My name is Zeina. I’m 12 years old. I live in Ras al-Amud in Jerusalem. I was 15 days old when my dad was sent to prison, and he’s serving a 20-year sentence.
– Produced by DCI-Palestine
– Directed by Sevan Karakashian
– Edited by Sameer Qumsiyeh
In a style much like that of disinformation agents Michael Shermer, Jonathan Kay and David Aaronvitch, Chomsky casts a generalizing net of his own imagination over the diverse array of critics that skeptically interrogate officialdom’s specious account of 9/11. One of the most bizarre of Chomsky’s generalizations is that those who are skeptical of the official interpretation of 9/11 are united by a common delusion that we can become experts in physics and civil engineering on the basis of an hour on the Internet.
Chomsky’s “bizarre non-sequitur” on the Internet and 9/11 “truthers” is at odds with the characterization put forward by another avid defender of the official narrative of 9/11. Jonathan Hillel Kay’s proudly-proclaimed Jewish approach to interpreting 9/11 presents a reverse version of the negative spin that Noam Chomsky gives the Internet in relation to the 9/11 Truth Movement. Where Chomsky sees “truthers” as a human type prone to abuse the Internet in order to arrive at conclusions too quickly, Kay attacks the 9/11 Truth Movement by associating it with “Internet addiction.” Are Chomsky and Kay delivering talking points emanating from a common source that has identified the “Internet” as a hot button term useful in casting aspersions on those to be attacked?
Whatever the case, there is no denying that the age of the Internet has made it possible for diverse individuals to interact in new types of configuration in the digital commons. This change in our primary mode of communication is eroding many former monopolies of power. The citizens’ investigation of the events of September 11, 2001 forms a classic case in point. Since 2001 the Internet has become the primary medium of convergence of millions of people sharing a common interest in holding the real culprits of 9/11 accountable for their international crimes.
The rise of the 9/11 Truth Movement through digital communication forms a primary test of the implications of New Media in formulating twenty-first century public policy. When, if ever, will the weight of Internet disclosures swing the pendulum of power away from fable-based formulations towards evidence-based formulations of public policy on the big issues of war and peace, life and death? How much longer can the war footing of so many Western governments be maintained as millions of citizens become aware of the specious nature of justifications for military aggression abroad, police state incursions at home? How much longer can the empire of illusion be maintained in an era of massive disclosures through Internet venues such as those through which Kevin Barrett spreads the fruits of his intellectual roots?
Kevin Barrett’s continuing career as a public intellectual would have been difficult to imagine without the Internet. Alternatively many of those that have lined up to insult Dr. Barrett’s work embody the old bastions of power that formerly operated through control of information. The mutual contempt of Jonathan Kay and Noam Chomsky for the intellectual work of Kevin Barrett forms a telling example of a convergence of hostility towards an individual whose career well illustrates the role of the Internet in breaking down old monopolies of academic and journalistic authority.
Mixing Fact and Fiction in the Literature of the Global War on Terror
The concept of “Internet Addicts” comes up in the subtitle of Among the Truthers, Kay’s volume authored to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11. By his own self-admission in a written communication to me, Kay is a notorious “poseur” who posed the part in this well-funded project as that of a sleuthing anthropologist turning up stones and slithering along murky caves in search of objects for his subterranean study. In the subtitle Kay advertises his text as A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings, and Internet Addicts.
Although he would subsequently try to distance himself from the episode, I personally witnessed Jonathan Kay cite Noam Chomsky approvingly in Montreal in 2009. After Richard Gage’s talk on behalf of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Kay publicly aligned himself with Chomsky’s hostility to the 9/11 Truth Movement. Kay’s work on Among the Truthers was supported by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an entity that extended the author a fellowship. The FDD is a richly funded Zionist lobby and think tank created three days after 9/11.
The FDD receives financial support from a number of Jewish family philanthropies. Many such estates are heavily committed to funding the various entities that work with the media such as the Rupert Murdoch Press, the BBC, the New York Times and the Postmedia newspaper chain in Canada to generate images and circulate stories meant to incite maximum fear and hate of Muslims.
With especially close connections to the New York Times, Rita Katz’s SITE Intelligence agency is an important Zionist entity at the strategic nexus between the media incitement of Islamophobia and the national security state’s Gladio-style engineering of false flag terrorism. The aim of this elaborate system of violence, publicity and deception is to shape public opinion in ways that facilitate Israel-directed war strategies through agencies that include NATO and the US Armed Forces.
Rita Katz’s SITE Intelligence agency is an important Zionist entity at the strategic nexus between the media incitement of Islamophobia and the national security state’s Gladio-style engineering of false flag terrorism.
The influence in high places of the hate-inducingIslamophobia Industry is marked by the fact that there is a virtual absence of skeptical investigation and reporting in the mainstream media when it comes to events where police and government officials blame terror events on Islamic extremists. Reporters are reduced to the status of mere stenographers for police and other public officials. As we have seen, many in the foundation-funded “alternative media” follow suit, betraying their mandate to evaluate official pronouncements honestly and skeptically.
The engineering of false flag terrorist events and the media coverage of them are part of the same dark psychological operation. This psy-op brings together the likes of Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Kay, two public intellectuals seemingly at different poles of the political spectrum. Kay’s sponsor, the FDD, draws on much the same Zionist circles of interest as did the Project for the New American Century. A year before 9/11, PNAC’s Israeli-American brain trust notoriously observed that its agenda of rapid militarization of the US Armed Forces could not be quickly achieved “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” [1]
Kay’s other book-length project is a mixture of fact and fiction co-authored with Michael Ross aka Michael Burrows. Ross worked with Jonathan Kay at the National Post doing stories including on the 9/11 research work of my former graduate student, Joshua Blakeney. The literary style of the book-length Kay-Ross collaboration marries snippets of truth with much fabrication, invention, exaggeration and adornment. The text provides something of a prototype to be replicated and adapted in the supposed news coverage of the Global War on Terror in its many incarnations.
