In October, three Palestinian journalists lost out on work and awards because of pressure from Israel lobby groups. The Thomson Reuters Foundation rescinded the Kurt Schork Award from Middle East Eye correspondent Shatha Hammad just two days after pro-Israel media watchdog, Honest Reporting, released a report describing her social media posts as anti-Semitic. Earlier in the month, Gazan photojournalists Soliman Hijjy and Hosam Salem were fired by TheNew York Times due to an Honest Reporting publication characterizing Facebook posts they made as anti-Semitic. Additionally, the BBC and Deutsche Welle have also terminated contracts with Palestinian journalists for similar reasons in the last year.
After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for the New York Times, I was informed via an abrupt phone call from the US outlet that they will no longer work with me in the future.
In response, more than 300 Palestinian journalists signed a letter denouncing what they called “targeted attacks on Palestinian journalists working in international organizations, by Zionist lobby groups.” The authors wrote in their statement:
[The Zionist institutions’] strategies are clear: they dig deep into journalists’ social media accounts, chasing after any expressions, statements, or even jokes said in childhood, taking them out of context and weaponizing them. What matters to these institutions is to continue to suffocate what remains of the air not contaminated by their bullets.”
As mainstream news outlets bend to Israel lobby pressure, Palestinian journalists are losing work and the Palestinian narrative is slowly being erased from the media spotlight.
HONEST REPORTING’S TIES TO ISRAEL
Honest Reporting has a deep relationship with the Israel lobby, military, and government. Described as “a pro-Israeli pressure group,” by American Journalism Review, the organization was founded in 2006 by Joe Hyams, a registered bureau speaker for the Israeli Embassy in the U.S., and Simon Plosker, the site’s editorial director. Plosker served in the Israeli military’s spokesperson’s unit and has worked with several pro-Israel organizations including the Jewish Agency, NGO Monitor, which targets NGOs for alleged anti-Israel bias, the United Nations Watch, which also attacks the UN for alleged anti-Israel bias, and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).
The group’s stated mission “is to ensure truth, integrity and fairness, and to combat ideological prejudice in journalism and the media, as it impacts Israel.” Honest Reporting does this by scouring news for content critical of Israel and then denouncing the media outlet or reporter on its website.
It also hosts trips to Israel jam-packed with a slew of speakers, including Israeli politicians, ambassadors and ex-military members. Several of the tour speakers are affiliated with Kohelet Policy Forum, an Israeli think tank that has promoted the discriminatory Jewish Nation-State Law.
A sample of Honest Reporting’s lineup of featured speakers reveals close ties to the Israeli gov’t
Honest Reporting’s staff is chock-full of Israel lobbyists and former members of the Israeli military. Until very recently, the organization’s CEO was Daniel Pomerantz, who was a civilian volunteer in the Israeli military. Pomerantz’s replacement, Jacki Alexander, came straight from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spending 15 years at the pro-Israel lobbying group, rising to become its regional director for the Southeastern United States.
Honest Reporting’s executive director, Gil Hoffman, is a reserve soldier in the Israeli military’s spokesperson unit. He has openly admitted that his organization coordinates with the Israeli government and other pro-Israel groups. This includes participating in government-run WhatsApp groups.
Senior international connector, David Mencer, led the Labour Friends of Israel in Britain for over a decade. He also boasts speech writing for former British prime ministers Boris Johnson, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown on his resume.
Raquela Karamson, Honest Reporting’s digital media specialist, previously worked in the Israeli military’s central command during the Second Intifada. And the organization’s lead designer, Bentzi Binder, served in the Israel military’s Givati combat infantry brigade.
Honest Reporting is classified as a tax-exempt organization in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. In its U.S. latest tax filing, it received more than $3 million in 2021 and donated $1.5 million for media reporting in the Middle East and North Africa. Given its tax-exempt status, Honest Reporting is not required to disclose the names of its grantees. But IRS filings reveal it does receive financial backing from pro-Israel millionaires like Israeli-American Council board chairman, Adam Milstein. In 2019, the Milstein Family Foundation contributed $10,000 to Honest Reporting.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA CONNECTIONS TO ISRAEL LOBBY
As Honest Reporting leads a campaign against Palestinian media professionals, those news organizations behind the recent terminations of Palestinian journalists also have suspicious ties to Israeli authorities.
Deutsche Welle currently employs Polina Gareav as its social media editor. She is also the programs manager at the Israeli government-funded Israel Public Policy Institute. Gareav previously worked as the news editor for the Israel military’s magazine, Bamahane.
Additionally, DW’s Middle East editor Jennifer Holleis previously worked for the Israeli-Swiss Association, which aims to build stronger partnerships between the two nations.
Eli Ovits, who worked as an assistant producer for the BBC in 2006, was also employed as an Israeli military spokesperson during that time. And former BBC editor Mark Berg was appointed as BICOM’s director in 2001. He stepped down from the role in 2002 and returned to the BBC, working on several flagship shows from 2005-2007.
A CLEAR DOUBLE STANDARD
Besides publishing a few photos for Al Jazeera English, former Times contributor Salem has not received any work since his termination in October.
“The matter is done to silence the voice of Palestinian journalists and to convey the Israeli narrative only,” Salem told MintPress News, referring to Honest Reporting’s involvement in his dismissal from the newspaper.
As Philip Weiss, founder of independent news website Mondoweiss’ noted, support for armed resistance against Israel’s occupation is widespread among Palestinians. “Sorting out journalists who have not expressed such views at some time is something like looking for Palestinian reporters who support Zionism,” Weiss wrote.
Yet while Palestinian journalists come under scrutiny for their social media or connections to resistance fighters, the same standard is not applied to Israeli journalists. The New York Times employed Ethan Bronner, Isabel Kershner, and David Brooks to write about Palestine while all three had children fighting in the Israeli military.
Following a trip to Gaza after an Israeli attack, former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren wrote on Facebook in 2012 that Palestinians seemed “ho hum” about the deaths of their children. Yet making such a bigoted statement did not cost her her job; the only consequence was that her employer insisted on overseeing and clearing her future social media posts.
The pro-Israel narrative has always been a mainstream media staple, but with the help of Honest Reporting, the gap in Palestinian voices in the news is significantly shrinking.
Rewriting history – essentially negating the historical relations between the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the ongoing struggle to free Palestine – serves the interests of mainstream Western media and their acolytes.
On January 1, 2022 – as South Africa buried one of its most illustrious sons and anti-apartheid icons, Archbishop Desmond Tutu – the hypocrisy of the corporate media was on full display. Reuters described him as “Africa’s ‘moral compass’.” Al Jazeera referred to him as “South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon.” CNN published articles referring to him as the “voice of justice.” and South Africa’s national conscience.” South Africa’s largest media outlet, SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) took the cake with an article titled: “Dalai Lama’s representative at Tutu’s funeral urges the world to think about China-Dalai Lama issue.”
While corporate media outlets literally trampled each other while competing to give the most glowing tribute to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they all shamelessly omitted his public and unwavering support to the people of Palestine and their daily struggle against the grip of Israeli occupation. Anyone with basic knowledge about the history of the Bishop would have expected his solidarity with Palestine to feature in any report on his life. There is simply no journalist or historian, worth their salt, who can talk about the Bishop and fail to mention his energetic and almost lifelong support of the Palestinian cause.
Desmond Tutu’s views and opinions on the Palestinian question are well documented; journalists do not need to dig too deep to find them. In an editorial published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2014, he pointed out the many parallels between the Israeli occupation and the apartheid government of South Africa, writing:
I have been to the Occupied Palestinian territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.”
A year earlier, the Bishop placed emphasis upon this comparison in an interview with The Washington Post, reminding readers that “What’s being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it’s the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa.”
Jewish activists holds a picture of Tutu during a flashmob in support of boycotting Israel in Tel Aviv, November 15, 2010. Photo | Activestills
Desmond Tutu was also a staunch supporter of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, for doing business with Israeli occupiers, he believed, dangerously perpetuated the status quo. In the Haaretz article, he pointed out:
Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of “normalcy” in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice. They are contributing to the perpetuation of a profoundly unjust status quo.”
