Truth as first casualty: Deconstructing disinformation campaign on Iran riots death toll
By Yousef Ramazani | Press TV | January 19, 2026
Amid the foreign-instigated riots and terrorism that struck Iran in recent weeks, a parallel narrative war also unfolded, centered on the deliberate propagation of wildly inflated and unverifiable casualty figures.
These figures were designed to manufacture global outrage and legitimize calls for American military intervention and yet another aggression against the Islamic Republic.
The discourse surrounding riot-related casualties in the past few weeks has been fundamentally shaped by a coordinated disinformation campaign originating from US-funded organizations operating entirely outside Iran. Central to this campaign was the circulation of sensational death tolls that bore little resemblance to verifiable facts on the ground.
The figure of 12,000 deaths was initially promoted by the New York–based Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization financially linked to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US Congress–funded entity with a well-documented history of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
This claim was presented without transparent methodology, primary data, or independent verification, raising eyebrows both inside and outside the country.
Despite this lack of evidence, the narrative was uncritically amplified by major Western media outlets and online influencers, creating a pervasive – but demonstrably false – impression of mass violence. Iranian officials consistently rejected these claims, presenting forensic evidence of manipulated datasets and instead reporting a death toll in the hundreds, the majority of whom were security personnel and civilians killed by armed rioters with foreign backing.
The subsequent escalation of these figures to even more implausible numbers – such as claims of 52,000 dead – underscores the persistence of a hybrid warfare strategy aimed at demonizing Iran while obscuring or outright excusing the violence committed by its adversaries.
Genesis of a false narrative: Center for Human Rights in Iran and its backers
The primary source of the sensational 12,000-fatality claim was neither an Iranian authority nor a verifiable international body, but the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization headquartered in New York. Despite its name, the group operates entirely outside Iran and has no physical presence or investigative capacity within the country.
An examination of its leadership and funding reveals a clear political orientation inconsistent with impartial human rights monitoring. The chair of its board is Minky Worden, an American activist with a documented history of spearheading anti-China advocacy campaigns, including efforts to politicize the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Financially, the organization relies heavily on grants from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. The NED is a privately managed but publicly funded institution that receives annual allocations from the US Congress through the State Department budget.
Historians, observers, and former intelligence officials have long characterized the NED as a transparent successor to activities once conducted covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly the funding of political opposition groups and media outlets under the banner of “democracy promotion.”
The NED’s record includes extensive involvement in “regime-change” efforts across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Asia – regions that have consistently featured in American foreign policy campaigns.
Amplification network: From NED grantees to global headlines
The unfounded casualty figure did not remain confined to a single organization. It was rapidly injected into the global media bloodstream through a tightly networked ecosystem of interconnected groups.
Other NED-funded entities, including the Human Rights Activists News Agency and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, echoed and cross-cited the same unsubstantiated statistics.
Operating largely from the US, these organizations function within a closed loop of mutual citation, manufacturing the illusion of multiple independent confirmations.
This echo chamber was then leveraged by major Western media outlets, including BBC Persian, Voice of America, The Washington Post, and ABC News, which incorporated the figures into their reporting.
Typically, these outlets attributed the numbers vaguely to “human rights groups” or “activists,” effectively laundering the information and granting it a veneer of credibility without conducting any independent verification. This failure is particularly striking given the well-documented funding sources and political objectives of the originating organizations.
Crucially, much of this coverage omitted the context that these groups are financially and ideologically aligned with the very governments actively seeking to pressure, isolate, and destabilize the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iranian rebuttal and exposure of fabricated evidence
Iranian government officials and domestic media mounted a comprehensive, forensic rebuttal to the widespread disinformation campaign. The judiciary’s spokesperson and the head of the Supreme National Security Council categorically denounced the claim of 12,000 deaths as “psychological warfare” and a “complete fabrication.”
They publicly challenged the originators of the figure to provide a single verifiable name, death certificate, or precise locational detail to substantiate their alleged casualty lists, a challenge that was never answered.
Cyber units affiliated with Iranian media conducted technical analyses tracing the viral dissemination of the figures to known bot networks operating from locations in the United States, Israeli-occupied territories, and Albania.
Further investigations revealed that purported “martyr lists” were riddled with fraud: hundreds of duplicate entries, names of individuals who had died decades earlier during the Holy Defense war, and even names copied directly from public cemetery records in other countries.
The case of Saghar Etemadi became emblematic of the deception. Widely declared a “martyr” by external outlets, she was later confirmed by the Iranian judiciary and by her own family to be alive and receiving medical treatment for injuries sustained during a riot.
Iranian reports emphasized that the actual death toll, resulting from terrorist acts carried out by foreign-backed armed rioters, numbered in the hundreds. A significant proportion of the victims were police officers, Basij forces, and civilians deliberately targeted by violent saboteurs.
Escalation to absurdity and the weaponization of atrocity propaganda
The disinformation ecosystem demonstrated its capacity for rapid and unchecked escalation.
From the initial claim of 12,000 deaths, narratives soon proliferated across social media platforms and activist circles alleging 52,000 fatalities and more than 300,000 wounded.
These figures, divorced from any conceivable reality, serve a deliberate psychological and political function. They are designed to induce global emotional shock, overwhelm critical scrutiny, and portray the Iranian state as uniquely and exceptionally undemocratic
This narrative fulfills a dual geopolitical purpose, according to experts. First, it seeks to manufacture consent for foreign intervention, intensified sanctions, or diplomatic isolation by invoking a humanitarian pretext. Second, it functions as a tool of distraction and moral laundering.
By creating a false equivalence, or even attempting to eclipse, the documented casualties inflicted by the Israeli regime in Gaza, the campaign aims to redirect global outrage and obscure the horrendous crimes of Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s allies.
Influencers and online networks aligned with the Israeli regime aggressively promoted the fabricated Iranian casualty figures in an effort to undermine the global Palestine solidarity movement and digitally overwrite the extensive evidence of Israeli war crimes.
Underlying architecture: NED as a US “regime-change” instrument
The role of the National Endowment for Democracy is central to understanding the structural foundations of this disinformation campaign. Leaked documents and historical analyses reveal the NED as a key instrument of US foreign policy, operating as a conduit for government funds to support political movements aligned with American strategic interests abroad.
The organization was established following congressional scrutiny of CIA covert operations. One of its founders, Allen Weinstein, openly acknowledged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The NED’s activities extend far beyond Iran. It has been a principal funder and organizer of so-called “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and has been formally designated an “undesirable organization” by Russia for interference in domestic affairs. Its involvement in Hong Kong and Xinjiang has prompted sanctions from China.
In the Iranian context, the NED has for decades funded an array of exile media outlets, advocacy groups, and cultural figures, with the explicit aim of cultivating an alternative political leadership.
A leaked 2024 proposal revealed NED plans to funnel State Department resources into an “Iran Freedom Coalition” composed of US neoconservatives and selected exile figures, exposing the direct link between humanitarian narrative construction and overt regime-change ambitions.
A perennial pattern of narrative warfare
The manipulation of casualty figures during the 2025–2026 unrest is not an isolated episode, but part of a recurring tactic in the long-running hybrid war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The pattern is consistent and predictable: a US-funded NGO, operating safely from New York or Washington, releases an unverifiable and sensational claim. A network of affiliated organizations and social media assets amplifies it, after which mainstream Western media repackages it as credible reporting.
The objective is never truth, but the construction of a carefully engineered perceptual reality serving strategic interests. This reality is designed to demonize independent states, legitimize coercive policies, and erase or minimize the crimes of allied regimes.
The Iranian experience, from the myth of 12,000 deaths to the even more fantastical claim of 52,000, stands as a stark case study in the weaponization of information in the 21st century.
In this domain, the battlefield is not only the street, but global consciousness itself, and the most powerful weapons are often not missiles, but meticulously crafted falsehoods.
Hepatitis B Vaccination of Newborns: Seriously Misleading Media Reports
By Peter C. Gøtzsche | Brownstone Institute | December 19, 2025
Fiction or faith. It is a major failure to give equal prominence to people presenting scientific facts and people talking about their feelings or beliefs with no evidence in their support, or to allow them to contradict unchallenged the most reliable evidence we have.
However, virtually every time I know something about a healthcare issue considered controversial, this is what I see in the news, and the hepatitis B vaccine controversy illustrates this abundantly.
On 5 December 2025, with a vote of 8 versus 3, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ended the recommendation that all newborns in the United States receive a hepatitis B shot at birth. The birth dose was recommended only if the mother had tested positive for the virus or if her infection status was unknown.
The change was very rational, and as in Western Europe, only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose, it would seem difficult to argue against it. But the media did and failed us badly. Two days after the vote, I downloaded news stories from 14 major media outlets, and they were all very negative. The media used three main tactics to support their beliefs:
They denigrated the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the members of ACIP he had selected, and some of the presenters at the meeting.
They gave undue prominence and praise to the three dissenting ACIP voices and outsiders, who were depicted as experts or scientists, as if to say that they must be right, and they were widely quoted for their remarks, which were rarely rational or evidence-based.
They didn’t check if what the critics of the policy change claimed was correct.
The Denigration of Kennedy
Of the 14 news outlets, only Nature did not denigrate Kennedy.