Entitled The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, the volume was written apparently with some authorization from the real Mossad. The text is written as Ross’ autobiography focusing on the years he is said to have spent as an agent in the Israeli secret service. Kay lends his literary skills to lionizing the Michael Ross character. Presented as a Jewish convert and Israeli patriot, Ross [Burrows] is said to have been born and raised an Anglican in Victoria BC. As depicted in The Volunteer, the Ross character is made to combine the suave know-how of James Bond with the gutsy bravado of Rambo. The main part of the heavily contrived narrative of the good Canadian Mossad agent unfolds during the decade between the Cold War and the origination of the Global War on Terror in the misrepresented events of 9/11.
Kay’s embrace of Zionism is considerably less muted than Chomsky’s. The story co-authored by the Canadian journalist begins and ends with a plea to embrace Israel as the essential shield against “militant Islam,” as the necessary bulwark of the rule of law and of civilization itself. The co-authors proclaim, “Israel’s battle is everyone’s battle.” Thus “Jew and gentile alike” should be joined in “Israel’s cause” because the Jewish state presents “a microcosm of the civilized world’s struggle against a murderous ideology and the men who embrace it.” As Kay and his real or imagined Mossad colleague would have it, the events of 9/11 demonstrate that we are “in a high stakes war that pits civilization against a fascistic death cult.” [1]
In Among The Truthers Kay repeats the core idea of The Volunteer. As Kay would have it, 9/11 confirms the role of Israel as the West’s primary bulwark against Islamic savagery. In making this case Kay repeats the assertion of Benjamin Netanyahu that 9/11 was good for Israel. Kay asserts, “Following the attacks supporters of Israel spoke of a silver lining. The war against militant Islam suddenly was a global one. Now the whole world would see and understand the sort of nihilistic hatred that Israelis confront every day.” As Kay sees it, Jews are being enlisted en masse to serve as primary soldiers in a war of civilizations. He writes, “The Jew was the perfect anti-Islamist, whose zeal and reliability was hard-wired into his political DNA thanks to six decades of Israeli warfare against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.” [3]
Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada.
Israeli occupation forces reportedly committed 51 violations against Palestinian journalists during August of 2016, the government media office stated.
According to Al Ray Palestinian Media Agency, a report published by the office revealed that Israeli forces detained eight journalists, holding four in custody, and served a summons notice to one journalist.
Israeli authorities recently renewed the administrative detention of four journalists and the actual prison sentence of two journalists. It also documented five cases of abuses committed against detained journalists.
Additionally, it documented seven cases of injury, regarding four female journalists, involving gas grenades and fire.
Israeli forces also banned five journalists from covering events and travelling, one of them from Gaza.
The report also documented the closing of one local radio in the occupied West Bank, the raiding of two media institutions and the storming of nine houses where Palestinian journalists resided. It also reportedly seized media staff equipment.
QALQILIYA – A Palestinian photojournalist was injured by Israeli forces Firday afternoon, as dozens others suffered from tear gas inhalation during the weekly protest in the norther occupied West bank village of Kafr Qaddum.
Popular resistance coordinator in Kafr Qaddum Murad Shtewei told Ma’an that Israeli forces “assaulted” participants in the protest minutes after it began.
The soldiers injured photojournalist Nidal Shtayyah after hitting him with a tear gas canister in the back of his head. He was taken to Rafidia hospital for treatment.
Shtewei added that Israeli forces fired a barrage of tear gas, which landed mostly in surrounding homes, causing a family of five to suffer from tear gas inhalation, in addition to others participating in the protest, who were treated on the scene.
Residents of Kafr Qaddum began staging weekly protests in 2011 against land confiscations, as well as the closure of the village’s southern road by Israeli forces. The road, which has been closed 13 years, is the main route to the nearby city of Nablus, the nearest economic center.
Following similar clashes that broke out last month, Shtewei told Ma’an that more than 330 protests have been held over that period, during which time 84 protesters have been injured by live fire, including 12 children.
Some 120 others have been detained at protests and were subsequently held in Israeli custody for periods ranging between four and 24 months, Shtewei said, adding that they have paid fines totaling some 25,000 shekels (approximately $6,488).
Over the course of five years, an elderly protester was killed after suffering from excessive tear gas inhalation, one youth lost his eyesight, and another his ability to speak, he added.
Meanwhile, along with armed Israeli forces, Israeli Jerusalem municipality crews reportedly raided the occupied East Jerusalem villages of al-Isawyia and Silwan, where they delivered demolition orders and summons to local residents.
According to the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, Israeli forces accompanied municipality crews who raided the al-Bustan neighborhood in Silwan, where they hung demolition orders and warnings telling residents to “follow-up with the municipality on several buildings in the area.”
The forces reportedly took pictures of neighborhoos buildings and entrances of the neighborhood, and wrote tickets for parked cars.
Muhammad Abu al-Homos,a member of the al-Isawiya monitoring committee, said Israeli forces raided the village, searched a house, and patrolled the street ‘provocatively’. He added that the forces detained a teenager who was present in the area.
An Israeli army spokesperson said they were looking into reports of all three incidents in Kafr Qaddum, al-Isawiya and Silwan.
In January, Security Council sanctions on Iran were lifted. America still maintains some of its illegally imposed ones, despite promises of relief following implementation of last year’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal – once again showing its word isn’t its bond.
Bipartisan US policymakers can’t be trusted, saying one thing, doing another. Hillary is militantly anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Iran, anti-peace.
According to her spokesman Jesse Lehrich, she “supports a clean reauthorization of the Iran Sanctions Act,” imposed solely for political reasons, along with numerous other US hostile actions, punishing the Islamic Republic unfairly and illegally since 1979.
Initially it was by seizing $12 billion in Iranian government bank deposits, gold and various properties in November that year.
A full trade embargo followed, largely maintained despite last year’s JCPOA implementation, normalization with Tehran denied because of heavy bipartisan congressional and Israeli pressure against it.
In 2006, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act was renamed the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA). Authorized through end of 2016, it prohibits US and foreign oil development investments.
Violators face stiff penalties. They include denial of Export-Import Bank of the United States help, rejection of export licenses, and a ban on all or some violating company imports.
Hillary wants US/Iranian relations based on a “distrust and verify” policy, continuing to punish the country for maintaining its sovereign independence and being Israel’s main regional rival.
