Activists protest at Park West school in Halifax, Canada. (Photo: via Palestine Online TW Page)
– Yves Engler is the author of Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid and a number of other books. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. Visit his website: yvesengler.com.
While Jewish settlers launch pogroms and Israeli ministers call to “wipe out” Palestinian towns, Canadian schools suppress Palestinian symbols and celebrate colonial violence.
Last week Park West School in Halifax forced a half dozen Palestinian-Canadian students to remove Kufiyahs they were wearing during a cross-cultural day. In a flagrant display of anti-Palestinian racism, the principal said the Palestinian scarf “represents the colors of war.”
In a similar case of cultural/political suppression, Palestinian students in Ottawa were blocked from flying the Palestinian flag alongside those from dozens of other countries. The Palestinian Youth Movement has been engaged in a year-long battle with the Ottawa Carleton District School Board over anti-Palestinian discrimination.
Recently a guest speaker, part of the English Montréal School Board Holocaust Education Program, told Westmount high school students that people say “Israel is a terrible country, [that] they’re abusing the Palestinians – which is a bunch of crap. I lived in Israel.
Trust me they’re doing everything but abusing the Palestinians.” Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other establishment human rights groups have concluded Israel is committing the crime of apartheid.
Last month the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation complained to the Toronto Sun about a workshop offered by an Ontario Secondary School Teachers Foundation (OSSTF) local titled “Anti-Palestinian racism: Nakba denial.” In recent years pro-Israel groups have lobbied Canadian school boards to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism.
While Palestinian solidarity and symbols are targeted, schools expose children to aggressive pro-Israel messages. On January 24 the Jewish National Fund of Canada reported, “270 students from various Jewish day schools in Montreal participated in JNF Day at Beth Zion Synagogue.” A large map showing the grade schoolers included the illegally occupied West Bank as Israel.
The kids were probably subjected to other anti-Palestinian positions. The session was led by JNF Educational Emissary, Yifat Bear Miller, who spent more than a decade as an education officer for the Israeli military. A registered Canadian charity, the JNF is an explicitly racist institution that’s played an important role in the colonization of Palestine.
The JNF educates Canadian educators in its racist worldview. On the “JNF Educators mission to Israel” participants “Learn about Eco–Zionism and the connection between Judaism, Israel, and the environment”.
In a recent JNF Canada Facebook post a young student is wearing an Israel Defense Forces shirt. Has any Canadian school banned shirts promoting this violent organization?
At Canada’s largest private high school kids are pressured to wear IDF shirts. During “IDF Days” at Toronto TanenbaumCHAT they fundraise for Israeli military initiatives. A summary of a 2020 IDF day noted, “Shavuah Yisrael continued today with IDF day. The TanenbaumCHAT community — under the leadership of our Schlichim [Israeli emissaries] Lee and Ariel — showed their support for the Israel Defence Forces by wearing green, eating green, and donating green! Proceeds from the delicious green-sprinkled donuts that were sold during the 10-minute break are being donated to help the well-being of Israeli soldiers on active duty on behalf of TanenbaumCHAT thru the Association for the Soldiers of Israel – Canada.”
Recent posts on the school’s Facebook page mention a presentation by a former member of an elite IDF unit and students taught “Krav Maga is a martial art developed by the IDF”. According to TanenbaumCHAT’s statement of purpose, “Israel engagement pervades our curricular and extracurricular programming and it is a shared vision–part of the consciousness of all our teachers and educators. Through connecting with our staff, guests and visiting speakers, our students develop relationships with Israeli peers and other Israeli role models. Students enjoy special Israel weeks and IDF days.”
As part of TanenbaumCHAT’s Israel engagement, some students attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington, D.C. In 2019 there was controversy over one of the school’s teachers, Aviva Polonsky, who posted a group picture on social media of her students meeting Sebastian Gorka, a far-right figure in the Donald Trump administration. Polonsky has stated publicly that she doesn’t accept students expressing non-Zionist views in her classes.
Netivot HaTorah, Bialik Hebrew Day School, Bnei Akiva, Toronto Heschel School are other schools breeding anti-Palestinianism. A December post from Leo Baeck Day School notes, “we are a Zionist institution with a core responsibility to preserve Israel.” An Israeli emissary spends a year at the Toronto elementary school and when they return, noted the Canadian Jewish News, “engages with students by way of live video chat from their Israel Defence Forces barracks dressed in their military uniforms.” Leo Baeck students also pay “tribute” to Israel’s fallen heroes” and fundraise for Beit Halochem Canada/Aid to Disabled Veterans of Israel, which supports injured IDF soldiers.
In a damning comment on Canadian political culture, some schools celebrate the colonizers’ military while others repress symbols of the colonized. Fortunately, there’s been some resistance. Thousands emailed and dozens rallied in opposition to the recent banning of Kufiyahs in Halifax, which prompted officials to label the incident a misunderstanding.
The Palestinian Youth Movement has organized protests against discrimination in Ottawa schools and a parent complained about the anti-Palestinian comment made at Westmount High school (these incidents have only come to light because of the protests)
While essential, defensive protests are insufficient. There should be public letters and rallies challenging “IDF Days” and the colonial indoctrination at Canada’s largest private school. We need to directly challenge schools breeding anti-Palestinian racism.
Professor David Miller is a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University and a former Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is a broadcaster, writer and investigative researcher; the producer of the weekly show Palestine Declassified on PressTV; and the co-director of Public Interest Investigations, of which spinwatch.org and powerbase.info are projects. He tweets @Tracking_Power – though he has been shadow-banned by Twitter.
The Israel lobby is working directly with the Canadian government and with Silicon Valley corporations to quash the voices of those critical of its expansionist policies and systematic oppression of its indigenous population.
One clear example of this came last September when an international parliamentary committee met in Congress in Washington, DC, to demand that Twitter remove the account of Palestinian-Canadian Laith Marouf. Marouf is a multimedia producer who currently serves as a senior consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre and the coordinator of ICTV, a project to secure a national multi-ethnic news television station in Canada. He also has a long record of active support for Palestinian rights.
As such, Marouf – whose Community Media Advocacy Centre is funded by the Canadian government – faced official consequences for comments he made critiquing Israel. But the Trudeau administration went further to secure his erasure from social media, which should concern all those who believe in free speech.
Marouf’s case is just one in an endless stream of such acts happening all over social media and beyond. Marouf, in other words, was not the first and certainly will not be the last. Furthermore, his case opens the floodgates for the stream of suspensions to become a torrent.
As a major human rights abuser engaged in apartheid and military occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s working relationship with big tech and the Canadian government is showcasing how antisemitism is being weaponized to target, flag and now vanish accounts critical of the apartheid state.
Marouf’s case also highlights the existence of a nearly fifty-year alliance between a Canadian national and a former Soviet dissident – a relationship that began as part of an Israeli intelligence operation. This history directly ties what happened to Marouf to Israel’s foreign policy strategies developed between 2000 and 2016.
A BIASED GROUP
The Interparliamentary Task Force To Combat Online Antisemitism is, as the name suggests, an international grouping of parliamentarians. Launched in September 2020, the task force is focused on increasing awareness of and developing responses and solutions to allegedly growing online antisemitism. Its first hearing was held on September 16, and the committee called executives from Twitter, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok to testify and explain how and why accounts like those of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, were still in existence. Khamenei’s English Twitter account has nearly a million followers. At the time of writing, it and its Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi alternative accounts remain live.
Former Canadian member of parliament (MP) Michael Levitt went over his five allotted minutes in his enthusiasm to denounce Marouf’s tweets. Another member of the task force devoted some of her time to arguing that “Zionism as an identity” should be included as a “protected characteristic.” She elaborated, “Zionist is an integral part of the identity of the majority of Jews and many non-Jews who self-define as Zionists.”
But who is on this committee, and why would they make such an argument? Answering this question accurately involves peeling back several layers of the onion and tracing back the origin story of this latest assault on online Palestinian speech.
An exhausted Laith Marouf and his CUTV crew report live from the ground in Montreal, May 20, 2012. Alexis Gravel | Flickr
It is claimed that the committee consists of “bipartisan legislators” and parliamentarians from Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Yet this claim of “bipartisanship” is quickly scotched. The task force’s four South African members identify as Zionists and are part of the controversial Democratic Alliance, the party for whom most White South Africans vote. No African National Congress (ANC) members are involved in the group. At the hearing, one MP denounced the ANC, reportedly claiming, “The greatest proponents of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment comes from our government.”
Members of the Task Force from the US include Democratic Congresspersons Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has visited Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored tour, and Ted Deutch, the newly-appointed CEO of the Zionist lobby group, the American Jewish Committee.
Among the British representatives is Andrew Percy, the Conservative MP who converted to Judaism in 2017 partly because of “a wholehearted commitment to support of Israel.” The other British representative is Alex Sobel, a longtime supporter of the Zionist affiliate of the Labor Party, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The Canadian representatives included the former MP Michael Levitt, who is now President-CEO of the Zionist Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Also from Canada was Anthony Housefather, who in 2019 wrote, “I have always been and will continue to be a huge supporter of Israel.”
Along with two Members of the Israeli Knesset (MK) was the former MK Michal Cotler-Wunsh. Widely respected journalist Gideon Levy has described Cotler-Wunsh as both “an expert on human rights, an enlightened intellectual” and “nationalist, racist, cruel.”
At the hearing itself, three more Zionists were present. The first was the Israeli special representative for antisemitism, Noa Tishby. Recently Tishby denounced Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bella Hadid – all Muslim women – as anti-Semites for condemning the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers. Tishby reportedly “singled out only criticism of Israel from Muslim Americans,” showing an apparent “effort to cast their anger as the product of ethnic or religious bigotry.” Another Zionist at the hearing was Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, appointed in March 2022. According to Ismail Allison of CAIR, Lipstadt has a “history of using bigoted rhetoric, including Islamophobic … talking points.”
Well-known Canadian politician and jurist Irwin Cotler was also in attendance. He is Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, a position receiving CA$ 5.6 million over five years beginning in 2022. He is also the stepfather of Michal Cotler-Wunsh MK, mentioned above. As it turns out, Cotler is the most significant actor in this story, being deeply embedded in Zionist lobby networks.
Unsurprisingly, no representative of Arab or Palestinian origin is involved in the task force.
20 YEARS OF CLASHES
Marouf claims that “in 2021, I began to be stalked and harassed online by Zionists in the Broadcasting sector in Canada.” These efforts led to his Twitter account being shut down for “hateful conduct” and promoting “violence against or directly attacking” people with protected characteristics like race, ethnicity or national origin.
In fact, Marouf has spent much of the past two decades years combatting Zionist efforts to censor him. The first such instance happened at Concordia University in 2001 when he was the first Arab candidate to be elected to a student union executive in Canada. Within months of his appointment, he was “expelled summarily … for writing that ‘Zionism is Jewish Supremacy’”. He won an ensuing six-month court battle with the university. After that, however, the attacks continued; the next was from the Chair of the Department of History, who, as Marouf noted, was also the chair of a Zionist lobby group.
Among the interlocutors back in 2002 was then-MP Irwin Cotler. Cotler’s reputation was at that stage not nearly as great as it is now. Perhaps this is why Marouf’s comrades were able to occupy his office, following which the police were called. Marouf has confirmed to Mintpress that he was “part of the organizing of the occupation” but was not present in the office.
At the time of Marouf’s clashes with Cotler, Cotler’s wife, Ariela, was also involved in the events. She was President of the board of Montreal Hillel in 2001 during the most heated period at Concordia. Hillel is the Zionist student organization on campus in Canada and the US. She “played a major role in the pro-Israeli activity” at that time, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank.
Before that, Ariela had been parliamentary secretary for Menachem Begin. As can be imagined from this, Ariela is a hardline Zionist and claims to have been involved “at the cradle” with the creation of the so-called Birthright program, which takes young Jews to “Israel” despite there being no “birthright” for Jews in Canada or elsewhere to colonize Palestine.
Ariela Cotler has also been involved in a wide range of other Zionist lobby groups, including the Canada Israel Committee and the Federation Combined Jewish Appeal, the largest Zionist fundraiser in Canada. The Federation CJA, as it is known, has promoted Canadians joining the Israeli army.
IRWIN COTLER – ZIONIST REGIME ASSET
Cotler’s public persona is that he has some sympathy for the underdog. At the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, he notes he has been described as “Counsel for the Oppressed” and as “Freedom’s Counsel.” His 600-word profile does not use the words “Israel,” “Zionism,” “Jewish,” or “antisemitism”; his decades-long advocacy for the crimes of the State of Israel are not even hinted at.
Born in 1940, he took degrees at McGill University and then secured a Law postgraduate degree at Yale in 1966. In 1968 he was hired as a speechwriter for the then Justice Minister for four years. In 1970 he was appointed as an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto before being appointed Professor at McGill in 1973. That same year he helped found and became President of the pro-Israel Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East, and he then “spent his summers travelling the Middle East.”
By the late 1970s, he was already heavily involved in Zionist advocacy, being the lawyer for Anatoli Shcharansky. A Ukrainian Zionist activist, Shcharansky was active in agitation as part of an operation run by a secret Israeli intelligence organization, Nativ, to access new settlers from the Soviet Union. Was Cotler aware that he was involved in an intelligence operation?
Cotler is welcomed by Benjamin Netanyahu during a 2014 visit to Israel. Photo | Israeli GPO
In 1978 while working with Shcharansky, he was living in the Jewish quarter of Damascus and, not surprisingly – given his Zionist contacts – drew the attention of Syrian officials. He also spent time in Egypt in 1975, 1976 and 1977, making contact with the political elite, including the foreign minister, and was introduced to President Anwar Sadat. Knowing that Cotler would later visit Israel, Sadat “asked him to deliver a message to … prime minister Menachem Begin.”
Cotler claims he said “he didn’t know” Begin “particularly well.” But when he arrived in Israel, he was “invited to lunch with members of the Knesset.” There he met a Begin staffer named Ariela Zeevi, who took him to meet her boss. The message was, “Egypt was prepared to enter into peace negotiations with Israel.” Cotler later married the staffer in 1979 and became a “close personal friend” of Begin.
ZIONIST LOBBY STALWART
In 1980, Irwin Cotler was appointed President of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Four years later, he participated in a Jerusalem conference entitled “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image.” (Hasbara is a Hebrew word meaning “explanation,” which is used as a synonym for “propaganda” in English). The American Jewish Congress ran the event, a group with a history of working directly with the Israeli intelligence agency Nativ, a campaign to recruit new settlers from the Soviet Union. Though referred to only as a professor of law at McGill, Cotler made it clear that he was a committed partisan of Israeli hasbara, complaining that “hasbara efforts are discriminated against” and that “Israel itself has become some kind of illegitimate entity.”
Since this public declaration of commitment to the cause of Zionism, he has taken up a dizzying number of appointments in Zionist organizations. He is or has been affiliated with a wide range of Zionist groups on three continents, including,
All of these groups are closely related to the State of Israel, some with intelligence connections, some in receipt of funds, or created by Tel Aviv. None of these roles are listed in his biography at the Wallenberg Center, to which he is currently attached. Nor are Cotler’s interesting links with the far right in Ukraine; he is reportedly on the advisory board of “Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter,” which honored Ukrainian Nazis who collaborated with Nazi Germany and massacred Jews in the 1940s.
ENTER THE MOSSAD
But it is in the policy planning process of the state of Israel that Cotler seems to have made the most significant impact. Cotler has been, as British writer Antony Lerman puts it, “probably the most significant and influential international figure in the propagation of the concept of the ‘new antisemitism.’” As codified and finally published in its current form in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, the “working definition” of antisemitism is the weapon of choice of the Zionist movement to intimidate and bully supporters of the Palestinians.
While the idea of the new antisemitism has roots back to the 1940s and was a subject of renewed interest from the early 1970s, the administrative infrastructure to redefine antisemitism flourished from the late 1980s when Mossad was given the lead in the coordination of the strategy. As Lerman has noted, the Monitoring Forum on Antisemitism, established in 1988, “aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism by Jewish groups worldwide.” It “was coordinated and mostly implemented by Mossad representatives” working in Israeli embassies.
A key step in the process was the first Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in January 2000. The resulting Stockholm Declaration “became the founding document” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. Cotler headed the Canadian delegation to that event. He was also a key figure in responding to the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, which concluded that Zionism is racism. In a hyperbolic reply for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he denounced “what was supposed to be a conference against racism” [emphasis in original], saying it “turned into a conference of racism against Israel and the Jewish people.” He also decried what he called a new “genocidal antisemitism – the public call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
Cotler was engaged directly with the state of Israel’s response to Durban in co-founding the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA) in 2002 “in collaboration with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior.” This venture, however, collapsed, its main problem being that it was obviously an instrument of Israeli foreign policy. Even an arch-Zionist like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League observed: “If a lot of its strategy and implementation is coming from Israel, I won’t be supportive of it.”