At first glance, one would get the impression that the failure by mainstream media to mention this important fact about Bishop Tutu was possibly the result of excessive drinking during the festive period. While intoxicating beverages may have played a role in this slight of facts, such an omission is by design, courtesy of the South African and international media. Rewriting history – essentially negating the historical relations between the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the ongoing struggle to free Palestine – serves the interests of mainstream Western media and their acolytes.
Conveniently selective editing
The African National Congress (ANC) and its leaders have a profound and long-standing relationship with the people of Palestine. It has been cemented by the shared experience of being subjected to brutal and murderous regimes in their respective countries. Made uncomfortable by this solidarity, the Israel lobby has spared no efforts to diminish, discredit or erase this relationship from public view. To achieve their objective, they now target mainstream consumers of corporate media, the so-called drivers of public opinion. Far too many editors have fallen for these schemes, rendering themselves butchers of the truth and facts.
Distorting history – African history, in particular – does not start with Bishop Tutu. From the continent and beyond, we also witness how Nelson Mandela’s legacy is scrambled and nullified. How many corporate media editors would fight for front-row seats at the unveiling of a statue in Madiba’s honor but not whisper a single word regarding his criticism of Israel’s apartheid policies and love and admiration for the Cuban Revolution?
Unwilling to offer a complete and coherent version of history and global icons such as Bishop Tutu, the mainstream instead provides viewers a photo-shopped edition. No amount of doctoring, however, can erase the brave and morally upright stance that the Bishop took on the Palestinian question. The best way we can honor his memory and legacy is to follow in his principled support of the sons and daughters of Palestine who aspire for freedom.
To Bishop Tutu, I say, “Hamba Kahle Mkhonto!” (You lit the torch of resistance and we shall follow in your footsteps!)
Unsubstantiated Saudi state media claims are very specifically designed to inflame tensions and to make the supporters of Hamas, Iran and Syria doubt their leaders and what may be going on behind the scenes.
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA — Saudi state media outlets have been found to repeatedly report information, lacking sources or supporting evidence, in order to attack their political opposition in the Middle East. This can range from stories about deserters from Hamas to the utterly absurd fictions regarding alleged assassinations of high-ranking Iranian officials, which, taken together, constitute a pro-Israel, pro-Washington psyop.
This Wednesday, Saudi state broadcaster Al-Hadath claimed that an Iranian ‘Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Commander named Seyyed Mustafa Javad Ghaffari had been kicked out of Syria by the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, sparking speculation over a possible breakdown in relations between Tehran and Damascus. For Israeli and U.S. media, which have now taken the report at face value, it is an intriguing story. And it would be an interesting development, except for one small detail: there is not a shred of evidence to support the claims.
According to the original report on Al-Hadath, Commander Ghaffari had set up a “black market” by bypassing customs and smuggling goods into Syria; additionally, Ghaffari had allegedly admitted to storing weapons in prohibited areas inside of Syria. Later reports in Israeli media, quoted Saudi media as claiming that Assad had accused Ghaffari of violating Syrian sovereignty and hence had expelled him. In addition to this, the unnamed Saudi media source seemed to work off of the assumption that the Iranian commander was behind an attack on U.S. forces and their allies on October 20 at their al-Tanf base in Syria. According to Al-Hadath, Syria was unhappy specifically with the IRGC commander’s conspiring against the Israelis and U.S. forces that occupy their territory, owing to fears of being dragged into a regional war.
Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia’s broadcaster used biased language, in what should have been a professional report, demonstrating instantly that the outlet, Al-Hadath, was coming at the report from the state’s propagandistic perspective. On its website, its report concludes:
The source viewed the exclusion of Mustafa Ghaffari, who is following in the footsteps of Qassem Soleimani by establishing the Syrian Hezbollah militia, as a blow to Soleimani’s vision and dream of establishing a land bridge between Iran and Lebanon.
So who is this source? We don’t have a name or even a title. All we know is that Al-Hadath calls them someone that is familiar with the Syrian senior leadership. Lacking any further information, it is reasonable to ask the following questions: How does an enemy state to both Syria and Iran manage to acquire such information first? If this source exists, they clearly chose an enemy state to leak this information to, so why not an American or Israeli media outlet with more credibility? And finally, is there really any such source?
I spoke to Seyyed Mohammed Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, who says that the claims are “utter nonsense.” “All Iranian commanders are rotated, Hajj Javad isn’t the first,” Marandi explained. He also went on to say that “actually, the Iranian change in command happened weeks ago; if they [Saudi media] know so much why didn’t they say anything when it happened?”
A history of similar claims
Interestingly, this is far from the first time that such reports have emerged — reports that carry the potential to sow confusion and distrust amongst supporters of parties and nations that are enemies of Saudi Arabia.
On July 19, 2020, Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya published claims that high-ranking Hamas officials had been caught spying on the Gaza-based movement, including a Commander of the al-Qassam Brigade’s elite naval wing, said to be named Mohammed Abu Ajwa, who they claimed fled to Israel via boat after spying for Israel since 2009. The source for these claims was again unnamed and the allegations were denied strongly by Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem, who said that “the Al-Arabiya channel is promoting rumors that serve the aims of the occupation in destabilizing the home front in Gaza.” It is now 2021 and Israel has yet to even comment on these claims officially, which is strange considering that such a propaganda win for Israel would normally be weaponized by their political establishment. In addition to this, no one in Gaza has ever heard of this alleged commander.
As with the claims made about Syria expelling an IRGC Commander, there was a minuscule grain of truth to what was claimed. In the case of Syria’s “expulsion” of Iran’s commander, Javad Ghaffari did leave Syria weeks ago; and in the case of Hamas collaborators, the movement did arrest 16 individuals on the basis of spying for Israel. In fact, the report for Al-Arabiya quoted the Ministry of Information for Hamas, to substantiate its claims of Hamas members being arrested.
The Times of Israel even claimed that it was a big deal that “Hamas admits” one of its own fled to the Israeli side, after Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk had stated as much, a fact already acknowledged to be true. This demonstrates the sensationalism of Israeli media at the time. During the interview quoted, conducted with Marzouk for Al-Mayadeen TV, the Hamas leader said:
They are isolated members. There is no connection between them. They are not commanders in the [Hamas military wing] Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, nor are they commanders in Hamas… What the occupation claims, that they are commando officers or senior naval officers, is absolutely false.”
The Times of Israel, along with other Israeli media, was quick to parrot unsubstantiated Saudi claims
It is important to know that Hamas regularly arrests collaborators and sentences many of them to death. This is not uncommon, nor is it out of the ordinary for members of the group to be blackmailed by Israel to work for them. To become a member of Hamas is not a difficult task and its membership is wide-ranging inside Gaza.
An Iranian commander assassinated, or not really
Another example of bogus claims made by Saudi State TV is that of an Iranian commander being assassinated in Syria’s Eastern Deir Ezzor province in November of 2020. In this case, Al-Arabiya added sketchy details to a story built on weak foundations. The alleged assassination of an Iranian Quds force commander would have had serious implications, especially as some sources claimed that it came as a result of a U.S. coalition force bombing campaign.
At the time I tracked the report to its origin, discovering that the allegations had emerged from a Syrian-opposition media group, called “Step News Agency,” which published a report on the alleged incident on November 29, 2020. The article claimed that the agency’s reporter, Abdul Rahman al-Ahmad, who was said to have been based in the Eastern Deir Ezzor province of Syria “obtained information” that indicated a vehicle belonging to Iran’s elite Quds forces was targeted and destroyed. The car was, according to this report, targeted near the Salbi area, in the Suwaiya Desert, after having crossed into Syria from a designated area for militias, near the Al-Qaim crossing. The initial report noted only that two were said to have died in the attack, also claiming that the week prior to this, unidentified aircraft – suspected to have belonged to the U.S. coalition – had launched 10 raids on pro-Iranian militia sites.
Israeli media outlets then ran with the claims despite having nothing but the word of a single Syrian opposition journalist to go on. Israel Hayom News, for instance, cited developed claims from Syrian-opposition media that instead of two Iranians having been killed, it was “a logistics officer in the IRGC’s elite Quds Force,” as well as two other Iranians, who had been assassinated.