She wants ISA renewed for another decade, effectively in perpetuity as long as Iran remains free from US dominance – with congressional authorization for new sanctions any time at Washington’s discretion.
Billions of dollars of Iranian assets remain frozen. European banks face heavy pressure not to resume normalized business relations with Tehran.
According to Iranian deputy oil minister for trade and international relations, Amir Hossein Zamaninia, European banks are reluctant to run afoul of US policies – complicated by deliberate lack of clarity on American-imposed rules for doing business with Tehran.
Sanctions relief isn’t coming as expected, Washington obstructing normalized relations. Decades of punishing Iran continues, things likely worsening if Hillary succeeds Obama.
War is the greatest risk with her in power, escalated against Syria, Iran next if Assad falls, Russia and China to follow. Possible nuclear armageddon awaits if she’s commander-in-chief of America’s military.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Israel is set to use fully autonomous unmanned vehicles along the border with the Gaza Strip, according to a report published by FoxNews.com.
While currently unarmed, the Israeli military plans to add machine guns to the so-called Border Protector Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) by “the beginning of next year”.
An unnamed Israeli military official told the website: “This is the future – the border is a very dangerous place… Sending unmanned vehicles to do these patrols means that troops’ lives are not at risk.”
According to the report, the Israeli army has worked with defence giant Elbit Systems to convert Ford pick-up trucks into UGVs by adding “specialised remote driving technology”, along with “four driving cameras and a 360-degree observation camera.”
UGV testing reportedly began in July 2015 and the trucks “became operational in February [2016].”
While each vehicle is currently “driven by an operator in a remote control room using a steering wheel, joystick and pedals”, an army official told FoxNews.com that “in the future, we will have the capability of fully autonomous driving.” The machine gun “will be operated from a control room.”
Odeh Bisharat, one of Haaretz’s few Israeli-Palestinian columnists (Sayeh Kashua is another), published an incisive article on what he calls “the end of the road” for Zionism. But the first paragraph, which comprised a quotation from David Ben Gurion (the full archival passage in Hebrew is here), really opened my eyes. At the first meeting of the Haganah military command after statehood was declared on May 15, 1948, he told the assembled leadership his strategic goals for the coming war. This grandiose vision dispels a long-standing claim by proponents of the Israel-as-victim view, who argue that Israel’s enemies have commenced all the wars against it and that the “Jewish state” has only acted in self-defense:
“We must immediately destroy Ramle and Lod. … We must organize Eliyahu’s brigade to direct it against Jenin in preparation for [conquering] the Jordan Valley. … Maklef needs to receive reinforcements and his role is the conquest of southern Lebanon, through bombing-support against Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. … Yigal Allon must strike Syria from the east and from the north. … We must establish a Christian state whose southern border will be the Litani [River]. We will forge an alliance with it. When we break the strength of the [Jordanian] Legion and bomb Amman we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria falls. And if Egypt still dares to fight, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.
… That is how we will end the war – and make a reckoning on our forefathers behalf with Egypt, Assyria and Aramea.”
Pro-Israel advocates will chalk this up to the braggadocio of a national leader preparing the troops for battle. He offers them a vision full of victories and maximalist territorial gain. It cheers them for the difficult battle ahead. Defenders may argue that Ben Gurion had to have been realistic enough to know that the new state had little chance of achieving such objectives.
But in my reading of Ben Gurion, there are two separate personalities: one of the pragmatist who accepts half a loaf instead of the whole; the other the ambitious politico-military strategist harboring imperial visions of Israel’s future (including the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian inhabitants of the new state). But even the pragmatist is only pragmatic in the moment. Ben Gurion makes clear that his pragmatism is only temporary until Israel is in a position to realize its maximalist goals.
The irony here is that it is Israeli advocates who continually claim that conspiring Palestinian militants only accept Israel on an interim basis until they are powerful enough to eradicate it. Therefore, Israel may never trust such enemies and never make peace with them; because a knife in the back is the only future Israel can expect from them. We can see that it is Israel that the Arab states had reason to distrust.
Another bitter irony is the claim by Israel and anti-Iran forces in the U.S. and elsewhere, that Iran has a nefarious plan to spread Shia hegemony throughout the Middle East to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf region. In truth, Ben Gurion shows that Iran is a piker by comparison. He envisioned a Greater Israel not just from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean), but a Davidic imperium spreading its influence from Syria to Egypt. Even those Arab states Israel permitted to remain would be little more than vassals of this new regional Goliath.
Just think how Ben Gurion’s successors implemented most of the strategic vision he proclaimed that day: a Christian state in southern Lebanon; the fall of Syria; Israeli bombardment of Arab capitals in Beirut, Damascus and elsewhere. The only elements of his plan that were unrealized (conquest of Jordan and the pacification of Egypt) weren’t necessary because both states sued for peace.
Today’s radical settlers, with their considerably ‘pared-down’ vision of a pure, racialist Judean state, rid of Palestinians, from the Jordan to the sea are inheritors of Ben Gurion’s legacy.
Bisharat quotes another telling statement from a pre-State Zionist leader who could be describing current Israeli strategy of sabotaging peace negotiations with the Palestinians. This was written in 1937:
“It turns out that we have put out our hand for peace, but took it back right away, when the other side expressed its interest in accepting it. This dangerous game did not help to raise our honor in their eyes as honest people, and the accusation that they blame us for, that we are conducting two-faced politics: On one hand we pretend as if we are asking for an agreement, and on the other hand we only want to gain time – is not baseless.”
This clearly explains Netanyahu’s Bar Ilan speech of 2009 in which he pretends to embrace a two-state solution (under severe pressure from the Bush administration to do so). The few times since when the Israeli leader has trotted out his affirmation of a two-state solution were times when he was under great duress and had to throw a sop to foreign interlocutors like the Obama administration. Clearly, Bibi’s heart is not in it, nor does he believe it.
Both houses of California’s legislature have now approved a bill to ban state government agencies from awarding contracts to companies that choose to join the international boycott against Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine.