Reuters started its press release by saying it was “a major policy win” for Kennedy that vaccine advisers named by him reversed a decades-long recommendation “that disease experts say will reverse decades of public health gains.” So, Kennedy’s advisers were not experts, and as the critics were experts, they must be correct, right?
Reuters noted that the CDC is “now run by a Kennedy-appointed acting head, Jim O’Neill, who is not a scientist;” that Kennedy founded the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense; fired ACIP’s previous 17 “independent” experts and replaced them with a group that largely supports his views; dropped broad recommendations for the Covid vaccine and cut funding for mRNA vaccines.
The facts are that several of the previous experts at the ACIP were not independent but had conflicts of interest in relation to vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies; that recommending Covid vaccines only to high-risk groups brought the US on par with Europe; and that cutting funding for mRNA vaccine research was well motivated. Kennedy said that his team had reviewed the science and found that these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu. His department was therefore shifting the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”
Reuters misrepresented the ACIP meeting entirely, claiming that “many of Kennedy’s committee members criticized the vaccine as unsafe.” What they said was that safety had not been adequately studied, which was correct.
The other media called Kennedy a vaccine sceptic (The Hill, Health Policy Watch, CBC), a vaccine activist (CNN, the Guardian), or an anti-vaccine advocate (PBS), who fired all 17 previous members of the ACIP, replacing them with people who largely shared his scepticism (New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CNN, PBS, CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch, CBC, BBC, Guardian ) with a “goal of upending vaccine policy” (New York Times ), and the vote fulfilled a long-held goal of the anti-vaccine movement (The Hill ).
The CBC, the largest news broadcaster in Canada, noted that Kennedy had promoted debunked theories linking vaccines to autism. It is correct that studies of the MMR vaccine and aluminium adjuvants did not find a link, but the aluminium study is seriously flawed, some studies have claimed a link, and as it has not been studied if the extensive US childhood vaccine program might cause autism, the CDC has suggested additional research projects.
The Washington Post said that aluminium had become a focal point for anti-vaccine groups that claim cumulative exposure may harm neurological development and that vaccine researchers note that aluminium is present naturally in breast milk, food, and water at far higher levels than in vaccines and is rapidly cleared from the body. It is highly misleading to compare dietary intake with injections, as very little aluminium is absorbed from the gut and the rest is effectively eliminated via the kidneys, and as aluminium adjuvants in vaccines are harmful.
The Hill and CNN noted that aluminium adjuvants in vaccines have been proven to be safe (which is false), but that vaccine sceptics like Kennedy have long said they are linked to allergies and other health conditions (which is correct). Natural infection protects against allergies, and studies comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children have shown vaccines increase the occurrence of asthma and other atopic diseases.
The Denigration of ACIP Members and Meeting Presenters
Nature noted that several panel members continued to express broad criticism of vaccines.
The New York Times lamented that most of the new ACIP members and some of the presenters have no experience in vaccine research or clinical practice and that the divisiveness and dysfunction of the committee in making the decision raised questions about the reliability of the advisory process.
This is terribly misleading. People who have learned to read can assess the merits of vaccines, and scientific debate is what furthers science. Acting ACIP chair Robert Malone said that the committee’s work must be guided by evidence, transparency, and a willingness to scrutinise assumptions rather than protect them.
Health Policy Watch wrote that Malone has been criticised for vaccine misinformation, which is a meaningless comment without any mention of what the issues were. Some of the most outstanding vaccine researchers in the world, professors Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn from Copenhagen, have been criticised for misinformation and have had lectures and interviews removed from YouTube even though everything they said was correct.
CBS News noted that ACIP member Retsef Levi, a mathematician with no medical training (so what?), had falsely claimed that experts had never tested the vaccines appropriately, and the New York Times called it incorrect when lawyer Aaron Siri, a presenter, said that “not one” of the shots administered to children had been compared against a placebo or an inert substance. But Levi and Siri were correct. No childhood vaccine on CDC’s schedule was studied in placebo-controlled trials or relied upon before licensure.
The CBC also described Levi as a person with no medical degree who had questioned the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines and called for Covid vaccine programs to be halted. Well, I have observed repeatedly that Levi’s arguments were far more persuasive than those offered by people with medical degrees, e.g. by ACIP member Cody Meissner, a paediatric infectious-disease specialist (see below).
And Covid vaccines are definitely not safe; they have killed children who developed myocarditis and adults who developed blood clots. It was very prudent to change the “all-inclusive” US Covid vaccine programs when by far most people have been infected, whether vaccinated or not, and because repeated boosters can weaken the immune system and increase the risk of respiratory infections, also for flu shots. Healthcare workers themselves have already delivered a verdict. According to the CDC’s own data, fewer than 10% received a booster in the past year.
National Public Radio denigrated Siri: an anti-vaccine lawyer with no medical or scientific training, and the Washington Post failed their readers, too: “Aaron Siri, a Kennedy ally and lawyer for the anti-vaccine movement, delivered a presentation for more than 90 minutes. Siri said clinical trials for vaccines have not been properly performed, that safety surveillance after vaccines are licensed is lacking and that the efficacy of vaccines in reducing deaths and spread of disease has been overstated. Siri and Kennedy-aligned activists argue that the cumulative number of shots places an undue burden on child immune systems. Scientists counter that… the immune system can safely handle far more antigens than vaccines contain.”
Siri is correct and the reason why he was given so much time is that he is evidence-based and very knowledgeable. His book about vaccines is outstanding. And “scientists” have no evidence that the immune system can safely handle many vaccine antigens injected simultaneously. This is unknown and needs studying.
The Washington Post also noted that “Siri petitioned the government in 2022 on behalf of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, which is run by Kennedy’s former communications director, to reconsider its approval of Sanofi’s stand-alone polio vaccine. Siri argued that the government had relied on inadequate data, a claim regulators rejected.”
However, the petition notes that “the clinical trials relied upon to license this product did not include a control group and only assessed safety for up to three days after injection. These trials therefore did not comply with the applicable federal statutory and regulatory requirements necessary to prove the product was ‘safe’ prior to licensure.” As live, attenuated polio vaccines can mutate and cause polio, I agree with Siri that this drug had not been adequately studied before licensure.
The New York Times and National Public Radio wrongly implied that Siri wanted to remove all polio vaccines (“polio vaccines” or “the polio vaccine”).
Praising “Experts” and Giving Them Undue Prominence
Safety was a major issue. Dissenting ACIP member Cody Meissner said at the meeting that we know that the vaccine is safe, and his reassurances were quoted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Nature, the BBC, and Time.
However, when the Institute of Medicine in 2013 was commissioned to review the safety of the CDC childhood vaccine schedule, they could not find a single study that had compared health outcomes in vaccinated children with those in children who had not received any vaccines and they concluded: “There is no evidence that the schedule is not safe.” Similarly, Time wrote about the hepatitis B vaccine that there is “no evidence in regard to lack of safety.” My comment on this kind of reasoning was: “If the brakes in a new car model have never been tested, the reassuring conclusion would be: ‘There is no evidence that the brakes don’t work.’”
At the ACIP meeting, Meissner accused Siri of presenting “a terrible, terrible distortion of all the facts” (New York Times, National Public Radio, The Hill, CNN, Time ) and of making “absolutely outrageous statements about safety.” This was totally false and Meissner should know better. ACIP members were shown that the clinical trials underpinning approval of the hepatitis B vaccine were small, lacked a placebo group, and followed infants for no more than seven days after vaccination, which would not detect any long-term adverse outcomes. Normally, such findings would have shocked people and prompted caution, but Meissner insisted that “There is no evidence of harm.” Well, if you don’t look, you won’t find.
Levi hit the nail on the head: “What is the number needed to vaccinate – among babies born to hepatitis B-negative mothers – to prevent one case of chronic hepatitis B?” No one supplied an answer. But if the true number was “in the millions,” then any credible harm-benefit analysis would require showing a number-needed-to-harm one infant seriously even higher.
Meissner, however, opined that the move was rooted in baseless scepticism and that we will see more hepatitis B infections (Washington Post, Nature ). He was also against possibly using fewer than three doses of the vaccine (New York Times, The Hill ), arguing that antibody titres are not a good correlate of protection and did not have scientific backing (Nature ). The inconsistency was unmistakable. Antibodies are embraced as proof of vaccine efficacy when convenient, e.g. in drug regulation, otherwise not.
Another dissenting ACIP member, psychiatrist Joseph Hibbeln, was quoted a great deal although he said nothing of substance: The revised guidance was “unconscionable” (Washington Post ), “the decisions should be based on data” (The Hill ), “Those are all speculations” (Time ), “Is there any specific evidence of harm of giving this vaccination before 30 days?” (Guardian ). Not a single journalist wondered why a psychiatrist sat in a vaccine committee.
Dr Tracy Beth Høeg, a presenter at the meeting, noted that the US was an outlier recommending around 72 childhood vaccine doses, while countries like Denmark use fewer than 30. PBS and Time argued that the US is not an outlier in recommending hepatitis B vaccines for newborns because 116 of the 194 WHO member states did the same. This is not a proper comparison, and, as noted above, in Western Europe, only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose.