Al-Arabiya Newsthen claimed to have obtained the identity of the commander, naming him as “Muslim Shahdan.” This was then published by the likes of the Daily Mail, which also repeated the claim made by the Turkish-based Anadolu Agency that there were now three IRGC members killed inside the car allegedly targeted in Deir Ezzor, Syria.
There was never any photographic evidence, witness testimony, approximate timing, video evidence, or any official confirmation of exactly where in Deir Ezzor this attack took place. There was no continuity through the various contradictory claims made by all the different media outlets and no one could even determine how many people actually died in the reported attack.
The story originated with Syrian opposition media groups, who have a clear anti-Iran agenda and have continued to peddle false claims of Iranian forces being killed in virtually every single Israeli attack on Syria, figures that Israel never clarifies and for which we never see proof. These groups claim to have sources in Syrian government-controlled areas, even naming those individuals occasionally. The question also must be posed in this case that if the Syrian government knows these journalists, how is it that they are still able to obtain sensitive information on military operations and casualties of individuals known only to a few to be in the country, in top-secret locations? Are we to believe that these unnamed sources are never identified and that in Syria anyone can know sensitive information about the government at any time without any questions asked? Also, how is it that these opposition journalists are the first people to report casualties, often before there is time for local medical staff to declare deaths?
There was then the story that was looped in with the alleged assassination attack, claiming that U.S. coalition forces attacked 10 Iranian sites in Abu Kamal, but according to the initial reports from Syrian opposition media, that had happened a week prior to the assassination. Israel Hayom and the Daily Mail failed to specify when the two separate attacks took place, making it seem as if it all had occurred on the same night. Again there are no specifics given here, just the repeated claims from Syrian opposition media.
The allegations that were made about weapons having been transported, in the car of the commander that was allegedly attacked, also seemed very unlikely. Why would an Iranian Quds Force commander be traveling in a car packed full of weapons and why do a weapons transfer in a regular car carrying a high-ranking commander in it? Why not just transport the weapons in trucks? These small details made the story seem less believable, especially when no one had been able to officially identify the two, three, or four Iranians said to have been killed.
As spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Saeed Khatibzadeh, later told Iran’s Mehr News that these allegations were false, yet many Western media outlets failed to publish this information. Talking to a Syrian Arab Army military source at the time, I was also informed that they were “not aware of any such attack happening”.
Saudi media playing a pro-Israel, pro-Western agenda
The examples above demonstrate a clear pattern with the media of Saudi Arabia and the way in which their “unnamed sources” are taken at face value and repeated verbatim throughout Western and Israeli media. The claims clearly serve a political agenda, but not just any agenda.
Such claims are very specifically designed to inflame tensions and to make the supporters of Hamas, Iran and Syria doubt their leaders and what may be going on behind the scenes. They play on issues that are normally dealt with behind closed doors and it is well understood that the average consumer of news will not have the time or resources to dig into such stories with the intent of uncovering the truth.
Israeli officials have now twice traveled to Saudi Arabia in the past year, that we know of, not only raising suspicions of unofficial cooperation between Riyadh and Tel Aviv, but confirming that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is warming up to the idea of openly normalizing ties with Israel, while the closeness of the United States government to the Saudis has long been apparent. Hence for Saudi state media to run media operations, as a form of psychological warfare, against their political foe, is not much of a surprise. Yet, for outlets across the world to choose to regurgitate the claims made by Saudi media, verbatim and without any critical take, is a real indictment of them and demonstrates a lack of journalistic credibility on their part.
In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.
WASHINGTON — The Washington Post’s glaring conflicts of interest have of late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article denouncing a supposed attempt to “soak” billionaires in taxes. Written by star columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued that Walmart’s wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government would “destroy [billionaires’] fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.” Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth, something they have been accusedof onmorethanoneoccasion.
There was considerable speculation online as to whether Bezos himself wrote the piece, so blatantly in his interest it was. Unfortunately, this sort of speculation has raged ever since the Amazon CEO bought the newspaper in 2013 for $250 million.
Being owned by the world’s richest individual does not mean that TheWashington Post and its employees are rolling in dough themselves. Far from it: Bezos’ revolution at the newspaper, which has led to both increased pageviews and company value, has been largely based on simply squeezing workers harder than before. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, management acknowledged that Post reporters are pushed to produce almost four times as many stories as their peers at The New York Times. Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from slightly different angles and with different headlines in order to generate more clicks, and thus more revenue. Thanks to new technology, reporters’ every keystroke is monitored and they are under constant pressure from management not to fall behind. The technique of constant surveillance is not unlike what hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse workers who wear GPS devices or Fitbit watches have to endure.
Bezos is currently worth a shade under $200 billion, with his wealth nearly doubling since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With such a fortune to protect, the obvious solution is to acquire media outlets to control the narrative in the face of rising public disenchantment with rampaging inequality. Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that this is a common tactic among the super wealthy. “Billionaire ownership of major news outlets is but another tool the billionaire class deploys for the purpose of wealth defense. It gives them the power to set the terms of the agenda and influence public opinion in their favor,” Ocampo told MintPress.
But Bezos is far from the only senior figure with questionable connections. The company’s CEO, Frederick Ryan, was a senior member of the Reagan White House, rising to become the 40th president’s assistant and later the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He later became CEO of Politico. In the Post’s announcement of the hiring move, they themselves noted that among Ryan’s biggest achievements at their rival outlet was “helping the news organization win a lucrative advertising deal with Goldman Sachs and host presidential debates before the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.”
Another neoconservative in a key position is Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. Under Hiatt’s tenure, anti-establishment columnists like Dan Froomkin were let go and warmongers like the late Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Ignatius moved in. “After being so wrong on such a huge story as the invasion of Iraq, hawkish ideologue Fred Hiatt should have been terminated as editorial page editor,” Jeff Cohen, former Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College and founder of media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told MintPress, adding:
In a decent media system, someone who has been so inaccurate on so many issues as Hiatt would not be in a powerful media position two decades later. Powerful voices in U.S. media often argue that society should be a ‘meritocracy’ — with advancement based on ability or achievement. Hiatt proves that the U.S. corporate media system is just the opposite — a ‘kakistocracy’ — where the unqualified and unprincipled rise to the top.”
Other highly questionable hires include Jerusalem correspondent Ruth Eglash, who spent seven years putting out content that was often indistinguishable from Israeli government propaganda. At the time of her hire, activists highlighted the conflicts of interest she had, given her husband’s job as a PR rep for the country. In November 2020, Eglash quit the Post to become chief of communications for the Israeli ambassador to the United States and United Nations. “My experiences as a journalist have afforded me a great instinct of how to better tell Israel’s unique story,” she said, adding “a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and showcasing Israel’s successes to the world has [sic] always been a passion of mine.”
At the center of the news cosmos
The Washington Post is among the most powerful, influential, and widely-read media outlets in the United States. Its position as the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital reinforces its place as a thought-leading, agenda-setting publication. Whatever appears in the Post will likely be in the rest of the nation’s media, so authoritative is its reputation.
There are no more important pages than its editorial section, where its board comes together to lay out the collective wisdom of its most senior journalists and editors. Through its editorial page, the senior staff lay out the newspaper’s line to others and broadcast what they see as the correct position on the most pressing issues of the day. Hence, editorials are essentially instructions to their well-heeled and influential readers in D.C. and around the country on what to think about any given subject.
This is particularly troublesome as, despite the fact the newspaper presents itself as a defender of liberty and a champion of the people (its tagline is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”), the editorial board has represented the interests of the powerful over ordinary Americans on issue after issue. The following editorials are examples of this in action.
Could we be any more pro-war?
The Post’s editorial board has generally been extremely supportive of whatever conflicts the U.S. has started, and has consistently warned against ending the violence. In a 2015 editorial entitled “Drone strikes are bad; no drone strikes would be worse,” it balked at the idea of stopping the highly controversial bombing campaigns throughout the Middle East and North Africa. By that time, President Barack Obama was bombing seven countries simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Post argued that drones had successfully defeated Al-Qaeda and that the use of drone strikes “shouldn’t be up for review.”