The bill, AB 2844, if passed, would be a serious attack on the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid and its treatment of Palestinians.
Companies who choose to boycott Israel, would be accused of being in violation of the state’s civil rights law and would not be permitted to accept a California government contract of $US100,000 or more.
The bill, which has eight different amendments, was eventually passed 60 to 0 in the assembly, and will now go to Governor Jerry Brown for has to decide whether to veto or sign the bill into law by the end of September.
BDS and civil rights advocates have urged Brown to veto the bill, while supporters of the bill have made much of the trade ties between the U.S. and Israel, as well as Israel’s positive treatment of LGBTQ persons as a reason for supporting AB 2844 – ignoring Israel’s long history of oppressing and collectively punishing Palestinians.
“AB 2844 is both an attack on the constitutional rights of Californians and a waste of taxpayer money, estimated to cost upwards of $140 million annually, according to the California Department of Finance, which opposes it,” read a statement from the Coalition to Stop AB 2844, which includes over 100 civil society organizations.
“Government should not be in the business of punishing supporters of BDS, whether corporations, universities, organizations or individuals, by denying them contracts,” said Nasser Barghouti from the U.S. Campaign to End The Israeli Occupation.
A number of other states, including New York and New Jersey, have passed similar laws to outlaw the boycott of Israel.
At a recent academic conference devoted to the historical analysis of culture, I spoke to a young Israeli colleague about the highly problematic nature of the term “terrorism”. As I spoke, he looked at me with genuine bafflement and then said, “I don’t understand what you are talking about”. And I really think that at that moment it was the case.
For this thirtyish resident of the self-proclaimed Jewish state there were—despite his professed interest in the historical evolution of languages and social ideologies—no semantic mysteries to be plumbed in this matter. No, for him, a terrorist was what the opinion-makers of his country had long told him it was: a person with malign and, more importantly, wholly irrational desire to harm members of his blood-bonded collective.
I then went on to explain that the powerful have long used the term terrorist to delegitimate the often quite understandable use of violence of their less lethally endowed adversaries, adducing a list of historical examples ranging from 19th century colonial Ireland to the South Africa of the 60s, 70s and 80s, where, of course, the now sanctified Nelson Mandela was considered the number one “terrorist” threat to the geboorteland.
Being a smart guy, he soon began to realize where this was going: to a place where his simplistic moral views of good and evil, rooted in cartoonishly ahistorical notions of causality, would not hold up too well. Not surprisingly, he changed the subject at the next socially appropriate juncture of the conversation
It is an experience I have had time and again over the years not only with Zionists, but their ideological first cousins, American Exceptionalists. Think of it as a form of tactical retreat designed prevent the further exposure of what spies sometimes refer to as “sources and methods”.
To engage in a discussion over the power of naming—which is to say, the descriptive shorthand used to generate more or less apprehensible (though not necessarily accurate) renderings of the enormous complexity of lived reality—is to admit the existence of the game. And to admit the existence of the game is to call attention to how power elites have long used it to deprive the less fortunate of the ability to craft an accurate and compelling narrative of their plight. The partisans of established power instinctively understand that they have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, in such dialogues. Hence, their vigorous attempts to head them off at the pass.
So, what are those of us on the other side to do when those comfortable with the status quo will not engage us on the very important matter of language usage?
Before answering that query, it might be useful to establish what we definitely SHOULD NOT do in such matters. First and foremost we need to stop engaging in the widespread fantasy, especially prevalent among liberals, of believing that “some how, some way” (it never ceases to amaze me how vague liberals can be on the operational details of their efforts within wars of ideas where the other side plans each move with great forethought and precision) we can substantially advance our cause from within the nomenclature the other side has established, and which it actively manages.
As long as we accept the blithe use of terms like “terrorist” to refer to Palestinians fighting for basic dignity and freedom, or, going in the opposite direction, accept the matter-of-fact description of Israel as a “democracy”, we lose the game. Why? Because those terms, and instructions for their effective deployment within dialectical confrontations, have been carefully designed by people like Frank Luntz to leave no room for a true dialogue of ideas. Indeed, their prime purpose is to stop sincere interchanges right in their tracks. So, as a first step we need stop expending our energies on arguments taking place within their parameters of thinkable thought.
One thing we CAN do is to politely, but firmly contest such usages in our everyday conversations. No need to get aggressive. Rather, when, in a dialogue, your interlocutor refers matter-of-factly to Palestinians as terrorists, or as people who widely “embrace terrorism” and who are bent on “ throwing Israel into the sea” you simply refer to the same people, as “resisters” “patriots” or “lovers of freedom” when it comes your time to speak.
Having grown used to employing such pejorative terms without reserve or circumspection for a long time, many will get annoyed. But if enough of us do it over time, they will begin to feel a lot less cocksure about their self-image as speakers of self-evident and unambiguous truths.
A version of this technique was used in Catalonia in the first years of the new Spanish democracy. During the nearly four-decade dictatorship of Franco, the use of Catalan in public spaces had been prohibited. With the coming of democracy in the eighties, linguistic and cultural activists made a point of always responding in Catalan (a more or less mutually intelligible language) to those that addressed them in Spanish. At first, this rankled the hell out of those who saw Spanish as the unquestioned first language of that cultural space. Over time, however, most came to accept it as least the co-equal of Spanish in their immediate surroundings.
Much more important in the long run, however, will be the construction of a readily apprehensible epic of the Palestinian experience of resistance and survival, and the creation of institutions—understood here in the broadest possible meaning of the term—that remind people of this very particular history.
Zionists have excelled at this practice during the last century. Granted, they have had many friends in the media to help them along. But, in the end, all such attempts to instrumentalize the past of a collective—an absolutely ubiquitous and essential element of all movements of national mobilization—begins with the psychological decision on the part of that movement’s partisans to invest themselveswith the power to name, and from there, the power to generate their version of who has done what to whom over time.
For example, Yad Vashem has a special section devoted to the Righteous Among the Nations whose purpose, as the organization’s website makes clear, is to honor what they portray as the relatively few gentiles that rose above the generalized “indifference” and/or “hostility” toward the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.
