Development Bank.
Where will these funds come from?
According to the documents, this amount is divided into $13.4 billion as grants, $25.7 billion as subsidised loans, and private capital in those projects will be $11.6 billion.
However, there are serious doubts as to whether this amount can be collected or not.
“There are deep doubts about the willingness of potential donor governments to make contributions at any time as long as the thorny political differences that are at the heart of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict have not been resolved,” Reuters mentioned in a report.
The news agency quoted experts as saying: “Most foreign investors will prefer to stay away not only because of security concerns and fears of corruption, but also because of the obstacles the Palestinian economy is facing due to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which hampers the movement of people, goods, and services.”
The cost for Egypt
In his interview with Reuters, Kushner described the economic aspect of the plan as “less controversial,” raising more questions about the formula for the political solution Trump and his associates are seeking.
Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, has repeatedly denied that the United States asked Egypt to give up land in Sinai to create a sovereign Palestinian entity expanding to parts of Rafah and Arish.
For its part, Egypt announced its participation in the Manama conference this week with a delegation headed by the Deputy Minister of Finance, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ahmed Hafiz told Middle East News Agency (MENA).
Hafez stressed that the Egyptian participation aims to “follow up the ideas that will be presented during the workshop and evaluate the compatibility of the contained theses with the Palestinian National Authority’s vision of the ways of granting legitimate rights of the Palestinian people through a political framework and in accordance with the Palestinian and Arab determinants and constants, and the related UN decisions.”
The deal of the century is a peace plan prepared by the Trump administration and is said to be forcing Palestinians to make unfair concessions in favour of Israel, including on the status of occupied East Jerusalem and the refugees’ right of return.
Boxed in by Neocons and the Media, Will Trump Launch Iran War?
By Ron Paul | June 24, 2019
President Trump did the smart thing last week by calling off a US airstrike on Iran over the downing of an American spy drone near or within Iranian territorial waters. According to press reports, the president over-ruled virtually all his top advisors – Bolton, Pompeo, and Haspel – who all wanted another undeclared and unauthorized US war in the Middle East.
Is Iran really the aggressive one? When you unilaterally pull out of an agreement that was reducing tensions and boosting trade; when you begin applying sanctions designed to completely destroy another country’s economy; when you position military assets right offshore of that country; when you threaten to destroy that country on a regular basis, calling it a campaign of “maximum pressure,” to me it seems a stretch to play the victim when that country retaliates by shooting a spy plane that is likely looking for the best way to attack.
Even if the US spy plane was not in Iranian airspace – but it increasingly looks like it was – it was just another part of an already-existing US war on Iran. Yes, sanctions are a form of war, not a substitute for war.
The media are also a big part of the problem. The same media that praised Trump as “presidential” when he fired rockets into Syria on what turned out to be false claims that Assad gassed his own people, has been attacking Trump for not bombing Iran. From Left to Right – with one important exception – the major media is all braying for war. Why? They can afford to cheer death and destruction because they will not suffer the agony of war. Networks will benefit by capturing big ratings and big money and new media stars will be born.
President Trump has said he does not want to be the one to start a new war in the Middle East. He seemed to prove that by avoiding the urgings of his closest advisors to attack Iran. It is hard to imagine a president having top advisors who work at cross-purposes to him, planning and plotting their wars – and maybe more – behind his back. Even Trump seems to recognize that his national security advisor is not really serving his administration well. Over the weekend he said in an interview, “John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him he’d take on the whole world at one time, okay?”
I think when you have a national security advisor who wants to fight the whole world at once, you have a problem. Does anyone believe we will be more secure after spending a few trillion more dollars and making a few hundred million more enemies? What does “victory” even look like?
President Trump is in a bind and it is of his own making. Iran has shown that it is not willing to take its marching orders from Washington, which means “maximum pressure” from the US will not work. He has two options remaining in that case: risk it all by launching a war or make a gesture toward peace. A war would ruin his presidency – and a lot more. I would urge the president to issue waivers to China, India, Turkey, and the others who wish to continue buying Iranian oil and invite the Iranian leadership to meet at a neutral location. And fire Bolton and Pompeo.
US deploying missiles along Russia’s borders could lead to ‘new Cuban crisis’ – Russia’s deputy FM
RT | June 24, 2019
Washington will provoke explosive tensions, reminiscent of the darkest moments of the Cold War, if it sends missiles close to Russia’s border after suspending the INF Treaty, a senior diplomat in Moscow warned.