In recent times, the rising newspaper of record has also been a driver of increased hostilities with China, describing Beijing’s military’s moves in the South China Sea as “provocations” against the U.S., spreadingrumors about the COVID-19 virus’s origin, and demanding American companies like Apple “resist China’s tyranny” and begin to relocate their production facilities elsewhere to punish the Chinese government.
On Latin America too, the editorial board has proven to be extremely hawkish. It immediately endorsed a U.S.-backed far-right coup in Bolivia in 2019, insisting that “there could be little doubt who was ultimately responsible for the chaos: newly resigned President Evo Morales.” The Post condemned him for refusing to “cooperate” with “Bolivia’s more responsible leaders,” who were organizing his overthrow, and chastised him for using the word “coup” for what was going on. Morales, they concluded, was a victim of his own “insatiable appetite for power” and his inability to “accept that a majority of Bolivians wanted him to leave office.”
In 2002, the paper also supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, falsely claiming the Venezuelan president had ordered the shooting of thousands of demonstrators and absurdly asserting that “there’s been no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with [it].
The WaPo editorial board’s less than subtle take on drone warfare
In more recent times, it has demanded more action to unseat Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, including supporting U.S. sanctions that have now killed over 100,000 people, according to a United Nations rapporteur. The Post’s justification in 2017 was that Maduro was on the verge of carrying out his own “coup,” “abolish[ing] the opposition-controlled legislature, cancel[ing] future elections and establish[ing] a regime resembling that of Cuba’s” — none of which has happened. In its efforts to oust the democratically-elected leader, the Post even aligned itself with Donald Trump and endorsed far-right coup leader Juan Guaidó as “Venezuela’s legitimate president,” a position some polls have suggested as little as 3% of Venezuelans hold.
The editorial board has expressed its desire to see regime change in leftist-controlled Nicaragua, too. President Daniel Ortega, it claims, is “taking a sledgehammer” to opposition against him, while it also demands that the U.S., which has done nothing but offer “mild verbal opposition” to his rule, do more. What happened to the U.S. of the 1980s, “which spent so much money and political capital to promote democracy in Nicaragua?” they ask sadly.
In reality, of course, the U.S. is currently trying to strangle Nicaragua’s economy through sanctions. And in the 1980s, Washington’s “democracy promotion” agenda included the funding, training and arming of fascist death squads who wrought havoc across Central America, killing hundreds of thousands in genocides from which the area may never recover. The architects of the violence were found guilty in U.S. courts, while the Reagan administration was tried and convicted by the International Court of Justice on 15 counts that amount to international terrorism. That the Post’s editorial board remembers that history as “promoting democracy” is particularly worrisome.
Fake news, fake newspapers
The Washington Post was the key supporter of fake news detection system “PropOrNot,” which was almostimmediatelyexposed as a fake operation itself, forcing the newspaper to publicly distance itself from its own reporting. Yet it was the Post itself that perpetuated the most notorious and damaging fake news story of the 21st century: the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction hoax and Saddam Hussein’s fictional links to al-Qaeda.
In a highly influential editorial entitled “Irrefutable” the Post wrote that, after watching Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech at the United Nations, “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction… And [Powell] offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al-Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe.”
“No page was more crucial in propelling the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq than the Post‘s editorial page — which beat the drums for war in a couple dozen editorials in the six months leading up to the invasion,” Cohen told MintPress, adding:
The Post’s op-ed page was almost as cartoonishly wrong on Iraq, offering little dissent or corrective to the editorial page’s jingoism — especially in that pivotal media moment following Colin Powell’s error-filled U.N. speech. While the editorial page offered up its ‘Irrefutable’ verdict, the op-ed page’s liberal voice offered an embarrassing column, headlined ‘I’m Persuaded’.”
The Post played a major role in manufacturing consent for the deadliest war since Vietnam, publishing 27 editorials in support of an invasion. As with PropOrNot, it backtracked long after the dust had settled, apologizing for its role in amping the public up to accept that war. Yet to this day it continues to push for others.
Surveillance state champion
Despite telling its readers that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post certainly has a negative opinion about those individuals who work to shine a light on illegal government activities. In 2016, its editorial board demanded “no pardon for Edward Snowden,” condemning his backers like filmmaker Oliver Stone and expressing outrage that Snowden had revealed that the U.S. was spying on Russia and carrying out cyberattacks against China. In its long denunciation, it insisted that the NSA’s massive surveillance operation against the American public resulted in “no specific harm, actual or attempted.” As such, the editorial board made history by becoming the first newspaper ever to call for the imprisonment of its own source, on whose back and information it won a Pulitzer Prize.
If Snowden was not worthy of defending, then it is no surprise that the Post’s editorial team expressed their delight when Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, declaring it a “victory for the rule of law.” “Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long overdue for personal accountability,” they wrote, spreading baseless conspiracy theories that the Australian publisher worked with Russia to hack American democracy.
After relying on him as a source, the Post went after Snowden and any who dared to back him
The Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa, which offered asylum to the Western dissidents, also came under fire. In 2013, the Post (falsely) labeled Correa an “autocrat” and “the hemisphere’s preeminent anti-U.S. demagogue.” They also directly threatened him, writing that, “If Mr. Correa welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate that Yanqui-baiting has its price.”
Of course, the Post is now intimately linked with the national security state after Amazon signed a number of deals to provide intelligence and computing services to several three-letter agencies. In 2020, the Bezos-owned Amazon Web Services signed a new deal with the CIA worth tens of billions of dollars.
The editorial board has also gone up to bat for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) multiple times, insisting that it is “the wrong target for outrage,” presenting the agency as key in the battle against art theft and nuclear proliferation. “Abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal,” the board wrote in 2018, despite the fact that the U.S. survived without the agency perfectly well until its creation in 2003.
Attacking any pro-people policy
The Washington Post has aggressively attempted to beat back any new political movements challenging the establishment. Chief among them has been the one around Bernie Sanders, for whom the newspaper has reserved a special ire. In 2016, it famously ran 16 negative stories on Sanders in the space of 16 hours and has used its fact-checking page to relentlessly undermine him, sometimes to bizarre effect.
“Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own numbers contradict that,” read the headline of one article, which detailed how his average donation was actually $27.89, not $27. It also gave his statement that six men (one of whom is Bezos) hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population “three Pinocchios” — the designation just below the most egregious lie. This was because, they argued, billionaires’ wealth is tied up in stocks, not money itself, and most people own essentially nothing. Why this disproved his assertion they did not explain. Going undisclosed is that both Bezos and the Post’s chief fact-checker Glen Kessler, who is the scion of a fossil fuel baron, would stand to lose a fortune if Sanders were elected.
In 2020, the Post was no less hostile to Sanders, publishing an editorial headlined “We should pay more attention to the Democrats who pay attention to reality,” which stated that “Mr. Sanders promises unlimited free stuff to everyone; other candidates propose smarter, more targeted approaches.”
The Post’s higher-ups have been careful to oppose virtually every piece of progressive or pro-people policy proposals. Chief among them has been healthcare. The United States is alone in the developed world in not offering some kind of universal healthcare to its population. Its privatized system is multiple times more expensive than that of comparable countries and has the worst outcomes in the West. Yet the board has consistently scare-mongered its readers, claiming “Single-payer health care would have an astonishingly high price tag,” and attacking Medicare-For-All proponents running for office. “Why go to the trouble of running for president to promote ideas that can’t work?” it asked rhetorically, before going on to insist that moving towards a healthcare system like that of Canada, Japan or Western Europe does not meet a “baseline degree of factual plausibility.”
On education, it has been just as regressive. “There are consequences to making college free,” it warned readers. Chief among these would be that private universities would make less money, which, apparently should be a major concern. “Forgiving student loans the wrong way will only worsen inequality,” ran the headline of another editorial, in which the board pretended to be ultra-left elite-hating radicals, arguing that we should not make college free because Ivy League graduates would benefit the most (around one-third of the Post’s editorial team attended an Ivy League school). It also feigned a far-left position on charter schools, pretending that essentially privatizing schools and handing them over to businesses to run would solve racial inequality in America, and that anyone who opposed them (like teachers’ unions) was no progressive.