Levi noted that “The policy in the US is completely misaligned with many countries that… care about their children just as much as we do,” and when Meissner viewed the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule as an achievement for child health, Siri countered correctly that the US “has the worst health outcomes amongst all developed countries.”
The media quoted three previous CDC directors. Rochelle Walensky said that over the past few months, she had observed “a systematic undermining of the nation’s vaccine program” (National Public Radio) and that the “US vaccine-safety monitoring system can detect very, very rare safety events“ (Nature ). Maybe, but she ignored them. In April 2021, cases of myocarditis after Covid-19 vaccination, particularly among young male vaccine recipients, had been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System at the CDC, but Walensky said by the end of the same month: “We have not seen a signal and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given.”
Tom Frieden provided a doomsday statement: “The ACIP recommendation… puts millions of American children at greater risk of liver damage, cancer and early death.” He advised everyone to “stand up for fact-based care” and “not accept this misguided and dangerous recommendation” (Time).
Demetre Daskalakis had a weird argument: “This will signal to clinicians that there is something wrong with the vaccine – there is not” (Reuters, CNN). It could also signal greater responsibility at the CDC than under previous directors. But the BBC and the Washington Post joined the folly arguing that public health experts, representatives of medical organisations, and some ACIP members worried the vote could raise unfounded safety concerns about the vaccine and undermine hard-won trust in vaccines leading to more sickness.
The media gave organisations undue prominence without ever considering if they were impartial. They urged people to look to “independent recommendations,” e.g. from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for “science-based advice” (National Public Radio).
I would call it advice based on money. The Academy would continue to support the birth dose of the vaccine (Reuters, CBS News, Health Policy Watch, CNN, Time, CBC) but all journalists forgot to say that it receives many millions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies. Unsurprisingly, hepatitis B vaccine makers Merck, Sanofi, and GSK defended their products as safe, and Merck was “deeply concerned by the vote” (Reuters ). Perhaps because Merck’s shares dropped?
“Don’t listen to ACIP at all… listen to the American Academy of Pediatrics” (CNN), which said that the “irresponsible and purposely misleading” guidance would harm children; called it a “deliberate strategy to sow fear and distrust among families” (CBC); and delivered a gigantic falsehood: “Vaccine recommendations are largely similar across developed countries” (CBS News).
Reuters noted that ACIP members had said that the birth dose “was out of step with peer countries, particularly Denmark,” but then quoted “a CDC disease expert” for saying that the US is not comparable to Denmark with its universal healthcare and more thorough screening for the virus. The Washington Post said that “public health experts” had noted that European countries recommending fewer shots for children were smaller and had better health care systems, and that medical associations had argued that the US schedule had been thoroughly studied (which is blatantly false). None of the media quoted Levi, who mentioned that the US and Denmark have the same background rate of hepatitis B despite different policies on the birth dose.
The American Medical Association is also heavily corrupted by industry money and said that ACIP’s decision was “reckless and undermines decades of public confidence in a proven, lifesaving vaccine. Today’s action is not based on scientific evidence” (CNN).
The American College of Physicians said that “This vote… will only endanger children and increase risk of death for millions,” and a hepatitis researcher urged people to “go back to our true experts… our CDC colleagues” (Health Policy Watch).
Time noted that “A group of several dozen professional medical organizations and health advocacy groups, including the American Medical Association” expressed alarm over the committee’s decisions: “Previously, we could expect science to drive decisions.”
Some panellists and media noted that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth had helped to nearly eliminate cases among newborns in the United States, and that there was no evidence of harm (New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Guardian ). However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. When Levi countered that the risk for a child of getting infected was extremely low, supporters of the birth dose noted that the virus can be spread by household objects like toothbrushes, razors, or combs used by an infected person. This is a fake argument and the CDC website is explicit: “Although HBV can be found in saliva, it is not spread through kissing or sharing utensils. It is also not spread through sneezing, coughing, hugging, breastfeeding, or food or water.”
Levi also said that the decline in hepatitis B cases occurred long before the birth-dose policy was introduced and was concentrated in older age groups, not among infants, which supported a risk-based policy, focused on infants born to hepatitis B-positive mothers and on high-risk adult populations. When ACIP liaison Dr Flor Muñoz of the Infectious Diseases Society of America claimed that much of the discussion amounted to “misinformation,” Levi responded: “It’s not misinformation… this is CDC data.” When Muñoz pushed back, presenting her disagreement as established fact, Levi replied: “I appreciate your beliefs and feelings about this, but these beliefs and feelings are not supported by the data that were presented.”
Levi also pointed to ACIP’s prior recommendation of Covid-19 vaccination for healthy, extremely low-risk children, which he described as “one of the most outrageous” examples of framework failure.
ACIP’s decision sparked anger from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a doctor, who said the vaccine is safe and effective (BBC, CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch). He wrote on X that “Siri, a prominent anti-vaccine lawyer, makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers and is presenting as if an expert on childhood vaccines. The ACIP is totally discredited” (Washington Post, The Hill ).
The Hill was particularly critical. It wrote about an ardent objection from major medical organisations, internal spats among ACIP members, and a stark lack of data to support altering decades-long vaccine guidance, in fact, “There’s been great data and studies done on these vaccines, and they are safe and effective.” The Hill quoted top figures from Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York City for their rants, which included that they would not abide by ACIP’s “irresponsible attacks on clear, evidence-based science.”
When journalists “dial-a-quote,” they call organisations or people whom they know will respond in a way that mirrors their own bias pretending they have asked an “independent expert.”
The media were full of evidence-free, derogatory comments that were meaningless because they could not be contested:
- “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines,” “heartbreaking to see this science-driven agency turn into an ideological machine” (New York Times );
- “Medical experts have argued that it’s important to vaccinate all newborns for hepatitis B” (Washington Post );
- “The vaccine is incredibly safe,” experts decried the move (Reuters );
- the American Association of Immunologists is “extremely disappointed” in the decision;
- the American College of Physicians called the meeting “completely inappropriate” (CBS News); “many experts expressed dismay at today’s decision” (CNN);
- “A long lineup of medical experts…strongly urged against changing the vaccination schedule” (Health Policy Watch);
- “Public health experts decried the move,” CDC and the ACIP are no longer trustworthy sources and are becoming increasingly irrelevant (CBC);
- “a forum for the discussion of falsehoods,” ACIP members promoted their own sceptical views on vaccines, looking for a bogeyman, and you’re not going to find something if it doesn’t exist (Time );
- “Experts say any change to the current hepatitis B vaccination recommended schedule could have significant and far-reaching consequences for childhood health in the US” (Guardian ).
When the media presented statements that could be contested, they were usually wrong or seriously misleading, e.g. “Siri’s presentation was replete with ‘falsehoods and misrepresentation of the data,’ and he conflated informed consent with mandates” (New York Times ); “fierce objections from medical groups that said the recommendation had proved a successful public health strategy, nearly eradicating the dangerous virus among U.S. children” (Washington Post); a “Minority of members argue the change is not supported by data” (Reuters ).
Persuasion by Big Numbers
Like the drug industry does, the media used big numbers in their propaganda.
Globally, the vaccine has prevented millions of infections (Health Policy Watch). Before the vaccine, around 200,000 to 300,000 people were infected each year; since the vaccines began being universally administered to babies, overall cases are down to around 14,000 annually (PBS).
After a birth dose was recommended in 1991, the shots have prevented an estimated 90,000 deaths in the US (BBC) and reduced hepatitis B infections among infants and children by 99% (CBS News, Time, Health Policy Watch, Nature ).
All these claims are false or seriously misleading. Data presented at the meeting showed that much of the decline in hepatitis B infections over past decades occurred before the birth dose was recommended and it was largely driven by behaviour change, screening, and targeted vaccination of high-risk groups.
Senator Cassidy wrote on X that “Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, it’s fewer than 20” (CBS News, CNN, Health Policy Watch). This was an error of 133 times. CDC data show that in 1990, only around 150 children below one year of age became infected.
Vaccinologist Paul Offit Lied on CNN
The most high-profile vaccinologist in the world, after vaccine “Godfather” Stanley Plotkin, is Paul Offit, but that may be a thing of the past after Siri’s recent revelations and his self-destructing appearance on CNN on the second day of the ACIP meeting.
Offit told viewers he had not been invited to speak at the meeting but internal documents show his claim is false. CDC officials had contacted him repeatedly – via emails, phone calls and a speaker-request form – inviting him to present.
Offit warned viewers that “50% of people in this country have chronic hepatitis B and don’t know it” (only about 0.3% have chronic disease) and suggested newborns were at risk through everyday contact with nannies, daycare workers, and family members because of sharing toothbrushes, towels, or simply being held by an infected adult, which the CDC denied could happen.
Offit described ACIP as a “clown show,” an “anti-vaccine advisory committee” that “puts children in harm’s way.” He lied monstrously saying that before universal infant vaccination, “30,000 children under the age of 10” contracted hepatitis B each year. CDC data presented at the ACIP meeting showed that new hepatitis B cases in children under the age of 10 were around 400 per year before the universal birth dose was introduced.
I am very indebted to journalist Maryanne Demasi, PhD, who wrote many of the articles I quoted above. She gave Offit the opportunity to clarify his remarks but he did not respond. This silence contrasts sharply with the certainty he brings to national television, where his claims are delivered without scrutiny and his financial ties to vaccine manufacturers are almost never mentioned.
