Illinois governor candidate Daniel Bliss has dropped Carlos Ramirez-Rosa as his running mate following Rosa’s alleged support of a Palestinian group calling to boycott Israel.
Rosa’s support for the Palestinian-led ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) movement was the reason he was dropped from the ticket, Biss said in a statement.
BDS calls for companies to stop doing business with Israel over its occupation of Palestinian territories.
The Democratic state senator wrote that Rosa told him he opposed the group prior to being chosen. Rosa’s position on the issue then changed, Biss claimed.
“I strongly support a two-state solution. I support Israel’s right to exist, and I support Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. I also care deeply about justice for Palestinians, and believe that a vision for the Middle East must include political and economic freedom for Palestinians,” Biss wrote, adding “That’s why I oppose the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, as I believe it moves us further away from a peaceful solution.”
In a Facebook post, Rosa wrote that while he and Biss “both oppose pursuing BDS at the state level, the difference of opinion we have on the role the BDS movement plays at the federal level would make it impossible to continue moving forward as a ticket.”
Rosa did not immediately respond to RT’s request for comment.
Before Biss made his decision to drop Rosa, he lost the endorsement of Democratic Congressman Brad Schneider, who cited Rosa’s “past comments about the United States support of our ally Israel, and his affiliation with a group that is an outspoken supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.”
Schneider was referring to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a political organization, which passed a resolution supporting BDS.
Rosa joined DSA in March.
“I said, if someone could run for president of the United States and say ‘I’m a democratic socialist,’ then, hell, I can come out of the closet. I’ve come out of the closet before,” Rosa told the Chicago Reader, referring to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Rosa, 28, is the first openly gay Latino to serve on Chicago’s City Council. He is also the youngest current alderman.
“I was asked to join the ticket to even more strongly advocate for the critical issues facing this state, such as medicare for all, a $15 living wage today, affordable childcare, and free college tuition,” Rose wrote in his statement.
On Friday, Biss announced his new running mate – Democratic State Congresswoman Litesa Wallace.
“As a woman of color, she understands that justice and opportunity are not equally distributed and in fact are not available to many. As a champion for social and economic justice, she’s a proven fighter for the issues and people that Illinois government so often forgets about,” Biss said of Wallace in a video statement.
Wallace’s views on BDS were not immediately clear.
The international community has long called for a two-state solution in the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians where the two peoples would eventually live in separate states. Israel had formally agreed to the two-state solution but has yet to take any practical steps to make it happen.
In August, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Israel’s continued construction of settlements on what the UN recognizes as Palestinian territories was illegal and a “major obstacle” to achieving a two-state solution and peace with the Palestinians.
It seems that very little time passed after her defeat in the 2016 presidential election before Hillary Clinton decided that the world had waited long enough for her understanding of that defeat. Advance copies of her new book, which will be released to the public on September 12, have been made available to select readers (this writer NOT being one of them), and some pearls of wisdom have been disclosed.
Let’s look first at a bit of history. Clinton has long been seen as the power behind the throne, beginning with orchestrating her husband’s comeback after his defeat for re-election as governor of Arkansas. Perhaps it was then that the taste of power proved so overwhelming as to become almost an obsession.
Yet it wasn’t only power that drove her; the pursuit of wealth has long been a motivating force for the former First Lady. From questionable investments with her husband’s donors back in their Arkansas days, to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for single speeches to corporate leaders, Clinton learned that money and power go hand-in-hand, and are an irresistible combination.
Her time as the United States’ First Lady was not uneventful; she worked on President Clinton’s failed health care policy, and became the first First Lady in history to testify before a grand jury. Then, toward the conclusion of her husband’s second term, she ‘surprised’ all and sundry by announcing what absolutely everyone expected: that she would seek a Senate seat in New York.
Although there was some criticism that she undercut NY elected officials who might otherwise have run, and that her main claim to fame was that she was married to a president, the voters of NY installed her as their junior senator.
From there, it seemed, it would be just a hop, skip and a jump to the White House, and in 2007, again surprising no one, she announced her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The road to the White House seemed clear.
It did, at least, until that upstart from Illinois entered the picture. With his youth, newness to the national scene, opposition to the war that Clinton had voted for, and a gift for oratory, it wasn’t long until Senator Barack Obama vanquished candidate Clinton, was nominated and elected, becoming the first African-American elected to the presidency.
But like a good corporate soldier, Clinton got on board, endorsing him at the convention, and campaigning for him. She then served as his Secretary of State, assisting him in destabilizing the Middle East, killing countless people and engendering more hatred toward the U.S.
As President Obama’s second term drew to a close, all was in place for her coronation. But Clinton is nothing if not pragmatic. She knew that there were large swaths of the electorate – Republican, Democratic and Independent – who despised the very sight of her. There might even be a sufficient number of them to deny her the nomination! What was a corrupt, power-hungry candidate to do?
Enter, the ‘Super Delegates’. While the primary season is ostensibly the time for the members of each party to indicate their choice for the party’s nomination, such trivialities as democracy and the will of the people must not stand in the way of the mighty Hillary Clinton. No, let the peons have their fun, voting in those little booths with the curtains, believing that pulling the lever actually means something. Behind the scenes, the Democratic Party would allow the head honchos to be king-makers, or rather, queen-makers, thwarting the will of the people, and doing the will of Clinton.
And, just to be sure, recruit Florida ‘Representative’ Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee (she was later forced to resign), to further tip the scales in Clinton’s favor, sealing the fate of the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
It seemed like the stars were all aligning for a Clinton coronation: the deck stacked in the Democratic Party, and the Republicans actually nominating Donald Trump – DONALD TRUMP! – as their candidate. Certainly, any wayward Democrats, those who had voted for Sanders, along with many Republicans and all Independents, would vote the Clinton ticket to prevent such a travesty as a Trump presidency.
Alas, no. Election night came and went, and with it, the dreams and aspirations of Hillary Clinton. True, she did receive the popular vote, but there does seem to be some kind of poetic justice in knowing that the system defeated her, after she manipulated her system, the Democratic Party, to defeat Bernie Sanders.
And now, according to information from her much-anticipated book, Clinton has pointed the finger of blame at Sanders, and former FBI director James Comey, who had the audacity to question Clinton’s use of private email servers when doing highly confidential government business. The blame is to be attributed anywhere but to the person to whom it rightly belongs (check out the mirror, Hillary).
Oh, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!
But let’s do a reality check, just for a moment.
As was mentioned, Clinton was perhaps the most polarizing candidate in modern history. There are those on one side who see her as a savior, a beacon of hope, showing that the glass ceiling can be destroyed, and all can be made right in the world, if only she can assume her destiny as President of the United States.
On the other side of the coin, however, are those who hold strongly to the belief that she is evil incarnate, the devil in a pantsuit, and there is no one, no, not even Donald Trump, who would be worse and more dangerous in the White House than she.
What could she have done differently? We’ll make a short list:
Not manipulate Democratic Party nominating rules to skew the results.
Avoid the ‘race car’ image; we all know how racing cars are covered with the logos and names of the companies that sponsor them. While Clinton stopped short of actually wearing such logos, she was as beholden to U.S. corporate giants as any racecar driver.
At least give the appearance that she cares about the working, and non-working, man and woman. Supporting every corporate scheme ever introduced, and hob-nobbing with millionaires and billionaires, makes it difficult to portray oneself as a champion of the people.
Give some attention to the wants and needs of U.S. citizens. Filling the coffers of the so-called charitable ‘Clinton Foundation’ with millions of dollars in donations from foreign countries does not support this concept
Of course, for Hillary Rodham Clinton to accomplish these tasks, she would need to be a different person. Not a new life script, but a new leading lady. Leopards cannot change their spots. There are numerous other pithy clichés that could be used, but we will spare the reader; he/she can come up with enough of their own.
If anyone thought that Clinton would fade into the woodwork after her Electoral College defeat, they were sadly mistaken. As long as there is money to be made, and the possibility, however remote, of grasping the seat of ultimate U.S. power, she will continue to make herself heard. Heaven help us all!
Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Pill Press).
SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.
*****
The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.
The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.
It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.
In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.
In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.
Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.
Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.
The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.
Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is push-back from individuals and groups — engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence — which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.
In historically recent human societies, essential push-back is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections of the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements, and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.
All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).
Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.
A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.
When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.
When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.
Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.
The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.
Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.
The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations — in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes — has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.
Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.
The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.
First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.
Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).
Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties.1
In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.
That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.
Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.
There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.
The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.
Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state — controlled by an elite class — effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence — otherwise known as “democracy” — must be allowed.
It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.
For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.
I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.
The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.
Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government2,3, freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions.4
Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law.5 They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.
The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:
being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
being induced to commit suicide
being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage
The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.
No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.
For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail.5
These anti-speech laws, of course, are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation”.6
Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.
As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.
The U.S. mainstream media is treating a new United Nations report on the April 4 chemical weapons incident in Khan Sheikhoun as more proof of Syrian government guilt, but that ignores a major contradiction between two groups of U.N. investigators that blows a big hole in the groupthink.
Though both U.N. groups seem determined to blame the Syrian government, the frontline investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) reported that spotters of departing Syrian military aircraft from Shayrat airbase did not send out a warning of any flights until late that morning – while the alleged dropping of a sarin bomb occurred at around dawn.
The report by the U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic noted that “two individuals interviewed by the OPCW claimed that on the morning of 4 April the early warning system did not issue warnings until 11 to 11:30 a.m., and that no aircraft were observed until that time.”
If the OPCW’s information is correct – that no warplanes took off from the government’s Shayrat airbase until late in the morning – then the Trump administration’s rationale for launching a retaliatory strike of 59 Tomahawk missiles at that airfield on April 6 is destroyed.
But the U.N. commission’s report – released on Wednesday – simply brushes aside the OPCW’s discovery that no warplanes took off at dawn. The report instead relies on witnesses inside jihadist-controlled Khan Sheikhoun who claim to have heard a warning about 20 minutes before a plane arrived at around 6:45 a.m.
Indeed, the report’s account of the alleged attack relies almost exclusively on “eyewitnesses” in the town, which was under the control of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and allied jihadist groups.
The report also gives no attention to the possibility that the alleged sarin incident, which reportedly killed scores of people including women and children, was a staged event by Al Qaeda to reverse the Trump administration’s announcement just days earlier that it was no longer U.S. policy to seek “regime change” in Syria.
The Khan Sheikhoun incident prompted President Trump to launch the missile strike that, according to Syrian media reports, killed several soldiers at the base and nine civilians, including four children, in nearby neighborhoods. It also risked inflicting death on Russians stationed at the base.
Lost History
In the U.N. commission’s report, the possibility of a staged event is not considered even though the OPCW had previously uncovered evidence that a chlorine-gas attack in the rebel-controlled town of Al-Tamanah, which also was blamed on the Syrian government, was staged by Al Qaeda operatives and their civilian “relief workers.”
OPCW investigators, who like most U.N. bureaucrats have seemed eager to endorse allegations of chlorine-gas attacks by the Syrian government, ran into this obstacle when townspeople from Al-Tamanah came forward to testify that a supposed attack on the night of April 29-30, 2014, was a fabrication.
“Seven witnesses stated that frequent alerts [about an imminent chlorine weapons attack by the government] had been issued, but in fact no incidents with chemicals took place,” the OPCW report stated. “[T]hey [these witnesses] had come forward to contest the wide-spread false media reports.”
In addition, accounts from people who did allege that there had been a government chemical attack on Al-Tamanah provided suspect evidence, including data from questionable sources, according to the OPCW report, which added:
“Three witnesses, who did not give any description of the incident on 29-30 April 2014, provided material of unknown source. One witness had second-hand knowledge of two of the five incidents in Al-Tamanah, but did not remember the exact dates. Later that witness provided a USB-stick with information of unknown origin, which was saved in separate folders according to the dates of all the five incidents mentioned by the FFM [the U.N.’s Fact-Finding Mission].
“Another witness provided the dates of all five incidents reading it from a piece of paper, but did not provide any testimony on the incident on 29-30 April 2014. The latter also provided a video titled ‘site where second barrel containing toxic chlorine gas was dropped tamanaa 30 April 14’”
Some other “witnesses” who alleged a Syrian government attack offered ridiculous claims about detecting the chlorine-infused “barrel bomb” based on how the device sounded in its descent.
The report said, “The eyewitness, who stated to have been on the roof, said to have heard a helicopter and the ‘very loud’ sound of a falling barrel. Some interviewees had referred to a distinct whistling sound of barrels that contain chlorine as they fall. The witness statement could not be corroborated with any further information.”
Although the report didn’t say so, there was no plausible explanation for someone detecting a chlorine canister in a “barrel bomb” based on its “distinct whistling sound.” The only logical conclusion is that the chlorine attack had been staged by the jihadists and that their supporters then lied to the OPCW investigators to enrage the world against the Assad regime.
The coordination of the propaganda campaign, with “witnesses” armed with data to make their stories more convincing, further suggests a premeditated and organized conspiracy to “sell” the story, not just some random act by a few individuals.
The Ghouta Attack
There was a similar collapse of the more notorious sarin incident outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, which killed hundreds and was also blamed on the Assad government but now appears to have been carried out as a trick by Al Qaeda operatives to get President Obama to order the U.S. military to devastate the Syrian military and thus help Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to win the war.
You might have thought that these experiences with staged chemical attacks would have given U.N. investigators more pause when another unlikely incident occurred last April 4 in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which was under Al Qaeda’s control.
The Trump administration had just announced a U.S. policy reversal, saying that the U.S. goal was no longer “regime change” in Syria but rather to defeat terrorist groups. At the time, Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, the Islamic State and other jihadist forces were in retreat across much of Syria.
In other words, the Syrian government had little or no reason to provoke U.S. and international outrage by launching a sarin gas attack on a remote town with only marginal strategic significance.
Chemical attacks, especially the alleged use of chlorine but sarin gas as well, also offer minimal military effectiveness if dropped on a town. Chlorine gas in this form rarely kills anyone, and the international outrage over sarin far exceeds any military value.
But the jihadists did have a powerful motive to continue staging chemical attacks as their best argument for derailing international efforts to bring the war to an end, which would have meant defeat for the jihadists and their international allies.
And, we know from the Al-Tamanah case that the jihadists are not above feeding fabricated evidence to U.N. investigators who themselves have strong career motives to point the finger at the Assad regime and thus please the Western powers.
In the Khan Sheikhoun case, a well-placed source told me shortly after the incident that at least some U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that it was a hastily staged event in reaction to the Trump administration’s renunciation of Syrian “regime change.”
The source said some evidence indicated that a drone from a Saudi-Israeli special-operations base inside Jordan delivered the sarin and that the staging of the attack was completed on the ground by jihadist forces. Initial reports of the attack appeared on social media shortly after dawn on April 4.
The Time Element
Syrian and Russian officials seemed to have been caught off-guard by the events, offering up a possible explanation that the Syrian government’s airstrike aimed at a senior jihadist meeting in Khan Sheikhoun at around noon might have accidentally touched off a chemical chain reaction producing sarin-like gas.
But U.S. mainstream media accounts and the new U.N. report cited the time discrepancy – between the dawn attack and the noontime raid – as proof of Russian and Syrian deception. Yet, it made no sense for the Russians and Syrians to lie about the time element since they were admitting to an airstrike and, indeed, matching up the timing would have added to the credibility of their hypothesis.
In other words, if the airstrike had occurred at dawn, there was no motive for the Russians and Syrians not to say so. Instead, the Russian and Syrian response seems to suggest genuine confusion, not a cover-up.
For the U.N. commission to join in this attack line on the timeline further suggests a lack of objectivity, an impression that is bolstered by the rejection of OPCW’s finding that no take-off alert was issued early on the morning of April 4.