Not much shyness or ambivalence about naming there. With enormous self-assurance, the management team at Yad Vashem presumes that it is very much in its purview as representatives of a people who have suffered massive and grotesque destruction, to spell out who among the much larger collective of gentiles acted in morally acceptable fashion. Much like the US government in the post September 11th era, they effectively put a great mass of people in the position of being guilty until proven innocent. And in this realm who holds the exclusive keys to their symbolic exoneration, a.k.a. the right to be “unnamed” as morally suspect? Quite conveniently, this institution of the Zionist state.
Let me be clear, I fully support the Zionist right to engage in these acts of moral discernment.
What I am challenging is the decision among many of us outside the pale, so to speak, to allow Zionists to view [and] claim this pursuit as their near exclusiveprerogative.
For example, what if those that support the Palestinian right to live in peace and dignity were to begin identifying and honoring “Righteous Jews”, that is, those people from Israel and the diaspora who have bucked the widespread social pressure of their communities to accept the logic of settler colonialism rooted in ethnic supremacism not only as normal and unremarkable, but as a great and admirable historical enterprise?
Sound jarring? Provocative? A little too “in your face”?
It shouldn’t.
The fact that it probably does conjure up these feelings in many reading these lines confirms just how much of our universal moral patrimony, our inherent individual and collective right to forthrightly “name” calculated acts of inhumanity in our midst as we each see fit, has been ceded to a small group of people with the incredible nerve to repeatedly present themselves and/or the group they belong to as having the Last Word™ when it comes to measuring the true comparative import of the targeted destruction of one nation by another, or deciding how others should or should not (e.g. the case of the nuns at Auschwitz) be able to commemorate such horrific tragedies.
The Zionist establishment its legion of paid and unpaid hasbarists have very seldom shown any reticence about playing dialectical hardball with those they perceive as their enemies, nor of using any and all linguistic tropes at their disposal to keep those inclined to criticize Israel’s consistently atrocious behavior toward the Palestinians back on their heels in a defensive posture.
I think it is time for us to demonstrate in a more coordinated and concrete fashion to our Zionist friends that the “name game” is now—and will be for the foreseeable future—much more of a two-way street.
If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes US President, she will be the first neoconservative to actually occupy that office. The neoconservatives have been an ascendant force in policymaking since the Reagan administration, and remained (through Vice President Dick Cheney) an unsteady heartbeat from the presidency in the G.W. Bush administration. Now possession of the highest office in the land is within their grasp.
This is important because the neoconservatives are wedded to war, death and destruction. It is the foundation of their policy and it dominates the culture that they have created. They see war and conquest as the means to maintain unchallenged US military, political, and economic supremacy in the world – and even (according to H.R. Clinton) as a “business opportunity”.
The origins of neoconservatism
The neoconservative movement dates from the 1970s. The term originally referred to “newcomers” to conservative politics from leftist and liberal origins. They gravitated to the politics of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Among their adherents were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and later Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
What they held in common was advocacy for aggressively challenging the Soviet Union, coercion of smaller countries through authoritarian puppet regimes and pre-emptive war. At home, they preached “free market” economic liberalism, while their domestic social agenda was moderately liberal and even progressive on some issues (e.g. civil rights). They became staunchly Republican during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, but gained a foothold in Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration and crossed party lines to an even greater extent during the Obama presidency. Their supporters include the military-industrial complex, the major financial institutions (“Wall Street”) and, importantly, the Israel lobby.
Israel and the neoconservatives
Israel and its supporters were inseparable from the neoconservative movement from the beginning. Many neocons were already Zionist or pro-Zionist, and their support for aggressive militarism was largely indistinguishable from Israel’s own strategic plans. To the extent that the neocon movement could sell Israel’s views as solidly American, it could bend the resources of the most powerful military on earth for Israel’s own ends.
Israel’s lobby invested heavily in strategic think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Brookings Institution, and later the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Project for a New American Century. By placing neoconservatives in these institutions, Israel helped to advance their influence and their careers in government while promoting Israel’s point of view in government circles.
Together, the Israel lobby and its neoconservative allies projected an image of Israel as a Middle East superpower, defending America against Arab nations allied with the USSR. In reality, Israel’s aggression against its neighbors and against Israel’s own captive Palestinian population only drove the Arab nations farther into the Soviet orbit and made the US more hated in the region. Ironically, Israel’s US allies used this to strengthen Israel’s image as a strategic and needed US asset. Even Israel’s attack on US forces in 1967, killing 34 servicemen and wounding 174 aboard the USS Liberty, did little to weaken this image.
Post-USSR: The New American Century and the baptism of Hillary Clinton
With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the neoconservatives accomplished one of their main goals and went on to argue that the US should take advantage of its status as the only remaining superpower to consolidate and extend its domination of the world. The first articulation of this was in the February, 1992 Defense Planning Guidance prepared for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney by Paul Wolfowitz and his subordinate, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The document and its subsequent revisions advocated a policy to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival” and “maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” It also advocated pre-emptive US intervention regardless of international law and the UN, and assurance of Israeli dominance in the Middle East.
The “Wolfowitz Doctrine” did not immediately win favor in the waning days of the G.H.W. Bush administration, but Hillary Clinton was one of its relatively few supporters when Bill Clinton came to office. (Her main early success was to instate Madeleine Albright as UN ambassador and then Secretary of State.) Then, in 1996, neocons Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and others prepared A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm for Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu during his successful campaign for prime minister of Israel. It argued for a “New Middle East” to be molded by “preemptive” war in order to “contain, destabilize, and roll-back” perceived threats.
The next year, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an explicitly neoconservative think tank, was formed. It globalized the regional principles and policies described in Clean Break, for application to US policy, but one direct carryover was a recommendation for regime change in Iraq. This became the subject of an open letter to President Bill Clinton in February, 1998, and it spurred the Iraq Liberation Act, strongly supported by Hillary Clinton and passed in October of that year.
When George W. Bush became president the following January, his Vice President, Dick Cheney, a leading neoconservative, brought many of his colleagues from PNAC and elsewhere into policy-making roles, including Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and many more. With the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, they put their plans for permanent warfare into motion. The first two objects of regime change were Afghanistan and Iraq. It is estimated that more than a million people died as a result.