Offit is not an impartial commentator. He earned millions from the sale of his stake in Merck’s rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, and has long been aligned with the pharmaceutical industry whose products he routinely defends. Yet major news outlets present him as a neutral authority and take his statements at face value.
Conclusions
The media’s reporting on the hepatitis B issue was seriously misleading and their advice that we should trust the “experts” who condemned the ACIP committee’s wise decision is horribly misguided.
The new ACIP’s first chair was biostatistician Martin Kulldorff. He developed the monitoring system the CDC uses for quick detection of vaccine harms, considered the best in the world. On 1 December, Kennedy announced that Kulldorff was appointed to a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services after he had “transformed ACIP from a rubber stamp into a committee that delivers gold-standard science for the American people.” NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said that “Five years ago, Martin Kulldorff and I co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration calling for an end to pandemic lockdowns. That evidence-based approach to public health now permeates HHS.”
What the media presented was what we call eminence-based medicine, and the medical journals’ reporting on vaccine issues is also a disaster. I shall end with the abstract of an article I published on 10 November:
The reactions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s initiatives to improve vaccine safety have been almost uniformly negative. I studied how the narratives were framed in a cohort of 33 articles in the BMJ of which 30 were written by journalists or the editor. I focused on whether the reporting was balanced and informative, and whether the articles saw any merit in Kennedy’s reforms in his role as Secretary of Health and Human Services or supported the status quo.
The reporting in the BMJ was highly biased. Much of the information provided in Kennedy’s disfavour was misleading, and some was wrong. All initiatives at improving vaccine safety were condemned, without any analysis of their merits in an evidence-based fashion. Instead, the BMJ cited people who had their own agendas and who condemned Kennedy without providing any evidence in their favour while expressing faith in vaccines, with the industry mantra that they are safe and effective, although all drugs will harm some people.
The BMJ did not take any interest in the widespread and lethal corruption in US healthcare institutions – one of Kennedy’s focus points – but toned it down.
Despite the constant ad hominem attacks, Kennedy has succeeded to introduce important changes and plans related to vaccine safety, guidance about how vaccines are used, and about avoiding neurotoxic metals in vaccine adjuvants.
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
The real Russiagate scandal blows away Watergate for crimes and treason by U.S. establishment
Strategic Culture Foundation | August 1, 2025
So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.
The potential impact is not confined solely to the violation of U.S. laws and the democratic process – bad enough as that is. The Russiagate scandal that began in 2016 has had a lasting, damaging effect on U.S. and European relations with Russia. The frightfully dangerous NATO proxy war incited in Ukraine, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale world war, was fueled in large part by the hostility generated from the false claims of Russian interference in the U.S. elections.
The allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a subversion campaign against the 2016 U.S. election and colluded with Donald Trump to get him elected were always specious. The scandal was based on shoddy intel claims to purportedly explain how Trump defeated his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, the scandal was hyped into a seemingly credible narrative by U.S. intelligence chiefs at the direction of then-President Barack Obama as a way to delegitimize Trump’s incoming first-term presidency.
Years before the recent intelligence disclosures, many independent journalists, including Aaron Maté, and former intelligence analysts like Ray MacGovern and William Binney, had cogently disproven the official Russiagate claims. Not only were these claims false, they were knowingly false. That is, lies and deliberate distortions. Russia did not hack emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee to discredit Clinton. Clinton’s corruption was exposed by a DNC internal leak to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblower site. That was partly why Assange was persecuted with years-long incarceration.
A large enough number of voters simply despised Clinton and her warmongering psychopathy, as well as her sell-out of working-class Americans for Wall Street largesse.
Furthermore, Moscow consistently denied any involvement in trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election or attempts to favor Trump. Putin has said more than once that Russia has no preference about who becomes U.S. president, implying that they’re all the same and controlled by deeper state forces. Laughably, too, while Washington accused Moscow of election interference, the actual record shows that the United States has habitually interfered in scores of foreign elections over many decades, including those of Russia. No other nation comes close to the U.S. – the self-declared “leader of the free world” – in sabotaging foreign elections.
In any case, it is instructive to compare the Russiagate farce with the Watergate scandal. Watergate involved spying by the White House of President Richard Nixon against a Democrat rival in the 1972 election. The political crisis that ensued led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. The U.S. nation was shocked by the dirty tricks. Several senior White House officials were later convicted and served time in jail for crimes related to the affair. Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and avoided prosecution. Nevertheless, Watergate indelibly disgraced U.S. politics and, at the time, was described as “the worst political scandal of the 20th century.”
Subsequent cases of corruption and malfeasance are often dubbed with the suffix “gate” in a nod to Watergate as a momentous political downfall. Hence, “Russiagate.”
There are hugely important differences, however. While Watergate was a scandal based on factual crimes and wrongdoing, Russiagate was always a contrived propaganda deception. The real scandal behind Russiagate was not Trump’s alleged misdeeds or those of Russia, but the criminal conspiracy by Obama and his administration to sabotage the 2016 election and subsequently to overthrow the Trump presidency and the democratic will of the American people. Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s most senior intelligence chief, has said that this amounts to “treason,” and she has called for the prosecution of Obama and other former senior aides.
Arguably, the real Russiagate scandal is far more criminal and devastating in its political implications than Watergate. The latter involved illegal spying and dirty tricks. Whereas, Russiagate involved a president and his intelligence chiefs trying to subvert the entire democratic process. Not only that, but the U.S. mainstream media are also now exposed for perpetrating a propaganda heist on the American public. All of the major U.S. media outlets amplified the politicised intelligence orchestrated by the Obama administration, claiming that Russia interfered in the election and that Trump was a “Kremlin stooge.” The hoax became an obsession in the U.S. media for years and piled up severe damage in international relations, a nefarious legacy that we are living with today.
The New York Times and Washington Post, reputedly two of the finest exponents of American journalism, jointly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for their reporting on Russiagate, the official version, that is, which lent credibility to the hoax. In light of what we know now, these newspapers should be hanging their heads in shame for running a Goebbels-like Big Lie campaign to not only deceive the U.S. public but to subvert the democratic process and poison international relations. Their reputations are shredded, as well as those of other major media outlets, including ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
Ironically, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its reporting on the Watergate scandal. The story was made into a best-selling book, All The President’s Men, and a hit Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing the roles of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post were acclaimed as the finest in U.S. journalism for exposing Watergate and bringing a crooked president to book.
How shameful and absurd that an even greater assault on American democracy and international relations in the form of Russiagate is ignored and buried by “America’s finest”. That the scandal is ignored and buried should be of no surprise because to properly reveal it would shatter the foundations of the U.S. political establishment and the sinister role of the deep state and its mainstream media propaganda system.
Trump’s phone diplomacy with Putin shatters the Euro-Atlantic Cold War mental bloc
Strategic Culture Foundation | May 23, 2025
As the old saying goes, “it’s good to talk.” Good, that is, for most reasonable people who understand that dialogue is a process that opens positive possibilities, especially when the dialogue is conducted respectfully and sincerely.
This week, US President Donald Trump held his third phone conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin since he was inaugurated in the White House in January. The latest one on Monday was even more substantive than the previous calls, lasting about two hours, and, according to both sides, it was conducted in a friendly and productive manner.
Of course, the main topic of conversation was finding a peaceful end to the more than three-year war in Ukraine. Trump deserves credit for at least trying to bring peace to the table, instead of more and more weapons, as his predecessor, the mentally decrepit Joe Biden, did, and assorted European leaders would like to continue doing.
There was also discussion between Trump and Putin, using first names in their verbal exchanges, about repairing US-Russia relations for trade and strategic cooperation.
That portends a transformation in Washington’s erstwhile agenda of hostility towards Russia.
Tellingly, however, the talking was deemed “not good” by others, as could be gleaned from the vexed reactions to Trump’s call with Putin from European leaders and American advocates of the Euro-Atlantic alliance.
European politicians were reportedly “stunned” and “shocked” by Trump’s diplomatic outreach to Putin.
Following his conversation with the Russian president, Trump briefed five European leaders jointly. They included Germany’s Merz, France’s Macron, Italy’s Meloni, Finland’s Stubb, and the European Commission’s chief Von der Leyen. Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky was also part of the conference call. The non-entity British prime minister was not included. Sometimes, talking with toxic people is not good!
The Europeans tried to put a positive spin on the briefing from Trump, with Von der Leyen describing it as “good”. But that was the Europeans trying to save face from what is a stunning blow to the Euro-Atlantic alliance.
In a press conference at the White House on Monday, after his calls with Putin and the Europeans, Trump made it clear from his statements that the vaunted alliance is shattered. He is no longer listening to them, and his agenda towards Russia is transformational, if it is permitted to develop.
Trump rejected the European demands for an immediate 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine and more economic sanctions on Russia. He said that imposing more sanctions did not help resolve the conflict. Trump also indicated that he concurred with Russia’s logical position that negotiations must be focused on establishing a lasting peace, one that deals with addressing the root causes of conflict.
The European and Ukrainian demands for a 30-day truce as a precondition are not workable or logical. Indeed, such insistence impedes negotiations. From a cynical point of view, that is why the European backers of the Kiev regime are making such a song and dance about sanctions and the 30-day truce, because those demands are aimed at preventing diplomacy succeeding with Russia.