Instead, the U.N. commission relied heavily on “eyewitnesses” from the Al Qaeda-controlled town with unnamed individuals even providing the supposed identity of the aircraft, a Syrian government Su-22, and describing the dropping of three conventional bombs and the chemical-weapons device on Khan Sheikhoun around 6:45 a.m.
But there were other holes in the narrative. For instance, in a little-noticed May 29, 2017 report, Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, challenged the Syria-government-did-it conclusions of The New York Times, Human Rights Watch and the Establishment’s favorite Internet site, Bellingcat.
Postol’s analysis focused on a New York Timesvideo report, entitled “How Syria And Russia Spun A Chemical Strike,” which followed Bellingcat research that was derived from social media. Postol concluded that “NONE of the forensic evidence in the New York Times video and a follow-on Times news article supports the conclusions reported by the New York Times.” [Emphasis in original.]
The basic weakness of the NYT/Bellingcat analysis was a reliance on social media from the Al Qaeda-controlled Khan Sheikhoun and thus a dependence on “evidence” from the jihadists and their “civil defense” collaborators, known as the White Helmets.
Sophisticated Propaganda
The jihadists and their media teams have become very sophisticated in the production of propaganda videos that are distributed through social media and credulously picked up by major Western news outlets. (A Netflix infomercial for the White Helmets even won an Academy Award earlier this year.)
Postol zeroed in on the Times report’s use of a video taken by anti-government photographer Mohamad Salom Alabd, purporting to show three conventional bombs striking Khan Sheikhoun early in the morning of April 4.
The Times report extrapolated from that video where the bombs would have struck and then accepted that a fourth bomb – not seen in the video – delivered a sarin canister that struck a road and released sarin gas that blew westward into a heavily populated area supposedly killing dozens.
But the Times video analysis – uploaded on April 26 – contained serious forensic problems, Postol said, including showing the wind carrying the smoke from the three bombs in an easterly direction whereas the weather reports from that day – and the presumed direction of the sarin gas – had the wind going to the west.
Indeed, if the wind were blowing toward the east – and if the alleged location of the sarin release was correct – the wind would have carried the sarin away from the nearby populated area and likely would have caused few if any casualties, Postol wrote.
Postol also pointed out that the Times’ location of the three bombing strikes didn’t match up with the supposed damage that the Times claimed to have detected from satellite photos of where the bombs purportedly struck. Rather than buildings being leveled by powerful bombs, the photos showed little or no apparent damage.
The Times also relied on before-and-after satellite photos that had a gap of 44 days, from Feb. 21, 2017, to April 6, 2017, so whatever damage might have occurred couldn’t be tied to whatever might have happened on April 4.
Nor could the hole in the road where the crushed “sarin” canister was found be attributed to an April 4 bombing raid. Al Qaeda jihadists could have excavated the hole the night before as part of a staged provocation. Other images of activists climbing into the supposedly sarin-saturated hole with minimal protective gear should have raised other doubts, Postol noted in earlier reports.
Critics of the White Helmets have identified the photographer of the airstrike, Mohamad Salom Alabd, as a jihadist who appears to have claimed responsibility for killing a Syrian military officer. But the Times described him in a companion article to the video report only as “a journalist or activist who lived in the town.”
Another Debunking
In 2013, the work of Postol and his late partner, Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories, debunked claims from the same trio — Bellingcat, the Times and Human Rights Watch — blaming the Syrian government for the sarin-gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.
Postol and Lloyd showed that the rocket carrying the sarin had only a fraction of the range that the trio had assumed in tracing its path back to a government base.
Since the much shorter range placed the likely launch point inside rebel-controlled territory, the incident appeared to have been another false-flag provocation, one that almost led President Obama to launch a major retaliatory strike against the Syrian military.
Although the Times grudgingly acknowledged the scientific problems with its analysis, it continued to blame the 2013 incident on the Syrian government. Similarly, Official Washington’s “groupthink” still holds that the Syrian government launched that sarin attack and that Obama chickened out on enforcing his “red line” against chemical weapons use.
Obama’s announcement of that “red line,” in effect, created a powerful incentive for Al Qaeda and other jihadists to stage chemical attacks assuming that the atrocities would be blamed on the government and thus draw in the U.S. military on the jihadist side.
Yet, the 2013 “groupthink” of Syrian government guilt survives. After the April 4, 2017 incident, President Trump took some pleasure in mocking Obama’s weakness in contrast to his supposed toughness in quickly launching a “retaliatory” strike on April 6 (Washington time, although April 7 in Syria).
A Dubious Report
Trump’s attack came even before the White House released a supportive – though unconvincing – intelligence report on April 11. Regarding that report, Postol wrote, “The White House produced a false intelligence report on April 11, 2017 in order to justify an attack on the Syrian airbase at Sheyrat, Syria on April 7, 2017. That attack risked an unintended collision with Russia and a possible breakdown in cooperation between Russia and United States in the war to defeat the Islamic State. The collision also had some potential to escalate into a military conflict with Russia of greater extent and consequence.
“The New York Times and other mainstream media immediately and without proper review of the evidence adopted the false narrative produced by the White House even though that narrative was totally unjustified based on the forensic evidence. The New York Times used an organization, Bellingcat, for its source of analysis even though Bellingcat has a long history of making false claims based on distorted assertions about forensic evidence that either does not exist, or is absolutely without any evidence of valid sources.”
Postol continued, “This history of New York Times publishing of inaccurate information and then sticking by it when solid science-based forensic evidence disproves the original narrative cannot be explained in terms of simple error. The facts overwhelmingly point to a New York Times management that is unconcerned about the accuracy of its reporting.
“The problems exposed in this particular review of a New York Times analysis of critically important events related to the US national security is not unique to this particular story. This author could easily point to other serious errors in New York Times reporting on important technical issues associated with our national security.
“In these cases, like in this case, the New York Times management has not only allowed the reporting of false information without reviewing the facts for accuracy, but it has repeatedly continued to report the same wrong information in follow-on articles. It may be inappropriate to call this ‘fake news,’ but this loaded term comes perilously close to actually describing what is happening.”
Referring to some of the photographed scenes in Khan Sheikhoun, including a dead goat that appeared to have been dragged into location near the “sarin crater,” Postol called the operation “a rather amateurish attempt to create a false narrative.”
Now, another U.N. agency has joined that narrative, despite a key contradiction from fellow U.N. investigators.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
In this short documentary, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), speaks to J Street about her support for Israel.
As she sees it, there are people on one side of a chasm who support Israel unconditionally – “never mind the occupation or democracy” – and people on the other side of the chasm who think Israel is evil and doesn’t have a right to exist, which “justifies BDS, or worse, violence and terrorism.”
The question is posed: does this position represent the teachers?
Under past AFT presidents as well as Weingarten, the union has passed a startling number of pro-Israel resolutions. She is following in their footsteps.
In a C-SPAN interview, Weingarten explained her efforts to overcome bigotry and hate among students by enlisting help from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The legitimacy of the ADL is brought into question: viewers are provided with a long list of shady dealings in which ADL has participated in the past.
The documentary suggests that “the ADL is not an entity that should be allowed to infiltrate US law enforcement or serve as a resource within the American education system.
The big question is, “Have Randi Weingarten and past AFT presidents abused their positions as leaders to co-opt the largest US teachers union into advancing the interests of a foreign country?”
Today, we hear a lot about White supremacy but very little about Jewish supremacy, as if the former stands for the latter.
It is true there are more similarities than differences between Jewish supremacy and White supremacy. Both are based on ethnic/nationalist bias and racism. They are both
“historically based, institutionally perpetuated system[s] of exploitation and oppression … a web of interlocking, reinforcing institutions: economic, military, legal, educational, religious, and cultural. As a system, racism affects every aspect of life in a country.”
Within Israel and militarily occupied Palestinian lands, Jewish supremacy is sometimes described as White supremacy, as in this headline:
“Israel’s White Supremacy Agenda Targets Other Jews, Arabs, Africans
Palestinians are not the only target for Israel’s animosity and ethno-centric policies.”