The Senate years
2001 was also the year Hillary Clinton first took office in the US Senate. There she supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and essentially the same foreign policy objectives as her neocon Republican colleagues, as her voting record attests. In 2007, she encouraged the founding of the first specifically Democratic neoconservative think tank, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). One of the co-founders of CNAS was Michelle Flournoy, a Defense Department political appointee in the Bill Clinton administration who is expected to be Secretary of Defense in a H.R. Clinton cabinet.
General Wesley Clark has also revealed that by September, 2001, Defense Department offices in the Pentagon had drafted plans to invade Iraq, and that by the following month seven countries in the Middle East had been targeted for “regime change” in a five-year period. Plans change, but we know that after Afghanistan, Iraq was, in fact, invaded and destroyed, as well as Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, either by the US or by its allies with US support. It is estimated that at least 2 million people died as a result of these actions (not including the million or more who died in the first Gulf War and as a result of a decade of economic sanctions), and that more than 20 million became refugees.
With the encouragement of her friends in Israel and its US Lobby, Hillary Clinton became one of the leading Democratic cheerleaders for these neocon projects while in the Senate during the G.W. Bush administration. In 2006, partly as a result of Israel’s experience of stronger-than-expected resistance from the Shiite Hezbollah movement during its war with Lebanon, Israel decided to make Shiite Islam a strategic target.
The neoconservatives in the G.W. Bush administration, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams and Douglas Feith, quickly championed this policy, as did Hillary Clinton. US destruction of Iraq had strengthened the hand of Iran and its Syrian and Hezbollah allies, and so neocon logic dictated that these countries should be destroyed, to prevent a potential challenge to Israeli and US supremacy in the region. It was also decided that it would be advantageous to stoke Sunni-Shiite rivalry in order to split and weaken the countries in the region, to the power advantage of Israel and the US. This policy formation is described in Seymour Hersh’s “The Redirection”.
Secretary of State
When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in the Obama administration in 2009, she was in effect the top ranking neoconservative in government. During her four years in that post, she encouraged and supported the neoconservative priorities of overthrowing the elected Honduran, Libyan, Syrian and Ukrainian governments. She advocated intervention in Syria and the provision of funding, training and military equipment to groups fighting the Syrian government.
In Ukraine she created a $5 billion program to “democratize” Ukraine. This became a regime change operation, which her State Department chum Victoria Nuland actively engineered, and which resulted in the overthrow of the legally elected Ukrainian government. Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, are important figures in the neoconservative movement, co-founded the neoconservative PNAC and Foreign Policy Initiative think tanks, and have held posts in the Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush and Obama administrations.
The neoconservative movement is a hammer that views every problem as a nail. Its foreign policy consists of intimidating every potential rival and making an example of every nation or movement that does not follow US direction or accept without question the dictates of Israel. There is essentially no room for win-win outcomes, and even a lose-lose outcome is acceptable if the greater loss is on the other side. Total military domination and the profligate use of unlimited lethal force is their stock in trade. The fastest way to advance in the dominant neocon culture in Washington is to propose ever more spectacular destruction and bloodletting on a massive scale, and especially if it benefits Israel.
The US alliance with and use of terrorist organizations
This explains the neoconservative love/hate relationship with terrorist organizations. The artful covert support of such groups contributes greatly to their agenda. From the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the late 1970s to al-Qaeda, ISIS and other groups today, neocons have successfully encouraged US exploition and often subsidization of such groups for strategic mayhem. They were employed to create a quagmire for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Since then, US-subsidized mercenary terrorists have served to undermine real or potential adversaries of the US and Israel as quasi-allies and recipients of covert aid. As enemies, they serve as a pretext for US intervention wherever they may be.
From the neocon perspective, the al-Qaeda attacks against the USS Cole, the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salam, the World Trade Center and other targets worldwide, as well as the ISIS targeting of western civilian populations, have helped to make the case for American military intervention and leadership without necessarily committing large numbers of American troops. The US has used these attacks to enlist countries like Britain, France, Canada and Australia in military actions against Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Britain and France also participated with the US in the destruction of Libya, for which Hillary Clinton in particular took credit. Terrorist organizations were allowed and even encouraged to take over, with the result that Libya went from having one of the highest standards of living in the region to a failed and destitute state. Clinton appears to have taken particular enjoyment in the US-sponsored terrorists’ grotesque murder of Libyan President Muammar Qaddhafi. She is also strongly implicated in the transfer of Libyan weapons to terrorist groups in Syria. These have possibly included Libyan sarin gas used in the false-flag chemical attacks blamed on the Syrian government. She has promised that she will escalate US intervention in Syria after becoming president.
Currently and for the past five years, the neoconservatives have successfully promoted the use of terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq. They are considered expendable, and they are a means of creating destruction where that is the intended result. Their purpose in Syria is to overthrow the government and create a failed state, as in Iraq and Libya but also to threaten the security of Russia and Iran. This explains why the US is waging selective “war” against ISIS in some regions while protecting and supporting it in others.
The threat to Russia includes encouraging terrorist groups from Russia’s Chechnya province, who are an important part of the estimated 100,000 foreign terrorist mercenaries from nearly 100 countries that have participated in trying to overthrow the Syrian government. Until now, there is no sign that the US is encouraging them to take their war back to Russia, but this is clearly a possibility that neither government will ignore. Nevertheless, the neoconservative agenda includes supporting Russia’s enemies in Ukraine and placing NATO troops into former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland.
China is also not spared. Chinese Uighurs are among the terrorist mercenaries equipped largely with US arms in Syria, and the US is undermining China’s security in the South China Sea and through its bases in Korea, Japan and the Philippines.
The prospect of a 2017 H.R. Clinton administration
These neocon ambitions will be more dangerous and destructive when Hillary becomes US President. Unlike previous administrations, it will not be a matter of selling the president on neoconservative policy or even allowing high-level neocons in government to dominate policy. When Clinton takes office, she will be leading the neoconservatives, not following their recommendations.