If Washington deploys short or mid-range ground-based missiles along Russia’s borders, the situation “will not only become complicated, it will escalate to the maximum level,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told lawmakers on Monday.
“We can end up in a missile crisis not just similar to the one we had in the 1980s, but to the Cuban Missile Crisis [in 1962].”
The diplomat was commenting on the demise of the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) between Moscow and Washington. The deal banned owning and testing of all ground-based missiles with a range of up to 5,500km (3,420 miles), as well as their launchers.
Last year, the US announced the suspension of its obligations under the treaty, alleging that Russia secretly violates it. Moscow strongly denied the allegations and accused the US of conducting tests, illegal under the INF Treaty, which Washington likewise denied. In February, Russia suspended its participation in the agreement in “a mirror response” to the US’ actions.
Speaking on Monday, Ryabkov said that Moscow stands ready to continue taking “a responsible approach” to the situation but will do everything to “firmly maintain its own national security and the security of our allies in the changing environment.”
Trump Describes Advisors’ Attempt to Push Him to Attack Iran as So Disgusting: WSJ
Al-Manar | June 24, 2019
US President Trump bucked most of his top national-security advisers by abandoning retaliatory strikes in Iran on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“In private conversations Friday, Mr. Trump reveled in his judgment, certain about his decision to call off the attacks while speaking of his administration as if removed from the center of it.”
“These people want to push us into a war, and it’s so disgusting,” Trump told one confidant about his own inner circle of advisers. “We don’t need any more wars.”
“In these conversations, Trump bemoaned the costs of a drone shot down by Iran—about $130 million before research and development—but told people the dollar figure would resonate less with US voters than the potential casualties.”
Will the Australian Government Join in a “Nuremberg Class” Attack on Iran?
U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo welcomes Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne to the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on January 30, 2019.
Credit: U.S. Department of State/ flickr
By David Macilwain | American Herald Tribune | June 24, 2019
As my father used to say in response to difficult questions – “ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies”. This seems to be the approach of Australia’s media organizations to our government’s extraordinary silence over events in the Gulf of Oman. Barring an anodyne statement condemning the attacks on civilian shipping, neither Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne nor Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ventured an opinion on who might have been responsible for these provocative actions. This remains the case even when subsequent developments included a narrowly averted war with global repercussions, with no questions asked and no lies proffered.
In the aftermath of recent attacks on journalistic freedoms and intimidation of whistleblowers, many people have expressed the view that it is the job of journalists to hold governments and public servants to account. That the governments of both Australia and its parent Britain seek to avoid such scrutiny is clear from their actions. Draconian punishments now apply to those who are thought to “threaten national security” by revealing inconvenient truths.
So we might wonder whether the ABC’s failure to ask questions of Government ministers about the dangerous confrontation in the Persian Gulf is connected to these recent developments, which included a highly provocative police raid on the headquarters of the ABC. The ABC purports to be independent of Government, and is expected to interview ministers on behalf of the public when necessary, as well as seeking the view of shadow ministers from the opposition Labor party.
In those recent raids, which concerned an Australian equivalent of the “Collateral Murder” crime exposed by an insider in Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan and leaked to an ABC journalist two years ago, there was a widespread shock at the actions authorized under the police warrant. In examining the ABC’s files relating to the case, it was revealed that the recently expanded powers of police forensic officers included the deletion and alteration of computer files – though this was explained as limited to the removal of irrelevant material and identities. This could be true given that the need to rewrite history is now minimized thanks to current controls over access to information.
What was more shocking to some, however, was a widely expressed but ill-informed view from the “Murdoch Right” that the ABC raids were justified, as its actions had endangered national security. Similar views were expressed over the alleged crimes of Julian Assange, whether “narcissist” or “cyber-terrorist”, with little sympathy from fellow Australians for his persecution and torture by the UK regime.
Australian sentiment towards the Islamic Republic of Iran is similarly prejudiced, so persuading the public that Iran would have launched an attack on two tankers near the Straits of Hormuz on the basis of minimal evidence was never going to be difficult; a mere dog-whistle sufficed. What now seems worrying is that “Central Narrative Control” knew this in advance – that they could show a blurry video of Iranian forces rescuing a ship’s crew, while saying it showed them “removing a limpet mine”, and the US aligned media audience would believe that this was what they saw.