Perhaps the most blatant conflict of interest the Post has displayed is in their committed opposition to a wealth tax. “Elizabeth Warren wants a ‘wealth tax.’ It might backfire,” they wrote, making a series of bizarre and illogical arguments against the plan, such as immigrants will stop wanting to come to the U.S. if such a tax is imposed (the threshold for paying a wealth tax is $50 million). Five months later, the board reaffirmed their position: “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich,” they wrote, claiming that rich people “can afford the best accountants and lawyers,” and so taxing them is presumably impossible.
Of course, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has every reason to go all out to prevent a wealth tax gaining traction. A CNBCstudy calculated that Bezos would be forced to pay $5.7 billion annually if Warren’s tax plans came to fruition.
The Post has also taken a firm stand against serious regulation of monopolies, decrying a supposed “antitrust onslaught” against Google, spearheaded by simplistic “break-them-up” rhetoric from dishonest actors. In 2016, it also lambasted Sanders for his “oversimplified,” “crowd-pleasing” demagoguery on Wall Street regulation, insisting that there has actually been widespread reform of the financial sector since 2008, making another crash unlikely.
Unsurprisingly for an outlet owned by a poverty-wage employer, the Post has also consistently opposed a national $15 minimum wage. In March, it categorically stated that “[a] $15 minimum wage won’t happen” and Democrats should stop trying to make it happen. Instead, they advised, they should “practice the art of the possible.” This, the board explained, meant falling in line behind Arkansas arch-Republican Senator Tom Cotton to support his proposals for a creeping state-by-state rise to $10.
On the climate, too, the Post has pushed extremely regressive positions, opposing a Green New Deal outright and suggesting the atmosphere be turned into a giant free market where polluters can trade credits and speculate. “The left’s opposition to a carbon tax shows there’s something deeply wrong with the left,” they wrote. They also endorsed the highly controversial process of fracking. Seeing as the Post’s editorial board is littered with former employees of the notorious climate-change denyingWall Street Journal, its stance is perhaps not surprising.
On COVID, the Post has consistentlyopposedteachers’ unions calls to keep schools closed, as well as standing against $2,000 checks. A universal payout is a “bad idea” they stated, but one “whose time has come because of politics, not economics.” So committed was the editorial team’s opposition to the idea of helping the poor that it presented Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a voice of sanity in Washington.
This does not mean that the Post was against direct payments to all people. In fact, all Post employees received a $2,021 bonus from management in January as a gesture of appreciation for their work during the pandemic. Two grand for me, not for thee.
Junk-food news
The point of a fourth estate is that it is supposed to shine a light on the powerful and hold them to account. But when corporate media are largely owned and sponsored by the super wealthy themselves, the claim that this is what they do is increasingly hard to maintain. In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.
While The Washington Post presents itself as an adversarial publication standing up to power, the fact that its senior staff constantly comes to such a hardline neoliberal elitist consensus on so many issues shows how little ideological diversity there is among its staff. Democracy dies at The Washington Post editorial board.
This is largely written on reflection of the so-called called Covid-19 crisis and lockdowns and looming world conflict.
A Comedy Of Errors
Throughout lockdown and particularly so recently, I’ve found it difficult to switch off and enjoy the outdoor things I used to, like cycling.
Last year, I wrote quite a few articles about the continued shutdown and I tend to find writing about it drains my energy. The frustration with other people who can’t see what’s happening and the worry about where this is leading has been quite stressful. I suppose many of us are in a similar boat and some far worse off.
Rather than venture out as much as I used to, recently I’ve been taking my mind off things in the evening by listening to music and watching old comedy clips.
I recently got into the Beach Boys and was amazed at the composition and complexity of some of their music. The talent and inspiration behind such songs fascinates me.
Similarly, I’ve been exploring certain comedy acts further and branching into stuff I’ve never seen or knew existed. Comedy always relaxes and inspires me.
This Laurel and Hardy five-minute clip I think is amazing and I often watch it when I want a very short release from the stresses and strains of the day. It has an innocence and charm from a bygone era.
I like a lot of the older British humour too but just lately I’ve been drawn to a series of American shows which took place just a little before my time, during a period around 50 years ago. I stumbled across this the other day while searching for another comedy act.
The Roasts
These were a series of panels made up mainly of actors, comedians, singers, sportsmen (and women) and even politicians where on each show one celebrity would be ‘roasted’ by the others.
These were hilarious, mainly for the sledgehammer wit and insults. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Muhammad Ali, Ronald Reagan among many featured. I recommend you click onto Don Rickles, Foster Brooks and Ruth Buzzi for what I think are the funniest.
The humour was often, non-politically correct, sometimes racial – and yes, over the top.
But the point I make is that the panels were diverse, and whether Jew, black or Italian, man, woman, drunk or sober, they all gave as good as they got. The humour was also self -depreciating and they were all great friends.
Unlike today’s virtual-signalling celebrities, they didn’t gloss over their differences or self-censor. In a sort of way, I would say it celebrated American culture and diverse heritages as it was clear once the insults ended, they all had a mutual respect for each other regardless.
Even Ronald Reagan, whom many today won’t be a great fan of, seemed to have an honest warmth about him and was comfortable within the diverse panel and evenmore diverseinsults. I suppose you could say there was equality as they all got equally insulted.
Above all, the material was highly intelligent and clever — in my view the best I’ve seen.
Contrast this with today’s comedy entertainment, which is obsessed with pandering to and patronising minority groups with PC. One joke vaguely out of line and you’re cancelled.
Anyway, I am confident that at least some of the above material will have you in stitches.
Moving towards a more serious note, all this got me thinking further of the uniform world we now inhabit compared to the intelligence, creativity and wit back then.
We just don’t hear and see such music and comedy these days. This, in my mind, is one sign something has gone wrong at many levels of society.
Anyway, I’ve written previously about the reasons for the decline but thought I would tie it together to get a fuller sense of where we are today and why. This is largely written on reflection of the so-called called Covid-19 crisis and lockdowns and looming world conflict.
The Symptoms
In the UK, I see a nation of people who’ve retreated into a shell. Many, particularly of the less well-off who’ve been more directly affected by lockdowns are confused, fearful and distracted.
Others seem oblivious to the wider suffering, sitting in large houses, yet are terrified of catching Covid-19, being the first to roll up their sleeve for the experimental ‘vaccine’.
I’ve experienced this strange, alarming mentality at first-hand, among my family and friends. There is a distinct lack of empathy for others, the perception that it’s all necessary for the greater good.
Many people are incapable of weighing up basic evidence and would rather leave decisions to the government and their ‘experts’. The destructive effects to the whole fabric of society, and a year into the madness, they don’t have the faintest clue about the dark deliberate motives involved.
Many people of all classes and backgrounds are consumed by group-think and by the belief they have to belong and conform to a group.
People, especially during lockdowns, are increasingly becoming divided and suspicious of each other. That suspicion is not directed towards the correct target, those who rule and make decisions for us.
Pointless virtual-signalling, the obsession with ‘diversity’, has created an uncomfortable and divisive climate, led by an out-of-touch celebrity culture. Nowadays you can’t out of interest even ask a person about their family heritage without fear of causing offence to the PC police.
All this in turn has created a pushback and misdirected hostility towards immigrants, foreigners and other groups.
Today, rather than be concerned about the destructive lockdowns or looming conflict in the Middle East or with Russia, people are more interested spending their free-time debating Meghan Markle or Piers Morgan’s tantrums.
Nuanced debate on serious matters and respect towards the views of others is largely absent. Cancel culture and ignorant Twitter mobs rule.
Individual creativity, free-thinking and intelligence are being sucked out of life. Conform culture, a pampered, fearful and dumbed-down populace prevails. Those are just some of the problems I see.
We now live in a society completely divorced from what’s really going on around us.
The future has never looked bleaker.
The Causes
These have been quietly ongoing for many decades, the current crisis exposing how far we’ve declined. Many of these overlap and interconnect somewhat but I identify these as my main observations.