This is because, contrary to Zionist myth, Jews don’t all belong to one race. The Jews who created the racist ideology of Zionism and initially colonized Palestine between 1882 and 1903 (at least 25,000 Jews arrived in Palestine, financially backed by European Jewish philanthropists, such as Moses Montefiore and Edmond de Rothschild) are Ashkenazim, Jews of Eastern European origin. (see Palestine and the first Zionist Colony)
Ashkenazi Jews are the elite of Israel and they dominate and discriminate against, not only Palestinian Arabs, but also other Jews and ethnicities in Israel.
The situation in the West Bank settlement of Immanuel exposes the deeply complex ethno-religious relations between European Jews and Middle Eastern Jews in Israel. Middle Eastern Jews have for many decades lived as stigmatized citizens of Israel; their traditional Arabic culture and form of Jewish religiosity frequently objects of scorn and prejudice… In spite of the fact that Sephardim comprise a substantial percentage of the Israeli Jewish population, in socio-cultural terms they find themselves in a subservient position vis-à-vis the Ashkenazim.
However, there are two major differences between the two racist ideologies, White supremacy and Jewish supremacy:
1) In so-called “liberal” circles, White supremacy is uniformly reviled, whereas Jewish supremacy, as it manifests itself in Zionism, is not only accepted but fiercely defended even by those Middle Eastern or Arab Jews mentioned above, who have internalized Zionist racism.
2) Jewish supremacy is wrapped up, not only in a secular Zionist ideology, but in a religious one as well, attracting Jews and evangelical Christians from all kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities.
In the wake of Charlottesville, for example, the ADL — Anti-Defamation League reported that it saw 1,000% spike in donations. The ADL is a Jewish supremacist organization, but it can masquerade in the United States as an anti-racist organization. As If Americans Knewreports, the ADL
“works to maintain the racist status quo in Israel-Palestine, which keeps Palestinians in Israel as third-class citizens and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank & Gaza stateless and without basic civil rights.”
It also keeps Palestinian refugees and exiles from returning to their homes and land, an internationally recognized right.
In 1994, while eulogizing Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn born Jew who had emigrated to Israel and killed 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers at Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, New York Rabbi Yaacov Perrin said,
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
He was defining the essence of Jewish supremacy that now reigns supreme in all of historic Arab Palestine.
Accepting the concept of Jewish supremacy in Palestine, As Sari Nusseibeh wrote,
would be [among other things] to privilege Judaism above the religions of Christianity and Islam, whose adherents together comprise 55 per cent of the world’s population. Regrettably this is a narrative propagated even by renowned Jewish author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who, on April 15, 2010, took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post and claimed that Jerusalem “is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture — and not a single time in the Qur’an”. Now we do not propose to speak for native Palestinian Arab Christians — except to say that Jerusalem is quite obviously the city of Jesus Christ the Messiah — but as Muslims, we believe that Jerusalem is not the “third holiest city of Islam” as is sometimes claimed, but simply one of Islam’s three holy cities. And, of course, despite what Mr Wiesel seems to believe, Jerusalem is indeed clearly referred to in the Holy Qur’an in Surat al-Isra’ (17:1) …
Zionist Jews in and out of Israel must confront the reality that Jewish supremacy in Israel, as David Lloydwrote about Americans and White supremacy in the U.S., “is an intrinsic if shameful element in their history and institutions whose consequences have yet to be overcome.”
The question then arises why so many Jewish liberal Zionists are blind to their own racism against Palestinian Arabs while condemning racism by other groups.
In addressing this conundrum related to the Palestine exception (or Zionist exception) — an exception that involves not only censorship of pro-Palestine speech but also bald-faced, legitimized racism against Palestinian Arabs that extends to Muslims generally – Philip Weisswrites:
I make it a point to hear Rabbi Yehuda Kurtzer speak at J Street and other Jewish spaces. He is a very smart guy and very positive. While he’s too Jewish-communitarian for my taste (the touchstones of his political judgments are Jewish values rather than universalist ones), he’s an idealist who addresses Israel’s crisis. So, I was disturbed to discover on his Facebook page from June a promotion of a visit to rightwing “hilltop” settlements in the Occupied West Bank to get to know those folks better, sponsored by the Shalom Hartman Institute, of which Kurtzer is an executive.
Weiss is justifiably disturbed to hear this from Rabbi Yehuda Kurtzer on three grounds. One is because “those settlements are illegal under international law”. The second is because they are “segregationist” communities, and the third is because of the schizophrenia involved in “condemning and exposing” White nationalism on the one hand, and seeking to understand “the settler movement” (meaning the spread of Jewish Zionist colonization of Palestine to the remaining territory that was partitioned in 1948) on the other.
To me, there is no mystery in the conundrum with which Weiss is concerned.
These liberal American Jews (both religious and secular) don’t know any better because they are committed to Israel as a Jewish state, just as Jews on the right of the political spectrum are.
They see no shame or contradiction in that position because they have swallowed whole the Zionist narrative that defines their identity as Jews, including the inability to see Palestinian Arabs as fellow human beings with fundamental human rights.
So, to me, the problem of Jewish supremacy or nationalism as it manifests itself in Palestine is the fundamental problem of Zionism — its immoral racialist and racist premise.
It makes no difference which brand of Zionism got the upper hand in Palestine, whether it is the nationalism of Theodor Hertzl (i.e., as a response to external pressures that were impossible to avoid — meant for Jews “who do not wish or are unable to assimilate”) or the nationalism of Ahad Ha-Am, to whom the possibility of total assimilation of Jews into their host societies was unacceptable, because the Jewish people were morally superior to all other people.
Today we have a situation in which millions of Jews, whether “assimilated” into their countries of origin or not, believe that Israel has a “right” to exist as a Jewish state and that Palestine belongs to Jews worldwide and not to its indigenous inhabitants regardless of religion or ethnicity.
That, to me, is the disturbing element of all Zionists, including the liberal Zionists Weiss addresses. They want Israel to “exist” as a Jewish state on land forcefully usurped and stolen from under the feet of its true owner, the Palestinian people, who continue to suffer as refugees and in exile as well as in Palestine under military occupation and under Apartheid.
Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is disturbing. Jewish supremacy whether rearing its ugly head in West Bank settlements or embodying the very existence of Israel is the nightmare.
A recent survey has found that nearly half of Israeli Jews believe in ethnic cleansing. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin reportedly called the findings a ‘wake-up call for Israeli society’. But what is it that these people should wake up to? The Jewish state was founded on ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs and defends its “existence” by continuing to ethnicly cleanse Palestinians. That’s what they should wake up to — the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
The Jewish supremacist state of Israel must come to an end as such. The goal of exposing Israel’s crimes and the immorality of its supporters is to seek transformative justice in Palestine – to de-Zionize.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
Who would have known that all it takes to beat Hillary Clinton, subvert “exceptional” US democracy, and send the entire western mainstream media into “red scare” panic mode was $100,000 in Facebook ads.
The New York Times has uncovered the smoking gun that lead to the rise of Trump, and the fall of “Crooked” Hillary Clinton.
According to the “groundbreaking” reporting of the New York Times…
Providing new evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Facebook disclosed on Wednesday that it had identified more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on hot-button issues purchased by a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin.
Most of the 3,000 ads did not refer to particular candidates but instead focused on divisive social issues such as race, gay rights, gun control and immigration, according to a post on Facebook by Alex Stamos, that company’s chief security officer. The ads, which ran between June 2015 and May 2017, were linked to some 470 fake accounts and pages the company said it had shut down.
Mr. Stamos wrote that while some of the ads specifically mentioned the two candidates, most focused instead on issues that were polarizing the electorate: “divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”
Buried deep inside the NYT article, is an admission that there is zero evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians…
To date, while news reports have uncovered many meetings and contacts between Trump associates and Russians, there has been no evidence proving collusion in the hacking or other Russian activities.
According to The Gateway Pundit, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election has taken yet another strange turn. This time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has transferred data on ads “likely” purchased by Russian entities.