But how could people be fooled by this ridiculous story, presented with a video that didn’t stand the slightest scrutiny? Why anyway would Iran sabotage two ships as a direct provocation, while trying to make it look as though the US or its allies were responsible? This wouldn’t make any sense, as the US would have no motive for such an attack – other than to frame Iran for it as a pretext for what has now followed!
The corollary of this perverse provocation by the US or its local agents is that while an Iranian strike on the two tankers could have been understood as a response to newly imposed sanctions targeting Iran’s petrochemical industry, such an attack on civilian shipping by the US with the sole object of framing Iran would be an undoubted war crime. As in fact, it was – and we need to remember this as subsequent events and silence from the media relegate it to a later investigation, or the memory hole. (Iran has also registered a protest over the US accusations with the UN)
Those subsequent events, which we now discover have brought us to the point of a major military escalation, allow current news reports to state that “following the Iranian attack on two ships in the Gulf of Oman” – tensions on both sides are increasing; no longer is the ship attack “alleged”. Instead, a new “limpet mine” narrative has been created to reinforce the idea of the Iranian threat, and this, in turn, feeds into talk of new Uranium enrichment above the agreed levels in the JCPOA, despite this being an entirely legitimate Iranian response to the US’ failure to keep to the agreement. Contrary to the immediate wild accusations from the usual suspects that Iran is now “again” working on a nuclear bomb (it never was, since 2003 [if ever] ), the renewed enrichment remains only to the 3.7% base limit, as those nuclear-armed suspects know perfectly well.
The need to be reminded of these stages in the development of the false narrative that Iran is the aggressor is that the silence from both media and politicians has actually enabled it, simply by drawing on the prejudices of the population. It seems that only those who doubt or deny the US-led accusations against Iran have noticed the deafening silence of Australia’s leaders and the failure of the main media to ask them to show their hand. Is it possible that we could find ourselves supporting the real aggressors in a criminal attack on a peaceful and friendly nation – a classic case of “sleepwalking into war”?
Well, now it appears that this is the case. The ABC hasn’t thought to ask the foreign minister whether we agree with the US story, and whether we would support them in military action against Iran despite the lack of evidence, because there is already that assumption. Despite the early skepticism of US claims from some mainstream commentators, and parallels drawn with the proverbial Iraqi WMD fraud, those reservations appear to now be forgotten. With this comes the realization that my father’s riposte does not apply to our national broadcaster; it doesn’t fear being told lies but rather fears having to admit the obvious truth, which is that of course, we believe the US story, and will support any action that our alliance demands.
Such blindness to the truth, and blind submission to the whims of the world’s most dangerous state, was brought home by this quote from Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Michael Bachelard:
“Some have likened the escalating atmosphere to the feeling leading up to George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. So why are we suddenly using the “w” word in the Middle East again, and should Australia brace to be invited into another Coalition of the Willing?”
Bachelard presents – and perhaps believes – “Australia” to be a well-intentioned onlooker on the mixed-up politics of the Middle East, whose “contribution” would always be towards peace and security and resolution of conflict. It is a rosy-eyed view of Australia sadly prevalent amongst people whose own intentions are honorable – assuming that the leaders of our traditional allies and partner “democracies” share their honesty and integrity and benevolence. By contrast, these same people seem happy to assume the worst about our “enemies”; Bachelard’s inappropriate use of a photo of a smiling President Assad greeting Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran in February in the above article nicely reflects this ingrained prejudice.
The reality of Australia’s role in Middle Eastern politics, on the battlefields of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and over Palestine and Israel is sadly very different. Despite a “modest contribution” to the Iraq invasion force, John Howard was George Bush’s closest ally, notably refusing to accept that Saddam Hussein had no WMD until around 2010. More recently the involvement of Australian fighter jets in the 2016 US coalition attack on the Syrian Army near Deir al Zour was symptomatic of Australia’s illegitimate presence in Syria, and complicity in NATO allies’ support for the insurgent forces. This intimate alignment with the US also saw Australia copying Trump’s “recognition” of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, despite the damage this did to relations with our closest neighbor Indonesia.
In the light of this record, and the catalog of unasked questions and untold lies, we can only speculate on the Australian Government’s RSVP to America’s “invitation” to join in a “Nuremberg class” attack on Iran. With Foreign Minister Marise Payne’s record of meetings with both Pompeo and Bolton, and our shared bases and assets in the region, it seems likely such an invitation was a mere formality, likely preceding the first strikes on tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
And as with the story of the war crimes in Afghanistan, there won’t be any desire to rewrite the history of how the third Great War began, should the truth finally surface. That history has already been certified as true by the silence of “Australia’s most trusted news source” and recorded in the mind of the nation; no-one would now believe otherwise.