In 2003 a new body, the Global Forum for Combatting Antisemitism, was created by Melchior and Cotler’s friend and former “client” Natan Sharansky (formerly known as Anatoli Shcharansky, he changed his name to Zionise it, as do many incoming settlers). Sharansky was also – as an Israeli government minister in charge of antisemitism —chair of the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, which had been set up in the 1990s. “The State of Israel has decided to take the gloves off and implement a coordinated counteroffensive against antisemitism,” Sharansky said.
Scharansky, right, holds the Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Reagan, center, as President-elect Bush looks on, Jan. 11, 1989. Barry Thumma | AP
In his “3D test of antisemitism,” Sharansky took up the idea of discrimination against a nation-state, trialed by Cotler. It focused only on the occasions where it was claimed that criticism of Israel became antisemitism:
“demonization” is “when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”;
“double standards,” when criticism of Israel is “applied selectively”;
“delegitimization” when Israel’s “fundamental right to exist” is denied.
These are tendentious arguments. Who is to judge what is “sensible” or “selective”? No regime or even state has a “fundamental” right to exist.
Cotler and Sharansky would frequently connect again over the course of the ensuing decade. For example, they both attended the February 2008 Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism. It was here that the plan to extend the event around the globe was announced. Though it has been claimed that the subsequent London event was independent, the 2008 event it was seen as simply another GFCA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) event. Minister Tzipi Livni personally thanked British MOP John Mann for ‘volunteering to host the Global Forum next year.’
Tellingly, the new body used the identical name to the previous 2002 effort: the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Sharansky was an advisor.
In 2009, Cotler was on the steering committee of the ICCA. Also, there was Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian writer and politician who has lived in an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem since 1998. Cotler led a delegation of 11 Canadian MPs to the event. Together, they decided to form a Canadian coalition. Thus was the Israeli network extended to Canada: the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism. It met in November 2010 and produced a final report the following year. Canadian groups which were critical of the redefinition of antisemitism to equate it with anti-Zionism responded to the consultation, but their submissions were “excluded from the hearings.”
The ICCA would host conferences in London in February 2009, Ottawa in November 2010, Brussels in June 2012 and Berlin in March 2016. A “task force” report on “internet hate” was published in 2013. In addition, an Italian parliamentary report was published in 2011, having reportedly taken “inspiration” from the ICCA. Similar German parliamentary reports came out in 2011 and 2017. These reports, commissions and groupings laid the groundwork for the American hearing late last year that removed Marouf from social media.
ZIONIST INFLUENCES EMBEDDED IN TWITTER
As the State of Israel developed its strategy to redefine antisemitism as opposition to Israeli government policy, it embedded a number of Zionist lobby groups in the process. For example, advisors on the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism included the following: The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), B’nai B’rith International (BBI), the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and the U.K.-based Community Security Trust (CST). Some of these advisors to the state of Israel were carried over as advisors to the European Union Monitoring Center, which first introduced the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2005. Both the ADL and BBI were there, as was the EU branch of the WJC, the European Jewish Congress and the UK-based CST.
When Twitter started to appoint advisors on content, these same groups were again in the frame, with no indication that they were essentially assets of the Israeli government. In 2015, Twitter launched a safety center and listed a number of ‘trusted partners’ in the US, Australia, and Europe.
In the area of offensive speech, it listed both the ADL and CST as concerned with antisemitism. Twitter executives have referred to the CST as “empowering” Twitter to “take action.” The big tech platform takes advice from precisely zero Palestinian organizations or grassroots Muslim groups on how to regulate its content.
From 2018, the list of groups working with Twitter evolved. In addition to the ADL, two new European groups were added: the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the UK and the Centre Européen Juif d’Information [European Jewish Information Center] (CEJI) in Brussels. Both these groups are strongly pro-Israel. The Board of Deputies unblushingly admits in its 2020 Trustees report that it enjoys a “[C]lose working relationship with the Embassy of Israel in the UK, including with the Ambassador, diplomats, and professional staff, and strengthened links to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the IDF Spokesperson Department.”
The CEJI is a Zionist organization that advertises working closely with a range of other Zionist groups as “partners,” including B’nai B’rith Europe and the CST. Scandalously, amongst its funders are a host of social media firms, including Twitter itself. So Twitter funds a Zionist lobby group to lobby Twitter on issues relating to the question of Palestine. It is not surprising, therefore, that when pressure is brought to bear from apparently bipartisan lawmakers, and Twitter turns to its trusted advisors, pro-Israel decisions are routinely made. The whole process of both pressure and response is entirely corrupted by Zionist influence.
Israel’s government is also heavily involved in censoring pro-Palestinian content online. According to 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the Israeli Ministry of Justice Cyber Unit sends requests to remove Palestinian content to tech giants. Through Israel’s access to information law, the government said requests to social media companies led to the deletion of 27,000 posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Google from 2017-2018.
CONCLUSIONS
After all these years, Cotler continues to spearhead illegitimate attempts to subvert solidarity with Palestine under the guise of fighting antisemitism. Shored up by a constantly evolving Zionist movement with its front groups, lobby initiatives and covert operatives (many of whom are embedded in Twitter’s own editorial structures), it is not a surprise that Twitter censored Laith Marouf’s account.
The Israel lobby’s cancel culture depends on the decades of work done by Cotler as an Israeli asset and by his close co-conspirator, the former Soviet prisoner and Israeli government minister Sharansky. Both have been central to forging the “criticism of Israel is antisemitism” weapon which is put to daily use by the lobby through their operatives on the ground, via inter-parliamentary front groups or via the editorial structures of Twitter itself, to do the bidding of a foreign state.
he Israel lobby is working directly with the Canadian government and with Silicon Valley corporations to quash the voices of those critical of its expansionist policies and systematic oppression of its indigenous population.
One clear example of this came last September when an international parliamentary committee met in Congress in Washington, DC, to demand that Twitter remove the account of Palestinian-Canadian Laith Marouf. Marouf is a multimedia producer who currently serves as a senior consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre and the coordinator of ICTV, a project to secure a national multi-ethnic news television station in Canada. He also has a long record of active support for Palestinian rights.
As such, Marouf – whose Community Media Advocacy Centre is funded by the Canadian government – faced official consequences for comments he made critiquing Israel. But the Trudeau administration went further to secure his erasure from social media, which should concern all those who believe in free speech.
Marouf’s case is just one in an endless stream of such acts happening all over social media and beyond. Marouf, in other words, was not the first and certainly will not be the last. Furthermore, his case opens the floodgates for the stream of suspensions to become a torrent.
As a major human rights abuser engaged in apartheid and military occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s working relationship with big tech and the Canadian government is showcasing how antisemitism is being weaponized to target, flag and now vanish accounts critical of the apartheid state.
Marouf’s case also highlights the existence of a nearly fifty-year alliance between a Canadian national and a former Soviet dissident – a relationship that began as part of an Israeli intelligence operation. This history directly ties what happened to Marouf to Israel’s foreign policy strategies developed between 2000 and 2016.
A BIASED GROUP
The Interparliamentary Task Force To Combat Online Antisemitism is, as the name suggests, an international grouping of parliamentarians. Launched in September 2020, the task force is focused on increasing awareness of and developing responses and solutions to allegedly growing online antisemitism. Its first hearing was held on September 16, and the committee called executives from Twitter, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok to testify and explain how and why accounts like those of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, were still in existence. Khamenei’s English Twitter account has nearly a million followers. At the time of writing, it and its Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi alternative accounts remain live.
Former Canadian member of parliament (MP) Michael Levitt went over his five allotted minutes in his enthusiasm to denounce Marouf’s tweets. Another member of the task force devoted some of her time to arguing that “Zionism as an identity” should be included as a “protected characteristic.” She elaborated, “Zionist is an integral part of the identity of the majority of Jews and many non-Jews who self-define as Zionists.”
But who is on this committee, and why would they make such an argument? Answering this question accurately involves peeling back several layers of the onion and tracing back the origin story of this latest assault on online Palestinian speech.
An exhausted Laith Marouf and his CUTV crew report live from the ground in Montreal, May 20, 2012. Alexis Gravel | Flickr
It is claimed that the committee consists of “bipartisan legislators” and parliamentarians from Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Yet this claim of “bipartisanship” is quickly scotched. The task force’s four South African members identify as Zionists and are part of the controversial Democratic Alliance, the party for whom most White South Africans vote. No African National Congress (ANC) members are involved in the group. At the hearing, one MP denounced the ANC, reportedly claiming, “The greatest proponents of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment comes from our government.”
Members of the Task Force from the US include Democratic Congresspersons Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has visited Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored tour, and Ted Deutch, the newly-appointed CEO of the Zionist lobby group, the American Jewish Committee.
Among the British representatives is Andrew Percy, the Conservative MP who converted to Judaism in 2017 partly because of “a wholehearted commitment to support of Israel.” The other British representative is Alex Sobel, a longtime supporter of the Zionist affiliate of the Labor Party, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The Canadian representatives included the former MP Michael Levitt, who is now President-CEO of the Zionist Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Also from Canada was Anthony Housefather, who in 2019 wrote, “I have always been and will continue to be a huge supporter of Israel.”
Along with two Members of the Israeli Knesset (MK) was the former MK Michal Cotler-Wunsh. Widely respected journalist Gideon Levy has described Cotler-Wunsh as both “an expert on human rights, an enlightened intellectual” and “nationalist, racist, cruel.”
At the hearing itself, three more Zionists were present. The first was the Israeli special representative for antisemitism, Noa Tishby. Recently Tishby denounced Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bella Hadid – all Muslim women – as anti-Semites for condemning the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers. Tishby reportedly “singled out only criticism of Israel from Muslim Americans,” showing an apparent “effort to cast their anger as the product of ethnic or religious bigotry.” Another Zionist at the hearing was Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, appointed in March 2022. According to Ismail Allison of CAIR, Lipstadt has a “history of using bigoted rhetoric, including Islamophobic … talking points.”
Well-known Canadian politician and jurist Irwin Cotler was also in attendance. He is Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, a position receiving CA$ 5.6 million over five years beginning in 2022. He is also the stepfather of Michal Cotler-Wunsh MK, mentioned above. As it turns out, Cotler is the most significant actor in this story, being deeply embedded in Zionist lobby networks.
Unsurprisingly, no representative of Arab or Palestinian origin is involved in the task force.
20 YEARS OF CLASHES
Marouf claims that “in 2021, I began to be stalked and harassed online by Zionists in the Broadcasting sector in Canada.” These efforts led to his Twitter account being shut down for “hateful conduct” and promoting “violence against or directly attacking” people with protected characteristics like race, ethnicity or national origin.
In fact, Marouf has spent much of the past two decades years combatting Zionist efforts to censor him. The first such instance happened at Concordia University in 2001 when he was the first Arab candidate to be elected to a student union executive in Canada. Within months of his appointment, he was “expelled summarily … for writing that ‘Zionism is Jewish Supremacy’”. He won an ensuing six-month court battle with the university. After that, however, the attacks continued; the next was from the Chair of the Department of History, who, as Marouf noted, was also the chair of a Zionist lobby group.
Among the interlocutors back in 2002 was then-MP Irwin Cotler. Cotler’s reputation was at that stage not nearly as great as it is now. Perhaps this is why Marouf’s comrades were able to occupy his office, following which the police were called. Marouf has confirmed to Mintpress that he was “part of the organizing of the occupation” but was not present in the office.
At the time of Marouf’s clashes with Cotler, Cotler’s wife, Ariela, was also involved in the events. She was President of the board of Montreal Hillel in 2001 during the most heated period at Concordia. Hillel is the Zionist student organization on campus in Canada and the US. She “played a major role in the pro-Israeli activity” at that time, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank.
Before that, Ariela had been parliamentary secretary for Menachem Begin. As can be imagined from this, Ariela is a hardline Zionist and claims to have been involved “at the cradle” with the creation of the so-called Birthright program, which takes young Jews to “Israel” despite there being no “birthright” for Jews in Canada or elsewhere to colonize Palestine.
Ariela Cotler has also been involved in a wide range of other Zionist lobby groups, including the Canada Israel Committee and the Federation Combined Jewish Appeal, the largest Zionist fundraiser in Canada. The Federation CJA, as it is known, has promoted Canadians joining the Israeli army.
IRWIN COTLER – ZIONIST REGIME ASSET
Cotler’s public persona is that he has some sympathy for the underdog. At the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, he notes he has been described as “Counsel for the Oppressed” and as “Freedom’s Counsel.” His 600-word profile does not use the words “Israel,” “Zionism,” “Jewish,” or “antisemitism”; his decades-long advocacy for the crimes of the State of Israel are not even hinted at.
Born in 1940, he took degrees at McGill University and then secured a Law postgraduate degree at Yale in 1966. In 1968 he was hired as a speechwriter for the then Justice Minister for four years. In 1970 he was appointed as an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto before being appointed Professor at McGill in 1973. That same year he helped found and became President of the pro-Israel Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East, and he then “spent his summers travelling the Middle East.”
By the late 1970s, he was already heavily involved in Zionist advocacy, being the lawyer for Anatoli Shcharansky. A Ukrainian Zionist activist, Shcharansky was active in agitation as part of an operation run by a secret Israeli intelligence organization, Nativ, to access new settlers from the Soviet Union. Was Cotler aware that he was involved in an intelligence operation?
Cotler is welcomed by Benjamin Netanyahu during a 2014 visit to Israel. Photo | Israeli GPO
In 1978 while working with Shcharansky, he was living in the Jewish quarter of Damascus and, not surprisingly – given his Zionist contacts – drew the attention of Syrian officials. He also spent time in Egypt in 1975, 1976 and 1977, making contact with the political elite, including the foreign minister, and was introduced to President Anwar Sadat. Knowing that Cotler would later visit Israel, Sadat “asked him to deliver a message to … prime minister Menachem Begin.”
Cotler claims he said “he didn’t know” Begin “particularly well.” But when he arrived in Israel, he was “invited to lunch with members of the Knesset.” There he met a Begin staffer named Ariela Zeevi, who took him to meet her boss. The message was, “Egypt was prepared to enter into peace negotiations with Israel.” Cotler later married the staffer in 1979 and became a “close personal friend” of Begin.
ZIONIST LOBBY STALWART
In 1980, Irwin Cotler was appointed President of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Four years later, he participated in a Jerusalem conference entitled “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image.” (Hasbara is a Hebrew word meaning “explanation,” which is used as a synonym for “propaganda” in English). The American Jewish Congress ran the event, a group with a history of working directly with the Israeli intelligence agency Nativ, a campaign to recruit new settlers from the Soviet Union. Though referred to only as a professor of law at McGill, Cotler made it clear that he was a committed partisan of Israeli hasbara, complaining that “hasbara efforts are discriminated against” and that “Israel itself has become some kind of illegitimate entity.”
Since this public declaration of commitment to the cause of Zionism, he has taken up a dizzying number of appointments in Zionist organizations. He is or has been affiliated with a wide range of Zionist groups on three continents, including,
All of these groups are closely related to the State of Israel, some with intelligence connections, some in receipt of funds, or created by Tel Aviv. None of these roles are listed in his biography at the Wallenberg Center, to which he is currently attached. Nor are Cotler’s interesting links with the far right in Ukraine; he is reportedly on the advisory board of “Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter,” which honored Ukrainian Nazis who collaborated with Nazi Germany and massacred Jews in the 1940s.
ENTER THE MOSSAD
But it is in the policy planning process of the state of Israel that Cotler seems to have made the most significant impact. Cotler has been, as British writer Antony Lerman puts it, “probably the most significant and influential international figure in the propagation of the concept of the ‘new antisemitism.’” As codified and finally published in its current form in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, the “working definition” of antisemitism is the weapon of choice of the Zionist movement to intimidate and bully supporters of the Palestinians.
While the idea of the new antisemitism has roots back to the 1940s and was a subject of renewed interest from the early 1970s, the administrative infrastructure to redefine antisemitism flourished from the late 1980s when Mossad was given the lead in the coordination of the strategy. As Lerman has noted, the Monitoring Forum on Antisemitism, established in 1988, “aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism by Jewish groups worldwide.” It “was coordinated and mostly implemented by Mossad representatives” working in Israeli embassies.
A key step in the process was the first Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in January 2000. The resulting Stockholm Declaration “became the founding document” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. Cotler headed the Canadian delegation to that event. He was also a key figure in responding to the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, which concluded that Zionism is racism. In a hyperbolic reply for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he denounced “what was supposed to be a conference against racism” [emphasis in original], saying it “turned into a conference of racism against Israel and the Jewish people.” He also decried what he called a new “genocidal antisemitism – the public call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
Cotler was engaged directly with the state of Israel’s response to Durban in co-founding the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA) in 2002 “in collaboration with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior.” This venture, however, collapsed, its main problem being that it was obviously an instrument of Israeli foreign policy. Even an arch-Zionist like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League observed: “If a lot of its strategy and implementation is coming from Israel, I won’t be supportive of it.”