Those dastardly “Russian entities” always out to destroy American democracy, and using Zuckerberg’s neo-liberal Facebook to accomplish their evil desires… and doing it on a shoestring budget.
If Hillary Clinton only knew about the power of Facebook ads, she might have directed $101,000 to FB, outspend Russia, and be the Madame President that she so richly deserved.
An internal Facebook investigation has found it is “likely” Russian operatives spent $100,000 on ads with “divisive messages” between June 2015 and May 2017.
A blog post on the issue, which was published on Wednesday, said the operation involved 3,000 separate ads over a two-year period and was likely to have been run out of Russia. In addition, Facebook found 470 affiliated fake accounts and pages.
The social media giant has turned over all information about those ads to special counsel Robert Mueller, a source familiar with the matter said told Reuters on Wednesday. That includes copies of the ads and the identity of the buyers, the source said.
Former FBI Director Mueller is investigating Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
In the last few months, several competing political, economic and military sectors – linked to distinct ideological and ethnic groups – have clearly emerged at the centers of power.
We can identify some of the key competing and interlocking directorates of the power elite:
Free marketers, with the ubiquitous presence of the ‘Israel First’ crowd.
National capitalists, linked to rightwing ideologues.
Generals, linked to the national security and the Pentagon apparatus, as well as defense industry.
Business elites, linked to global capital.
This essay attempts to define the power wielders and evaluate their range of power and its impact.
The Economic Power Elite: Israel-Firsters and Wall Street CEO’s
‘Israel Firsters’ dominate the top economic and political positions within the Trump regime and, interestingly, are among the Administration’s most vociferous opponents. These include: the Federal Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen, as well as her Vice-Chair, Stanley Fischer, an Israeli citizen and former (sic) Governor of the Bank of Israel.
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and an Orthodox Jew, acts as his top adviser on Middle East Affairs. Kushner, a New Jersey real estate mogul, set himself up as the archenemy of the economic nationalists in the Trump inner circle. He supports every Israeli power and land grab in the Middle East and works closely with David Friedman, US Ambassador to Israel (and fanatical supporter of the illegal Jewish settlements) and Jason Greenblatt, Special Representative for International negotiations. With three Israel-Firsters determining Middle East policy, there is not even a fig leaf of balance.
The Treasury Secretary is Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who leads the neo-liberal free market wing of the Wall Street sector within the Trump regime. Gary Cohn, a longtime Wall Street influential, heads the National Economic Council. They form the core business advisers and lead the neo-liberal anti-nationalist Trump coalition committed to undermining economic nationalist policies.
An influential voice in the Attorney General’s office is Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller the chief investigator, which led to the removal of nationalists from the Trump Administration.
The fairy godfather of the anti-nationalist Mnuchin-Cohn team is Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sach’s Chairman. The ‘Three Israel First bankerteers’ are spearheading the fight to deregulate the banking sector, which had ravaged the economy, leading to the 2008 collapse and foreclosure of millions of American homeowners and businesses.
The ‘Israel-First’ free market elite is spread across the entire ruling political spectrum, including ranking Democrats in Congress, led by Senate Minority leader Charles Schumer and the Democratic Head of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff. The Democratic Party Israel Firsters have allied with their free market brethren in pushing for investigations and mass media campaigns against Trump’s economic nationalist supporters and their eventual purge from the administration.
The Military Power Elite: The Generals
The military power elite has successfully taken over from the elected president in major decision-making. Where once the war powers rested with the President and the Congress, today a collection of fanatical militarists make and execute military policy, decide war zones and push for greater militarization of domestic policing. Trump has turned crucial decisions over to those he fondly calls ‘my Generals’ as he continues to dodge accusations of corruption and racism.
Trump appointed Four-Star General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis (retired USMC) – a general who led the war in Afghanistan and Iraq – as Secretary of Defense. Mattis (whose military ‘glories’ included bombing a large wedding party in Iraq) is leading the campaign to escalate US military intervention in Afghanistan – a war and occupation that Trump had openly condemned during his campaign. As Defense Secretary, General ‘Mad Dog’ pushed the under-enthusiastic Trump to announce an increase in US ground troops and air attacks throughout Afghanistan. True to his much-publicized nom-de-guerre, the general is a rabid advocate for a nuclear attack against North Korea.
Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster (an active duty Three Star General and long time proponent of expanding the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan) became National Security Adviser after the purge of Trump’s ally Lt. General Michael Flynn, who opposed the campaign of confrontation and sanctions against Russia and China. McMaster has been instrumental in removing ‘nationalists’ from Trumps administration and joins General ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis in pushing for a greater build-up of US troops in Afghanistan.
Lt. General John Kelly (Retired USMC), another Iraq war veteran and Middle East regime change enthusiast, was appointed White House Chief of Staff after the ouster of Reince Priebus.
The Administration’s Troika of three generals share with the neoliberal Israel First Senior Advisors to Trump, Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner, a deep hostility toward Iran and fully endorse Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand that the 2015 Nuclear Accord with Tehran be scrapped.
Trump’s military directorate guarantees that spending for overseas wars will not be affected by budget cuts, recessions or even national disasters.
The ‘Generals’, the Israel First free marketers and the Democratic Party elite lead the fight against the economic nationalists and have succeeded in ensuring that Obama Era military and economic empire building would remain in place and even expand.
The Economic Nationalist Elite
The leading strategist and ideologue of Trump’s economic nationalist allies in the White House was Steve Bannon. He had been chief political architect and Trump adviser during the electoral campaign. Bannon devised an election campaign favoring domestic manufacturers and American workers against the Wall Street and multinational corporate free marketers. He developed Trump’s attack on the global trade agreements, which had led to the export of capital and the devastation of US manufacturing labor.
Equally significant, Bannon crafted Trumps early public opposition to the generals’ 15-year trillion-dollar intervention in Afghanistan and the even more costly series of wars in the Middle East favored by the Israel-Firsters, including the ongoing proxy-mercenary war to overthrow the secular nationalist government of Syria.
Within 8 months of Trump’s administration, the combined forces of the free market economic and military elite, the Democratic Party leaders, overt militarists in the Republican Party and their allies in the mass media succeeded in purging Bannon – and marginalizing the mass support base for his ‘America First’ economic nationalist and anti-‘regime change’ agenda.
The anti-Trump ‘alliance’ will now target the remaining few economic nationalists in the administration. These include: the CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who favors protectionism by weakening the Asian and NAFTA trade agreements and Peter Navarro, Chairman of the White House Trade Council. Pompeo and Navarro face strong opposition from the ascendant neoliberal Zionist troika now dominating the Trump regime.
In addition, there is Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, a billionaire and former director of Rothschild Inc., who allied with Bannon in threatening import quotas to address the massive US trade deficit with China and the European Union.
Another Bannon ally is US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer a former military and intelligence analyst with ties to the newsletter Breitbart. He is a strong opponent of the neoliberal, globalizers in and out of the Trump regime.
‘Senior Adviser’ and Trump speechwriter, Stephen Miller actively promotes the travel ban on Muslims and stricter restrictions on immigration. Miller represents the Bannon wing of Trump’s zealously pro-Israel cohort.
Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s Deputy Assistant in military and intelligence affairs, was more an ideologue than analyst, who wrote for Breitbart and rode to office on Bannon’s coat tails. Right after removing Bannon, the ‘Generals’ purged Gorka in early August on accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Whoever remains among Trump’s economic nationalists are significantly handicapped by the loss of Steve Bannon who had provided leadership and direction. However, most have social and economic backgrounds, which also link them to the military power elite on some issues and with the pro-Israel free marketers on others. However, their core beliefs had been shaped and defined by Bannon.
The Business Power Elite
Exon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump’s Secretary of State and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, Energy Secretary lead the business elite. Meanwhile, the business elite associated with US manufacturing and industry have little direct influence on domestic or foreign policy. While they follow the Wall Street free marketers on domestic policy, they are subordinated to the military elite on foreign policy and are not allied with Steve Bannon’s ideological core.