‘They tried hard, but failed’: Iran foiled all US attempts to carry out cyber-attacks
RT | June 24, 2019
Iran successfully prevented US cyber-attacks that targeted its infrastructure, the country’s information minister said after Washington was reported to have crippled Tehran’s missile control sites with a retaliatory cyber-strike.
Minister for Information and Communication Technology Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi appeared to deny reports in the US media that a massive cyber-offensive had disabled Iranian computer systems that control rocket and missile launches on Thursday.
Neither the Pentagon nor the White House commented on the reports, which claimed that the strike had been carried out by US Cyber Command in cooperation with US Central Command to avenge the downing of an unmanned US Navy drone by Iran on Thursday morning.
Stopping short of directly addressing rumors that the attack had taken place, Jahromi said that Iran has vast experience of thwarting these kind of assaults, having foiled some “33 million attacks with the [national] firewall, only within the last year.”
He specifically referred to Stuxnet, a computer worm jointly developed by the US and Israel, which was used to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility networks in 2009-2010.
“They try hard, but have not carried out a successful attack”.
The Washington Post reported earlier that the alleged cyber-strike had incapacitated Iran’s military command posts and control systems.
The Trump administration has been pursuing a hawkish cyber-strategy. Signed by Trump last September, the document rolled up many of the constraints that limited the usage of offensive cyber-operations in retaliation against foreign actors.
Unveiling the strategy, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, who has been rallying behind a military option in Iran, announced that Washington’s “hands are not tied” anymore.
Meanwhile, Iran has exercised caution, warning that the US military should carefully assess the risks before going to war with Tehran. A senior Iranian general warned that if a conflict breaks out, “no country would be able to manage its scope and timing.”
Who are Canary Mission?
Semitic Controversies | June 2, 2019
Canary Mission is a jewish pro-Israel organisation that is fairly infamous amongst the anti-Zionist community given that it has created and maintained a blacklist of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (hereafter BDS) activists. It then pushes for these blacklists to be used to identify ‘enemies of Israel/the jewish people’ by jews and ‘friends of Israel’ in communal and private organizations as well as the Israeli government.
In an article in the normally ardently pro-Israel ‘Tablet Magazine’ jewish academics David Greenberg, Rebecca Lesses, Jeffry Mallow, Deborah Dash Moore, Sharon Ann Musher, Cary Nelson, Kenneth Stern and Irene Tucker summarized Canary Mission’s strategy as:
‘Canary Mission, however, is not simply creating lists. It urges action to punish the students it targets, including the call to private organizations to shun them when hiring. But private organizations with a political mission are better off interviewing and inquiring to make sure they are making appropriate hires, rather than relying on Canary Mission’s dubious lists. They don’t need and should not turn to any blacklist to help them screen applicants. Canary Mission’s efforts enhance the potential for the unethical political screening of job applicants.’ (1)
They go on to explain Canary Mission’s modus operandi as follows:
‘In the spring of 2015 an anonymous group of people established a website announcing the formation of an organization they called Canary Mission. They began posting photos of college student activists working on behalf of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, along with brief accounts of their activities. They described the website as a database “created to document the people and groups that are promoting hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on college campuses in North America.” A smaller number of pro-BDS faculty were also documented on the site. From about 50 dossiers in the spring, the site grew to 150 by fall 2015. Canary Mission also began tweeting notices about BDS advocacy and organizing, along with tweets about the people the site was highlighting. As of mid-October 2016, there are 63 faculty members and 602 “individuals,” mostly students, identified on the site.’ (2)
This extremely cavalier and broad-brush approach to labeling people – often jews – as being ‘BDS activists’ and/or ‘enemies of Israel/the jewish people’ is seen most obviously in the fact that Canary Mission have routinely labelled Liberal Zionists such as David Biale of the University of California, Davis as such despite their obvious pro-Israel advocacy and credentials. (3)