Education
Poor education is a key cause, obvious to me even over a few decades. I wrote about this in detail here but in the past many children received a good grounding in the core subjects. Maths, English and science but also including history, geography and critical thinking. Decades ago, there was a tendency to require students to think and problem solve.
Now it’s more about dumbed- down qualifications and league tables.
Hence, during this crisis, many under 40s can’t or won’t interpret a graph or understand basic statistics or probabilities. They don’t have the creativity or structured thought to consider opposing arguments.
They can’t grasp basic scientific processes. They don’t have the ability to compare and contrast historical events and learn from them.
They have travelled all over the world but know not where they’ve been. And as I said above, they accept what they are told to think.
As a result, they lack curiosity and a thirst for knowledge and truth. There are some exceptions of course but this is largely the reason we are where we are.
Money, Status, Family, Technology
In the past, I feel more people were content with having financial security but enjoying a balanced life of work and family and outdoor pursuits. They let their kids go out without supervision.
Nowadays with social media, many adults are more concerned with their Twitter profiles. They are focused very much on their careers and way up the corporate ladder. This is understandable in a way as people wish to provide financial security for their families. However, there are too many distractive influences and pressures.
Nowadays people aren’t satisfied with one car or one laptop. They take on a debt whereas decades ago, people saved up. Unlike the past, holidays are regarded as a right rather than a treat.
Of course, where debt is available and manageable, that’s fine. But I think the balance has gone and explains our attitudes and sense of self-entitlement reflected in wider behaviour.
Even before the lockdown, many children in recent years have been pampered, not allowed out on their own and are addicted to their phones.
Most parents of my age will have noticed the difference between the freedom and self-expression we had compared to kids in today’s risk-adverse society.
The result of all this is that children are less resilient and physically and mentally prepared to become healthy, well-adjusted adults.
Media Propaganda
This has been covered extensively on this site over the years and requires little explanation.
Mainstream media nowadays is owned by a few press barons in the pockets of governments, intelligence services, big financial corporations and pharma. They are totally controlled.
The main things are the dominance mainstream has over the narrative from Covid-19 to Syria and the ability to sensationalise events, which ‘divides and rules’. And poor journalist standards and coverage.
In this background, with the other factors I mention, it’s easy to see why people accept what they are told and take reports from BBC correspondents as ‘expertise’.
Media coverage of Brexit, immigration and Meghan Markle are designed to divide and distract the public away from more pressing concerns the government of the day don’t want discussed.
In the past, there was a little more media independence, less trivia and investigative journalists with some courage and gravitas.
While I don’t think we ever had a decent press, I think half- intelligent people could at least discern the good journalism from the dross.
Now, it’s virtually all the same dross dressed up as liberal or conservative leaning and factual which a largely unsuspecting, dumbed-down public accept.
Crime And Perception
Corruption is everywhere but it just isn’t called corruption in the West. I wrote about it here.
One thing I’ve noted is that we’ve developed an inertia towards wrong-doing. We complain about fraudulent scam calls and illegal immigrants but don’t call out large-scale corruption and wars abroad pursued by elites. It’s almost as if we think they have mitigating circumstances because they have stressful jobs in running the country.
Without exception, after these events, we learn of the sheer criminality involved.
I often come across people who manage to recognise a fraud or an illegal regime change war which has killed millions.
The politicians claim it was a ‘mistake’ but they were right in the overall scheme. Yet, western publics can’t understand the seriousness or translate it into prison time.
And it goes on and on.
Hence why Covid-19 and lockdown narratives and the collateral damage have been entertained for far too long.
The reasons for this attitude towards crime are linked to other points here, education and media indoctrination. But perhaps among the public, a general lack of interest and empathy, them struggling with their own hectic lives.
Groupthink
Groupthink is everywhere, especially big workplaces. This illness has now reached the general population through the dissemination of bad science and lockdown measures.
It is destructive and could kill us.
Groupthink crept into my last workplace and has been there ever since. My previous article goes into detail on this.
Anyway, putting the deliberately engineered reset agenda aside, the experience I had in the workplace then is very similar to what’s happening at a national level. Loads of useful idiots trying to climb the greasy pole, unaware of the big picture.
As I said above, people cling to ideology and causes which in the grand scheme are irrelevant. They are being played, being distracted and becoming divided by government policy and media reporting. But they will realise when the life-changing disaster which is reset unfolds further.
Nannying, Political Correctness, Poor Problem-Solving.
As is clear from the above, we live in a nanny state, many people incapable of thinking and acting for themselves. But they are not finished with us yet.
PC and nannying has taken over. I see this most prevalent in workplaces and in recent years has invaded all areas of our life, particularly in the last year.
I witnessed all this in my last job, an organisation which resolved financial disputes.
Our very diverse organisation introduced a restructure to improve efficiency. When that went tits-up, they rolled out endless ‘unconscious bias’ and diversity and inclusion training courses, presumably to distract from the disastrous restructure.
Because of the stresses and strains of the way the organisation was being destroyed, mental health issues among staff went through the roof.
The company’s mental health support network proclaimed that resilience among staff was the issue and prescribed ‘resilience’ training courses and advised anti-depressants if staff members’ symptoms persisted.
As in all walks of life, rather than problem-solving the root causes, they were fire-fighting the symptoms and blaming the staff becoming ill through their policies.
I had anxiety/stress issues at the time, but in the end told the organisation that they were causing this and that of hundreds of other staff.
I told them to shove their nannying tendencies and anti-depressant pills where the sun don’t shine.
They backed off and my anxiety disappeared overnight. A true story.
Does any of this sound familiar to what’s happening now?
What Can We Do?
There’s no magic wand. But for starters you can tell them to shove the vaccine.
But society generally may have to go through the process of being shocked into realisation of the disaster unravelling, clear to those of us who maintain a functioning brain.
We should be sympathetic to those who don’t but who will one day be forced to engage theirs.
Meanwhile us truth-seekers should all unite and not become distracted by issues which in the grand scheme don’t matter. On the lockdown sceptic and anti-war spectrum, there are differing viewpoints but we all want the same outcome.
In any event, we should all watch the clips above and marvel at the times when wit, intelligence and creativity prevailed.
If you are not sufficiently amused, I’ll provide a refund.
After a decade of bombing, invasions, exoduses and economic strife, it is clear that there are precious few winners in the Syrian Civil War — or from the rest of the Arab Spring, for that matter.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA — This March marks the 10-year anniversary of the Arab Spring and the protests that rocked Syria, which were a starting point for the ongoing civil war. That conflict has led to over half a million deaths and nearly 13 million people displaced, according to some estimates.
Now, after 10 years of attempts to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad, it appears that many in the U.S. government and media are quietly conceding defeat.
“We tell Syria’s human stories so that the ‘victors’ don’t write its history,” ran the headline of a CNN article marking the anniversary. Who the victors are is not spelled out explicitly, although it is clear that the reference is to the Syrian government. In explaining the reasons for the violence, the article tells us:
The Assad regime gunned down those who called for a peaceful transition to democracy. Gulf countries sent in suitcases of cash with a wink and a nod towards more religiously conservative fighting units. Assad let former al-Qaeda members and other criminals out of jail. The U.S., at the peak of its involvement, half-heartedly trained some ‘moderate’ rebels, many of whom went on to join the ranks of extremist groups.
Thus, Assad is presented as an ally of al-Qaeda, while forces the U.S. and its allies “half-heartedly” supplied and trained register merely as “religiously conservative fighting units” and “moderate rebels,” inverting reality on its head.
The New York Times was less cryptic in its description of the outcome of the conflict, its headline reading “Having Won Syria’s War, al-Assad Is Mired in Economic Woes.” While accepting military defeat in Syria, the U.S. appears to be using its economic power to make sure there can be no clear victory for Assad, enacting waves of sanctions that have crushed the country’s economy, leading to power outages, food shortages, inflation and falling wages.
In its article covering a potential change in Syria policy by the Biden administration, the Minneapolis Star Tribune quoted one former Obama official who said the international take-home message is that “the Syria war is over, Assad has won, Assad will be in power as long as he is breathing oxygen.”