Trump’s business elite, which has no link to the economic nationalists in the Trump regime, provides a friendlier face to overseas economic allies and adversaries.
Analysis and Conclusion
The power elite cuts across party affiliations, branches of government and economic strategies. It is not restricted to either political party, Republican or Democratic. It includes free marketers, some economic nationalists, Wall Street power brokers and militarists. All compete and fight for power, wealth and dominance within this administration. The correlation of forces is volatile, changing rapidly in short periods of time – reflecting the lack of cohesion and coherence in the Trump regime.
Never has the US power elite been subject to such monumental changes in composition and direction during the first year of a new regime.
During the Obama Presidency, Wall Street and the Pentagon comfortably shared power with Silicon Valley billionaires and the mass media elite. They were united in pursuing an imperial ‘globalist’ strategy, emphasizing multiple theaters of war and multi-lateral free trade treaties, which was in the process of reducing millions of American workers to permanent helotry.
With the inauguration of President Trump, this power elite faced challenges and the emergence of a new strategic configuration, which sought drastic changes in US political economic and military policy.
The architect of the Trump’s campaign and strategy, Steve Bannon, sought to displace the global economic and military elite with his alliance of economic nationalists, manufacturing workers and protectionist business elites. Bannon pushed for a major break from Obama’s policy of multiple permanent wars to expanding the domestic market. He proposed troop withdrawal and the end of US military operations in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, while increasing a combination of economic, political and military pressure on China. He sought to end sanctions and confrontation against Moscow and fashion economic ties between the giant energy producers in the US and Russia.
While Bannon was initially the chief strategist in the White House, he quickly found himself faced with powerful rivals inside the regime, and ardent opponents among Democratic and Republican globalists and especially from the Zionist – neoliberals who systematically maneuvered to win strategic economic and policy positions within the regime. Instead of being a coherent platform from which to formulate a new radical economic strategy, the Trump Administration was turned into a chaotic and vicious ‘terrain for struggle’. Bannon’s economic strategy barely got off the ground.
The mass media and operatives within the state apparatus, linked to Obama’s permanent war strategy, first attacked Trump’s proposed economic reconciliation with Russia. To undermine any ‘de-escalation’, they fabricated the Russian spy and election manipulation conspiracy. Their first successful shots were fired at Lt. General Michael Flynn, Bannon’s ally and key proponent for reversing the Obama/Clinton policy of military confrontation with Russia. Flynn was quickly destroyed and openly threatened with prosecution as a ‘Russian agent’ in whipped-up hysteria that resembled the heydays of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Key economic posts in the Trump regime were split between the Israel-Firster neoliberals and the economic nationalists. The ‘Deal Maker’ President Trump attempted to harness Wall Street-affiliated neoliberal Zionists to the economic nationalists, linked to Trump’s working class electoral base, in formulating new trade relations with the EU and China, which would favor US manufacturers. Given the irreconcilable differences between these forces, Trump’s naïve ‘deal’ weakened Bannon, undermined his leadership and wrecked his nationalist economic strategy.
While Bannon had secured several important economic appointees, the Zionist neoliberals undercut their authority. The Fischer-Mnuchin-Cohn cohort successfully set a competing agenda.
The entire Congressional elite from both parties united to paralyze the Trump-Bannon agenda. The giant corporate mass media served as a hysterical and rumor-laden megaphone for zealous Congressional and FBI investigators magnifying every nuance of Trump’s US Russia relations in search of conspiracy. The combined state-Congressional and Media apparatus overwhelmed the unorganized and unprepared mass base of the Bannon electoral coalition which had elected Trump.
Thoroughly defeated, the toothless President Trump retreated in desperate search for a new power configuration, turning his day-to-day operations over to ‘his generals’. The elected civilian President of the United States embraced his generals’ pursuit of a new military-globalist alliance and escalation of military threats foremost against North Korea, but including Russia and China. Afghanistan was immediately targeted for an expanded intervention.
Trump effectively replaced Bannon’s economic nationalist strategy with a revival Obama’s multi-war military approach.
The Trump regime re-launched the US attacks on Afghanistan and Syria –exceeding Obama’s use of drone attacks on suspected Muslim militants. He intensified sanctions against Russia and Iran, embraced Saudi Arabia’s war against the people of Yemen and turned the entire Middle East policy over to his ultra-Zionist Political Advisor (Real Estate mogul and son-in-law) Jared Kushner and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
Trump’s retreat turned into a grotesque rout. The Generals embraced the neoliberal Zionists in Treasury and the Congressional global militarists. Communication Directory Anthony Scaramucci was fired. Trump’s Chief of Staff General Joe Kelly purged Steve Bannon. Sebastian Gorka was kicked out.
The eight months of internal struggle between the economic nationalists and the neoliberals has ended: The Zionist-globalist alliance with Trump’s Generals now dominate the Power Elite.
Trump is desperate to adapt to the new configuration, allied to his own Congressional adversaries and the rabidly anti-Trump mass media.
Having all but decimated Trump’s economic nationalists and their program, the Power Elite then mounted a series of media-magnified events centering around a local punch-out in Charlottesville, Virginia between ‘white supremacists’ and ‘anti-fascists’. After the confrontation led to death and injury, the media used Trump’s inept attempt to blame both ‘baseball bat’-wielding sides, as proof of the President’s links to neo-Nazis and the KKK. Neoliberal and Zionists, within the Trump administration and his business councils, all joined in the attack on the President, denouncing his failure to immediately and unilaterally blame rightwing extremists for the mayhem.
Trump is turning to sectors of the business and Congressional elite in a desperate attempt to hold onto waning support via promises to enact massive tax cuts and deregulate the entire private sector.
The decisive issue was no longer over one policy or another or even strategy. Trump had already lost on all accounts. The ‘final solution’ to the problem of the election of Donald Trump is moving foreword step-by-step – his impeachment and possible arrest by any and all means.
What the rise and destruction of economic nationalism in the ‘person’ of Donald Trump tells us is that the American political system cannot tolerate any capitalist reforms that might threaten the imperial globalist power elite.
Writers and activists used to think that only democratically elected socialist regimes would be the target of systematic coup d’état. Today the political boundaries are far more restrictive. To call for ‘economic nationalism’, completely within the capitalist system, and seek reciprocal trade agreements is to invite savage political attacks, trumped up conspiracies and internal military take-overs ending in ‘regime change’.
The global-militarist elite purge of economic nationalists and anti-militarists was supported by the entire US left with a few notable exceptions. For the first time in history the left became an organizational weapon of the pro-war, pro-Wall Street, pro-Zionist Right in the campaign to oust President Trump. Local movements and leaders, notwithstanding, trade union functionaries, civil rights and immigration politicians, liberals and social democrats have joined in the fight for restoring the worst of all worlds: the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Clinton policy of permanent multiple wars, escalating confrontations with Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela and Trump’s deregulation of the US economy and massive tax-cuts for big business.
We have gone a long-way backwards: from elections to purges and from peace agreements to police state investigations. Today’s economic nationalists are labeled ‘fascists’; and displaced workers are ‘the deplorables’!
Americans have a lot to learn and unlearn. Our strategic advantage may reside in the fact that political life in the United States cannot get worse – we really have touched bottom and (barring a nuclear war) we can only look up.
Please note James Petras’s most recent book:
THE END OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE DELUSION OF EMPIRE
ISBN: 978-0-9972870-5-9
$24.95 / 252 pp. / 2016
EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-9972870-6-6
ORDER E-BOOK: $19.00
The United States of America has sunk to a new low in diplomacy and civilized relations between nation states with its demand that Russia close its consular missions in San Francisco, Washington and New York, quickly followed by its order that the consular staff leave the premises while the FBI conducted a search of the premises and staffers personal apartments. To order the closure of a mission, or to order the withdrawal of a member of diplomatic staff, is within its right but a search of consular property is not. It is a flagrant violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961.
Article 22 of the Convention states:
1. “The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
2.The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.
3.The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.”