In the election, she is likely to benefit from crossover votes from disaffected Republicans while assuming that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party will have little choice but to vote for her. She has a history of cooperation with Republican foreign policy neoconservatives, and may choose to move closer to their positions during the remainder of the campaign, in order to attract their support. “I would say all Republican foreign-policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan said at a “foreign-policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”
Former GOP candidates Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Lindsay Graham and Jeb Bush have refused to back Trump, as have George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Brent Scowcroft, Tom Ridge and other Republican leaders. With their support, Clinton may be able to craft a stable bipartisan majority in Congress for her neoconservative agenda, even if substantial elements in both parties oppose it.
This would enable her and her fellow neocons to pursue the most dangerous and aggressive foreign policy in US history. If we extrapolate from the two previous administrations, we should expect at least a million people to die in US-sponsored foreign wars, and ten million to become refugees. And if plans go forward to further challenge the security of Russia and China, we could see a nuclear crisis rivaling or surpassing the Cuban missile crisis, with potentially more disastrous results.
There are many career professionals in the US State Department, intelligence community and the Pentagon who believe that the neocon agenda is foolish and destructive, and that perpetual warfare has too many unintended consequences to be an effective means of national policy. They believe that diplomacy is a better way, and point to examples like the de-escalation of the imminent US bombing of Syria in September, 2013 through a Russian-brokered agreement for Syria to give up its entire chemical weapons arsenal.
Unfortunately, this is not the plan of Hillary Clinton and her neoconservative partners. For one thing, diplomacy diminishes the value of Israel as a strategic asset, and so the Israel lobby will be opposed. In addition, however, the neoconservatives view diplomacy as the way of the weak and the timid. If they are allowed to prevail, perhaps only another catastrophic world war will cause a new generation to re-learn the lesson of those who survived WWII and vowed to find a better way. If we survive.
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump headlined a $25,000-per-ticket fundraiser at the California home of Saul Fox, a private equity CEO and secret donor behind the “Children of Israel.”
Forty people attended the Monday fundraiser including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who arrived with Trump.
The visit was the billionaire’s first visit to San Jose since a clash between his supporters and protesters in the Silicon Valley city.
Fox is one of the many political donors who use so-called ‘ghost corporations’ to conceal their identity.
It was revealed only earlier this month that he was the main donor behind ‘Children of Israel,’ who have donated $734,000 to the Republican party so far this year, according to The Intercept.
This includes a $400,000 donation to the Super PAC Stand for Truth, which supported Ted Cruz’s presidential run, as well as $334,000 to the RNC.
Shaofen Gao, a realtor in Silicon Valley with no history of making political contributions, was listed as the registered agent for Children of Israel in mid-2015, but a later filing revealed that the sole person behind the money was Fox.
Fox hasn’t commented on why he channeled the money through the company, keeping his identity hidden. In addition to the company’s donations, Fox himself has also donated to the GOP.
Most recently, he donated $100,000 to speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s aptly-titled fundraiser “Team Ryan” as well as a $25,000 donation to Trump’s joint fundraising committee.
Fox’s 2016 donations also include $2,700 to Mike Huckabee’s presidential bid and the $5,400 maximum to the campaigns of both Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v FEC decision in 2010, the 2016 election cycle has seen an unprecedented influx of corporate donations with one out of every €8 collected by super PACs coming from ‘ghost corporations,’ according to the Washington Post.
In 2015, Children of Israel gave $50,000 to Pursuing America’s Greatness, a super PAC supporting Huckabee’s run, as well as $100,000 to a pro-Huckabee group.
There was a time when I, like tens of thousands of my progressive partners, held Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman in awe. After all, Amy informed us and Noam spoke for us, coherently explaining the issues. However, as I became more aware and more informed, I realized that there were great differences between their thinking and mine.
In many instances, our gurus spoke with forked tongue. Although Amy’s program Democracy Now! was informative, there were many areas of reporting that were out of bounds and were not reported on.
One could legitimately claim that reporters cannot report on everything and they would be right. But let us be honest. When 9/11 occurred, it was an historical event and an event that changed the course of history. Where was Amy? Relatively silent. She invited David Ray Griffin, who has written several books illustrating the lies and misdirections of the government’s narrative about that day, to Democracy Now! which one could claim was a significant journalistic move.
However, instead of interviewing him so that he could reveal to her listening audience the facts that he had accumulated that put into question the government’s explanations of that day, she paired him with a pro-government guest who spent the hour attacking Griffin personally and ignoring any of the data Griffin produced. It became a three-ring circus and helped sabotage any impetus the Truth Movement might have gained within the progressive community. Was that her goal? I’m not sure I can answer that but it was a successful strategy, progressives seemed reluctant to support the Truth Movement. The Movement was being portrayed as one in which there were marginal “conspiracy nuts” leading the charge and should be avoided.
Where was Noam Chomsky on this issue? Despite the significance of 9/11, Chomsky has remained relatively passive concerning this event.
During an interview on Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky stated that he believes Osama bin Laden was probably behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. The statement was curious because in earlier interviews Chomsky described the evidence against bin Laden as thin to nonexistent, which was accurate and, no doubt, explains why the US Department of Justice never indicted bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.
In two peer-reviewed papers published in 2008–2009, independent scientists reported finding residues of nanothermite, an incendiary, military level explosive which is capable of cutting through steel, in dust samples from the collapsed World Trade Center. The scientists also found tiny flakes of unexploded nanothermite.
How did this explosive material get into the dust at the WTC? Certainly, one could conclude that the explosives were used to bring down all three towers (WTC #7 collapsed later that day in free fall time despite the fact a plane never touched it).
This evidence of explosives coupled with the testimony of many New York City firemen, who claimed they heard a continuing series of explosions before the towers collapsed, and the testimony of Willie Rodriquez, a maintenance worker in the towers, who stated that there was an explosion in the sub-basement before any planes flew into the towers, make it clear that it was the explosives, not the planes that brought the towers down. The question now is, who planted these explosives in the three buildings that collapsed? It takes time to set up a controlled demolition which means the explosives had been placed in the buildings prior to 9/11. Does this sound like a conspiracy to anyone?