In 2003 a new body, the Global Forum for Combatting Antisemitism, was created by Melchior and Cotler’s friend and former “client” Natan Sharansky (formerly known as Anatoli Shcharansky, he changed his name to Zionise it, as do many incoming settlers). Sharansky was also – as an Israeli government minister in charge of antisemitism —chair of the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, which had been set up in the 1990s. “The State of Israel has decided to take the gloves off and implement a coordinated counteroffensive against antisemitism,” Sharansky said.
Sharansky right, holds the Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Reagan, center, as President-elect Bush looks on, Jan. 11, 1989. Barry Thumma | AP
In his “3D test of antisemitism,” Sharansky took up the idea of discrimination against a nation-state, trialed by Cotler. It focused only on the occasions where it was claimed that criticism of Israel became antisemitism:
“demonization” is “when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”;
“double standards,” when criticism of Israel is “applied selectively”;
“delegitimization” when Israel’s “fundamental right to exist” is denied.
These are tendentious arguments. Who is to judge what is “sensible” or “selective”? No regime or even state has a “fundamental” right to exist.
Cotler and Sharansky would frequently connect again over the course of the ensuing decade. For example, they both attended the February 2008 Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism. It was here that the plan to extend the event around the globe was announced. Though it has been claimed that the subsequent London event was independent, the 2008 event it was seen as simply another GFCA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) event. Minister Tzipi Livni personally thanked British MOP John Mann for ‘volunteering to host the Global Forum next year.’
Tellingly, the new body used the identical name to the previous 2002 effort: the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Sharansky was an advisor.
In 2009, Cotler was on the steering committee of the ICCA. Also, there was Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian writer and politician who has lived in an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem since 1998. Cotler led a delegation of 11 Canadian MPs to the event. Together, they decided to form a Canadian coalition. Thus was the Israeli network extended to Canada: the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism. It met in November 2010 and produced a final report the following year. Canadian groups which were critical of the redefinition of antisemitism to equate it with anti-Zionism responded to the consultation, but their submissions were “excluded from the hearings.”
The ICCA would host conferences in London in February 2009, Ottawa in November 2010, Brussels in June 2012 and Berlin in March 2016. A “task force” report on “internet hate” was published in 2013. In addition, an Italian parliamentary report was published in 2011, having reportedly taken “inspiration” from the ICCA. Similar German parliamentary reports came out in 2011 and 2017. These reports, commissions and groupings laid the groundwork for the American hearing late last year that removed Marouf from social media.
ZIONIST INFLUENCES EMBEDDED IN TWITTER
As the State of Israel developed its strategy to redefine antisemitism as opposition to Israeli government policy, it embedded a number of Zionist lobby groups in the process. For example, advisors on the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism included the following: The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), B’nai B’rith International (BBI), the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and the U.K.-based Community Security Trust (CST). Some of these advisors to the state of Israel were carried over as advisors to the European Union Monitoring Center, which first introduced the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2005. Both the ADL and BBI were there, as was the EU branch of the WJC, the European Jewish Congress and the UK-based CST.
When Twitter started to appoint advisors on content, these same groups were again in the frame, with no indication that they were essentially assets of the Israeli government. In 2015, Twitter launched a safety center and listed a number of ‘trusted partners’ in the US, Australia, and Europe.
In the area of offensive speech, it listed both the ADL and CST as concerned with antisemitism. Twitter executives have referred to the CST as “empowering” Twitter to “take action.” The big tech platform takes advice from precisely zero Palestinian organizations or grassroots Muslim groups on how to regulate its content.
From 2018, the list of groups working with Twitter evolved. In addition to the ADL, two new European groups were added: the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the UK and the Centre Européen Juif d’Information [European Jewish Information Center] (CEJI) in Brussels. Both these groups are strongly pro-Israel. The Board of Deputies unblushingly admits in its 2020 Trustees report that it enjoys a “[C]lose working relationship with the Embassy of Israel in the UK, including with the Ambassador, diplomats, and professional staff, and strengthened links to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the IDF Spokesperson Department.”
The CEJI is a Zionist organization that advertises working closely with a range of other Zionist groups as “partners,” including B’nai B’rith Europe and the CST. Scandalously, amongst its funders are a host of social media firms, including Twitter itself. So Twitter funds a Zionist lobby group to lobby Twitter on issues relating to the question of Palestine. It is not surprising, therefore, that when pressure is brought to bear from apparently bipartisan lawmakers, and Twitter turns to its trusted advisors, pro-Israel decisions are routinely made. The whole process of both pressure and response is entirely corrupted by Zionist influence.
Israel’s government is also heavily involved in censoring pro-Palestinian content online. According to 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the Israeli Ministry of Justice Cyber Unit sends requests to remove Palestinian content to tech giants. Through Israel’s access to information law, the government said requests to social media companies led to the deletion of 27,000 posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Google from 2017-2018.
CONCLUSIONS
After all these years, Cotler continues to spearhead illegitimate attempts to subvert solidarity with Palestine under the guise of fighting antisemitism. Shored up by a constantly evolving Zionist movement with its front groups, lobby initiatives and covert operatives (many of whom are embedded in Twitter’s own editorial structures), it is not a surprise that Twitter censored Laith Marouf’s account.
The Israel lobby’s cancel culture depends on the decades of work done by Cotler as an Israeli asset and by his close co-conspirator, the former Soviet prisoner and Israeli government minister Sharansky. Both have been central to forging the “criticism of Israel is antisemitism” weapon which is put to daily use by the lobby through their operatives on the ground, via inter-parliamentary front groups or via the editorial structures of Twitter itself, to do the bidding of a foreign state.
– Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, community worker and artist. Much of his work on Palestine involves public education, such as through his recently created interview series, “Palestine in Perspective” (The Dark Room Podcast), where he speaks with writers, scholars and activists. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Recently I organized a demonstration outside a Toronto theatre. It was to protest the screening of a dishonest documentary—First to Stand: The Cases and Causes of Irwin Cotler—taking place inside.
The documentary is on former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, professor and lawyer Irwin Cotler. He also denies the Nakba—the catastrophe of 1948 when at least 800,000 and 15,000 Palestinians were, respectively, displaced and killed by Israeli forces to make way for the state of Israel. The film however presents Cotler as a human rights “hero”, which no Nakba denier can be.
Admittedly all documentaries have a degree of bias in them in that they portray individuals, states of affairs, etc. from a particular point of view, often the filmmaker who, say, wants to convey a certain social or political message. However, First to Standdoes more than this. It misleads the public by keeping outside the frame any substantive discussion or critique about Cotler’s denialism.
That’s a major part of who Colter is. For years he’s been promoting the view that the Nakba, as understood by historians the world over and formally acknowledged by a United Nations resolution last year, is effectively a fiction.
In doing so, he Is part of a larger global subculture, if you will, of racists, that either seek to downplay the severity of the Nakba or, like Cotler, erase it as a historical fact. In turn, they, deplorably, trivialize the legacy of Palestinian suffering and trauma caused by the Nakba itself, which—as we see on social media daily—is ongoing through Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing against Palestine, carried out with impunity (e.g. Israel not being sanctioned by Western powers).
Whether it manifests itself in the bombing of Gaza, random killings of unarmed Palestinian civilians, illegal evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank (to build more Israeli settlements that contravene international law), such cleansing is inextricably connected to the Nakba. For the Nakba is coextensive with the founding of Israel which, ever since, has been a state that was founded on and continues to expand by destroying Palestinian life. Israel would simply not be where it is today without that destruction.
At recent Toronto launch of film about @IrwinCotler attendees deny existence of Palestinians & react angrily to protesters calling him a human rights “fraud” pic.twitter.com/jBArAYDvQ7
This all went into my thinking as I independently organized the demonstration. The event was not sponsored or part of any formal organization. I mostly did the organizing online and when it was thought, at first, that Cotler would be in attendance there seemed to be quite a bit of enthusiasm among possible demonstration attendees. Many of us, at the time, were moved by the idea of contesting Colter, non-violently and face-to-face in the theatre. But as it turned out (and was advertised) he would only be at the screening virtually.
When this came to light the enthusiasm dropped. This was admittedly discouraging; I wasn’t sure if it was worth organizing any demonstration at all. I felt I might be the only one to show at it—a lone person standing outside the theatre with a sign protesting Cotler.
The thought of that changed everything. I asked myself why not do that. Why does a demonstration have to be big? Loud? A crowd? Why can’t a demonstration, however great the injustice it opposes, not be comprised of one individual? What ultimately matters, it seemed to me, is that a demonstration conveys a clear message, such as that First to Stand is a dishonest film. I also thought that I had a duty to protest the documentary, as an ally to the Palestinian people who could not be outside the theatre (living in another continent and, in the case of Gaza more specifically, under illegal blockade) at the time of the demonstration. Accordingly, the duty, as I conceived of it, would consist of me being a voice in solidarity with the Palestinian people, not for them, where they were physically absent. Whether I’d get much of a rise from any single passerby (and there turned out to be many) was irrelevant. Central to my thinking was that the documentary, whatever merit it had, is whitewashing the anti-Palestinianism of Cotler and by extension the current Canadian government where he enjoys the prestigious post of Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.
Moreover, I didn’t want the documentary to be screened and people—entering the theatre, passing by it, etc.—not know this was happening. If I could get them to think about that or, better, engage in conversation with them so that eventually they might join the larger struggle for Palestinian justice, I believed that would be a tiny but meaningful victory. And so in a similar spirit to what St. Therese of Lisieux and later Dorothy Day referred to as the “little way”, while strengthened by love for the Palestinian people, I resolved to do so while holding up a simple sign. Made with only a black marker it read: “IRWIN COTLER IS A NAKBA DENIER.”
I announced my plan to others in the WhatsApp group where I was doing part of the organizing. I also invited any who wanted to join me to do so. My tone was cordial. I did not want anyone to feel they had to or feel bad if they couldn’t. Additionally, I wanted to clarify for any who anticipated something bigger that the demonstration might very well just be me. I didn’t want people to attend it thinking they had in any way been misled to believe they would be part of a sizeable, animated crowd—though any non-violent action for Palestine, whatever the scale, is in my view both necessary and worthwhile.
As the video of this article shows and to my pleasant surprise about 10 fellow Palestinian allies showed also protest the dishonesty of the film. They were of different faiths, ethnicities, etc. with one thing in common—their love for the Palestinian people and unwavering commitment to justice for Palestine itself.
Some I knew already, others the honor of meeting the first time. It was an emotional experience for me. It confirmed there were others who believed enough in my small act of standing alone, in solidarity with Palestine, to join me and ultimately turn the act into a group event.
We held signs, distributed a flyer about Cotler’s anti-Palestinianism, chanted loudly pro-Palestinian messages and others that challenged the legitimacy of Cotler—in contrast to the documentary—as a beacon for human rights. As we did so people, many of whom were entering the theatre, passed by us. Some were curious to know more about our message. We engaged them in constructive dialogue, as I had hoped.
Others mocked and yelled at us, not unlike at the pro-Palestinian demonstration I attended in Toronto last December and wrote about. Like at that demonstration, we were at times met with anti-Palestinian animus. At least two people told us that there was no Palestine, echoing the false and racist position of Toronto groups such as the Canadian Education Antisemitism Foundation (CAEF) thatdoes the same and held an event last November where Cotler was a featured guest.
Not only did the demonstration allow us to contest the documentary it also brought out the anti-Palestinianism that still exists in Toronto. I’ve brought this to the attention of several local and federal elected officials, including recently resigned Mayor John Tory, inviting them to work with those concerned about both the safety of Palestinians in Toronto and justice for Palestine more broadly. None have replied.
On a positive note, the demonstration was a success. It challenged people to think about who Cotler really is and, in turn, how anti-Palestinianism in Canada and elsewhere is not being taken seriously. I’m also encouraged by, looking back, how it doesn’t take much to hold a demonstration as we did. It can begin with one person saying I’ll be at a certain place and time to protest an injustice, be it against Palestine or otherwise. If others see your sincerity, that you’re not doing it to be “cool” or get likes on social media, they will join you. Even if they don’t you can still demonstrate alone.
That requires the mustering of at least some courage, the inspiration for which can be drawn from the Palestinian people themselves. Risking their lives they fight daily against Israeli military might, far exceeding their defense resources and capacity. If they can do that surely we, in safer and more privileged parts of the world, can demonstrate against anti-Palestinianism—however large or small we are in number—in public.
That has more impact than posting about Palestine online. It tells people you are serious about Palestine and you are not afraid to fight for it in the proximity of random strangers, who you can’t just scroll over like on a computer screen. This will surely upset some but, more importantly, mobilize others.
Among those strangers are those who want justice for Palestine too. If it means holding a sign in front of a theatre, let them know they can join that struggle with you.
There’s no reason to hide from that struggle if it’s in your heart to partake in it. There’s an international family of pro-Palestinian brothers and sisters waiting for you. And unlike First to Stand we do not hide the truth. We are not afraid to say that the Nakba is ongoing and it’s high time it ends.
The recent article by Yves Engler, published by The Palestine Chronicle, resonates with me. It reminds me that many in the Canadian establishment not only do not care about Palestinian justice. They will go out of their way to undermine efforts that aim to achieve it.
I was at the pro-Palestinian demonstration Engler talks about. It happened in fact not far where I live in Toronto and in the same riding to be exact.
However, those opposing us at the demonstration—unapologetic Israeli ultranationalists—made me feel that I was in some other world. We were, in addition to being called “murderers”,“terrorists”, and “pieces of garbage”, told by them to “get out of our neighborhood you scum.”
In what democracy is this ok, let alone against those protesting the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians? Why are the Canadian politicians mentioned in Engler’s article not condemning the anti-Palestinian hatred we were subjected to but instead misframing the demonstration so as to suggest it was somehow antisemitic? And perhaps most importantly why do they repeat this kind of behavior and get away with it?
One of the main reasons I believe is that they are continuing to exploit something that Canadian society has not fully grappled with or taken seriously. I will call this an anti-Palestinian presumption of guilt.
It rears its head every time, and there have been many, pro-Palestinian voices are attacked, maligned, degraded or abused. Instead of perpetrators being held accountable their targets or victims are misrepresented, illustrated by social media posts cited by Engler, as the wrongdoers. (How this occurs specifically in the world of Canadian academia is presented well in “Unveiling the Chilly Climate: The Suppression of Speech on Palestine in Canada”, by Sheryl Nestel and Rowan Gaudet of Independent Jewish Voices.)
Those engaged in such misrepresentation also do so confidently. They know they will likely be believed and not pro-Palestinian voices. This works, so to speak, since Canada is still a society where much of the public—reflecting again by the presumption of guilt—views Palestinian solidarity efforts as a “dangerous” or “violent” threat. It’s a warp in the public mind that needs to be corrected.
I’ve talked in previous articles about how this can be done through a responsible school system. In a similar spirit, it can also be done through launching public anti-hate campaigns, as the City of Toronto has commendably—through its Toronto For All initiative—done for several groups. It is yet to do so for pro-Palestinian voices.
Not only would this help the public better understand that the larger Palestinian community, including Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike, are fighting against Israeli apartheid—a crime against humanity. It will also expose and address how power, presently and historically, has tried to undermine this through the presumption of guilt.
I don’t believe that the Canadian public, learning about such underhandedness, will be tolerant of it. Canadians are largely people of conscience. They care about many things that used to be largely hidden or never discussed: racism, violence against women, police brutality, religious intolerance, truth, and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, to name a few.
But, no, we are not yet at that point where we as a society are pushing back against those unfairly vilifying Palestinian voices. Indeed it has become normalized and those perpetuating it are not being taken to task or being seriously questioned by mainstream media. In this regard such media is complicit with Regavim—the group our demonstration was protesting against and works to expedite the illegal evictions of Palestinians from their homes. For almost a week they spread the myth, in various Toronto locations, that Palestinians are not deserving of the same respect as their more “civilized” Israeli counterparts. Mainstream media, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)—cherished by many as an outlet that tells the truth (nice and not so nice) about Canadian affairs—has yet to say a word about this. Not even the widely circulated press release and associated letter campaign by Just Peace Advocates, emphasizing both the moral and legal problems of Regavim in Canada, was able to get mainstream media to break their silence.
This has been weighing heavily on me. It confirms that, in addition to Palestinian voices, you can denigrate Palestinians themselves in Canada and not be held accountable.
I purposely avoid using any sort of words like “punished”, which too often emanates from a spirit of revenge. Animated by the spirit people harm others. They do not move towards, much less achieve, accountability. Likewise, I wish no harm against those who verbally attacked me for my solidarity with Palestine. In fact, similar to what well-known musician and pro-Palestinian activist Roger Waters observed in a webinar, I “pity” them.