Those in the current administration are more tacit in their acceptance of the situation on the ground. A joint statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his European counterparts last week asked for a nationwide ceasefire, promising that they were not “abandoning” the conflict or Syria’s people, whatever it might look like. The statement also condemned the fast-approaching presidential elections as neither free nor fair, historically a very good indicator that they expect the result to go against their interests. “It’s clear that the regime will leverage the upcoming presidential elections in May to unfairly claim Assad’s legitimacy,” said the United States’ acting deputy ambassador to the UN, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, last week. “The United States will not recognize these elections unless they are free, fair, representative of Syrian society, and supervised by the United Nations,” he added.
The prospect of holding a proper election in a country destroyed by ten years of constant war is indeed very dim. With food prices rising, millions displaced, and millions more having fled abroad, just surviving is a task enough for many. Last month the World Food Program warned that a record 12.4 million Syrians — more than half of the population — are currently food insecure. This is an increase of around 4.5 million from last year. Over the past 12 months, the price of basic foodstuffs has increased by an average of 236%. Some of this is down to U.S. sanctions, with Washington apparently deciding that — as in Venezuela, Cuba and other nations — if the U.S. cannot overthrow the government, it will fall back on starving the country as a punishment.
Ten years of violence
While the conflict is universally described as a civil war, from the outset it has been dominated by foreign groups. March 15, 2011 saw the Arab Spring spread to Syria, with large demonstrations against Assad’s rule in many major cities. However, this unrest was quickly overtaken by armed groups whose goal was to take the country by force. In July of that year, the Free Syrian Army was established, quickly receiving considerable Western backing. Almost immediately, the country of 21 million people became a proxy war for various regional and world powers, including Turkey, the United States and its European allies, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. At one point, the CIA was spending almost $1 billion per year training and fielding an army of jihadists. Fighters came from as far afield as Libya and Xinjiang province in China to join their ranks.
A US-backed anti-government fighter mans a heavy machine gun next to a US soldier in al Tanf. Hammurabi’s Justice News | AP
The bitter fighting and terrible violence on all sides led to a refugee crisis for a country that had historically been a haven for victims of war in the region. The famously secular nation also became a stronghold for the Islamic State. With the help of Russian forces, ISIS was beaten back, but to this day, a number of foreign powers continue to occupy the country militarily. One of them is the United States, which last month launched a strike on a town on the Syria/Iraq border, dropping 1.75 tons of explosives and reportedly killing 22 people. Between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. and its allies dropped at least 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria. The U.S. also continues to militarily occupy Syria’s oil fields, hamstringing the nation’s efforts to recover economically.
A short spring, a long winter
Unfortunately, Syria is far from the only country that has been left in a much worse state than what it was in ten years ago. In 2011, the Arab Spring sparked hope across the Middle East, capturing the world’s attention for months as, one after another, movements arose challenging the power of undemocratic governments. Yet few, if any, can be said to have succeeded.
Egypt was the centerpiece of the uprising, as hundreds of thousands of people poured into Tahrir Square in Cairo. Dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign and Mohamed Morsi was elected president in a democratic election. Yet barely a year later many were in the streets again, begging the military to overthrow him. The resulting coup brought General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power, establishing a dictatorship every bit as brutal as Mubarak’s. Sisi has signalled his intent to remain in power until at least 2034, which, considering his age, is effectively a lifetime appointment.
In Libya, protests against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s rule were used as a pretext by NATO for regime change, sparking a bitter civil war, Gaddafi’s assasination, and the rise of Al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces that turned the once-rich country into a failed state, replete with slave markets.
Meanwhile, Yemen is now commonly described as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” where 24 million people need assistance, including 20 million with little or no access to clean water. Yesterday, Oxfam warned that the country is reaching a tipping point, amid a massive spike in COVID-19 cases and a feared outbreak of cholera. The cause for the crisis is clear: the Saudi-led onslaught against the country, which, in turn, has its roots in the constitutional crisis sparked by the Arab Spring protests.
Few remember that the Arab Spring actually started in Western Sahara. But over the past 10 years, the country is being progressively eroded, as Morocco continues to occupy it militarily, building a succession of walls and annexing its most valuable land. As a result, the fortunes of the Sahrawi people are as bad as ever.
After a decade of bombing, invasions, exoduses and economic strife, it is clear that there are precious few winners in the Syrian Civil War — or from the rest of the Arab Spring, for that matter. There are, however, millions of losers. Chief among them are the people of Syria, who have seen their country torn apart as foreign powers, great and minor, wrestle for control of their nation. While the U.S. and its media might be tacitly conceding defeat, few are proclaiming victory.
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Blatant disinformation spews from the western media. And law is never mentioned. Sen.Mark Rubio can threaten a most cruel assassination of Nicolas Maduro, whilst Trump, Bolton (1) and Pence promise that ‘everything is on the table’. Psychopaths join together very easily and according to Hare (2) they make up about 4% of all populations worldwide.
What the voters in all those ‘democratic’ nations fail to realise is that the characteristics of the psychopath make for an easy ascent of the greasy pole. Charm, lying and an able tongue are a few.
But how are they sustained? How do they escape preventive detention?
Of course, the ‘media’ is key. It works on the in-built prejudices of the subject populations, which it helps to generate. It makes sure they are not informed and that the big lies sink in with ease. I recall reading that the Third Reich found value in the polished, cunning British propaganda.
The reporting of the Syrian ‘civil war’ by the BBC is a prime example. In these islands the BBC/State Propagandist is ace.
To respond to it one needs to listen to the audio or watch the television so one can laboriously record the words. At one time the flagship programme, Today, produced a transcript of the whole three hours. With word recognition technology that would be easy to revive but that will not happen. The fact is that in every hour of its national and World Service Broadcasts there is cardinal omission, usually of the victim nation’s voice, distortion or frank lies. There is much more, and the BBC is skilled at inserting important nuances. As a lonely individual in an ocean of lies, it is impossible to keep up.
Here are a few fragments of its recent output.
a.
Dear Mr Landale, 8-02-19
I saw you speak on the BBC1 evening news about 4 days ago. Venezuela, in spite of its vast mineral wealth, has been destabilized. Corruption by the rich and perhaps poor governance are two factors, but another are the sanctions installed in 2015 by the USA against international law. We know the latter is worse than hollow. I do not know whether other countries have been strong armed in collaborating with these sanctions as with Iran.
I believe you did not mention sanctions in your piece. BBC coverage of this country in these last few weeks has been unbalanced. Will Grant in Cuba does better. (Ed. He does not it seems)
yours sincerely David Halpin FRCS
No reply
b.
Malaysia’s Minister of Youth and Sports, Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman, said the country stood by its decision to bar Israeli athletes.
“If hosting an international sporting event is more important than standing up for our Palestinian brothers and sisters who get murdered, maimed and tortured by the Netanyahu regime, that means Malaysia has truly lost its moral compass,” he said in a statement. (3)
The British State Broadcaster could not say these truths to the millions. No coverage by the BBC.
c.
Chris Mason (image on the right, from his twitter account), a BBC Westminster correspondent is engaging. He was speaking of the critical reaction to the loss of Shamima Begum’s third baby in a refugee camp in Syria. She had gone to live with the ‘jihadis’ at age 15 with two girlfriends. Home Secretary Sajid Javid had stripped British citizenship from her. (It emerged he had done the same to two other women previously.)
He failed to say that the UK had supported some of these super-terrorists who came from outside Syria. The PM and the then Foreign Secretary had both stated their intention of ‘toppling Assad’. The aim of this proxy destruction of an ancient country was clear. So their shunning of this young woman and her three dead babies was a montrous hypocrisy. The BBC did its duty and joined in. And massaged it further by speaking of the UK giving £170 million ‘to Syria’.
At another time it reported that a UK government spokesman said the death of any child was “tragic and deeply distressing for the family”. As it was to the hundreds of dear children and their mothers who fleeing from the manufactured war drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Or those that were blown apart or maimed by the ‘jihadis’ as ordered by Saudi Arabia and its slaves to money.