Britain’s Financial Times headlined its report on the Trump-Putin call: “Why Europe fears the worst after Trump’s ‘excellent’ chat with Putin”.
The BBC inadvertently shed light with its headline: “Trump’s call with Putin exposes shifting ground on Ukraine peace talks”. The BBC-speak about “shifting ground on peace talks” is an Orwellian translation. What the BBC should have said in plain language was that Trump is shafting the European warmongers.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the supporters of the NATO proxy war against Russia tried their best to undermine Trump’s diplomacy.
The New York Times – the CIA’s main choice for gaslighting the American population – called the phone call a “diplomatic win for Russia” and snidely said, “Trump backs off ceasefire call”. The latter implied that Trump is against peace when, in fact, he is the only Western adult in the room calling for peace.
The Washington Post also did its best to smear Trump, reporting: “After call, Trump gives Russia more time for Ukraine war”. An op-ed piece also mockingly claimed: “Trump wasted two hours with Vladimir Putin”.
CNN, another outlet that has loyally and absurdly pushed the NATO proxy war as a noble endeavor, accused Trump for “siding with his friend in the Kremlin” and claimed that “peace in Ukraine looks further away after Trump’s call with Putin”, adding that “Putin got exactly what he wanted… stringing Trump along.”
The riot of negative and vitriolic reactions on both sides of the Atlantic shows that the US-European alliance under Trump has shattered. That alliance embodied by the NATO military bloc has been the linchpin of the “Collective West” for eight decades. It has now cracked wide open.
Unlike his predecessors in the White House, Donald Trump does not want to pursue a destructive and futile policy of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. That policy is what engendered the war in Ukraine, from the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, to the provocative weaponization of Ukrainian NeoNazis, until Russia’s intervention in February 2022 to defend its rights.
Trump appears to genuinely want to end the proxy war and to normalize relations with Russia for the sake of world peace, and, why not, good business.
For the Euro-Atlanticists, with their incurable, imperialist, and Russophobic mindsets, such a policy is anathema.
However, the good news is that the gaping cracks in the so-called Collective West now provide a path to peace.
Trump and Putin can end the war in Ukraine and negotiate an important peace deal that addresses Russia’s historic security grievances that stem from the decades of NATO aggression, which past American presidents and their European surrogates have facilitated.
For Trump to do that, he needs to listen carefully to the Russian leadership and reciprocate. If a new detente can be achieved, then the world will be a better, more secure, and peaceful place.
The other thing that Trump needs to do is to dismiss European lackeys with their warmongering servility to the status quo ante. They are has-beens and have nothing constructive to offer.
Trump’s phone call with Putin this week has had a major impact, and one that has significant potential for peace. The cracks in the Cold War mental bloc, so to speak, are a way forward.
WaPo Putin-Trump call claim ‘pure fiction’ – Kremlin
RT | November 11, 2024
US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin did not have a phone conversation about the Ukraine conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
The Washington Post claimed on Sunday that Trump called Putin after winning his second, albeit non-consecutive term as US president to discuss his vision regarding how the Ukrainian crisis could be deflated. Peskov said on Monday that the article was a “vivid example of the quality of information published by even some respectable outlets.”
“This absolutely does not correspond to reality. This is pure fiction. This information is simply false,” he told the press.
Kiev previously denied the claim made by the Washington Post in its piece that the Ukrainian government was informed about the phone call beforehand and gave its consent to the US-Russian engagement.
“Reports that the Ukrainian side was informed in advance of the alleged call are false,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman told Reuters on Sunday.
Trump had claimed while on the campaign trail that he could end the Ukraine conflict “in 24 hours,” if US voters grant him a second term in office. He reportedly intends to leverage US military and financial aid to Ukraine to pressure both Moscow and Kiev to achieve a compromise.
Russia, which currently has the advantage on the battlefield, has said that it will only accept an outcome that addresses the core causes of the Ukraine conflict. Those include NATO’s enlargement in Europe and Kiev’s discriminatory policies against ethnic Russians, according to Moscow.
The Washington Post reported a phone call between Trump and Putin based on accounts by sources “familiar with the matter,” who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Bob Woodward Badly Misquotes Russian FM Lavrov
By Scott Horton | The Libertarian Institute | October 16, 2024
I emailed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward:
Dear Bob,
It appears that you have misquoted FM Lavrov on page 88 of your new book.
Lavrov’s full quote was: “Those who mechanically repeat the points made in Bucharest and insist that ‘third countries’ have no right to express their position on the issue of NATO enlargement are playing with fire. I am convinced that they cannot be unaware of this.” “Statement by Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, at the Twenty-Eighth Meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council,” December 2, 2021, https://osce.org/files/f/documents/a/c/506840.pdf.
Here is your version from page 88 of War, to compare to the original above: “‘Third countries’ — meaning, the United States — ‘have no right to express their position on the issue of NATO enlargement and are playing with fire,’ Lavrov warned, ‘I am convinced that they cannot be aware of this.’”
You omitted everything before “third countries,” and failed to put brackets around his capital T, to indicate it was not truly the beginning of the sentence, importantly losing the context that he was discussing others: “Those who… repeat and insist that,” at the beginning. You also added “— meaning, the United States —” after “third countries,” when Lavrov clearly meant Russia, and added the word “and” after “enlargement” to make it at least make sense grammatically, if in no other way. But you did not put brackets around the and as though you are sure that was what he meant to say. Perhaps because you knew that he did not?
The sentence as reproduced in your book makes no sense at all in English without the addition of the word “and.”
And it makes no sense whatsoever in context: You would have us accept that the Russian foreign minister believes and said out loud that the United States of America is a “third country” which has “no right” to an opinion on the size of its own military alliance, only he does, and that the US is “playing with fire” by having an opinion, rather than by disregarding Russia’s — really?
Do you have any comment? Thanks!
Best,
Scott Horton
1-Minute Junking: Emissions caused Hurricane Helene to intensify?
JunkScience.com | September 30, 2024
ABC fact checking is a ‘black box’
Who are the fact checkers, what are their qualifications and how do they decide what is true or false?
Maryanne Demasi, reports | April 22, 2024
Australia’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), proudly announced in 2022 that it had partnered with the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), an international alliance of major news corporations and Big Tech firms, to counter the growing threat of “fake news.”
It was part of sweeping reforms in the media to deliver ‘trusted’ news to global audiences and protect the public from the harms of misinformation and disinformation online.
Spearheaded by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), partners include Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times, The Washington Post, and ABC Australia, along with social media and tech giants – Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Microsoft (LinkedIn) and Google (YouTube) to name a few.
When ABC announced its new alliance with TNI, Justin Stevens, ABC News Director said, “We’re pleased to join the Trusted News Initiative and, in the process, provide Australian audiences with a deeper and better-informed view of our region and the world.”
Justin Stevens appointed ABC News Director in April 2022
During the pandemic, the alliance promised to focus on preventing “the spread of harmful vaccine disinformation,” and “the growing number of conspiracy theories,” targeting online memes that featured anti-vaccine messaging or posts that downplayed the risk of covid-19.
But critics have grown increasingly uneasy about the alliance. They say governments are being protected by journalists, instead of being held to account for their pandemic policies and they’re concerned the alliance has shaped public discourse by controlling people’s access to information and censoring content that diverges from the status quo.
Weaponising fact checking
Deploying fact-checkers is one way that TNI members control the dissemination of public information. When they label a statement ‘false’, ‘wrong’, or ‘misleading’, it’s used by social media platforms to legitimise the censorship of that content by deprioritising, hiding, demonetising, or suppressing it.
Debunking content is time consuming and costly. Fact-checkers are invariably junior journalists or intern researchers, with little to no understanding of complex scientific issues or public health policies, and often appeal to governments for the ‘truth’.
When the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration opposed government enforced lockdowns, fact checkers ran hit pieces on the authors – the notable academics were then shadow-banned, censored and deplatformed from social media.
In the case of the ABC, its original in-house fact checking unit was axed in 2016 because of Federal budget cuts, but was revamped the following year when the ABC teamed up with RMIT University in Melbourne to form the RMIT ABC Fact Check and RMIT FactLab departments.
The ABC paid more than $670,000 to RMIT between 2020 – 2023 as part of its joint fact-checking venture but they quickly gained a reputation for being flawed. For example, concerns about the suppression of the lab leak theory were labelled as “false” even though they were true.
ABC’s fact checkers were also accused of being biased by SkyNews because they had used their influence to censor disfavoured political views in the Voice to Parliament referendum.
Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick grilled ABC’s Managing Director David Anderson at a Senate Estimates hearing about the network’s dodgy fact-checking practices last year.
“Who is fact-checking the fact-checkers?” asked Senator Rennick.
“You’ve made some outrageous claims on these fact-checks that aren’t correct, and you haven’t actually backed them up with any facts,” added Rennick, accusing the ABC of bias for predominantly fact-checking politically conservative voices in the media.
Sources say these controversies have prompted the ABC to cut ties with RMIT whose contract ends in June 2024.
New fact-checkers, same problems?
An ABC spokesperson said the network is now building its own internal fact-checking team, called “ABC NEWS Verify,” which appears to have similarities to the “BBC Verify” initiative.