Article 45 states that even
“If diplomatic relations are broken off between two States, or if a mission is permanently or temporarily recalled:
(a) The receiving State must, even in case of armed conflict, respect and protect the premises of the mission, together with its property and archives;
(b) The sending State may entrust the custody of the premises of the mission, together with its property and archives, to a third State acceptable to the receiving State;”
The Vienna Convention is one of the foundations of international relations. Without it, and the ancient customs enshrined in it, international relations cannot exist. The United States of America is a state party to the Convention and so is bound by it as part of international law and as part of American law.
The Russian Foreign Ministry correctly stated that, “the occupation of Russian diplomatic properties in the US is a blunt act of hostility and in violation of international law.” The Russians also expressed their logical concern that the only reason for such a search to be conducted, aside from bullying and intimidation of the Russian people, is to use it as an opportunity for the Americans to plant items, which they will then use in their propaganda war against Russia. This concern is valid and strong since there can be no valid reason to insist on the staff leaving the premises so a “search” can be made except that the US government does not want its FBI agents observed.
This action by the USA is not just a crime against Russia. It is a crime against all the nations of the world who depend on the articles of the Vienna Convention to protect their diplomats and properties in host nations without which international diplomacy cannot be conducted. For if the USA will do this to Russia it will do it to anyone it chooses. No nation can now regard its diplomatic missions in the United States as protected, as the Convention requires. The ramifications will take a while to sink in but in effect the United States has now declared itself to be a rogue state that has no respect for its own or international law and the rights of other nations.
It is also a profoundly stupid action that can only damage the United States itself since, by its own example, it can no longer expect other nations to respect the diplomatic immunity of its diplomatic missions around the world.
So, why has the United States undertaken such a reckless and provocative action? There is no doubt that it is part of the bizarre and clumsy propaganda theme that Russia interfered in the American elections and so the “search” is meant to raise in the minds of Americans that there is something to be searched for, some evidence of a “crime.” Why this would be found in San Francisco is a mystery but the American government and media never seem to bother about logical plot lines in their propaganda stories.
The other reason is to provoke Russia. The provocations against Russia from Ukraine, to Latvia, from Crimea to Syria, continue to escalate. The provocations on the diplomatic front have been many, but it was Obama that expelled 35 Russian diplomats just before he left office and ordered the seizure of two Russian compounds. The Russia government held off responding to that for several months, hoping that the new US administration would be more reasonable, but in vain. Things just got worse and so the Russians ordered America to cut its diplomatic presence in Russia. The American seizure of more Russian properties and the search of the San Francisco mission are in line with the American logic of hostility towards Russia.
The provocative nature of this action is revealed in the statement of Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, quoted by Tass, on Sunday the 3rd of September,
“By the way, do you know, what they were looking for – as we were told before the searches? You would not believe it – they were looking for explosives,” she said, adding ironically that it can be easily imagined how Russian diplomats are carrying explosive substances in their elegant cases.”
And,
“According to Zakharova, the US security services obviously hoped Russian diplomats would lose their nerves and here there will be ‘an image of an aggressive Russian. Just try to imagine that you are being brainwashed for a year that an enemy is living overseas and this enemy is impacting your life and everything bad that might happen – the election of a president you don’t like – has been done by the Russians,’ she said.”
There we have it, The American government has become completely unhinged. They appear to have lost all sense of reality and can be said to be suffering from a type of psychosis and for all that are becoming more dangerous. A US government spokesperson stated that President Trump ordered this latest action, once again proving that Trump, for all his narcissism and arrogance, simply follows the long line of American presidents who have stirred up trouble in the world.
So far as I can determine, no other country has conducted itself like this before, not even the United States. Even the Japanese were not treated this way after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese embassy was locked down, put under the control of a neutral country and the Japanese diplomats allowed to leave the country. That is, the United States then, even in the face of a direct military attack against it by Japan, still adhered to international law and respected diplomatic customs. So far has the United States declined into barbarity that it does not now afford to Russia, a fellow member of the United Nations, and with whom war has not broken out, the same courtesies that were applied to Japan, a nation that attacked it. In fact, by its action, it negates Russia as a sovereign nation, since it denies Russia is entitled to the respect and courtesy due to all sovereign nations.
So far the Russian response has been muted, simply calling in the American deputy ambassador to hand him a note of protest. The First deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Duma stated, “The US authorities may rest assured that the searches will not go unanswered.” But how? It is clear the Americans don’t give a tinker’s dam about law or custom or civilized behavior and are intent on provoking Russia. So what can an appropriate response be? I can only recall, once again, something my friend, Harold Pinter, the Nobel Laureate for Literature said in his acceptance speech. He stated,
“The United States quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.”
“How to make them give a damn,” he once asked me, “before they kill us all?”
How indeed? I do not know but I do know that the nations of the world, including Russia, should pay heed to what Harold Pinter said, to think about it, to understand what the American action means at a deep level, and only then to respond accordingly.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events.
TEHRAN – A peace activist and journalist based in Virginia said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s panic about recent advances of Iran and its allied forces against terrorists in Syria signals that the Tel Aviv regime is “losing its stranglehold” over Washington.
“Netanyahu’s panic and his incessant warnings regarding ‘Iranian expansion’ may be the most hopeful sign that Tel Aviv is losing its stranglehold over Washington,” Janice Kortkamp from Leesburg, Virginia, said in an interview with the Tasnim News Agency.
Following is the full text of the interview:
Tasnim: It seems that recent advances of the Syrian army and its allied forces against foreign-backed terrorist groups like Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) in the Arab country have infuriated the Israeli regime. A senior Israeli official has issued a warning to Russia that the Israeli military will bomb Syrian President Bashar Assad’s palace in Damascus if Russia allows Iran to make military advances in Syria, according to media reports. The official added another caution in the Al-Hayat al-Jadida newspaper that if regional changes don’t take place in the current advance by Iran, Israel will act to scuttle the Syrian ceasefire deal recently concluded by the US and Russian governments. The warnings came during a meeting last week on the Black Sea between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In your opinion, what is the reason behind the Israeli officials’ concerns?
Kortkamp: I believe this is an exceedingly dangerous time in the Syrian conflict; Israel is in a panic right now with the victory in the strategic Qalamoun region over Daesh. Israel’s goal has been to keep the war in Syria going indefinitely – for it to bleed to death – to weaken the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) and Hezbollah just as they had wanted the war in Iraq to weaken both it and Iran. The opposite outcome has occurred with Hezbollah stronger and more respected than ever; the alliance and coordination between Syria, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia also stronger; Iraq is also cooperating in many regards with that alliance, and President Putin is now seen as the predominant global strategist. Another factor is that Prime Minister Netanyahu is under investigation for fraud and corruption and a war would probably distract Israelis from pursuing an indictment. Netanyahu’s emotional entreaties to President Putin seemed to have fallen on deaf ears according to Pravda’s report of August 25 on the meeting, saying Israel’s Prime Minister failed to convince President Putin on the need to stop “Iran’s expansion in the Middle East.” In fact, the report stated the Kremlin is “interested to further strengthen Tehran’s influence in the region.” A trapped predator is the most dangerous however and many analysts, including former CIA operations operator who writes on these topics, Philip Giraldi, are predicting a preemptive strike against an Iranian target in Syria, which might escalate into greater involvement by the United States against Syria on Israel’s behalf.
Tasnim: As you may know, a US helicopter has recently transferred members of the Daesh terrorist group in Syria’s eastern province of Deir ez-Zor for the second time in a week, according to a UK-based monitoring group called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). The SOHR said the airlift was conducted in the town of al-Tabani. Measures taken by Washington up to now indicate that it has been seeking to destabilize the Arab country by arming and supporting the terrorists under the disguise of anti-terrorism coalition. What do you think about these developments?
Kortkamp: There are several points to consider:
1) I do not think of the SOHR as a credible resource, however that action would be consistent with other US actions in both Syria and Iraq so it could well be true.