In response to a question at the University of Florida recently, Noam Chomsky claimed that there were only “a minuscule number of architects and engineers” who felt that the official account of WTC Building 7 should be treated with skepticism. Chomsky followed-up by saying, “a tiny number—a couple of them—are perfectly serious.” The reality is that close to 2,500 architects and engineers have expressed their doubts about the government’s explanation of how and why the towers fell. It doesn’t matter how many professionals or intellectuals are willing to admit it. The facts remain that the U.S. government’s account for the destruction of the WTC on 9/11 is purely false. There is no science behind the government’s explanation for WTC 7 or for the Twin Towers and everyone, including the government, admits that WTC Building 7 experienced free fall on 9/11. There is no explanation for that other than the use of explosives.
Also, Chomsky’s assumption that only a small number of architects and engineers have expressed support for the notion that the towers fell because of explosives planted in the buildings and that a much larger majority of architects and engineers have remained silent, is the argument of the absurd. It is equivalent to implying that if 10,000 New Yorkers claim the schools are substandard, because the rest of New Yorkers remain silent, the schools cannot be considered substandard.
Chomsky and Goodman are bright, knowledgeable, intelligent people. What has influenced them to avoid confronting the government regarding the events of 9/11?
The fact that 9/11 investigators had already presented substantial documented evidence for: prior warnings, Air Force stand-down, anomalous insider trading connected to the CIA, withdrawal of most of the U.S. fighter planes from the east coast to participate in military exercises on that particular day, cover-up of the domestic anthrax attacks, inconsistencies in identities and timelines of “hijackers” did not appear to influence either Amy or Noam.
Their influence on people who view themselves as progressive cannot be over estimated. When I began questioning the government’s role regarding 9/11, several of my friends responded to me negatively and said specifically that if my suspicions had any legitimacy, Chomsky and Goodman would be speaking out.
Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and even ultra-Left have been downright fanatical in combating notions that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks or at least had foreknowledge of the events.
This kind of response from Chomsky regarding possible government conspiracies is not new. He still insists that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas. Anyone who still supports the Warren Commission hoax after 50 years of countering proofs is either ill-informed, dumb, gullible, afraid to speak truths to power or a disinformation agent.
Michael Morrissey stated, in one of his articles, “Rethinking Chomsky,” in 1994, “we should be clear about the stand that ‘America’s leading intellectual dissident,’ as he is often called, has taken on the assassination. It is not significantly different from that of the Warren Commission or the majority of Establishment journalists and government apologists, and diametrically opposed to the view ‘widely held in the grassroots movements and among left intellectuals’ and in fact to the view of the majority of the population.”
Michael Parenti states, “Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.”
However, the word conspiracy is often used by those in power, who have participated in a conspiracy to advance their own power and/or wealth, as a label to marginalize and neutralize those who seek to reveal the conspiracy. Thus we, as a society, have developed what Parenti calls conspiracy phobia.
The behavior of both Chomsky and Goodman have led me to conclude that they hesitate to see the conspiracies for fear that such acknowledgment would compromise their reputations. Either that or they are controlled by powerful people who censor their behavior. We cannot afford to accept what they say at face value.
Chomsky’s questionable political positioning is still evident today. On May 17, Chomsky appeared on Democracy Now! and was asked by Amy Goodman to speak on the Syrian crisis. Chomsky is a linguist and words are very meaningful to him. So what he said and how he said it is significant.
“It’s necessary to cut off the flow of arms, as much as possible, to everyone. That means to the vicious and brutal Assad regime, primarily Russia and Iran, to the monstrous ISIS, which has been getting support tacitly through Turkey, through—to the al-Nusra Front, which is hardly different, has just the—the al-Qaeda affiliate, technically broke from it, but actually the al-Qaeda affiliate, which is now planning its own—some sort of emirate, getting arms from our allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Our own—the CIA is arming them.”
I found it particularly informative that he describes Assad’s regime as vicious and brutal and places Russia and Iran right alongside ISIS.
If Assad’s government is really brutal and vicious, why did 86% of the Syrian people vote for him in the last election. Also, let it be clear that it was Russia’s entrance into the conflict last September that led to the retreat of ISIS from many cities and villages, a success that the U.S. had avoided for a year. Syrians who were freed from ISIS rule were openly happy to welcome Assad’s “brutal” army into their villages. Many Syrian refugees began returning to their homes.
Chomsky also managed to portray the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as terrorists in their conflict with Britain. He conveniently omitted the context for their behavior . . . the brutality of British rule against the Irish Catholics for hundreds of years.
Both Amy and Noam are extremely influential and have attained a degree of power amongst progressives. It is crucial that we remain aware of what they are telling us, how they are framing it, and what it is they are not telling us. Both seem to have provided, and continue to provide today, a cover from the left for the U.S.’s imperialist agenda.
Chomsky is called upon to address various issues periodically. Amy, on the other hand, is viewed every week, Monday through Friday. It is easy to identify her evolution into someone slightly to the left of MSNBC.
With the world collapsing around her, she offers relative silence on issues such as the U.S. supported takeover of the Ukrainian government by neo-Nazis, the surrounding of Russia by U.S. and NATO military forces, the threat of WW3 which would likely be a nuclear war, the Syrian crisis and the U.S. desire to overthrow Assad’s government, the humanitarian crisis in Libya, the coup to oust Dilma Rousseff from office in Brazil, the ongoing collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the threat to the Maduro government (please note: both Rousseff and Maduro are progressive thinkers—is the U.S. behind the collapse of their governments?). She does not address the continuous wars sponsored by the U.S. and NATO countries in their imperialistic ventures.
Instead, most of her time is spent covering the election and interviewing guests who have recently published books. Her program has mellowed. Most of her guests are establishment people, people MSNBC would not hesitate to have on. The radical view, the view that challenges the establishment, is no longer part of her coverage.
Amy’s audience expects to get the news coverage and the variety of views the MSM does not provide. Today’s Democracy Now! no longer provides that.
Dave Alpert has masters degrees in social work, educational administration, and psychology.
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
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Israeli occupation forces reportedly committed 51 violations against Palestinian journalists during August of 2016, the government media office stated.
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
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