“ABC NEWS Verify will be our centre of excellence for scrutinising and verifying information in online communities,” said the spokesperson outlining the various tasks of fact checkers. “Establishing a dedicated team will enhance and focus our efforts, creating a hub for verification best practice.”
I asked the ABC if it had any internal policy document outlining the criteria its fact-checkers would use to deem content as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ but the spokesperson responded saying “no it doesn’t.”
Andrew Lowenthal, an expert in digital rights and a Twitter Files journalist, said the ABC’s failure to explain how it intends on fact-checking claims was “seriously ridiculous.”
“That the ABC is seeking to decide what is misinformation without laying out any criteria demonstrates just how farcical and political ‘fact-checking’ has become,” said Lowenthal.
“Without transparent and publicly available criteria the program will quickly turn into a partisan advocacy initiative,” he added.
Andrew Lowenthal, Twitter Files journalist
Lowenthal’s Twitter Files investigation confirmed the Australian government was monitoring Covid-related speech of its citizens and requesting that posts were flagged and censored if they deemed them to be misinformation.
“In that investigation, the government’s Department of Home Affairs was relying on Yahoo! News and USA Today, among others, to justify their take down requests or they’d hire journalists without scientific credentials. We need dialogue, not diktats, to determine what is true,” said Lowenthal.
Senator Rennick agreed, saying the ABC’s process lacks transparency. “Who are these people that claim to be the fact-checkers in the first place and what are their credentials? Sounds to me like it’s a black box,” said Rennick.
“Often when fact checkers come out with their reports, they don’t give the other person they’re fact checking, a right-of-reply. Also, they rarely disclose the conflicts of interest of the so-called ‘experts’ they use to fact check claims,” he added.
Michael Shellenberger, author, journalist and founder of Public, has written extensively on the “censorship industrial complex.”
“That’s what the trusted news initiative [TNI] was all about…a strategy to use fact checking initiatives to demand censorship by social media platforms,” said Shellenberger.
Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins 2020)
“They can pretend that’s not what it’s about, but the fact that the news media are participating in this, is grotesque. It’s a complete destruction of whatever reputation and integrity they used to have,” he added.
“Organisations like BBC and ABC… they used to have reputations for independence and integrity, but they’ve now decided to destroy their entire reputation on the mantle of them being the deciders of the truth. The Central Committee. That’s totalitarianism that’s not free speech.”
The ABC says its new ABC NEWS Verify will have no connection to TNI.
Impartiality and credibility?
TNI’s broad principles of working in lockstep towards a single narrative, has meant that legacy media operate largely as a mouthpiece for government propaganda, offering little critique of public health policies…and ABC has been no exception.
During the pandemic, the broadcaster repeatedly came under fire after its medical commentator Dr Norman Swan made countless calls for harsher lockdowns, mask mandates and covid boosters – policies that strongly aligned with the government but had little scientific backing.
Swan’s commentary rarely provided an impartial perspective and he was eventually called out for failing to publicly disclose his financial interest in seeking government contracts related to covid-19.
In addition, Ita Buttrose, who was ABC Chair until last month, was seen fronting Pfizer’s advertising campaigns for covid products. ABC defended Buttrose saying, “Given she was not involved in editorial decisions, there was no conflict of interest.”
Ita Buttrose, former ABC Chair, March 2019 – March 2024
The ABC denies its alliance with TNI has impacted its editorial independence but Shellenberger says the entire purpose of joining TNI is to ensure they become the single source of truth.
“They’ve stopped doing real reporting, and they’re just out there wanting to be paid to regurgitate and act like publicists for the government. It’s grotesque. It’s not journalism, it’s propaganda,” said Shellenberger.
Resisting the tyranny
Some journalists have been resisting what they perceive to be ‘tyranny’ in legacy media and the widespread suppression of free speech.
In June 2021, a group of around 30 journalists rallied together to denounce TNI’s “censorship and fearmongering” and accused the alliance of subjecting the public to a distorted view of the truth.
The group known as ‘Holding the Line: Journalists Against Covid Censorship’ shared concerns that reporters were being reprimanded by their superiors and freelancers were being blacklisted from jobs for not following the “one official narrative.”
Presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr has filed a lawsuit against TNI alleging that legacy media organisations and Big Tech have worked to “collectively censor online news” about covid-19 and the 2020 presidential election.
The lawsuit states:
“By their own admission, members of the “Trusted News Initiative” (“TNI”) have agreed to work together, and have in fact worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics.”
A group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have since published The Westminster Declaration.
In essence, it’s a free speech manifesto urging governments to dismantle the “censorship industrial complex” which has seen government agencies and Big Tech companies work together to censor free speech.
In Australia, the journalist’s union MEAA has called on ABC’s newly appointed Chair Kim Williams to “restore the reputation of the national broadcaster by addressing concerns about the impact of external pressures on editorial decision making.”
Kim Williams, current Chair, ABC Network Australia
Williams, who took over from Buttrose last month, has warned his journalists that “activism” is not welcome at the ABC and that if they fail to observe impartiality guidelines, they should consider leaving the network.
Will the ABC course-correct with Williams at the helm? Now that trust in legacy media is at historical lows, the ABC’s partnership with TNI does little to assuage fears that the network has passed the point of no return.
NB: I was a TV presenter/producer at ABC TV (2006-2016) and wrote about my experiences with censorship at the network here and here.
ANALYSIS: HOW THE UK AND US MEDIA DEHUMANISE PALESTINIANS
BY CLAIRE LAUTERBACH AND NAMIR SHABIBI | DECLASSIFIED UK | NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Nazis. Beneath animals.
This is a small sample of what Palestinians have been called by commentators speaking to Western media outlets in the last month of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – examples of the bestiary of zoological terms natural to a coloniser’s view of the colonised.
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote during France’s colonial war in Algeria of “hordes of vital statistics”, “hysterical masses”, “faces bereft of all humanity”, and “children who seem to belong to nobody”.
These are all terms that could describe how western media covers the suffering of Palestinians — “a tide of humanity… a teeming mass of Gazans”, as the BBC put it (15 October). This is all sharply in focus since Hamas’ October offensive, and Israel’s genocidal razing of the Gaza strip.
We analysed the front page coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza by five major US and UK news media — the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, and the BBC (the news landing page at 7am daily) between 7-26 October.
Over these three weeks following Hamas’ offensive, the mechanics of the Western press’ dehumanisation of Palestinians in death and life are revealed as clinical and routine.
Israelis are murdered, Palestinians die
The dehumanisation process begins (or ends) with questioning who counts in death, and how the killer and the victim are portrayed.
In the UK-US mainstream media, Israelis die actively. They are either killed or murdered by Hamas, or “after a surprise Palestinian attack”. “The Palestinians” stands in for “Hamas” for sloppy or ideological editors, for example in the Guardian on 8 October.
Palestinian civilians, by contrast, die passively – and yet it is they who have done most of the dying since 7 October; over ten times the number of Israelis killed.
Gazans aren’t killed by Israeli forces or Israeli government policies. They “dehydrate to death as clean water runs out” (Guardian, 18 October) while Israeli airstrikes “continue to pound the Palestinian territory”.
On 9 October, the BBC ran with “700 people have been killed on the Israeli side with more than 400 also dead in Gaza”, presumably succumbing to shock or an act of God.
On 8 November, the Times of London noted: “Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died”, which is of course qualified.
Palestinian deaths are natural, undifferentiated. This is only possible because the media treat Israel’s blockade of Gaza as wholly logical, proportionate and even restrained.
Violations of international law
Collective punishment, which is essentially what Israel is doing by striking civilian “targets” and totally blockading the “open prison” (in former prime minister David Cameron’s words), is also illegal. This is the view of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, UN human rights chief Volker Türk and Human Rights Watch, among others.
When UN chief António Guterres noted Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and called for an end to the siege, Israel’s UN representative demanded he resign. At least one of Guterres’ colleagues, the head of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, Craig Mokhiber, resigned of his own accord, protesting Israel’s “genocide unfolding before our eyes” in Palestine.
However, in none of the three weeks’ of front-page headlines and lead paragraphs for the five UK-US media analysed for this article are Israel’s serial violations of international law mentioned.
The exclusion of this important context on Israel’s crimes is important. As journalists we’re trained to account for the fact that most people don’t read beyond the headlines or first paragraphs.
Off the front page, some media published separate analysis pieces, such as the New York Times’ “Israel, Gaza and the laws of war” (12 October). This unsurprisingly goes nowhere near calling Israel’s crimes what they are: crimes.
Despite discussing at length how civilians cannot be targeted or disproportionately harmed for military purposes, the closest the New York Times gets to criticising the action of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is quoting the opinion of an expert on siege law.
This was that Israel’s siege is “an unusually clear-cut example of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, which is considered a violation of international humanitarian law, a crime against humanity and a war crime” (emphasis added).
A swift qualifier follows: “Jurisdiction over some war crimes would depend on whether the conflict is considered inter-state.” So some crimes are not a crime as long as Palestine or Palestinians don’t exist, as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir asserted over 50 years ago, repeated by current Israeli politicians.
By contrast, Hamas’ actions are, to the same cited expert, “not close calls”.