Perhaps predictably once jews realized that if you weren’t a hard-line Revisionist Zionist of the Likudnik or more radical variety then you ran the risk of being labelled a ‘BDS activist’ and/or ‘enemy of Israel/the jewish people’ then they have begun protesting and kvetching loudly about Canary Mission’s mislabeling them but without too much upset about the tactics Canary Mission have used per se. (4)
Tilly Shames – a jewess who runs Hillel at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbour (aka an ardent Zionist) – was quoted by the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ as stating that:
‘The tactics of the organization are troubling, both from a moral standpoint, but have also proven to be ineffective and counterproductive.’ (5)
And ‘Shames said that Canary Mission’s publication of dossiers on students on her campus had led to greater support for the targeted students and their beliefs, and had spread mistrust of pro-Israel students, who were suspected of spying for Canary Mission.’ (6)
Greenberg et al writing in the previously-mentioned article in ‘Tablet Magazine’ are also deeply suspicious of Canary Mission’s tactics and write that:
‘After a collage of campus demonstrations, including one of an anti-war rally, it continues: “Join us to combat this wave of hatred, protect freedom, and make campus life safe for everyone. It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”
As part of its fear-mongering agenda, the video tracks slowly across a Holocaust photograph. Whether this allusion is more absurd or despicable may depend on your perspective.’ (7)
This allusion to the central place of the ‘Holocaust’ in Revisionist Zionist thought and – what has been termed ‘the founding myths of Israel’ by the French writer Roger Garaudy – by Greenberg has been analysed in detail by academics such as Jacqueline Rose. (8) For our purposes we need to note the direct association by Canary Mission of the ‘Holocaust’ with non-support for Revisionist Zionist ideological positions.
This is important to note as we get on to who runs Canary Mission and its ever increasing ‘blacklist’ (9) as that links back to who runs it and confirms it via the strong ideological bias shown by Canary Mission even in its attempt to get into the jewish communal organization fetish of ‘published research reports’ about so-called ‘anti-Semitism’. (10)
Just who was running Canary Mission was a mystery until 2018 when Josh Nathan-Kazis of the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ managed to find the disguised funding trail from a mysterious Israeli charity named ‘Megamot Shalom’ which has been receiving donations for Canary Mission from jewish communal organizations such as $100,000 from the San Francisco-based ‘Helen Diller Family Foundation’ in late 2016. (11)
To quote Nathan-Kazis’s summary at length:
‘According to filings with Israel’s charities registry, Megamot Shalom was set up in July 2016, just over a year after Canary Mission’s website appeared online. Its mission, according to the filings, is to “ensure the national image and strength of the state of Israel via the use of information disseminated by technological means.”
The public filings don’t mention Canary Mission by name, though they do say that the organization paid freelancers for editing website content and a consultant for data security. Among Megamot Shalom’s only reported assets are computers worth around $5,000.
Megamot Shalom’s publicly available financial reports bear two signatures. One signature is illegible in English and Hebrew. The other is the signature of Jonathan Bash, a British-born Jerusalem resident who two people, granted anonymity to speak about private conversations, told the Forward identified himself to them as the person who operates Canary Mission, as the Forward first reported in August.
Bash is identified in the filing as a “member of the directorate” of Megamot Shalom. When the Forward emailed him for comment in late September, two of his email accounts bounced back auto responses saying he was on an extended vacation.
Megamot Shalom has virtually no online footprint. What does exist on the Internet was scrubbed after the Forward began asking questions about the organization. An Israel-based writer named Zahava Raymond previously identified herself on LinkedIn as a “writer-researcher” for Megamot Shalom, but removed the organization’s name from her profile after the Forward sent her a query over Facebook. Raymond previously worked for Honest Reporting and NGO Monitor, pro-Israel advocacy groups.