2) The two previous administrations have held the goal of destabilizing Syria using covert pressure as well as through proxy forces armed and funded by the West’s allies in the Persian Gulf countries and Turkey. Little seems to have changed under President Trump, with the new administration putting considerable resources into supporting America’s latest “rebel” force – the SDF.
3) The support for Kurdish and other separatists is troubling and seems to indicate continued US commitment to dividing the northern part of Syria off which would be in line with Israel’s desires – it is no coincidence separatists are waving Israeli flags at rallies. President Trump has surrounded himself with advisors whose interests are “Israel first” and using military action to achieve it. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley discusses eliminating Iran from Syria as the only priority there and Jared Kushner is clearly under Netanyahu’s influence.
4) Top Israeli defense chiefs were in Washington recently to discuss Syria and they reiterated what anyone following this conflict knows, that the outcome of the war in Syria will reshape the region. It doesn’t appear though that the delegation from Tel Aviv went home with many reassurances.
5) President Trump’s turning over of the Afghanistan conflict to his generals is also troubling as it is in their interest to prolong every war and to create new ones. The Israeli delegation also put pressure on Washington to remain in and strengthen forces in Afghanistan.
6) All that being said, no one knows what was discussed between President Putin and President Trump. Netanyahu’s panic may be the most hopeful sign that his incessant warnings regarding “Iranian expansion” may finally be losing their stranglehold over Washington.
Tasnim: Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Jaberi Ansari said on Monday that the next round of Syria peace talks in Kazakhstan’s capital city of Astana would be held in mid-September. What is your assessment about the previous rounds of the talks between Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara on the Syrian crisis? And what is your prediction about the result of the next round?
Kortkamp: The current agreement has allowed Syrian and allied forces to make considerable gains over the past months so I am hopeful the next round of talks may also be effective. I would never consider President Erdogan a trustworthy alliance member but the strength of Russia and Iran seems to have curtailed his actions against Syria.
Once again, everything is in the balance and the tipping point is Syria. Saudi Arabia is receiving greater criticism of their war against Yemen; their proxies in Syria are crumbling, and there is a deep schism now between them and Qatar. Israel is seeing their many-decades long plan for hegemony in the region failing.
The stakes are so very high. We are facing a possible regional conflagration that could dwarf the horrific wars of the past 13 years and ignite a global conflict, or the US and its allies may back down from Syria and let a much-needed balance occur in the region.
Janice Kortkamp became an independent, completely self-funded, journalist after “seeing Western media bias regarding Syria and how that bias was promoting war and destabilization in Syria and all the Levant”. She has researched the current crisis for over four years, putting in over 6,000 hours of study. She has visited Syria three times over the past year, spending three months traveling around the major population areas and the outskirts of Damascus, Homs, Latakia (including Kessab) and Aleppo. She has also gone to Germany, Lebanon, and Kuwait to meet with Syrian refugees and emigrants. Through friends and contacts in Syria as well as reports from genuine news sources around the world, she tracks the situation on the ground in Syria on an hourly basis.
The Labour Party in the United Kingdom has made a huge switch in its policy leaving many followers of the Jeremy Corbyn headed Party in disappointment and disbelief.
When Jeremy Corbyn ran his election campaign he presented a clear message to his Palestinian human rights advocating audience, which was outlined in the Labour Manifesto. However this stance for human rights and international law has been all but erased.
The original manifesto stated that “A Labour government will immediately recognise the state of Palestine” and that the party would call for the end of the 11 year ongoing siege of Gaza and the end to the Israeli illegal occupation of the West Bank (occupied officially since 1967).
Now however, due to pressure in the party, Labour have changed their stance on the issue to read; “In Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Labour is committed to a comprehensive peace based on a two-state solution: a secure Israel alongside a secure and viable state of Palestine.” Far from the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state which was formerly promised.
This change in policy has alarmed an overwhelming number of Labour MPs (Jewish and non-Jewish) and is seen to have implications on the parties reputation when it comes to its stances of international relations.
Earlier in January of this year an Israeli government employee (Shai Mascot) working for the embassy was exposed plotting to influence lobby groups, politicians and British student movements. Shai attempted to set up a pro-Israel group called the Young Labour Friends of Israel, he was exposed by al-Jazeera for doing so and with that the activities of many other pro-Israel figures were brought to light.
It seems that the latest move by the Labour Party only benefits pro-Israeli members of the party, and with the move being so widely condemned by Jewish and non-Jewish members alike for changing such a popular manifesto its a real wonder how such a change has been able to happen.
Online publication Newsweek upped the ante in explosive rhetoric Sunday by suggesting the Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon terror attack, were operating on behalf of Moscow – even though Russian security agencies tipped off the FBI and CIA that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother presented imminent security risks.
Since evidence is apparently optional for arguments published by Newsweek, this time, an author featured in the publication seems to have looked out onto the world, found it bloody and complicated, and decided to pin any old recent disaster on Russia.
The United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe and the rise of right-leaning politicians can all be traced back to one single, remarkably effective cause: Moscow. “Russia must accept a share of responsibility” in all of these events, Andrei Kovalev wrote in a September 3 op-ed for Newsweek.
As for the Boston bombing, he asks, “Did the emigrants, the brothers Tsarnaev, of Chechen nationality, responsible for the Boston attack, act on their own initiative? It seems most unlikely.”
Kovalev worked as a diplomat in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev as well as for Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. “Sometimes I am reproached for attributing to the Kremlin too much influence in the world,” he confessed in the article.
In reality, Russian security services sent warnings to multiple US agencies explaining that Chechen-American Tamerlan Tsarnaev had “changed drastically since 2010” and that he and his mother were adherents to “radical Islam” long before the Boston attack occurred. “The Russians were concerned that mother and son were very religious and strong believers, and they could be militants if they returned to Russia,” a US official told the New York Times in 2013.
“You have Russian intelligence services contacting two agencies without our federal government responsible for our national security, the FBI and CIA … they tell us, ‘We believe you have a radical Islamist in your midst,'” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham explained at the time.
Newsweek’s readers quickly pointed out that the claim that Russia had orchestrated the Boston Marathon terror attack originated with Louise Mensch, a former UK member of Parliament who shot to fame as a darling of the Russia-bashing wing of the Trump resistance, but, given her penchant for calling literally any critic a Russian spy, has somewhat fallen from favor. Mensch was recently embarrassed by the Guardian for broadcasting information around the internet that was made up by a hoaxer but supported her “Russians are behind it all” agenda. As Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines host Garland Nixon joked, “pretty much everybody that dies, the death was related to Vladimir Putin,” in Mensch’s world.
When faced with accusations of spreading deleterious and false information, Mensch doubled down and said the Guardian was being operated by Russian security agency spies, too. The former MP alleged that one of her collaborators, Claude Taylor, had been duped, but that her reporting remained free of falsehoods.
Mensch has nevertheless been published by the New York Times, the Guardian and the Sun in addition to making TV appearances on MSNBC and Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show. A running list of her baseless conspiracies includes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acting as a mole and Putin ordering the assassination of Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart to pave the way for Steve Bannon to take the reins of the organization.
Newsweek, too, has gotten quite good at getting things wrong. It previously deleted two slanderous articles attacking a former Sputnik News editor following a defamation lawsuit settlement levied by now-attorney and former Sputnik weekend editor William Moran. During the scandal, in which the young lawyer represented himself in legal proceedings alleging slander against himself and Sputnik as a whole, Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Jim Impoco was fired. The February ouster was first reported by Politico.
Newsweek was forced to settle with Moran in July. “I brought this case before I was admitted to the bar and was up against the talented attorneys at mega law firm Pepper Hamilton,” Moran said in a statement that month after a settlement was reached between the publication and recent Georgetown Law graduate for an undisclosed sum.
Shortly after, Editor-in-Chief Matt McAllester was forced to take a leave of absence for “personal reasons” in the beginning of August following an age and sex discrimination suit filed against Time Inc. by its former European editor, Catherine Mayer, in which McAllester is featured as the main offender. By August 25, McAllester had been dismissed from his position, the New York Post reported, citing internal company memos.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