Preventable deaths
Moving on from, or ignoring completely, both the illegality of Israel’s total siege of Gaza, the UK-US media portray the starvation and preventable deaths resulting directly from it in almost entirely passive, naturalistic language.
For example, the Washington Post’s print version front page: “Civilian harm in Gaza looms over Biden’s visit; Rising human toll from attacks could threaten Israel’s global backing” (harm arising of course from Israel’s battering).
On 13 October, from the New York Times : “300,000 homeless in battered Gaza as food runs low” (because Israel is blocking food from entering Gaza). It continues: “Hospitals overwhelmed and fuel scarce” (because Israel is blocking medical supplies and fuel from reaching Gaza) “as Israel strikes back at Hamas.”
That’s fine then – the reader should feel at ease since Israel’s crushing of hospitals is merely an act of “self-defence”.
The Israeli military is not much a fan of Gazan hospitals – it regularly bombs them. It ordered 23 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate on 13 October, and seems to have been picking them off, with patients inside, ever since.
When Israel might have gone too far, as it did in almost certainly bombing Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October, most outlets covered the strike by repeating both Israel’s and Hamas’ “he said-she said” accusations against the other.
Nevertheless, the New York Times gave the IDF’s denial more weight with “Hamas fails to make case that Israel struck hospital” (23 October, emphasis added), which is a catchier headline than “We don’t know, and don’t want to work it out ourselves”.
Meanwhile, the Times ran with “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”, swiftly adding that “Israel denies responsibility and blames jihadis”, with no comment from a Palestinian voice.
Mirroring the discrepancy between how Palestinians have died (passively, often with no mention of Israeli actions) and Israelis have died (actively, directly attributed to Hamas or “Palestinian” actions) is how the media describes child victims of both sides.
Discussing a prisoner exchange, a Washington Post columnist described Israel’s “children hostages” while referring to Palestinian children as “young people”. Under Military Order 1591, the Israeli government can hold minors as young as 12 without trial and potentially indefinitely in “administrative detention”, UNICEF reports.
When Gazan civilian deaths from siege and strikes against civilian infrastructure are shown as authorless natural disasters rather than as war crimes, any access Gazans get to essential goods becomes “aid” or “relief”, and every tiny amount allowed to reach them is an act of Israeli mercy.
For example, the New York Times (19 October): “Deal lays groundwork for aid to reach desperate Gazans”. Or the Washington Post (12 October): “Closed borders, falling bombs choke Gaza; thousands injured as supplies wane”, adding “humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens” (due to Israeli siege, let’s not forget).
Also in the Washington Post is the incredible headline (16 October) “As Palestinian death toll rises, aid stuck in Egypt”, as if it couldn’t physically fit through the door, which ignores the fact that Israel prevented aid from entering Israel via Rafah, demanding proof it would not be diverted to Hamas.
The numbers
Having reduced Palestinians to numbers, the work then becomes to cast doubt on these numbers.
When Israel’s flattening of Gaza began raising international alarm, Biden said he didn’t trust that “Palestinians” (or the Hamas government, since to him the distinction is irrelevant) “are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
His statement was the latest in a time-honoured tradition of US administrations disputing the number of deaths wreaked by their allies abroad, from Suharto’s Indonesia, to Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and Saudi Arabia today, as historian Bradely Simpson notes.
No one seriously disputes the Gazan Ministry of Health’s numbers as too high. If anything, they are likely a serious undercount given how many bodies are trapped under rubble.
Nevertheless, the attribution of figures to the “Gaza Ministry of Health” is now almost always prefaced by “Hamas-government” or followed by “controlled by Hamas”. This would seem an odd waste of words, considering that everyone from the UN to the US State Department cites Gazan health ministry casualty data, and Gaza’s government is run by Hamas.
Dead Palestinians are simply irrelevant for some media. The first mention of Palestinian deaths in Times headlines occurred 11 days after Hamas’ assault: “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”. It had by then run several front page pieces about specific, named Israeli victims, including an in-depth profile (with portrait) of a kibbutz family horrifically killed by the Hamas-led offensive [or not].
Unsurprisingly, on 12 October, the Telegraph published the number of Israelis killed in factors of “9/11s” in a striking infographic which didn’t even bother to include an estimate of Palestinian deaths.
Double standards
Once a people are truly dehumanised, it becomes logical – necessary, even – to apply a wholly different standard of (in)decency to them.
UK-US media report Palestinian deaths passively, as if through apparent acts of God, often couching the deaths in language suggesting that they were mostly Hamas or Hamas-adjacent, or at least that they inconveniently stood in missiles’ way.
For still-breathing Palestinians, it is not enough to have somehow escaped being killed by the almost 6,000 bombs Israel launched in its first six days punishing the densely populated territory. This is more than the US, not usually known for its restraint, deployed in any single year of its war in Afghanistan.
A living Palestinian must justify his or her continued aliveness by disavowing Hamas. A viral example of this can be seen in BBC Newsnight’s interview of the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot.
Presenter Kirsty Wark barely flinched upon hearing Zomlot describe in detail how members of his family had been killed by Israeli strikes in the previous days before repeatedly demanding Zomlot condemn Hamas’ actions.
To reverse this, in other words, to ask every Israeli who had lost a family member in this conflict to first begin by condemning Israel’s murders and collective punishment of civilian Gazans would be rightly seen as outrageous. Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any examples of such in the Western press.
The UK-US press also tells us that to support Palestinians is to support Hamas, in case anyone doubted the conflation.
The BBC declared London’s peaceful pro-Palestine protesters as providing “backing for Hamas.” It later retracted its “poorly phrased” comments.
Sky News did no better in using images of peaceful protesters bearing Palestinian flags to accompany its discussion of efforts by the London Metropolitan Police to “tackle extremism”.
These “slips” pale in comparison with the virulently offensive terms guests on BBC programmes have called Palestinians, completely unchallenged by their hosts.
For example, BBC Arabic hosted former Israeli intelligence veteran-turned academic, Mordechai Kedar who refused to recognise popular Israeli racism towards Palestinians, claiming that bestial comparisons of Palestinians are “denigrating to animals.”
Tellingly, the BBC Arabic host neither ejected Kedar from the interview, nor did she admonish him and demand an apology. Instead, the host pivoted away from Kedar’s genocidal language with the comment “that’s your opinion”.
Platforming Israeli justifications
UK-US media have also taken to running pieces platforming Israeli justifications for the IDF’s actions when the staggering number of dead Gazan civilians was becoming harder to write around.
“How Israelis justify scale of airstrikes” ran the New York version front page of the New York Times on 26 October. It was later rewritten as “Israel’s strikes on Gaza are some of the most intense this century”.
It is unthinkable that a Western newspaper would carry a piece platforming in the same benign-to-neutral terms Palestinian rage, or worse, justifications for Hamas’ crimes.
Another trend is to normalise Israel’s actions by focusing not on its costs in Gazan lives, but its intentions which, of course, are shown as benign. (Note: intentions don’t matter in the laws of war.)
Three days into Israel’s illegal total blockade of Gaza, the BBC asked: “Could an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza meet its aims?” (14 October). Charitably characterising Netanyahu as “risk-averse” (for Israelis, not Palestinians), the New York Times ran with “All-out war is untried ground”, comforting readers that “limited strikes in past were safe politically”.
Dissenting voices: harder to hear
Journalists at the BBC and Agence France Presse (AFP) who have been critical of their agencies’ bias against Palestinian lives and minimisation of Israeli war crimes told Declassified that there is no space to discuss editorial concerns.
Palestinian commentators have seen their segments edited out of mainstream news programmes. Palestinian Americans report their events are being cancelled while they’re called Hamas supporters.
Meanwhile, a senior editor at US publication Newsweek called for Gaza to be flattened to resemble a parking lot, apparently without censure.
Elsewhere in the media ecosystem, an official of the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM, Fadzai Madzingira, was suspended for a social media post criticising UK support for “ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians” and “this vile colonial alliance”.
None of these points – that Israel may be committing genocide, that it continues to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land or that Israel was founded as a colonial project which still uses settler outposts to consolidate territorial control – is outside of reasonable analysis of historical facts.
It’s looking an awful lot like the beginning (or end, depending on your starting point) of a genocide.
The IDF has instructed all Palestinians to flee south of the Wadi Gaza area “for their safety” from Israeli strikes. Some were struck as they were evacuating, and Palestinians are still being shelled by the IDF in southern refuge areas.
Soldiers plant Israeli flags on Gazan beaches, while Israel’s intelligence agency floats the idea of permanently expelling Gazans to Egyptian Sinai as a preferred solution. Netanyahu invokes a Bible passage where God orders the Israelites “to put to death men and women, children and infants” of a rival kingdom.
Still, the New York Times uncritically presents Netanyahu as “seeking [a] permanent end to threat but not a reoccupation” (13 October).
That last bastion of dissent, gallows humour, is also at grave risk. Michael Eisen, editor of science journal eLife, was sacked for posting on Twitter an article from humour site the Onion, with the headline “Dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas”.
The Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell’s contract was not renewed after his sketch of Netanyahu preparing to operate on his own stomach with an outline of Gaza was deemed too reminiscent of the “pound of flesh” anti-semitic trope.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a cartoon of a Hamas official with Gazan children and women strapped to him saying “How dare Israel attack civilians”. It’s since been deleted following racism complaints.