They’ve been conditioned to believe, perhaps through the Israeli ultranationalist subculture of which they are part, that hating me or Palestine is the right thing to do. It forms part of their identity; without that hate, they somehow feel lost. They might not even know who they are. Vile as that hatred this too is tragic. It pains me to know that anyone is consumed by deep-seated resentment of any kind.
A young man some meters across from me at the demonstration, on the opposite side of the police line dividing us, was among those demanding we get out of the neighborhood. In fact, he entered the area of the demonstration while yelling for us to “f**k off” from his car. He even told one of the officers that approached him shortly afterward—as if he owned the area and was in a position of authority over the officer himself—to rid our presence.
When he was a little calmer and now across from me I told him that I lived in the area. I was hoping that would open some kind of dialogue between us. I also added that my late grandmother or nonna (Italian) cleaned the homes and businesses of the area for many years. In fact, a great deal of the furniture in my home are gifts from those very places.
I’m not a deeply religious person but, in sharing that bit about my nonna, it felt like she was present and giving me the strength to invite this person into dialogue. A friend of mine at the demonstration cautioned against this, saying that it was a waste of time but I still believe it was important to try. Through dialogue, people can, however difficult and slowly, overcome hatred.
Perhaps my friend was right. The young man replied by calling me a “local terrorist” and that my grandmother must be “rolling in her grave.”
All I could ask in turn was, “Do you believe yourself to be a decent person?” He seemed to curse me a little bit more under his breath at this but was not looking my way anymore. He still stood in the same spot but mentally removed himself from the situation by returning to whatever he was doing on his phone.
I wish there was some way of telling him, without being patronizing, that the phone won’t eliminate anti-Palestinian hatred from his heart. And that, like hatred generally does, will distort your sense of reality. That’s why Israeli ultranationalists see Palestinians as beneath them, as somehow lacking in our shared humanity. Moreover, til you allow yourself the opportunity at least to connect with Palestinians as people—not the discriminatory ideas you have of them in your head—you will retain that hate.
The Palestinian struggle for justice, on the other hand, defies hate. That’s ultimately why we were demonstrating. We imagine, desire, and insist on a world where all peoples can live together—where no neighborhood is “off-limits” on account of one’s ethnicity or otherwise.
Likewise challenging both Regavim and the anti-Palestinian presumption of guilt is not only to contest hatred. It’s a refusal to give up on what all of us want despite our unique differences.
To live and care in community.
– Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, community worker and artist. Much of his work on Palestine involves public education, such as through his recently created interview series, “Palestine in Perspective” (The Dark Room Podcast), where he speaks with writers, scholars and activists. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Canada’s Green Party Leader, Elizabeth May. (Photo: Karen Fox, via Wikimedia Commons)
– Yves Engler is the author of Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid and a number of other books. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. Visit his website: yvesengler.com.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs’ recent attack against Elizabeth May is farcical. Canada’s leading mouthpiece for Israel criticized the Green Party leader for saying she takes her direction from the representative of the Palestinian Authority, which actually serves as the subcontractor for Israel’s occupation.
At an event marking International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People May said, “I take my marching orders from the permanent representative of Palestine to Canada.” CIJA clipped this short bit of a much longer speech and tweeted, “particularly at a time when Canadians are increasingly concerned about foreign interference in Canadian politics, no Canadian elected official should get their ‘marching orders’ from a foreign government and its official representatives.”
While it is interesting that CIJA has acknowledged the PA as a “foreign government” when many fanatic Israeli nationalists condemn the CBC for even saying there is such a place as Palestine, the video has been viewed 220,000 times. Apparently, Zionist Twitter and May’s detractors are smitten with it.
This is an extreme example of the pot making racist comments at the kettle. In case the apartheid lobbyists forgot, the first three words in CIJA’s name are “Centre for Israel”. CIJA justifies Israel’s apartheid and violence against Palestinians while celebrating Israel’s friends and demonizing its enemies.
Framing May’s comment as a sign of foreign interference is way beyond silly and headed into fantasyland. Are we to believe the Palestinians, without control over any territory, are even trying to dictate to a member of the G7?
CIJA’s post is absurd for other reasons. As CIJA knows, May orchestrated a stunningly anti-democratic move to protect Israel from censure. After Green members voted to back boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) measures targeting sectors of the Israeli economy profiting from the occupation of the West Bank, May demanded a special general membership meeting be held to discuss a Palestine policy endorsed prior to the August 2016 convention, at the convention and in a follow-up online poll. She forced the party to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hold a special convention four months later to discuss that single resolution.
Yes, since then, May’s position on Palestinian rights has improved. On November 29 she tweeted, “Today, I stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people living under conditions worse than apartheid. Alongside my friend, Mona Abuamara, Chief representative of the Palestinian Delegation to Canada, I call for an end to the occupation. Let Palestinians live in peace.”
Still, May’s hyper-focus on the PA representative is a political weakness. The PA is highly deferential to the apartheid state and there have been major demonstrations in the West Bank calling for the fall of the PA due to its role in repressing the Palestinian liberation struggle. The US/Canada-financed and armed PA acts as a subcontractor of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and internationally it has undercut Palestinian civil society’s call to boycott Israel. In Canada, the PA has failed to raise its voice against the outrageous sums raised for Israeli-focused registered charities, which include groups that support racist organizations, West Bank settlements and the Israeli military.
Irrespective of her limitations, May should be applauded for marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. She should also be defended from CIJA’s attacks and the apartheid lobby group should be constantly denounced.
The world elite is not ready to compromise with Moscow by Alexander Khramchikhin
The training of Australian submariners on the British nuclear submarine Anson is being carried out as part of the effort to put together a new Anglo-Saxon coalition on a world-wide scale. Photo from http://www.gov.uk The most important political outcome of the outgoing year should become a radical change in Russia’s relations with the West. Not at the level of propaganda for the “plebeian multitudes”, but at the political, economic and, most importantly, mental level.
BEFORE AND NOW
At present, Russia’s complete and final break with the “collective West” (which means the countries of NATO, the EU, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and, with some reservations, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) is becoming not only an objective reality, but also an objective necessity. Over the past half century, the Western model of development has undergone a very serious degradation, and this degradation continues to deepen.
Half a century ago, the West, with its classical democracy, was qualitatively superior to the then Soviet Union in all respects – both in terms of the living standards and quality of life, and in terms of democratic freedoms (competitive elections, real pluralism of opinions, equality of all before the law). If a Soviet person had the opportunity to emigrate, only two things could stop them – patriotism (in relation to the country and its culture, and not to the system) or sincere adherence to communist ideology (although there has been no smell of communism in the USSR for a long time).
Today the situation has changed radically. The West still has some purely quantitative advantage over today’s Russia in the living standards and quality of life, but even that can be claimed only with very large reservations. As far as the level of democratic freedoms is concerned, the West and we have now became practically equal, and in some ways, perhaps, we even surpassed the West.
Therefore, today there are only two rational reasons for emigration – the guaranteed availability of a well-paid job in the West, or a fanatical adherence to the left-liberal ideology with its tolerance, the cult of “identities” and such things as the “cancellation culture” that have nothing to do with the real democracy.
WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE
So, the Western model (even if taken independently of the current state of relations with the West) can no longer serve as a model or guide for Russia, thus reconciliation with the West becomes meaningless. At the same time, the reconciliation also became impossible due to the intellectual degradation of the Western political elites (which we will discuss later), due to their feminization and a significant presence of the representatives of sexual minorities. Who are, in fact, hired according to the quotas – as it was practiced in the USSR for workers and peasants.
Feminists and the representatives of sexual minorities make negative contribution to the politics of those states where they are allowed into the power structures. Moreover, all such people view Russia not so much as a geopolitical, but as an ideological adversary, reconciliation with whom is fundamentally impossible. In addition, the West has absolutely inadequately assessed its “victory” in the Cold War, assuming Russia was a country which lost and which has to to acknowledge its defeat and live with that knowledge forever, giving up protection of its national interests ( “Russia and the West remain antagonists” , “NVO”, 12/15/17).
For all these reasons, modern Western elites will not make any compromises with Russia and will make no concessions. Because Russia’s concessions and accommodations to the West are unequivocally regarded by the West not just as a Russia’s weakness, but as the reason to apply even more pressure to achieve its unconditional surrender followed by its dismemberment into several states.
Nor will Russia be able to incorporate itself into the collective West on its own terms by force, which, it seems, our elites continue to aspire to to this day. For the West, any Russian success becomes just an excuse to try to isolate Russia as much as possible, to weaken and undermine it from within.
WESTERN WORLD DECLINE
There is no reason to hope that the Western elites will be replaced by some more adequate ones. The process of changing elites by itself takes decades. We don’t have that much time at our disposal.
But the main thing is that right now there is an ongoing progressive degradation of the Western elites taking place. If any of the Western politicians nowadays demonstrates even a minimal degree of adequacy, those, almost exclusively, are retired politicians of the old generation. Accordingly, even if the governments of the individual European countries change due to the socio-economic problems, nothing is going to change for Russia this winter.
For example, the right-wing coalition who denies the current Western left-liberal “tolerant-politically correct” political mainstream, won the recent parliamentary elections in Italy. At the same time, however, the winners immediately stated that there would be no changes in the support of Ukraine.
In Germany, Chancellor Scholz (he is 64 years old) is losing popularity very quickly. But the most popular political figure in the country, who could theoretically replace Scholz at his post, is the current foreign minister, 41-year-old Annalena Burbock, whose Russophobia is almost clinical.
It is unlikely that the activities of 47-year-old Liz Truss as a Prime Minister of Great Britain need additional commentary.
Here again we can turn to the Soviet example. It must be acknowledged that the level of education in the USSR was very high, which made a massive contribution to the collapse of the system and the country – it was thanks to good education and the ability to think critically that people realized the absurdity of the communist ideology and the falsity of propaganda.
The current West is much more consistent in this regard. The most powerful brainwashing through propaganda is combined not only with the gagging of any opponents, but also with an obvious drop in the quality of education. Therefore, there will be simply no one to understand the absurdity of the left-liberal ideology and the falsity of the propaganda. Accordingly, the quality of the elites will only worsen.
TURN FROM THE WEST
In connection with all these circumstances, the Russian elite should be purged to the maximum extent of the supporters of normalizing relations with the West, and of playing by the rules of the West. This is not about those who work directly for the West (this is a criminal offense). We are talking about those who are trying in one way or another to influence the domestic and foreign policy of Russia in this direction, without being formally a direct agent of the West.
It is especially necessary to rid the power structures of the people who have personal interests in the West (bank accounts, real estate, families living there, children studying there). Today, these people represent the main threat to the national security of the Russian Federation.
The same applies to the representatives of big business, who maintain close ties with the West and with Ukraine. It is extremely significant that, even after falling under Western sanctions, none of the Russian oligarchs provided any assistance to the Russian and allied army forces in Ukraine. Moreover, some of them, on the contrary, are ready to help Ukraine in order to earn the lifting of the sanctions.
Accordingly, for Russia there is no alternative to a complete break with the West. This means that it is necessary to stop any attempts to communicate with the West in any format (except for maintaining diplomatic relations).
It is necessary for ourselves at the mental level to break the long-established paradigm of identifying the collective West with the “world community” and the “civilized world”. The world community is all countries of the world without exception. The civilized world is also all countries, except, perhaps, some states of Tropical Africa. The opinion of a notional “Egypt” cannot be less valuable than the opinion of a notional “Belgium”.
Moscow needs to stop its attempts to prove to the world that it is not in the “international isolation”, as this only leads to senseless concessions to the West, which in turn create serious problems for us and do not provide us with the slightest benefit. A classic example of such a “breaking the isolation” was Russia’s participation in the Normandy format and the subsequent signing of the Minsk agreements in 2014. The purpose of these actions was precisely the “breaking the isolation” and a forceful insertion of ourselves into the formats with participation of two large Western countries – which was a gross mistake and brought us nothing but harm.
Instead, it had been necessary to finish off the current Kyiv regime and change the structure of Ukraine (at least by tearing away from it the eastern and southern regions from Kharkov to Odessa), which at that time would have been an order of magnitude easier task than now. In fact, all of our current losses in Ukraine are the result of signing of the Minsk agreements.
TURN TO THE EAST
The West should be assessed adequately and all the political and economic processes going on there should be watched. Now the US and UK are almost openly destroying the economy of the European Union, eliminating it as an economic competitor and facilitating transfer of the European industry and the most skilled workforce to the US.
By forcing European countries to transfer their already limited military equipment to Ukraine, the United States are trying to make the military potential of the European countries totally insignificant. They lose the ability to defend themselves not only individually, but even collectively. The destruction of economic and military potentials tightly binds Europe to the United States in the military-political sphere, making any relations with Europe completely meaningless for Russia (except, again, purely diplomatic ones).
This US policy further confirms the fact that NATO is of a value to Washington only politically, but not militarily. Ever since the end of World War II, the most important allied format for the Americans has been a coalition of five Anglo-Saxon countries.
However, New Zealand is geographically too isolated, its economic, demographic and military potentials are extremely insignificant, besides, it has long pursued a non-nuclear policy. Because of this, her value in the Anglo-Saxon coalition is limited. But Canada, Great Britain and Australia are truly the closest allies of the United States (this is manifested in all American military campaigns, starting from the same World War II), and their geographical position gives the coalition a global scale. Naturally, the format of this coalition is much broader than the intelligence cooperation known as the Five Eyes.
The UK, especially after leaving the EU, plays the role of the main “subcontractor” of the US in Europe. In particular, last year it was London that became the main “watchdog” on Ukraine instead of Washington itself ( “Washington promotes its little brother” , “NVO”, 07/16/21). At the same time, Great Britain became part of the Pacific Anglo-Saxon AUKUS format.
The fact of creation of AUKUS once again confirms that the United States is paying more and more attention to the Asia-Pacific region (APR). Since it has been clear for several decades that it is this region, and by no means the Euro-Atlantic one, that is now the “locomotive” of the world development ( “Imaginary Threats and Cynical Alliances” , “NVO”, 10/15/21).
In this regard, it is absolutely puzzling that Russia, which has direct geographical access to Asia-Pacific region, had, so far, paid minimal attention to it. During the post-Soviet period, Moscow has managed to make many “turns to the East”, but only in words. If we do not actually start doing this today, then it would be simply impossible not to recall the classic question of Pavel Milyukov: “What is this – stupidity or treason?
Posted on November 27, 2022 by worldpeacewithjustice
November 26, 2022
Canadian member of Ontario’s provincial parliament, Joel Harden. (Photo: via Wikipedia)
– Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, community worker and artist. Much of his work on Palestine involves public education, such as through his recently created interview series, “Palestine in Perspective” (The Dark Room Podcast), where he speaks with writers, scholars and activists. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
This week Joel Harden, a Canadian member of Ontario’s provincial parliament, made this unnecessary apology:
“I would like to apologize unreservedly to the Jewish community for comments I made during an interview with the Ottawa Forum on Israel Palestine. I spoke in a way that perpetrated an antisemitic stereotype towards Jewish neighbours. I regret my choice of words and sincerely apologize to the Jewish community. You have my commitment that it won’t happen again and I will continue to work with Jewish leaders who can help me understand antisemitism.”
Specifically, the apology was made in reference to this statement he made in the interview, in August 2021:
“If I were to name…the single greatest threat, the single greatest origin of violence in the Middle East, it is unquestionably the state of Israel and the way in which they feel absolutely no shame in defying international law, doing whatever they want.”
There’s nothing wrong with this since, first, it’s no secret that Israel has absolutely no reservations about and is routinely breaking international law (as confirmed by the United Nations, Amnesty International, other major human rights organizations the world over) and, second, whether Israel is in fact “the single greatest origin of violence in the Middle East” is at worst only debatable.
Given that Israel is constantly demolishing Palestinian properties, opening live fire and killing Palestinian civilians, illegally raiding Palestinian homes, physically and mentally (as through its military) harassing Palestinians, detaining them without any charge whatsoever, and holding them indefinitely behind bars (often referred to more nicely as “administrative detention”)—just to name a few of its crimes and in addition to its periodic bombing of Gaza (a densely open-air prison where Palestinians are wholly defenseless)—it is hardly a farfetched a view that Israel is the “single greatest origin of violence in the Middle East.”
To go any further at this point in listing Israeli crimes is simply to repeat what’s already been public for long. Motasem A Dalloul, in a recent article published in Middle East Monitor, succinctly notes what ultimately needs to be stressed:
“For 70 years Israel has been the subject of numerous UN resolutions, statements of condemnation and rulings of the illegality of its policies against Palestinians and yet no sanctions have been imposed against it nor have Palestinians been given aid to combat its aggression.”
In fact, as in the cast of Harden, we see the opposite, namely politicians and others apologizing for truthfully speaking to the illegality in question. Aside from such apologies being unnecessary they reflect four problematic issues, concerning Israeli ideologues.