Megamot Shalom received roughly $165,000 in the last six months of 2016, according to its financial report. It has not yet filed its financial report for 2017, which was due at the end of August. It’s not clear whether the donation from the Diller Foundation is reflected in the 2016 filings, or if it came in the 2017 calendar year.’ (12)
The ‘Helen Diller Family Foundation’ and its trustees are not without influence in American life since as Nathan-Kazis further points out:
‘The president of its board, real estate developer Jaclyn Safier, sits on the board of visitors of the University of California, Berkeley, and is a distinguished director of a foundation that supports the University of California, San Francisco. Another board member, Richard Rosenberg, is the former chairman and chief executive of Bank of America.’ (13)
This foundation also supports a vast array of other Revisionist Zionist and Israel First organizations operating in the Diaspora as proxies for the more politically extreme elements of the Israeli government as Sue Fishkoff has explained in San Francisco’s ‘JWeekly’:
‘Several other right-wing organizations that have received funding through Federation donor-advised funds or supporting foundations are now off the table as well, Grossman said. They include David Horowitz Freedom Center; the American Freedom Defense Initiative, founded by Pam Geller and Robert Spencer; and the American Freedom Law Center, co-founded by Robert Muise and David Yerushalmi. Past funding for these organizations has been criticized in recent reports in the Forward and Haaretz.’ (14)
Nor is the ‘Helen Diller Family Foundation’ alone in its unhappy position of being discovered financially supporting Israeli attempts to undermine the First Amendment in the United States and suffering the considerable backlash from their own members as a result. (15)
Between November 2016 and September 2017 the ‘Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles’, ‘one of the largest Jewish charities in the country, made a series of grants totaling $250,000 to Megamot Shalom, the Israeli not-for-profit organization that the Forward has identified as the likely operator of Canary Mission. The foundation now says that it will not fund Megamot Shalom in the future.’ (16)
Despite the ‘Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles’ donating four times to ‘Megamot Shalom’; it has tried to spin this by claiming that it only knew that ‘Megamot Shalom’ was ‘fighting anti-Semitism’ (17) and apparently was so utterly incompetent as to never do basic due diligence on the groups that it was dishing out money to.
It sort of sounds like a jewish conspiracy: doesn’t it?
Now this large amount of kosher cash being distributed to Canary Mission went somewhere and to whom it went was not so much the a-forenamed jew-pretending-to-be-gentile Jonathan Bash. (18)
Bash is merely a front-man for Rabbi Ben Packer – an activist and leader of the goy-hating movement of literal jewish terrorists named Kach based on the writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane – (19) who is using the money to fund Canary Mission and label his political enemies – of which there are legion – as Israeli daily ‘Haaretz’ has exposed. (20)
Perhaps the scariest thing about Rabbi Packer’s running of Canary Mission is the fact that it has direct links to the Israeli government or more specifically the rabidly Revisionist Zionist ‘Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy Ministry’ – run until recently by goy-hating extraordinaire Naftali Bennett – whose primary responsibility is ‘Public Diplomacy’, which is better known to the reading public as ‘Hasbara’.
This is demonstrated by the fact that the ‘Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy Ministry’ has been using Canary Mission’s blacklists as the basis for its own visa blacklists used to deny ‘enemies of Israel/the jewish people’ entry visas at Israeli immigration checkpoints. (21)
Nor is Canary Mission the only organisation of this type run by/closely allied to the ‘Israel on Campus Coalition’ and the new outfit ‘Know Your Professor’ – similar outfits to Canary Mission but more focused on blacklisting opponents in academia than in general – (22) also linked back to the Israeli government. (23)
Sounds like a jewish conspiracy to manipulate non-jews run in part by the Israeli government: doesn’t it?
References
(1) https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/216271/the-blacklist-in-the-coal-mine-canary-missions-fear-mongering-agenda-college-campuses
(2) Ibid.
(3) https://forward.com/opinion/411404/im-a-zionist-canary-mission-targeted-me-anyway/
(4) https://forward.com/fast-forward/419806/st-louis-jewish-group-slams-canary-mission-for-blacklisting-local-student/
(5) https://forward.com/news/national/411355/revealed-canary-mission-blacklist-is-secretly-bankrolled-by-major-jewish/
(6) Ibid.
(7) https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/216271/the-blacklist-in-the-coal-mine-canary-missions-fear-mongering-agenda-college-campuses
(8) Jacqueline Rose, 2003, ‘The Question of Zion’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, especially pp. 58-107
(9) https://forward.com/opinion/411658/how-a-reporters-curiosity-broke-through-a-shadowy-websites-secrecy/
(10) https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/11/anti-semitism-watchdog-canary-mission-exposes-jewish-voice-for-peace-in-new-report/
(11) https://www.jweekly.com/2018/10/03/canary-mission-funding-was-one-time-grant-says-s-f-federation/; https://forward.com/news/national/411426/breaking-after-forward-report-federation-says-it-will-not-fund-canary/; https://forward.com/news/national/411355/revealed-canary-mission-blacklist-is-secretly-bankrolled-by-major-jewish/
(12) https://forward.com/news/national/411355/revealed-canary-mission-blacklist-is-secretly-bankrolled-by-major-jewish/
(13) Ibid.