Yet the cartoonist is still drawing for mainstream media. Last week he published another cartoon in the Las Vegas Review showing a (fat, black) woman with a Black Lives Matter t-shirt holding up a sign saying “Terrorist Lives Matter: Blame Israel, Support Hamas”.
How dare Israel attack civilians indeed.
Claire Lauterbach is an independent investigative journalist and producer. She is the former Head of Investigations at Privacy International where she investigated the use and abuse of surveillance and military technologies, and a former Senior Investigator at Global Witness. Claire previously investigated war crimes in Goma, DR Congo for Human Rights Watch.
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist, visiting lecturer in Geopolitics at the University of Westminster, and PhD candidate researching covert paramilitary action in the ‘War on Terror’. He is a former International Committee of the Red Cross delegate investigating breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Darfur and Guantanamo Bay.
Joe Biden’s Washington Post op-ed shows the US never learns its lessons
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | November 20, 2023
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has recently published an op-ed. Appropriately released through the Washington Post, it is, of course, really the equivalent of a regime policy declaration – a laying down of the party line, if you wish. As such, the text deserves attention, never mind that it is impossible that America’s leader, clearly challenged by worsening senescence, has written it himself. This is, to borrow a phrase from the Russia-watching crowd, America’s “collective Biden” speaking.
Translated from official jargon and scrubbed of empty rhetoric and euphemisms, the long proclamation makes only two substantial points about what the US and its “allies” (really clients and vassals) must do: Continue waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and continue backing Israel in its genocidal war against the Palestinians (no, it is not a “war against Hamas,” that’s a side effect).
In that sense, there is nothing surprising, or hopeful, in collective Biden’s announcement: It took them more words this time, but this Democratic administration of neocons is simply repeating the equally tone-deaf slogan of a former Republican president representing a past gaggle of neocons: Stay the course, as George W. Bush put it succinctly during the Iraq disaster. Deja Vue all over again, in the words of America’s greatest philosopher.
But the details of the text still merit scrutiny. Let’s pick out a few highlights:
Hamas is repeatedly denounced as carrying out “pure, unadulterated evil” and such. Every fair observer would reserve such terms by now for what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. But let’s set that aside for now and let’s also set aside that we now know that substantial numbers of Israelis were killed by Israeli forces. Let’s instead focus on Hamas. Is such language factual? The rational answer to that question is not a matter of opinion, and it has to be “no”: In reality, the empirical record shows that Hamas is a resistance organization engaged in a legally and ethically justified struggle against massive national oppression. It has attacked military targets, which is legitimate, as well as committed terrorist crimes. But if any political and armed organization that does both engage in legitimate violence and terrorist crimes is carrying out “pure evil,” then almost every halfway powerful state in this world has done just that or is doing it even now. Clearly, we are dealing with an absurd statement here.
Usually, the cause of such absurdities is strategic dishonesty. That holds here as well. For the Biden administration is transparently pursuing two aims with this Orwellian abuse of terminology: First, make Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians appear, if not justified, then at least so “understandable” or “inevitable” that we stop objecting to them (and, if we are Americans, vote for Democrats, even while they support these perfectly avoidable crimes).
Secondly, prepare the ground for the proposal, following further down in the proclamation, to entirely eliminate Hamas from any post-assault settlement and, instead, “ultimately” make a “revived Palestinian Authority” rule both the West Bank and Gaza, while work on some lasting settlement continues.
This proposal is wrapped in deceptive and revoltingly cynical rhetoric: If Joe Biden has a broken heart over the slaughtered children of Gaza, then Andrew Jackson must have cried while signing the Indian Removal Act. If Biden wants a two-state solution, then why is he allowing and helping one of the “two states” to wipe out the other? If he has “counselled” Israeli leaders to refrain from excessive violence, then why has he not backed up his kind words with using his massive leverage and stopping the flow of arms, money, information, and diplomatic cover to help their genocidal attack? If Biden is worried about antisemitism spreading, why does he allow far-right Zionists to claim that their policies, which lead to deaths of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children, are somehow “Jewish”?
Hypocrisy like that may still fool some Americans, namely those who really believe that the adequate answer to the umpteenth mass shooting at home is “thoughts and prayers.” But a US president and those writing and thinking for him would be well-advised not to embarrass themselves further before everyone else, at home and abroad.
The real policy proposal, meanwhile, is nothing else but an attempt to return to the post-Oslo Accords system on even worse terms. That means, creating a situation in which urgent, vital Palestinian needs and crystal-clear Palestinian rights will, once again, be de facto suspended in an endless dishonest “process,” which really only serves as a screen and stalling device for Israel, while the latter settles occupied land, practices the internationally recognized crime of apartheid, and conducts the occasional massacre.
But the proclamation addresses more than the Middle East. Turning on Russia, the collective Biden personalizes the issue, in bad old neocon style. Instead of any attempt at a rational – albeit critical, even hostile – approach to Moscow’s actions and interests, we find the usual daft insults: Russian President Vladimir Putin is juxtaposed with Hamas, as if he were a one-man “terrorist organization.” (Never mind that Hamas is not, actually, a terrorist organization, although it also engages in terrorist acts; see above.)
The war in Ukraine is reduced to Putin’s personal “drive for conquest,” as if there has been no history of two decades of American provocations by reckless over-expansion, bad faith, and refusal to negotiate serious issues of international security in earnest and constructively. In that regard, Russia is receiving the same rhetorical treatment as the Palestinians: When it fights, we are forbidden to notice all the very real reasons it was given to do so.
And finally, both “Putin” – read: Russia – and Hamas stand accused of two things: Wanting to “wipe a neighboring democracy off the map” and taking us to a new, vile international order, where the strong abuse the weak and might makes right.
Newsflash: Actually, neither Israel nor Ukraine are democracies. In Israel’s case, the claim is vitiated by the simple fact that its government exerts de facto control over millions of Palestinians, all of whom face discrimination and the vast majority of whom do not have a vote, or, for that matter any ordinary civil and human rights. Ukraine, meanwhile, has Vladimir Zelensky, Washington’s darling in decline, who started dismantling the country’s brittle democratic structures – for what they were worth – in 2021, well before the war, and clings to power by cooperating with a violent far-right, eliminating the political opposition, streamlining the media, and delaying elections. Again, these are not matters of opinion but facts.
Secondly, Hamas is not trying to wipe out Israel, despite endless claims to the contrary. In the past, it has repeatedly signaled a willingness to compromise and accept a two-state solution. Claiming Hamas wants the total destruction of Israel is akin to using one idiotic quote from former US President Ronald Reagan to “prove” that he wanted to erase the whole Soviet Union. Hamas also simply does not have the capacity – not by a very far stretch – to do so.
Likewise, Russia is not trying to abolish Ukraine. As its compromise proposals of late 2021 clearly showed, its key aim is a neutral Ukraine that is not used as a proxy by the West. It is true that Russia, by now, claims some Ukrainian territory. Depending on how long the war continues, it may end up claiming and taking even more. You may very well object to that. Yet it is not the same as a will to exterminate a whole state or, for that matter, its population.
Finally, regarding the warning that Hamas, Russia, and who knows who else (China? India? Brazil? Simply everyone who won’t do as told by Washington?) are hellbent on dragging us all into new dark ages of ultra-cynical realpolitik and brute force, guess what: That is precisely where we are now. And have been for the last quarter of a century, under the benevolent aegis of the USA. Don’t believe it? Ask Gaza.
In sum, all we can really learn from this letter from on-high is that the Biden administration has understood nothing and is determined to learn even less. If, in the words of the declaration, the world is ever supposed to have even a slight chance of seeing “more hope, more freedom, less rage, less grievance, and less war,” then we first need to see much less of Joe Biden and everything and everyone he stands for.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
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Guaido’s true colors: “President” to fix Venezuelan relations with Israel
By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | February 13, 2019
Caracas – In an interview over the weekend, “interim President” of Venezuela Juan Guaido promised he would work on restoring relations with Israel.
Despite not actually having a government or being in any type of official position of power within Venezuela Juan Guaido is still somehow making big promises. Last week it was the promise to sell oil he doesn’t control to the US and this week he is setting foreign policy for a state, a military, and a diplomatic core that he doesn’t have.
Regardless of Juan Guaido’s material position, Israel has been more than willing to indulge in the US fantasy in Venezuela and was one of the early states to recognize the fraud as “interim President.” Now it seems Guaido is more than willing to repay the favor should he ever actually hold office.
Guaido made this promise in a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper where he told the interviewer that he was “very happy to announce that the process of stabilizing relations with Israel is in full swing.” While what exactly that means when you’re a President with no power is rather ambiguous, for some reason Guaido has said restoring relations “is very important for us.”
Regardless of all these factors, there are still several reasons the new President has made this a high priority. Even without any actual diplomatic staff recognized by the state, Guaidó has still been in contact with Israel and has even discussed opening a new Venezuelan embassy in Israel, saying it “is one of the subjects we are talking about.”
Another reason Guaidó claims he wants to restore relations with the Zionists is due to the fact that there “are many Venezuelans in Israel and many Jews in Venezuela.”
According to Guaidó, this Venezuelan Jewish community “is very active and prosperous”… continue
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