First, Israeli ideologues, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) that took exception to Harden’s statement, don’t want to be criticized about Israeli criminality. Ever. In their view, if you draw attention to any of the various modes in which they are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, whether outside the head (e.g. bombing of Gaza and Israeli settlement displacement) or inside the head (e.g. erasing Palestine from our memory and concerns), is already to have gone too far. And we know where that leads: being called “antisemitic.”
Stated bluntly, if you think that taking issue with what Israel is doing to Palestine is “antisemitic”, there’s something seriously amiss. Not with the person taking issue but with your thinking. It is so ludicrous to associate, at a very basic level, antisemitism with legit criticism of any state at all, let alone Israel, that the burden of proof is on you—not me—to explain the logic of that. Recalling, as I write, my time as a philosophy instructor, it would have admittedly made for an interesting assignment, where students would be challenged to demonstrate their argumentative abilities.
But should you have handed in, say, an essay where the constant refrain throughout is that criticism of Israel amounts to “antisemitism”, despite the criticism focused exclusively on its actions alone, you’d of course receive a failing grade. By the same token—and if we’re sincere about being “modern” (a word progressives and liberals love to apply to themselves) such that we accept that truth requires justifying what we say with material facts—equating criticism of Israel as antisemitic is empirically bankrupt.
Second, Israeli ideologues lie about the Palestinian struggle for justice and history. And no one among them corrects them for doing so. One example that immediately comes to mind is how they do this with respect to the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” So often they, perfectly illustrated in this recent op-ed, attack it as a call to pro-Palestinian terrorism. Had Harden or any other Canadian politician done the same the ideologues would not come after them. It’s as if the Israeli ideologue cannot process the basic idea that the phrase refers to the rightful liberation of the Palestinian people, covering the geographic expanse of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
What they’d like the world to falsely believe is that it means annihilating Israelis. No doubt this is a kind of fear-mongering to not only vilify Palestinians and their allies but also to drum up further support for the continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Sociopaths act similarly. They manipulate you to believe in certain lies so you, acting accordingly, advance some particular agenda. Even when doing so is to your own or others’ detriment.
Third and finally, Israeli ideologues are selective about what they mean by “antisemitism.” Preposterous criticism of Israel, for them, amounts to such hatred but slandering or demeaning Jews as “self-hating” for supporting the Palestinian struggle for justice is not. An egregious incident where this happened, involving Palestinian solidarity expressed by Hasidic Jews in Toronto this year and detailed well by Montreal activist and writer Yves Engler, is a case in point. CIJA, among other Israeli ideologues, surely knows about this. They are, without fail, vigilant in documenting all antisemitic incidents that happen in Canada. They however do not respond to those where the targets of the incidents are pro-Palestinian.
Ignoring antisemitism when it occurs against pro-Palestinian Jews while condemning all other forms of antisemitism (perceived, such as criticism against Israel, or real, such as denying a person entry somewhere because they are Jewish), is more than turning a blind eye. It’s outright deplorable. It means that the pro-Palestinian Jew is “less” a Jew. Conversely, and following this perverse logic, being “Jewish” entails supporting the Israeli oppression of Palestine. Should you challenge that you are a “traitor” to other “real” Jews who will not come to your aid or safety?
Those publicly endorsing such thinking should be apologizing for offending being antisemitic. Those, however, fighting for Palestinian justice—Jews and non-Jews alike—have nothing to be sorry about. Remember this, dear Palestinian allies. As much as each of us is flawed, not perfect, and have things about ourselves that we have to work on, you do no harm when you oppose the unconscionable crimes that Israel—as a violent state and not the exclusive representative of worldwide Jewry—perpetrate daily against the Palestinian people. You will likely offend those who, lacking conscience, want it otherwise. But that is their failing. Not ours.
Do not let it deter you from engaging in the Palestinian struggle. There is lots of good, however difficult, work left to be done.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau falsely claims that Iran has sentenced 15,000 protestors to death before deleting the tweet in which he made the false claim.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, February 11, 2022 (Reuters)
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau falsely claimed on Tuesday that Iran was sentencing some 15,000 protestors to death on Twitter before deleting the tweet after an onslaught of reports containing the false news came out.
The Prime Minister’s post led to a slew of other – nonetheless fake – posts making the same claim and echoing concerns for the Iranian rioters.
However, interestingly enough, the social media campaign did not have any evidence to back it, and despite that, it garnered the attention of thousands, including renowned celebrities such as actresses Sophie Turner and Viola Davis.
“Canada denounces the Iranian regime’s barbaric decision to impose the death penalty on nearly 15,000 protestors,” Trudeau wrote. “These brave Iranians were fighting for their human rights – and we continue to stand united in support of them, and united against the regime’s heinous actions.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tweet
The post – now taken down – was widely shared and used by users and advocates alike in the 12 hours it stayed up.
Ottawa sanctioned 10 Iranian individuals, in addition to entities, – an extension of the ongoing acts of Western hostility against the Islamic republic.
The list of 6 individuals sanctioned by the Canadian Foreign Ministry includes Iran’s Deputy Interior Minister Seyyed Majid Mirahmadi; Mohammad Karami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Operational Base in Sistan and Baluchistan Province; Ezzatollah Zarghami, the former head of Iran’s Broadcasting Corporation; Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, the former head of the Iranian National Security and Foreign Policy Commission; Soghra Khodadadi Taghanaki, the current director of Qarchak Women’s Prison; and Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, the former speaker of the Guardian Council.
More sanctioned entities include Iran’s Guardian Council, Assembly of Experts, Expediency Discernment Council, and the Fars News Agency.
Instagram has since tagged the post as “False Information”, saying: “Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.”
The post garnered the attention of various media personalities and journalists, who were quick to criticize the Canadian premier and dismiss his claims.
“Extraordinary lack of basic fact-checking. Iran has not sentenced 15,000 protesters to death, as a number of celebrities and political leaders are saying,” said Sune Engel Rasmussen, a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent said.
Extraordinary lack of basic fact checking. Iran has not sentenced 15,000 protesters to death, as a number of celebrities and political leaders are saying. Here are the facts as we know them: #IranProtestspic.twitter.com/8PvK7slYBd
“I don’t know the source of the news that 15,000 protesters were sentenced to death, but even Justin Trudeau repeated it,” a senior BBC Persian reporter, Siavash Ardalan, said in criticism of Trudeau’s decision to echo the false claim.
“Apart from showing how weak the Canadian prime minister’s news sources are, it also has a terrible result that the execution of less than 15,000 people will be considered a success by the government,” the senior reporter added.
“The post was informed by initial reporting that was incomplete and lacked necessary context. Because of that, it has since been deleted,” a Canadian government spokesperson told CNN.
“It was based on reporting of serious concerns raised by international human rights advocates warning of possible future sentences, including the death penalty, imposed on thousands of Iranian protesters who have already been detained by the regime,” they added.
It is noteworthy that the rioters committed several atrocious crimes during the mass riots, including arson, rape, and even murder. However, only one person has been officially sentenced to death by the judiciary.
The unnamed rioter is facing the death sentence over committing arson after he set fire to a government building. Five others who took to the streets to participate in the riots were sentenced from five to 10 years in prison after they were convicted of colluding to commit a crime against national security and disturbance of public peace and order.”
The original riot-turned-demonstrations took place in the aftermath of a young woman’s death that the West rushed to capitalize on, claiming that the Iranian police murdered her.
Afterward, the Iranian police published CCTV footage documenting the last moments of the young Iranian girl, Mahsa Amini, at the police station. The Tehran police said the footage proved that the 22-year-old was not subjected to any violence or physical abuse.
The demonstrations were organized in many cities, namely: Tehran, Isfahan, Kashan, Shiraz, Mazandaran, Yasuj, Bandar Abbas, Qom, Qazvin, Gilan, and Bojnord, among others.
The demonstrators then issued a statement denouncing riots, acts of sabotage, and vandalism that hurt the interests of the Iranian people.
The United Nations General Assembly voted 98-17 to seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the illegality of the “Israeli” entity’s occupation of Palestinian territories on the grounds that it can be considered de facto annexation.
This resolution specifically asked the ICJ for an opinion on the status of al-Quds [Jerusalem]. The city is one of the most volatile and contentious points of discord between “Israelis” and Palestinians.
The “Israeli” entity, the United States, Canada and Australia were among those who opposed the ICJ referral when the UNGA Fourth Committee held its preliminary vote on Friday in New York.
The issue now moves to the UNGA plenum for final approval.
“There is no authority that can declare that the Jewish nation is an occupier in its homeland,” the “Israeli” entity’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan tweeted defiantly after the vote.
Erdan wrote that he had warned the UN nations that an appeal to the ICJ at The Hague was the “last nail in the burial coffin” of “Israeli”-Palestinian reconciliation. “Unilateral measures” such as an ICJ appeal “will be met with unilateral measures.”
At issue is the question of whether after 56 years, the “Israeli” entity’s hold on territories it captured from Jordan Egypt and Syria in the defensive 1967 Six-Day War, can be considered tantamount to de facto annexation and thus illegal under international law.
The international community does not recognize “Israeli” “sovereignty” in al-Quds [Jerusalem] and only the US accepts the entity’s annexation of the Golan.
The “Israeli” entity withdrew from Gaza, but the international community still holds that its under “Israeli” occupation due to the “Israeli” Occupation Forces’ [IOF’s] control of much of its borders.
An ICJ opinion on the matter is non-binding, but it would help codify into international law the Palestinian insistence that all that pre-1967 territory, should be within the final boundaries of its future state.
At Friday’s meeting, the US and the “Israeli” entity charged that the resolution was an attempt to bypass a negotiated resolution to the conflict with the Palestinians and as such ran counter to past UN resolutions including at the Security Council which called for such talks.
“The Palestinian’s have rejected every single peace initiative, and now they embroil an external body with the excuse that the conflict has not been resolved but the only reason why it has not been resolved is because of their rejectionism,” Erdan said. “They claim that they are ready to negotiate, but what they fail to mention is that they are only ready to do so if they are guaranteed 100 percent of their demands before they even sit down at the negotiating table,” Erdan explained.
“Exploiting a UN organ by enlisting the UN’s politicized anti-‘Israel’ majority for the purpose of forcing your demands instead of negotiating, is clearly a unilateral step,” he added.
The United States Representative Andrew Weinstein said that the “failure” in such resolutions “to acknowledge the shared history of the Haram al-Sharif [Temple Mount], a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims, is perhaps the clearest demonstration that they are intended only to denigrate ‘Israel’, not to help achieve peace.”
After the vote, the Palestinian Authority Ambassador Riyad Mansour thanked all the nations that endorsed and supported the resolutions.
“Nothing justifies standing with ‘Israeli’ annexation and occupation,” Mansour said, noting that these actions went against the UN Charter.
“This occupation needs to end,” Mansour said.
The request for an ICJ advisory opinion, submitted for the first time this year, was tacked onto a pre-existing annual resolution called “‘Israeli’ practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people.”
The text of the resolution was read out by Namibia and Cuba.
A number of nations objected to the inclusion of the ICJ resolution in an already existing text rather than as a stand-alone item, noting that the matter had been pushed through quickly with little time for review.
The resolution asks the ICJ to advise on “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violations by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.”
This includes, the resolution stated, “measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures.”
In addition, the resolution asked the ICJ to explain how Israel’s policies and practices “affect the legal status of the occupation” and what are the “legal consequences that arise for all states the UN from this status.”
Among the nations that opposed the text were Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Liberia, Lithuania, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau.
Many European countries abstained including Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Ukraine, Ireland and Poland were among those countries that supported the ICJ referral.
This is the second such ICJ referral. In 2004 the ICJ issued an advisory opinion against the “Israeli” entity’s security barrier, explaining that its construction in east al-Quds [Jerusalem] and the West Bank was illegal.
Former US Army Special Operations Officer [11th Psychological Operations Battalion, Civil Affairs-Psychological Operations Command] Scott Bennett accused the ‘Israeli’ occupation entity of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people.
Bennett made the remarks in a conversation with al-Ahed News on the sidelines of his participation in the event held for ‘Palestine International Prize for Literature’ in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, which is focused on the Palestinian Cause.
The non-governmental prize is organized with the cultural and literature institutions in several Muslim countries.
As he stated that “God has opened my eyes and shown me the evil that has been done by ‘Israel’ and the United States,” Bennett also hailed that “There are many Americans that are coming out and speaking the truth. It is God awakening, and I think it is important for Palestine and the other people of the Middle East to see that there are real Americans, honest Americans, that we tell the truth fearlessly.”
Lamenting that there are very few conferences on Palestine, and none in America that really talk about this since it is being covered up by the Zionist media, the former US Army officer highlighted the need to have more of them in other countries, in America, Australia, Europe, Canada, South America.
Bennett urged every continent to have a conference and a discussion to tell the truth about the Palestinian suffering and the issue of the ‘Israeli’ aggression. “That needs to be spoken about to stop it because it is a war crime and a crime against humanity what ‘Israel’ has been doing to the Palestinians,” he concluded.
Despite history of human rights abuses, the Israeli are training American cops. (Photo: File)
– Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, community worker and artist. Much of his work on Palestine involves public education, such as through his recently created interview series, “Palestine in Perspective” (The Dark Room Podcast), where he speaks with writers, scholars and activists. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
I was at a Toronto mall Saturday. I help coordinate a weekly talent show there.
After one of the talented singers, a girl about 10 years old, performed the MC asked her to stay on stage to share some words about herself.
“What do you like to do when you’re not singing?” he asked.
“Eat pizza and school,” she replied.
“Oh, tell us what you like about school?”
“I get to learn. I know a lot of things,” she said confidently. “I know about science, stuff like chemistry and biology, math, I’m learning about geography too. Places outside Canada.”
When she said that I thought about Palestine. And was hit with sadness too. I went for a walk.
I questioned the sadness. Yes, I reflected, Palestine brings to mind the suffering of innocent people. That always makes me sad.
Still, I felt there was something else underlying the feeling. I figured it out after the showcase.
The sadness stems from knowing that the girl is but one of many young people, as we saw during the Javier Davila scandal at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), who are part of a larger educational system in Canada that prevents students from learning about what’s actually happening in Palestine. In fact, it’s a system, as a recent Independent Jewish Voices Canada report confirms, that bullies educators into not teaching that all.
Children have a right to learn about world injustices at school. That obviously includes the longstanding Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, thereby denying them a safe and dignified life. Where the right is denied children cannot explore–in the classroom, for example–ways of ending this.
Questions that might be explored to that end include: how can the international community play a role in dismantling the regime of Israeli apartheid, set up to keep Israelis “superior” and Palestinians “inferior”? What legal and other mechanisms must be in place to ensure that Israel is held accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people–presently and historically?
Why are those who occupy important roles in democratic governments, such as Irwin Cotler (Canadian Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism), permitted to endorse and spread Nakba denialism with impunity? How can young Canadians—as people of conscience—be better allies to the Palestinian people, including children who deserve yet don’t have the same educational opportunities as their Canadian counterparts?
Surely some segment of intelligent and caring children will eventually go on to become pro-Palestinian activists. Perhaps the girl singer too. But by not improving the Canadian educational system such that it is not hostile to the truth about Palestinian oppression we are doing them a great disservice. We leave them to figure out, on their own, a world that is rife with racist Israel ideologues—and dishonest ones at that—intent on destroying the Palestinian people and their allies (either physically as in the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, or metaphorically where the voices of pro-Palestinian dissent are killed or intimidated into silence).
We owe young people more and that means preparing them within the educational system to challenge this. Conservatives will object: “Leave politics out of school. There’s no place for activism in the classroom anyway.” But as the great political theorist and leftist activist, Henry Giroux, once told me during a podcast, nothing is apolitical.
What the objection really is about is reproducing the status quo—the educational system does not prepare students to fight for social justice, in solidarity with the Palestinian people and others. Quite often that’s because conservatives would rather students undergo a rigid and even morally impoverished education: preparation to succeed in the job market, such as acquiring and developing “skill sets” to perform well at impersonal work. If that’s what an “education” is about then, frankly, it sucks.
It’s important that students have at least the opportunity to become anti-colonial activists at school. Granted that’s no easy task where conservatives determine school curricula. This only means we must push harder. Anti-colonial efforts should be something in which all are engaged—for the betterment of humanity. By the same token how to engage in such efforts need to become a priority in schools. What values do schools have if they are not helping students learn to think critically and act in constructive ways to dismantle regimes like Israel, which keep fellow persons subjugated?
Ultimately we are not here for ourselves but for one another. We are reminded of that by the pain of having, by choice or otherwise, separated ourselves from the task of living and building community together. School curricula should reflect that and pave the way for young people to join Palestinian and other solidarity efforts, which aim to obliterate needle divisions between people—on the basis of race, class, gender, etc.