(14) https://www.jweekly.com/2018/10/19/how-does-the-s-f-federation-vet-grantees/
(15) https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-young-jewish-activists-furious-over-s-f-federation-s-support-of-canary-mission-1.6530890; https://www.jweekly.com/2018/10/18/former-diller-teen-fellows-its-not-enough-to-apologize-you-have-to-take-action/
(16) https://forward.com/news/national/411895/second-major-jewish-charity-admits-funding-canary-mission-blacklist/
(17) https://forward.com/fast-forward/412097/la-jewish-group-suspends-grants-to-organization-tied-to-canary-mission/
(18) https://forward.com/news/national/411355/revealed-canary-mission-blacklist-is-secretly-bankrolled-by-major-jewish/
(19) Cf. Ami Pedahzur, Arie Perliger, 2009, ‘Jewish Terrorism in Israel’, 1st Edition, Columbia University Press: New York
(20) https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-new-details-revealed-about-the-israeli-money-pipeline-to-canary-mission-1.6554802; https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/what-happened-to-these-u-s-jews-after-birthright-1.5465493; https://forward.com/news/411881/documents-reveal-men-behind-megamot-shalom-mysterious-charity-tied-to/
(21) https://forward.com/news/411453/israel-uses-canary-mission-blacklist-info-to-bar-activists/; https://www.timesofisrael.com/government-said-to-use-canary-mission-blacklist-to-bar-visitors/
(22) https://worldisraelnews.com/know-your-professor-a-new-website-to-expose-anti-israel-lecturers/; https://forward.com/news/410757/campus-pro-israel-group-monitored-progressive-jewish-students/
(23) https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/blacklisting-u-s-citizens-playing-d-c-on-iran-aj-investigation-implicated-israel-1.6577528
Trump Has a $259 million Reason to Bomb Iran
By Eli Clifton | LobeLog | June 22, 2019
On Thursday, the United States came perilously close to a military confrontation with Iran after it downed a U.S. drone that may or may not have entered the country’s air space. President Donald Trump reportedly ordered a retaliatory military strike on Iran but called it off, according to Trump’s own tweets on Friday morning, because a general told him that “150 people” might die in the strike.
Much analysis of Trump’s slide toward war with Iran has focused on his hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, who, reportedly requested options from the Pentagon to deploy as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East and hit Iran with 500 missiles per day. Bolton is the loudest voice inside the White House pushing for a military escalation to the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for his part, is staking out the position that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force allows the administration to take military action against Iran without congressional approval, an unusual and broadly criticized interpretation of congressional oversight.
Yet, there’s another omnipresent influence on Trump: $259 million given by some of the GOP’s top supporters to boost his campaign in 2016 and support Republican congressional and senate campaigns in 2016 and 2018.
Those funds came from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus, donors who have made no secret, both through public statements and funding think tanks that support military action against Iran, of their desire for the United States to destroy the Islamic Republic.
Adelson, who alongside his wife Miriam are the biggest donors to Trump and the GOP, contributed $205 million to Republicans in the past two political cycles and reportedly sent $35 million to the Future 45 Super PAC that supported Trump’s presidential bid. His role as the biggest funder of Republican House and Senate campaigns makes him a vital ally for Trump—who relied on Adelson’s campaign donations to maintain a Republican majority in the Senate and curb Republican losses in the House in the 2018 midterm election—and any Republican seeking national office.
Adelson publicly suggested using nuclear weapons against Iran and pushed for Trump to replace then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster with Bolton, partly due to the former’s perceived unwillingness to take a harder line on Iran. In 2017, the Zionist Organization of America, which receives much of its funding from the Adelsons, led a public campaign against McMaster, accusing him of being “opposed to President Trump’s basic policy positions on Israel, Iran, and Islamist terror.”
In 2015, Trump mocked his primary opponent, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), for seeking Adelson’s financial support, warning that Adelson expects a degree of control over candidates in exchange for campaign contributions. Trump tweeted:
Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!
And Adelson isn’t alone.
Billionaire Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus is the second largest contributor to Trump’s campaign, providing $7 million. He also champions John Bolton, contributing $530,000 to John Bolton’s super PAC over its lifetime. And he’s a major contributor to GOP campaigns, contributing over $13 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and GOP congressional campaigns in 2016 and nearly $8 million to GOP midterm efforts in 2018.
Marcus, like Adelson, makes no qualms about his views on Iran, which he characterized as “the devil” in a 2015 Fox Business interview.