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
Lowkey begins this latest episode by delving into recent revelations around the case of Shamima Begum, a British national who fled the U.K. as a teenager and joined ISIS in Syria. Lowkey examines the new admission that a Canadian secret service agent trafficked at least 140 British citizens into Syria. He also examines Turkish police claims that this agent’s handler was believed to be British intelligence working out of the Canadian Embassy. It is important to remember that the British Monarch is the head of state in Canada.
When asked about these activities, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau responded that his intelligence agencies must be “creative and flexible.” To gauge the response to this, Lowkey is joined by Sally Letts, the mother of Jack Letts, a Canadian citizen who is currently detained in a prison in Northern Syria after travelling there during the war. Both Letts and Begum have had their British citizenship stripped by the government, despite the question marks surrounding their journeys there.
As a direct reply to Trudeau, Sally Letts suggests his statement could be read as meaning that it is “perfectly acceptable for the Canadian Security Service here to engage in child trafficking.”
Richard Walton, former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, sought to justify this policy:
If you are running agents on the ground, you are acquiescing to what they are doing. You are turning a blind eye”.
During the podcast, Sally and Lowkey explored the Active Change Foundation and its curious role in obtaining the conviction of her and her husband for funding terrorism. Their son had been imprisoned three times by ISIS and his family sought to rescue him. Discussing how this Prevent-backed counter-extremist organization, which initially portrayed itself to be an ally to the family, was secretly gathering intel and giving false impressions to the family about rescuing their son. This in turn led to the conviction of Jack’s parents. Thus, the steps taken by Active Change Foundation toward the Letts family are eerily reminiscent of FBI entrapment cases in the United States.
Sally Letts identifies parallel similarities between her son’s case and Shamima Begum, pointing out that the person who facilitated Jack’s journey to Syria has gone uncharged by the police, despite ample evidence. Sally told Lowkey that the family now believes it likely that the person that facilitated Jack’s entry is an informant of the intelligence services. She laments the dehumanization of both Shamima Begum and her son Jack have been,
Demonized as monsters. They are not given human rights like other people…universal human rights seem to have been thrown out the window in all of these cases under the guise of terrorism.”
Filed under: Britain, Canada, ISIS | Tagged: ISIS is an American Asset | Comments Off on HOW WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENTS TRAFFICKED TEENS INTO ISIS’ HANDS, WITH SALLY LETTS
by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
When Green fanatic Robert Habeck, posing as Germany’s Economy Minister, said earlier this week “we should expect the worst” in terms of energy security, he conveniently forgot to spell out how the whole farce is a Made in Germany cum Made in Brussels crisis.
Flickers of intelligence at least still glow in rare Western latitudes, as indispensable strategic analyst William Engdahl, author of A Century of Oil, released a sharp, concise summary revealing the skeletons in the glamour closet.
Everyone with a brain following the ghastly Eurocrat machinations in Brussels was aware of the main plot – yet hardly anyone among average EU citizens. Habeck, Chancellor “Liver Sausage” Scholz, the European Commission (EC) Green Energy VP Timmermans, EC dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen, they are all involved.
In a nutshell: as Engdahl describes it, this is about “the EU plan to de-industrialize one of the most energy-efficient industrial concentrations on the planet.”
That’s a practical translation of the UN Green Agenda 2030 – which happens to be metastasized into crypto Bond villain Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset – now renamed “Great Narrative”.
The whole scam started way back in the early 2000s: I remember it vividly, as Brussels used to be my European base in the early “war on terror” years.
At the time, the talk of the town was the “European energy policy”. The dirty secret of such policy is that the EC, “ advised” by JP MorganChase as well as the usual mega speculative hedge funds, went all out into what Engdahl describes as “a complete deregulation of the European market for natural gas.”
That was sold to the Lugenpresse (“lying media”) as “liberalization”. In practice, that’s savage, unregulated casino capitalism, with the “free” market fixing prices while dumping long-term contracts – such as the ones struck with Gazprom.
How to decarbonize and destabilize
The process was turbo-charged in 2016, when the last gasp of the Obama administration encouraged massive export of LNG out of the US’s huge shale gas production.
For that one needs to build LNG terminals. Each terminal takes as much as 5 years to build. Within the EU, Poland and Holland went for it from the start.
As much as Wall Street in the past invented a “ paper oil” speculative market, this time they went for a speculative “paper gas” market.
Engdahl details how “the EU Commission and their Green Deal agenda to ‘decarbonize’ the economy by 2050, eliminating oil, gas and coal fuels, provided the ideal trap that has led to the explosive spike in EU gas prices since 2021.”
The creation of this “single” market control implied forcing illegal rule changes on Gazprom. In practice, Big Finance and Big Energy – which totally control anything that passes for “EU policy” in Brussels – invented a new pricing system parallel to the long-term, stable prices of Russian pipeline gas.
By 2019, an avalanche of Eurocrat energy “ directives” by the EC – the only thing these people do – had established a totally deregulated gas market trading, setting the prices for natural gas in the EU even as Gazprom remained the largest supplier.
As lots of virtual trading hubs in gas futures contracts started popping up across the EU, enter the Dutch TTF (Title Transfer Facility). By 2020 the TTF was established as the real EU gas benchmark.
As Engdahl points out, “TTF is a virtual platform of trades in futures gas contracts between banks and other financial investors. Outside, of course, of any regulated exchange.
So LNG prices soon started to be set by futures trades in the TTF hub, which crucially happens to be owned by the Dutch government – “the same government destroying its farms for a fraudulent nitrogen pollution claim.”
By any means necessary Big Finance had to get rid of Gazprom as a reliable source to allow powerful financial interests behind the Green Deal racket to dominate the LNG market.
Engdahl evokes a case very few know about across Europe: “On May 12, 2022 although Gazprom deliveries to the Soyuz gas pipeline through Ukraine were uninterrupted for almost three months of conflict, despite Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, the NATO-controlled Zelensky regime in Kiev closed a major Russian pipeline through Lugansk, that was bringing Russian gas both to his Ukraine as well as EU states, declaring it would remain closed until Kiev gets full control of its pipeline system that runs through the two Donbass republics. That section of the Ukraine Soyuz line cut one-third of gas via Soyuz to the EU. It certainly did not help the EU economy at a time Kiev was begging for more weapons from those same NATO countries. Soyuz opened in 1980 under the Soviet Union bringing gas from the Orenburg gas field.”
Hybrid War, the energy chapter
On the interminable soap opera involving the Nord Stream 1 turbine, the crucial fact is that Canada deliberately refused to deliver the repaired turbine to Gazprom – its owner – but instead sent it to Siemens Germany, where it is now. Siemens Germany is essentially under American control. Both the German and Canadian governments refuse to grant a legally binding sanction exemption for the transfer to Russia.
That was the straw that broke the (Gazprom) camel’s back. Gazprom and the Kremlin concluded that if sabotage was the name of the game, they couldn’t care less whether Germany received zero gas via Nord Stream 1 (with brand new Nord Stream 2, ready to go, blocked by strictly political reasons).
Kremlin spokesman Dmity Peskov took pains to stress
“problems in [gas] deliveries arose due to sanctions that have been imposed on our country and a number of companies by Western countries (…) There are no other reasons behind supply issues.”
Peskov had to remind anyone with a brain that it’s not Gazprom’s fault if “the Europeans (…) make a decision to refuse to service their equipment” which they are contractually obligated to do. The fact is the whole Nord Stream 1 operation hinges on “one piece of equipment that needs serious maintenance.”
Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who knows one or two things about the energy business, cleared up the technicalities:
“The entire problem lies precisely on [the EU’s] side, because all the conditions of the repair contract have been completely violated, along with the terms of shipping of the equipment.”
All that is inscribed into what Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov describes as “a total war declared against us”, which is “being waged in hybrid forms, in all areas”, with “the degree of animosity of our opponents – of our enemies” being “enormous, extraordinary.”
So none of this has anything to do with “Putin weaponizing energy”. It was Berlin and Brussels – mere messengers of Big Finance – which weaponized the supply of European energy on behalf of a financial racket, and against the interests of European industry and consumers.
Beware of the toxic trio
Engdahl has summarized how, “by systematically sanctioning or closing gas deliveries from long-term, low cost pipelines to the EU, gas speculators via the Dutch TTP have been able to use every hiccup or energy shock in the world, whether a record drought in China or the conflict in Ukraine, to export restrictions in the USA, to bid the EU wholesale gas prices through all bounds.”
Translation: casino capitalism at its finest.
And it gets worse, when it comes to electricity. There is a so-called EU Electricity Market Reform in progress. According to it, producers of electricity – from solar or wind – automatically receive “the same price for their ‘renewable’ electricity they sell to the power companies for the grid as the highest cost, i.e. natural gas.” No wonder the cost of electricity in Germany for 2022 increased by 860% – and rising.
Baerbock incessantly parrots that German energy independence cannot be secured until the country is “liberated from fossil fuels.”
According to Green fanaticism, to build the Green Agenda it’s imperative to completely eliminate gas, oil and nuclear power, which happen to be the only reliable energy sources as it stands.
And it’s here that we see the toxic trio Habeck/Baerbock/von der Leyen ready for their close up. They pose as saviors of Europe preaching that the only way out is to invest fortunes in – unreliable – wind and solar power: the “answer” from Providence to a gas price debacle manufactured by none other than Big Finance, Green fanaticism and Eurocrat “leadership”.
Now tell that to struggling pan-European households whose bills will surge to a whopping, collective $2 trillion as General Winter knocks on the door.
Political commentator Darya Dugin, 30, is assassinated in a massive explosion about 20 km from Moscow following her departure from her father’s lecture.
A large explosion tore into an SUV on a highway 20 km away west of Moscow, instantly killing its driver, who was identified as political commentator Darya Dugina, Russian political analyst and thinker Alexander Dugin’s daughter. Dugin the father is an influential veteran political commentator, also known as one of the Kremlin’s “ideological masterminds”, and an occasional contributor to Al Mayadeen English.
The assassination was carried out at 21:35 Moscow time. Witnesses divulged that the explosion happened in the middle of the road, where debris and metal wreckage scattered in the air right before the car crashed into a fence, according to photos and videos.
According to emergency services, there was only one person inside the car, and it was a female body burned beyond recognition.
The identity of the victim is yet to be confirmed by authorities – however, multiple Russian media sources and Telegram channels have reported that the victim was Darya Dugina, 30. According to videos circulating social media, her father arrived at the scene just after the explosion, devastated.
As for the cause of the explosion, preliminary reports suggest that a homemade explosive device may be involved, however, investigators have not yet confirmed it.
On Saturday evening, Dugin was giving a lecture in Moscow on “Tradition and History” at a traditional family festival in Moscow; Dugina attended the event as a guest. Reports are claiming that Dugin planned to leave the festival with his daughter, but instead took a separate car. Darya took her father’s Toyota Land Cruiser Prado.
Darya, in July 2022, was placed on the UK sanctions list. Her father in 2014 and 2015 was sanctioned by the EU, US, and Canada.
More details are to unfold.
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The murder of the daughter of the thinker Alexander Dugin… the most prominent close associate of President Putin
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By now, many will be familiar with Project MKULTRA. For decades, the CIA conducted highly unethical experiments on humans in order to perfect brainwashing, mind control and torture techniques.
Perhaps the program’s most notorious aspect was the administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs to targets, particularly LSD. These substances were brought to Langley’s attention in 1948 by Richard Kuhn, one of 1,600 Nazi scientists covertly spirited to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip following World War II. When MKULTRA was formally established five years later, some individuals consulted directly on the project.
The unwitting dosing of U.S. citizens with LSD is infamous; among those spiked were CIA operatives themselves. That the Agency exploited mental patients, prisoners, and drug addicts for the purpose – “people who could not fight back,” in the words of an unnamed Agency operative – is less well-known.
A study by academics at the University of Ottawa’s Culture and Mental Health Disparities Lab sheds significant new light on this underexplored component of MKULTRA and illuminates a hitherto wholly unknown dimension of the program; people of color, overwhelmingly Black Americans, were disproportionately targeted by the CIA in its service.
SPOKEN OF AS ANIMALS AND TREATED AS SUCH
In 1973, due to fears CIA covert action might be officially audited in the wake of the Watergate scandal, then-Agency chief Richard Helms ordered all papers related to MKULTRA destroyed.
Tens of thousands of documents somehow survived the purge. Even more conveniently, a significant portion of the research yielded by the project’s experiments was published in freely-accessible, peer-reviewed scientific journals, as over 80 private and public universities, prisons, and hospitals – whether knowingly or not – conducted psychedelic drug experiments on behalf of the CIA. While LSD was the preponderant substance of interest, the effects of DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, and THC were also extensively explored.
In all, the University of Ottawa team analyzed 49 of these papers, published from the 1950s to the 1970s. Forty percent related to experiments conducted at the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky, which the CIA directly managed.
The site included a prison for individuals charged with violating narcotics laws, a “special ward” for drug research, and a prison populated by purported “addicts.” Researchers employed there avowedly preferred to perform tests on former and current drug users, as they were considered to be “experienced” in the effects of illicit substances and therefore better able to give informed consent than the abstinent. In practice, the CIA’s guinea pigs frequently had no idea what was being administered.
In analyzing available literature, the academics examined participants’ stated race and ethnicity, recruitment strategies, methodology, and potential dangers to participants. All studies used captured, incarcerated test subjects, coercive incentives for participation, unsafe dosing levels, and had questionable scientific merit.
In almost 90% of cases, at least one ethical violation was identified, over three-quarters employed a high-risk dosing schedule that would be unacceptable under modern guidelines, and 15% used participants with psychotic disorders. Roughly 30% exploited people of color.
While in many studies, the race or ethnicity of test subjects was not recorded, further investigation by the Ottawa academics revealed Black Americans were significantly overrepresented in the recruitment sites from which test subjects were drawn. It is inevitable that the actual number of MKULTRA studies that abused people of color is far larger. For example, while people of color constituted just 7% of Kentucky’s population at the time of experiments at the Addiction Research Center, Black and Mexican Americans represented 66% of the site’s inmate population.
Culture and Mental Health Disparities Lab | University of Ottawa
In any event, that people of color suffered to a far greater degree than White test subjects at the proverbial hands of the CIA is starkly set forth in the experiments’ bloodcurdling details. For instance, a 1957 study records how numerous vulnerable individuals were psychologically and physically tortured, in particular one Black participant, who was described by researchers as if he were an animal and treated accordingly.
Dosed with LSD, he exhibited a “wild frightened look” and asked for “medicines to relieve his fear.” Their response was to place him in restraints and administer a further cocktail of drugs at far higher doses than other participants – whose race was not recorded – and to continue doing so against his will.
Similarly, the previous year, an experiment was conducted in which Black participants were given 180 micrograms of LSD each day for 85 days, while White participants received 75 micrograms each day over just eight days. One Black subject had a “very severe” reaction to their dosage and asked to drop out of the study once they had recovered. After “considerable persuasion,” however, they agreed to continue.
Undue influence was a recurrent theme identified by the academics across the papers analyzed. A variety of coercive techniques were frequently employed to solicit and maintain participation in brutal and, at times, life-threatening examinations.
For example, Addiction Research Center inmates were offered a choice of reduced sentences, or drugs such as heroin, in return for volunteering. These drugs could be taken upon completion of a study or saved in a “bank account” for subsequent “withdrawals.” Test subjects almost always chose to feed their addictions rather than get out of prison earlier.
‘DR. X, THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS….’
The settings in which participants were experimented upon also differed wildly according to race – even in the same study. One in 1960 observed side-by-side the effects of LSD on a group of “Negro” men convicted of drug charges, who were dosed in a prison research ward, and another comprised of professional White Americans, who freely volunteered and received their doses in the cozy confines of the principal investigator’s home, “under social conditions designed to reduce anxiety.”
Such cases give the appearance of having been expressly conducted to gauge potentially varying reactions to psychedelic drugs in Black and White participants, which raises the obvious question of whether the CIA had a specific – or indeed greater – interest in the effect of certain drugs on people of color, rather than the civilian population in general.
A volunteer undergoes LSD research project at an honor camp in Viejas, California, Sept. 6, 1966. Photo | AP
Dana Strauss, who led the Ottawa University investigation, argues that the disproportionate representation of Black Americans in MKULTRA experiments, while intensely racially charged, was simply a reflection the ethnic compositions of the institutions targeted by the CIA – although she’s certain that if the Agency’s researchers did not have a readily available prison population at their disposal, they would still have opted to targeted people of color, in the manner of the Tuskegee syphilis study.
As Strauss explained to MintPress:
Prisons were already filled with Black bodies. They could have experimented on free individuals, but they would not have been able to get away with these kinds of experiments. There were no protections at this time for vulnerable populations such as incarcerated research participants, so the researchers could basically do what they wanted…These people were targeted for these dangerous studies specifically because they were Black and prisoners and therefore less valued.”
Just as the closed environments of Nazi concentration camps permitted monsters like Josef Mengele to conduct callous, horrific experiments on humans with no regard for health or safety, so too did incarcerated and/or institutionalized people of color afford the CIA an endless supply of test subjects “who could not fight back,” to be exploited and violated however Langley wished, without scrutiny or consequence.
In the process, Strauss says, researchers tested human responses to psychedelic drugs to the absolute limit. Yet while MKULTRA researchers did not quite match the evil and barbarity unleashed in Auschwitz, at least as far as we know, a comparable contempt for test subjects is evident in several studies. Such disregard may account for the wanton and excessive nature of certain experiments, which served no clear purpose and the scientific value of which was far from clear.
In 1955, a team of researchers conducted a study on four schizophrenic patients at Spring Grove State Hospital, in Baltimore, Maryland, a now majority Black city. The test subjects were given enormous amounts of LSD over an extended period – 100 micrograms per day for two weeks, which was increased by a further 100 micrograms daily thereafter to combat rising tolerance levels. For comparison, current psychedelic research guidelines mandate a 200 microgram dose of LSD as an absolute maximum per day, and warn against extended dosing periods.
All along, the researchers monitored participants without compassion, disrespecting and dehumanizing them. Objectifying language in their resultant report reflected this depraved outlook. Their perverse voyeurism extended to observing “toilet habits” and “eroticism”, and reporting on how often the four “soiled themselves” and “smeared feces”. They also noted how often the patients “masturbated or talked about sex,” and even recorded how one patient protested desperately about their mistreatment: “Dr. X, this is serious business…we are pathetic people… don’t play with us.”
“GLARING RESEARCH INJUSTICES”
For Strauss, that MKULTRA’s racial component remained unacknowledged and hidden in plain sight so long “speaks to where we are as a society.”
Just as CIA researchers devalued the lives of Black Americans and prison inmates, so to have academics ever since, even if unconsciously. Contemporarily, Strauss notes, scholars remain intensely uninterested in how non-White individuals respond to mental health treatments. She points to a recent study that found over 80% of participants in modern psychedelic research studies are non-Hispanic White.
“Psychedelic research, psychology and academia as a whole are still White-dominated fields. In 2015, over 85% of psychologists in the U.S. were White, and less than 5% were Black. A Black psychologist, Dr. Monnica Williams, was the first to investigate the research abuses and ethical violations in MKULTRA,” Strauss tells MintPress. “I think the real question is, why didn’t anybody else investigate these glaring research injustices?”
Even more shockingly, while the morality of scientists and medical professionals using inhumane and illegal Nazi research continues to be hotly debated, no such concerns are apparent in respect of the highly unethical and fundamentally racist MKULTRA studies examined by Strauss and her team; they continue to be cited as legitimate academic work today.
Chemist Cecil Hider displays a sample of LSD during testimony in March 1966 about the control of hallucinogenic drugs. Walter Zeboski | AP
n which research abuses have impacted and continue to impact people of color and how mental health research can become more socially responsible and culturally competent.
More generally, there is clearly a pressing need for an official MKULTRA truth and reconciliation committee. No CIA official or participating academic was ever held accountable or punished in any way for any of the countless crimes against humanity committed under its auspices, and the Project’s full extent remains opaque and mysterious. All the time, though, in spite of ongoing obfuscation, we learn ever more about the sinister secret program, including its overseas component, MKDELTA.
In December 2021, it was revealed that for decades, the CIA had conducted invasive experiments on Danish children, many of them orphans, without their informed consent. When one of the victims attempted to access locally-held documents on the macabre connivance, authorities began shredding the papers. Questions abound as to where else in Europe the Agency may have undertaken similar efforts.
Evidently, the coverup continues – suppression surely not only motivated by a reflexive desire to conceal historic crimes, but because such records may well have relevance to CIA activities in the present.
As MintPress revealed in April, many of the techniques of torture and mental manipulation honed by the Agency over the course of MKULTRA’s official existence were employed to devastating effect on the inmates of Guantanamo Bay. There is no reason to believe they aren’t still in use elsewhere now or won’t be in the future.
Richard Helms’ fears of congressional probes into MKULTRA eventually came to pass in 1977. Among those who testified was Edward M. Flowers, the only surviving prisoner participant of CIA mind control experiments to have been located. Flowers took part in psychedelic tests at the Addiction Research Center in the 1950s while incarcerated. While the hearings granted him a new, disquieting understanding of what had been done to him in the name of science, nothing came of it.
“I really got a first-hand insight about some things when we had the hearings…I got in touch with the fact that the CIA was behind all this…They used my ass and took advantage of me,” he recalled many years later. “I went back up on The Hill a second time. I sat down with a couple of people, and they talked about some things that had to do with compensation…and that was the last I heard of it.”
By contrast, in November 1996, as the furor over allegations the CIA had facilitated the sale of crack cocaine in California in order to finance covert operations in Nicaragua reached a crescendo, then-Agency chief John Deutch was compelled to field difficult questions from residents of Los Angeles about the reported conspiracy at an unprecedented face-to-face meeting.
There is no reason that public outcry over the Ottawa University study’s findings could not again pressure Langley representatives to explain themselves in public. And every reason that it should.
Europe today does not have – or possibly never had – an effective vision of the no-nonsense existential strategy it required to subsist in peace. Furthermore, as if not aware of the coming debacle, EU leaders firmly insist on their failed policies. Now, former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder proposes to solve the EU’s self-inflicted ´gas crisis´ by launching the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) gas pipeline… although German authorities have repeatedly rejected the idea.
Today the EU is governed by childish impulses necessarily leading to confusion and self-harm. First the EU imposes highly crippling sanctions on its Russian partner and then demands from her full natural gas delivery — even under the current most special situation — while flagrantly violating well-known contract clauses. Accordingly, it is obvious that the assumed European ´energy crisis´ does not really exist as such, be it for natural gas, oil, distillates, coal, uranium rods… or whatever others for that matter. Because if a genuine “energy crisis” truly existed, Europe would not have full access to tangible energy from Russia, which is not the case. Actually, Europe has an enviable, excellent access to high quality, decades-proven, swift, trouble-free, close-by, door-to-door delivery of truly cheap energy from fully-vetted Russian vendors willing and able to reliably deliver the goods as they always have since decades yonder.
contract violations
But besides being immature, the EU can also be highly creative. For instance, by playing games with sacrosanct contractual requirements for the famous peripatetic Siemens NS1 turbine # 073… now stranded at Mülheim an der Ruhr after a yet unfinished maintenance episode at very distant Siemens Canada facilities of all places. Accordingly, Russia´s Gazprom has now officially rejected to accept delivery of turbine # 073 on the basis that
“The sanctions regimes of Canada, the EU, the UK and a mismatch of the current situation with the existing contractual obligations by the Siemens side make delivery of the 073 engine to the [ Russian ] Portovaya compressor station impossible”. Gazprom claims that essential documents have not been presented stating that turbine 073 is not under sanctions. “Words are not enough”.
Furthermore, the Minister of Natural Resources of Canada Jonathan Wilkinson declared that “Canada grants a time-limited and revocable permit for Siemens Canada to allow the return of repaired Nordstream 1 turbines to Germany…” So, no direct return to Russia — which is a clear breach of contract — and also under time-limited and revocable conditions which is an additional contract violation simply because turbine # 073 is still not sanctions-free and thus uninsurable. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov made clear that the turbine had been sent to Germany without Russia’s consent and that in the current situation Moscow should now have to make sure that the turbine “cannot be stopped remotely”… Sabotage cannot be excluded while Germany is actively sending weapons to Ukraine to kill Russians.
EU sanctions have shut down several Russian pipelines thus completely tying down Gazprom´s hands. Ukraine and Poland effectively closed off the Yamal-Europe pipeline. Ukraine did it overtly for strictly political reasons while Poland by refusing to pay under the new gas-for-Roubles scheme. Also, the NS1 pipeline is still suffering the Siemens-Canada tumultuous service problems. Besides, Gazprom is unable to fully use another pipeline route as Ukraine has been rejecting its transit applications. In sum, Europe has pro-actively shut itself off from Russian gas. Go figure…
et tu Siemens ?
Siemens Energy is the NS1 turbine manufacturer squarely and contractually responsible for the regular maintenance and proper functioning of all NS1 turbines, property of Russia. Siemens has now officially declared what Gazprom has been saying all along, namely that only one of five NS1 turbines is truly operational and able to deliver gas. Of course, this means that Europe is able to receive only 20% of Russia´s badly-needed natural gas as the condition of the four other remaining NS1 turbines is still undefined. According to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the reduction in the NS1 flow rate capacity is entirely Siemens’ fault, not Gazprom´s. Sanctions obviously still apply to turbine # 073 and surely to any other Russian-related piece of equipment or produce or program or whatever Russian.
et tu Gazprom ?
Vitaly Markelov, deputy head of Gazprom, said that Siemens has not fulfilled its obligations to adequately maintain NS1 engine and thusly several pieces of equipment are currently idle. Besides, Gazprom claims it has not received from Siemens the required, well-known, complete package of documents allowing transportation, maintenance service and repairs of Russian-owned equipment. The EU keeps playing lots of childish games while winter gets ever closer. If Gazprom were to accept the turbine it would be liable for illegally breaking the EU sanctions regime plus other unfavorable complications. Lots of tricky lawfare involved while the EU can’t stop digging an ever deeper hole for itself. What´s bloody wrong with Europeans ? Why do they insist in choking down on their own vomit ? EU sanctions were rolled back regarding insurance on freight vessels with Russian oil, right ? So go for it you ignorant fools, now.
Gazprom says: “The current anti-Russian sanctions are hindering the successful resolution of the issue of the transportation and repair of Siemens gas turbine engines for the Portovaya compressor station, which supplies gas to European consumers through the Nord Stream pipeline.”
In the whole history of worldwide warfare, no help was ever made readily available by any enemy. Let alone would such help ever include the life-blood of Europe´s economy, including vital products and energy. So Russia right now is not Europe´s “enemy”. Today European industry and households are simply undergoing a fake ´energy crisis´ (not) of their own making by decisions made by un-elected EU politicians who do not represent Europe´s best interests. Now, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder insists in a Stern Magazine interview the NS2 pipeline with Russian-made turbines would immediately solve Europe´s — possibly terminal — ´energy crisis´ come winter 2022 – 2023.
But there are three major “problems” to be solved. Number one problem is the absurdly required US political approval of the idea as broadly explained below. Problem number two is time is up as the NS2 certification and commissioning process would have to start right now — meaning yesterday – in order to possibly make it soon enough as neither problem #1 or #2 are simple nor quick to solve. Why so ? Well, one reason the dependency on US authorization of anything meaningful for Europe which is now clearly exposed for all to see. This also includes among other things any European trade and investment decisions with Russia. Furthermore, due to serious and most valid technical reasons, several weeks are required before any natural gas can flow from Russia to Germany through the NS2. Otherwise, the risks of serious accidents and/or malfunctioning could mean the sudden end to any possible successful solution of the problem at hand. People at large – and even top ranking specialized politicians – many times think that oil & gas feedstock flows can be turned on and off with the flip of a switch (not). Of course, all of the above furthermore requires German cooperation and correct decisions such as not using NS2 terminal facilities for any other purposes than those originally intended with specific design criteria and construction technology in mind. This is of utmost importance because German officials have already announced their idea of ´speeding up´ and supplementing the installation of LNG terminals with available NS2 hub-heads to support non-Russian LNG gas imports.
And problem number three is that at this very late stage of the game Gazprom could only deliver 25% of its nominal design capacity. In May, Russia´s President Putin specifically advised German Chancellor Scholz that Gazprom had contractually reserved the NS2 delivery capacity which needed to be effectively purchased as it could not remain suspended in mid-air indefinitely. Thus, President Putin then also warned Chancellor Scholz that Russia was forced to soon redirect half of the NS2 volume for domestic consumption and processing. Therefore, even if Gazprom were to be duly authorized to launch NS2 tomorrow morning, it would pump only 50% of its original nominal design capacity. And given that we are already more than halfway through 2022, that would be just be 20-25%…or less.
The US does not leave Europe free to make rational decisions, simply because Europe constitutes a heterogeneous group of vassal states still under US military occupation. The NS2 natural gas pipeline runs under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany right besides the currently problematic NS1. Its construction was recently completed but the pipeline was denied certification and commissioning by German authorities prior to the crisis in Ukraine. Despite former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder´s insistence, the German government has repeatedly said that launching NS2 now is absolutely out of the question. It is impossible to make this stuff up…
the EU perfect storm
“Europe is facing a perfect storm: energy prices are up, economic growth is down and winter is coming ” officially stated by Mr. Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Add to that the ever-lower Rhine River water levels – almost impassable by barges of any draft — and you get the idea. This ultra-low Rhine level tremendously restricts – and may possibly cut-off altogether – the very badly-needed coal shipments to the now absurdly RE-commissioned coal-fueled power stations. Of course, also this impacts the physical delivery of everything – not just fuels and inputs thereof — with necessarily much higher costs requiring non-available trucking freight. “The risk here is the trade of huge quantities of commodities that would otherwise be used to stave off an economic crisis become logjammed on the Rhine as low water levels make certain parts impassible. Shipment costs for coal are therefore increasing, which in turn inflates the costs of operating coal plants.”
The low water levels are already forcing “irregular operation” at a Uniper 510-megawatt Staudinger-5 coal-fired power plant through the first half of September because fewer and fewer barges have been able to deliver coal as stockpiles dwindle. Rhine water levels below 40 centimeters at Kaub would halt shipments via inland waterways to the power plant, forcing highly expensive and inefficient shipments by land. Many other key industries are seriously affected.
The Rhine River directly affects trade and industrial logistics of several key European countries namely, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands while indirectly affecting many others or, in some cases, all the others. In particular, the über-important German inland transportation system – and therefore its entire supply chains network – depends upon normal levels of Rhine River waters. Because it´s not only a matter of sourcing the right quality, quantity and price of any produce. It is just as important to receive it Just-In-Time at process destinations such as refineries or power plants as explained later. Simultaneously, all European stakeholders are competing with each other tooth and nail struggling to find, contract and retain exactly the same resources in order to solve the same unexpected problems all at once and by the same date.
Steve Sweeney has reported from hot spots around the world, exposing Imperialist war crimes and attempts to interfere in and destabilize sovereign nations.
He is Morning Star International Editor, founder of Media Workers for Palestine, and reports on global liberation movements, press freedom & resistance.
Steve contacted me the other day to ask for a statement on Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) recent appeal to censor Russian media, on their premise that Russian media is “inciting hatred” and “condoning war crimes.”
He also contacted RSF with an excellent list of questions including why a (supposed) press freedom group is demanding that alternative media narratives are censored, could they give concrete examples regarding what they’ve accused Russian media of doing (no), and whether RSF would comment on journalists like me being put on Ukraine’s kill list because of my reporting from on the ground in Donbass, where I’ve just returned incidentally.
After a series of insightful exchanges, I asked Steve to please have a conversation with me about all of this. What a conversation it was! In our conversation, he details how RSF panicked and stalled replying, only to essentially give lengthy non-answers and flat out refuse to address some questions (including the one about me and Ukraine’s kill list).
A spoiler: Steve notes that RSF is not the neutral body it pretends to be, instead receiving obscene amounts of money from NED, Soros’ Open Society, USAID, the Ford Foundation…a “rogue’s gallery of the worst kind of regime change organizations.”
As RSF endeavours to shut down Russian media, I joined my Russian colleagues today in going to sites that were bombed by Ukraine yesterday in Gorlovka, killing one civilian & leaving two others in critical condition. This is the sort of crimes Ukraine has been perpetrating for over eight years, and its courageous journalists like my colleagues who have been putting their lives on the line to expose Ukraine’s genocide of the Donbass people. RSF by whitewashing Ukraine’s crimes is abetting in genocide.
How cute: instead of doing a report on the fact that Ukraine has me on a kill list for my journalism, Canadian state-funded CBC seems to be gearing up to do a smear on my participation on a tribunal on Ukraine's war crimes.
However, in my opinion, RSF could stand condemning the kill list more loudly & frequently (I couldn't find any recent mentions, only from 2016 or so), particularly since journalists whose details were put on the site were then assassinated…https://t.co/dQGbIm8iR4
— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) July 4, 2022
This outstanding report from Syria by Eva Bartlett penetrates the 'iron dome' of Western propaganda, also known as news. It is about a chemical attack that never happened in a country attacked, subverted and blockaded in your name.https://t.co/AX1Zwbg0g0
Question: Mr President, some would think the world has forgotten about Syria amid the numerous issues on the international agenda. But we have seen today that this is not so.
We would like to hear your views on the situation on the ground in Syria. A great deal has been said today about points of contact, but there are many differences as well. Have you discussed or coordinated any fundamentally new solutions today? I am referring primarily to these differences.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: What I would like to begin with is not the differences but the fundamental issues that allow us to work and continue our efforts in the trilateral format. All of us believe that it I necessary to guarantee the territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic and to eliminate all sorts of terrorists, which I will not enumerate here. This is the fundamental and the most important thing, as we have pointed out again in our joint statement. I believe that this is very important.