Unlike Adelson and Marcus, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer was a “never Trump” conservative until Trump won the election. Then he donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Singer is far more careful with his words than Marcus and Adelson, but his money supports some of the most hawkish think tank experts and politicians in Washington.
Singer, alongside Marcus and Adelson, has contributed generously to the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose experts have spent the past decade regularly promoting policies to pressure Iran economically and militarily, including most recently Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach.
According to donor rolls of FDD’s biggest supporters by the end of 2011, a year that saw a sharp rise in tensions and rumors of war by Israel against Iran, Adelson contributed $1.5 million, Paul Singer contributed $3.6 million, and Bernard Marcus, who sits on FDD’s board, contributed $10.7 million.
(FDD says that Adelson is no longer a contributor, but Marcus continues to give generously, contributing $3.63 million in 2017, over a quarter of FDD’s contributions that year.)
Employees of Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, were the second largest source of funds for the 2014 candidacy of the Senate’s most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a “retaliatory strike” against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers last week.
Singer donated $26 million to Republicans in the 2016 election and $6.4 million to the GOP’s midterm campaigns.
The billionaire Iran hawks—the Adelsons, Singer, and Marcus—made combined donations of over $259 million to GOP politicians in the past two cycles, making them some of the Republican Party’s most important donors. That quarter-billion-dollars doesn’t include contributions to dark money 501c4 groups and donations to 501c3 nonprofits, such as think tanks like FDD.
News coverage of Trump’s slide toward war frames the discussion as a competition between his better instincts and a national security advisor and secretary of state who, to varying degrees, favor military action.
But the $259 million that helped elect Trump and Trump-friendly Republicans must loom large over the president.
As Trump evaluates his options with Iran and turns his attention to the 2020 election, he knows he’ll need to rely on the Adelsons, Singer, and Marcus to boost his campaign, maintain a narrow majority in the Senate, and attempt a takeback of the House.
These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect a return on their investment in Trump’s GOP.
US plan will not lure Lebanon into settling Palestinians
MEMO | June 23, 2019
Lebanon will not be lured by a US plan to invest billions in the country in return for settling Palestinian refugees, its parliament speaker Nabih Berri said on Sunday, reports Reuters.
US President Donald Trump’s blueprint for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, set to be presented by his son-in-law Jared Kushner at a conference in Bahrain on June 25-26, envisions a $50 billion investment plan to lift the Palestinian and neighbouring Arab state economies. But it has met broad rejection in the Arab world, even as some in the Gulf called for giving it a chance.
Lebanese parties have long held that Palestinian refugees cannot be permanently settled in the country, which is widely believed in Lebanon to be a goal of the Kushner plan.
“Those who think that waving billions of dollars can lure Lebanon, which is under the weight of a suffocating economic crisis, into succumbing or bartering over its principles are mistaken,” Berri said in a statement from his office.
The rejection of settling Palestinian refugees who must have the right of return stands at the forefront of these principles, he said.
Any investment “at the expense of the Palestinian cause” will not find fertile ground in Lebanon, Berri said.
The idea of permanently settling mainly Sunni Muslim refugees is highly sensitive in Lebanon, sparking fears of rocking its delicate sectarian balance.
Estimates of how many Palestinian refugees are in Lebanon vary. The United Nations says 470,000 Palestinian refugees are registered, though a 2017 official Lebanese census found the number to be around 175,000.
The US plan envisions spending more than half of the $50 billion in the Palestinian territories over 10 years while the rest would be split between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan.
The Trump administration hopes that wealthy Gulf states and nations in Europe and Asia, along with private investors, would foot much of the bill, Kushner told Reuters on Saturday.
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From the Archives
How 1960’s French Nuclear Tests Are Still Claiming Lives in Algeria
Sputnik – 15.02.2018
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- US-‘Israel’ alliance faces growing rupture after midterms
- GOP’s Crushing Midterm Loss Could Reshape US Political Landscape – Analyst
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- Midterms Were ‘Vote of No Confidence’ in GOP, But Iran Has No Illusions About Democrats – Marandi
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- Ukraine arrests woman who exposed Azov battalion’s ‘torture chamber’
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- How Iran defeated Trump’s Israel First GOP
- De-escalating the conflict: What the OSCE, the UN, and Europe are (not) doing to prevent war
- Desperate For A Renewed Iran War, Israel Dusts Off The WMD Deception.
- If Americans Knew
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- No Tricks Zone
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