Yes, there are certain differences, which is obvious, but all of us support the constitutional process. Thanks to our efforts, we have brought together various conflicting parties at one negotiating platform, including the opposition and the official authorities of the Syrian Arab Republic, experts and representatives of public organisations, as well as the UN. I believe this is extremely important. This is the first point.
The second. Humanitarian aid is being provided to Syria, for which there is particularly great demand today, because the sanctions imposed on Syria and the Syrian people have produced a deplorable result: nearly 90 percent of people in Syria are living below the poverty line. The situation in Syria is extremely serious.
Of course, it would be unfair to give priority attention to certain groups, to politicise humanitarian aid.
Third. There are different approaches to organising humanitarian aid. We have always believed that it should be organised in full compliance with international humanitarian law. This means that all humanitarian aid must be provided through the official Syrian authorities, through Damascus. However, we have agreed to extend the existing procedure for six months, including for deliveries to the Idlib zone, so as to have more time for coordinating our positions.
There is some disagreement about what is happening in Northern Syria. Incidentally, we also have some common ground here: all of us believe that US troops should leave this area. This is the first point. And they should stop looting the Syrian state, the Syrian people, taking their oil illegally. But there is disagreement about how to organise and stabilise the situation in that region. As you know, Russian-Turkish observation convoys are working there together.
However, in our view, in order to ensure a long-term, stable situation there it is necessary to transfer the entire territory under the control of the official authorities in Damascus, under the control of the Armed Forces of the Syrian Arab Republic, and then it will be possible to hold a dialogue with those who are responsible – in this case the official Syrian authorities. I believe it would greatly stabilise the situation there.
But in general, it is work in progress. As I have said many times and would like to stress once again, the work of this tripartite group – Russia, Turkiye and Iran – this joint effort to search for compromises and find these compromises has led to the fact that over 90% of Syria is now under official government control and, as we say in such cases, we have broken the back of international terrorism there. This is a great result of this joint work.
Question: Mr President, you had three one-on-one meetings today, first with Mr Raisi, then with Mr Khamenei, and then with Mr Erdogan, and there were no news conferences after these meetings. All we know is the topic you were discussing, the official part.
In particular, you said that you discussed the grain issue with your Turkish counterpart, the issue of supplying Russian and Ukrainian grain to international markets. Could you tell us some more about that, please?
Vladimir Putin: There are no secrets here; in fact, almost everything is known. There are some subtleties; maybe I do not always have time to follow what is happening in the information field. I will tell you how I see it.
First, what was the highlight of the three meetings? At each meeting, there were issues that could be considered central to a particular bilateral meeting.
For example, as I said at the news conference, in my press statement, the main theme at the meeting with the Spiritual Leader of Iran was strategic issues, including developments in the region. This is natural, as it is the sphere of his activity. It was very important for me to hear his opinion, his assessment. I have to say that we have very similar views with Iran on many aspects. So, it was very important and very useful.
As for my meeting with President Raisi, we discussed primarily economic matters. I would like to note that Russian-Iranian trade has grown by 40 percent over the past six months. This is a very good indicator.
There are promising spheres for our cooperation, and there is a great variety of them, like infrastructure development. You may know that a deputy prime minister of the Russian Government chairs a group that is responsible for developing relations in the South Caucasus, including infrastructure projects in the South Caucasus, that is, in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia. A great deal can be achieved in this sphere in cooperation with Iran.
As you know, the first pilot train is travelling along the North-South Railway line. It is a short route to ports in the south of Iran, which further leads to the Persian Gulf and India.
There is a practical project: the Rasht-Astara railway is a short 146-kilometre line across Iran. Azerbaijan is interested in its construction. I recently met with President Aliyev during the Caspian Summit, and we discussed this matter. Iran is interested in this as well, as our Iranian partners have told us just now. Russia is interested in this, because it will connect Russia’s northern region, St Petersburg, directly to the Persian Gulf. It is a very interesting and promising project. The task now is to build this line, which is only 146 kilometres. Russia is ready to do this.
We need to coordinate the conditions of this construction project. We have discussed its general outlines with our Iranian partners and friends, and we have coordinated it with Azerbaijan. I hope we will get down to business now. And then, it will be an interesting job for us. It actually amounts to exporting the services of Russian Railways (RZD). This is one of the relevant examples.
There are other spheres. There are security issues relevant to Iran’s nuclear programme. It was very important for us to understand the sentiments of the Iranian party regarding this work. It also involves Russia, which is contributing to the joint efforts aimed at relaunching interaction between Iran and the IAEA. I will not speak about this now, but Russia is playing a considerable role in this.
The grain issue. It is what we discussed with the President of Turkiye. I have already said that the Republic of Turkiye and personally President Erdogan have done a great deal to facilitate the agreement on Ukrainian grain exports. But initially we suggested that it should be adopted as a package, that is, we would facilitate the Ukrainian grain exports provided all the restrictions on the potential exports of Russian grain are lifted. This is what we initially agreed upon with international organisations. They pledged to formulate this as a package solution. Nobody has so far raised any objections, including our American partners. We will see what comes of it in the near future.
As you know, the Americans have actually lifted restrictions, for example, on the delivery of Russian fertilisers to the global market. I hope this will also happen with regard to the export of Russian grain if they really want to improve the situation on the global food markets. As I have said, we are ready to do this right now. We can export 30 million tonnes of grain, and our export potential based on this year’s harvest will be 50 million tonnes.
Question: Mr President, a serious energy crisis is developing in Europe, which is discussing the possibility of Gazprom cutting off gas deliveries. The company has allegedly issued an official notification to one of its German clients, citing force majeure circumstances.
Are there grounds for accusing Russia of causing this energy crisis? Will Gazprom continue to honour its obligations
Vladimir Putin: First of all, Gazprom has always honoured, and will continue to honour its commitments.
There are no grounds at all for the attempts by our partners to shift or try to shift the blame for their own mistakes on Russia and Gazprom.
What is the situation with energy deliveries? In 2020, in the first half of 2020, gas cost 100 euros per 1,000 cubic metres in Europe. The price rose to 250 euros in the first half of 2021. Today it is 1,700 euros per 1,000 cubic metres of gas.
What is happening? I have spoken about this on numerous occasions, and I do not know if we should go into detail regarding the energy policies of European countries, which underrate the importance of traditional sources of energy and have put money on non-traditional energy sources. They are big experts on non-traditional relations, and they have also decided to make a bid for non-traditional energy sources like the sun and wind.
Last winter was long, there wasno wind, and that did it. Investment in the fixed assets of traditional energy producers has decreased because of previous political decisions: banks do not finance them, insurance companies do not insure them, local governments do not allocate land plots for new projects, and pipeline and other forms of transportation are not developing. This is a result of many years, probably a decade of this policy. This is the root cause of price hikes rather than any actions by Russia or Gazprom.
What is going on today? Until recently, we supplied gas to Europe without Turkiye: we supplied around 30 billion cubic metres a year to Turkiye, and 170 billion to Europe, 55 billion via Nord Stream 1, and, if memory serves me, 33 billion were supplied via Yamal-Europe, via the two strings that run through Ukraine. About 12 billion were delivered to Europe through Turkiye via TurkStream.
Ukraine suddenly announced that it was going to close one of the two routes on its territory. Allegedly because the gas pumping station is not under its control but on the territory of the Lugansk People’s Republic. But it found itself under the control of the Lugansk People’s Republic several months before, and they closed it just recently without any grounds. Everything was functioning normally there, no one interfered. In my opinion, they closed it simply for political reasons.
What happened next? Poland imposed sanctions on Yamal-Europe, which supplied 33 billion cubic metres of gas. They used to take 34, I think, 33–34 million cubic metres a day from us. They shut it down completely. But then we saw that they turned on the Yamal-Europe pipeline in reverse mode, and they started taking about 32 million a day from Germany. Where is the gas from Germany coming from? It is our Russian gas. Why from Germany? Because it turned out to be cheaper for the Poles. They used to get it from us at a very high price, closer to the market price, whereas Germany gets it from us 3–4 times cheaper than the market price under long-term contracts.
It is profitable for German companies to sell it to the Poles at a small premium. It is profitable for the Poles to buy it because it is cheaper than to buy it directly from us. But the volume of gas in the European market has decreased, and the total market price has gone up. Who has won? All Europeans only lost. This is the second point: Yamal-Europe.
So, first one of the routes in Ukraine was shut down, then Yamal-Europe was shut down, now Nord Stream 1, which is one of the main routes – we pump 55 billion cubic metres a year through it. There are five Siemens gas compressor stations working there, and one is on standby. One compressor had to be sent out for repairs. A repaired compressor was supposed to come from Canada, from the Siemens plant in Canada, to replace it. But it ended up under sanctions in Canada. So, one pumping station, just one piece of equipment was out of order because of scheduled maintenance work and it has not been returned from Canada.
Now we are being told that the unit will be delivered from Canada soon, but Gazprom does not have any official documents yet. We must certainly obtain them, because this is our property, it is the property of Gazprom. Gazprom should receive not only the hardware, not only the gas pumping unit, but also the accompanying documents, both legal and technical documentation. We must be able to see what Gazprom is taking – the turbine’s current condition as well as its legal status, whether it is under sanctions or not, what we can do with it, or maybe they are taking it back tomorrow. But that is not all.
The problem is that at the end of July, on July 26, I think – we can ask Gazprom – another turbine should be sent for routine maintenance, for repairs. And where will we get a replacement from? We do not know.
One more turbine is actually out of order because of some crumbling of its internal liner. Siemens has confirmed this. That leaves two operational units, which are pumping 60 million per day. So, if one more is delivered, fine, we will have two in operation. But if it is not, only one will be left, and it will pump only 30 million cubic meters per day. You can count how much time it will take to pump the rest. How is this Gazprom’s responsibility? What does Gazprom even have to do with this? They have cut off one route, then another, and sanctioned this gas pumping equipment. Gazprom is ready to pump as much gas as necessary. But they have shut everything down.
And they have fallen into the same trap with the import of oil and petroleum products. We hear all sorts of crazy ideas about capping the volume of Russian oil imports or the price of Russian oil. This is going to lead to the same situation as with gas. The result (I am surprised to hear people with university degrees saying this) will be the same – rising prices. Oil prices will spiral.
As for gas, there is another route we are ready to open, which is Nord Stream 2. It is ready to be launched, but they are not launching it. There are problems here as well, I discussed them with the Chancellor about six or maybe eight weeks ago. I raised this issue; I said that Gazprom had reserved the capacity, and that this capacity needed to be used, and it cannot be suspended in mid-air indefinitely.
The answer was that there were other issues on the agenda, more important things, so it is difficult for them to deal with this right now. But I had to warn them that then we would have to redirect half of the volume intended for Nord Stream for domestic consumption and processing. I raised this issue at the request of Gazprom, and Gazprom has actually already done it. Therefore, even if we launch Nord Stream 2 tomorrow, it will not pump 55 billion cubic meters, but exactly half that amount. And given that we are already halfway through this year, it would be just a quarter. Such is the supply situation.
But – I said this at the beginning of my answer to your question and I want to end with this – Gazprom has always fulfilled and will always fulfil all of its obligations, as long as, of course, anyone needs it. First, they themselves close everything, and then they look for someone to blame – it would be comical if it were not so sad.
Question: You spoke with Mr Erdogan today. He has repeatedly stated his readiness to arrange talks between you and Vladimir Zelensky. Has this issue surfaced today? Are you ready to meet with the President of Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin: President Erdogan is making a lot of efforts to create the necessary conditions for normalising the situation. It was during our talks in Istanbul that we actually reached an agreement, and it only remained to initial it. But, as you know, after that, when our troops, in order to create the right conditions, withdrew from central Ukraine, from Kiev, the Kiev authorities backed off on those agreements. These were agreements that had actually been achieved. So, you see that the final result depends, of course, not on intermediaries, but on the parties’ commitment to fulfil the agreements reached. And we can see today that the Kiev authorities have no interest in that.
As for Turkiye’s efforts, as well as other countries’ proposals – Saudi Arabia has offered its mediation services, and the United Arab Emirates, and they do have such capabilities – we are grateful to all our friends who are interested in resolving this crisis for providing their opportunities. Even their willingness to make some contribution to this noble cause is worth a lot. We are deeply grateful for that.
In the interview, I note how disingenuous the entire piece is, from moment of emailing me to request an interview (no thanks, not interested! I know how corporate hacks roll.); how they intentionally omitted any mention of Ukraine’s kill list, which I am on and which Rick Walker & colleagues specifically contacted the CBC about; their deceitful framing of my journalism (on the ground in the Donbas under Ukrainian bombing) as me being a duped “frontline soldier” in Russian researcher and journalist, Maxim Grigoriev (who I know and respect)’s plot to frame Ukraine as being overrun with Nazis (it is) and committing war crimes (Ukraine & its Nazis are)…and more, including the things CBC omits: Ukraine’s bombing of the DPR & LPR, targeting civilians, apartments, hospitals, schools, city streets, rescuers, etc…
CBC thinks its viewers are idiots, clearly.
I’d like to note, however, that since the smear, I’ve gotten many supportive emails, messages and comments, and an increase in people who ask to support me financially. So, thanks, CBC, and more importantly, thank all of you who support in any manner.
I’ll put related links at the bottom of this post.
As I wrote in a rebuttal to a Guardian smear, “Addressing “the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism, ”award-winning journalist and film maker, John Pilger, said (emphasis added):
“Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It’s a history few journalists talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising.
As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called ‘professional journalism’ was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment, objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalists. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media.
…The whole thing was entirely bogus. For what the public didn’t know, was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources. And that hasn’t changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories, domestic and foreign, and you’ll find that they’re dominated by governments and other establishment interests. That’s the essence of professional journalism.”
“I happen to agree with Eva’s take on Syria, but from a journalist’s perspective, the true importance of what she does goes beyond reporting from any single country. She challenges the accepted narrative–and that is the essence of journalism. Everything else is stenography. Budding foreign correspondents take note!!”
“The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative. So many people in the American press who write about the world are merely stenographers. The great qualification you need for a journalist is the confidence to go out and see for yourself, and believe that your eyes are actually telling you more than press releases from some other country.
It’s amazing to see how many people have built reputations as commentators on foreign countries and world affairs who have never been there, have no idea, beyond vague tropes, of what those countries are. The intellectual laziness of the American press in covering the world has never been as extreme as it is now. It’s just as dangerous in most what’s called NATO countries to be contradicting the narrative as it is in the United States.”
“Regime media may call themselves “news media,” but there is next to no actual journalism involved in their work. In that spirit, students at contemporary Canadian schools of “journalism” are in fact being trained in the methods of policing restive subjects with “unacceptable views”. Embracing “advocacy,” they have degenerated into mere practitioners of propaganda whose ultimate aim is the reproduction of the ideas of the ruling faction of the regime.
Regime media’s public scripts involve a regression to some of the most outmoded forms of propaganda seen since World War I. Their work involves a classically crude command structure: they tell people what to think, plain and simple. Then they tell people what to think about, and here the agenda-setting is particularly exclusive…”
Says the PM of a country which routinely prevents Russian media from reporting in Canada, and also a PM who supports Nazis in Ukraine and seemingly has no problem with a Canadian journalist (me) being on Ukraine's kill list… https://t.co/QiX0EYLZ9A
— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) May 19, 2022
Worth reading the report, this is only a glimpse of Ukraine's torture practices again any sort of dissenting voice… pic.twitter.com/5pHVsX0bDl
— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) July 4, 2022
And, how embarrassing for Brandy, in her attempt to discredit me she pushed the White Helmets narrative, discrediting herself 😆🤣😂🤯 pic.twitter.com/pKIWR6DBiz
— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) June 9, 2022
This outstanding report from Syria by Eva Bartlett penetrates the 'iron dome' of Western propaganda, also known as news. It is about a chemical attack that never happened in a country attacked, subverted and blockaded in your name.https://t.co/AX1Zwbg0g0
Ukraine Continues Killing Children in The Donetsk People’s Republic, Including With Western Weapons:
I just spent 2 hours with journalist Roman Kosarev at Emergency Services in Kievskiy district, Donetsk. The Ukrainian shelling was intense and relentless.
The building has blown out windows, sand-bagged windows to attempt to protect the workers. Five days ago, the director's… pic.twitter.com/4oLD7iTRqw
An FYI: Whether or not I contribute periodic opinion pieces to RT, I'll continue to write what I see/think. The "you're a Kremlin agent" thing doesn't work, nor the "you work for RT". My observations on #Moscow protests don't jive w MSM scripts; nothing to do w where I publish pic.twitter.com/s9KEepSrLb
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 