The BBC pumped out massive black propaganda to justify the illegal wars on Iraq and Libya, and continues to distort completely the maelstrom of suffering and destruction brought by plan to Syria. The journalist, Robert Stuart, ‘contended that sequences filmed by BBC personnel and others at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of an incendiary bomb attack on a nearby school are largely, if not entirely, staged.’ His evidence is here. (4)
The BBC distracts with much ‘entertainment’, including sport, and now has trailers with fast changing mindless images. It appears to be attempting to further shrink thought and morality. The other night at a Comic Relief show in a theatre with a largely female audience, three naked men were on the stage. They kept swapping balloons from their chests to genitalia, and turned to present their ugly backsides to a largely embarassed audience.
There are peerless BBC programmes. Among them are Countryfile, which centres on farming and the beauty of the British Isles, and Call the Midwife. This recalled the caring spirit and the energy of the young NHS. Within its ranks there are moral, imaginative and very talented people. But they cannot have much influence on the output.
The ether is dominated by the psychopath with talk of endless aggressive war including sanctions, as with the collective, long and increasing punishment of two million people in Gaza.
Please someone, take Bolton and show him a tight flower bud in midwinter and later as it emerges in all its beauty and intricacy. Take Trump, alone, and see the mother suckling her tiny baby. An ultimate symbol of peace.
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David Halpin FRCS is a retired orthopaedic and trauma surgeon who yearns for peace and especially in Palestine. He has also spent much time, with a few others, pleading for an inquest on Dr David Kelly, which uniquely has never happened. The NHS is his other major concern. His woodlands that he planted give some peace.
Source of pro-Israel Guerrilla Warriors on Social Media Exposed
By Nasim Ahmed
A number of prominent Jewish-American leaders are funding covert, anonymous campaigns targeting pro-Palestinian student activists, The Forward has found. The Jewish daily newspaper, which has been publishing valuable information concerning the source of funding for these hyper-aggressive and shadowy groups – which spearhead coordinated hate campaigns against critics of the Zionist state – has uncovered the identities of those behind hidden social media accounts.
Community heads and prominent Jewish organisations with a carefully-crafted, respectable public profile have donated millions to fund secret projects targeting students and lecturers, the report has found. On a number of occasions, their blind support for Israel has seen them bankroll far-right and anti-Muslim hate groups.
The latest pro-Israeli group to be exposed by The Forward is the campaign targeting the pro-Palestinian campus network Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). SJP is said to be the most well-known advocate of the Palestinian cause on US campuses. It has been the target of a pro-Israel group known as SJP Uncovered, which anonymously attacks student activists affiliated with SJP across the country. With more than 100,000 followers on Facebook, SJP Uncovered has gone after pro-Palestinian students by maintaining a veil of anonymity that is said to be all-but impenetrable.
Until now, the source of funding for SJP Uncovered had been a mystery. The Forward has now been able to shed light on the organisation to reveal that the site is a secret project of the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), a Washington DC-based pro-Israel organisation tied to most mainstream funders and organisations in the Jewish community.
On its official website, the ICC says that its vision is to create a campus environment where “dialogue and ideas are freely exchanged about Israel”. Publicly, the ICC presents a respectable face typical of nearly all pro-Israeli groups, but privately it is funding one of the most aggressive and shadowy student groups responsible for hateful campaigns against critics of the Zionist state. The Forward revealed that the ICC paid over $1 million in the 2016/2017 fiscal year to SJP Uncovered, in that time also running vicious campaigns against students with the aid of political consulting firms.
Until around 2014, the ICC is said to have been a standard pro-Israel advocacy group receiving donations from the largest and most mainstream Jewish-American foundations. In 2015, its operations changed to “covert, anonymous campaigns targeting pro-Palestinian student activists, often with the help of top-tier paid professional political consultants,” according to the investigative report.
Describing the change in focus, one former pro-Israeli campus official said: “It was clear that the old way of doing business […] was not making the cut, and was not enough, and there was a totally new offensive approach to things.” He added:
The overall framing was [that] the pro-Israel community is no longer going to sit back and let things happen, they are going to go on the offense […] It was very clear that going on the offensive to them meant going after students and the organizations that were bringing BDS.
With the change in emphasis in 2015 towards more aggressive campaigns, the ICC began hiring paid political consultants – including opposition researchers – to work on campuses. It transformed itself into a cog in what is often described as Israel’s secret global war against pro-Palestinian activists, which is operated by a dedicated ministry in Tel Aviv known as the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Its main function is to spearhead Israel’s overt and covert efforts to smear the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that is modelled on the global campaign that helped end Apartheid in South Africa. In November, the Electronic Intifada published in full an undercover Al Jazeera documentary that revealed some of the ministry’s tactics. The documentary was censored, allegedly after Israel lobby pressure on Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera.
SJP Uncovered is one of many pro-Israel organisations to emerge from a new consensus within sections of the Jewish-American community. They believed that defeating the global BDS movement was a key priority, which could only be achieved through aggressive means. Such tactics, however, not only risked falling foul of the rules of respectable public institutions, it was bad for their image. The solution for Zionist and pro-Israel groups, both in the US and Israel, was to adopt secretive and clandestine tactics against their targets in an effort to protect their reputation. One of the best known of these operations is the formerly-anonymous website Canary Mission, which posts political dossiers on college students. The site went live in 2015, and has since grown to include dossiers on thousands of students.
A series of Forward exposés in October revealed that a foundation controlled by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, a major Jewish charity with an annual budget of over $100 million, had donated $100,000 to the website, whose work has drawn comparisons to a McCarthyite blacklist. An Haaretz profile of the Canary Mission found that, for three years, the website had spread fear among undergraduate activists by posting more than a thousand political dossiers on student supporters of Palestinian rights. At the same time, the website had gone to great lengths to hide the digital and financial trail connecting it to its donors and staff. Registered through a secrecy service, the site had been untraceable until recently.
While the federation had assured that it was a “one-time grant” that would never happen again, the uncovering of a publicly respectable pro-Israel organisations giving funds to operate clandestine hate campaigns against pro-Palestinian activists triggered further investigations. The Canary Mission was just the tip of the iceberg, as tax filings seen by the magazine +972 showed that there was a pattern of systemic financing of radical right-wing and anti-Muslim groups.
Why was 2015 pivotal to this shift in strategy? Jewish leaders in the US, says Forward reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis, decided to spend significant communal resources attacking college students in that year because there was a coming-together of Israel’s spy culture and Jewish-American mega donors like Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban. Both felt that the work being carried out by mainstream Jewish organisations was unsatisfactory. Wanting to shift the entire tenor of the Jewish communal approach to fighting anti-Semitism and BDS, major Jewish organisations were called to a secret meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada.
During this 2015 meeting, there was a consensus for a push towards more aggressive responses to BDS. A new initiative, named after Jewish guerrilla warriors Maccabees, was formed. On its website, the Maccabee taskforce – which claims that the BDS movement is spreading anti-Semitism across the world – says it is “determined to help students combat this hate by bringing them the strategies and resources they need to tell the truth about Israel”.
Strategies developed by Israeli think tanks like the Reut Institute became the playbook for the aggressive tactics that is said to have come into maturity during that period. These tactics, Nathan-Kazis explains, called for pro-Israel advocates to “out, name and shame” harsh critics of Israel, and to “frame them […] as anti-peace, anti-Semitic, or dishonest purveyors of double standards”. They talked about “establishing a ‘price tag’” for attacks on Israel and “isolating” advocacy groups that attack Israel, while “organizing regular meetings of pro-Israel networks”.
The Turkish government has informed US officials it has audio and video recordings that prove that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, according to a report by the Washington Post.
The video and audio recording reportedly show that Saudi Consulate security team detained Jamal Khashoggi after he entered the building on October 2 to obtain some documents for his upcoming wedding, and then killed him and dismembered his body.
According to US and Turkish officials cited by the Washington Post, the audio recordings in particular provide “persuasive and gruesome” evidence that the Saudi security is responsible for the journalist’s death.
“The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,” said one source with knowledge of the recording.
“You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic,” the source added. “You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and then murdered.”
The other person quoted by Washington Post says the recording proves Khashoggi was beaten by the Saudis.
The existence of these recordings explain why Turkish officials were so fast to accuse Saudis of killing the journalists, the newspaper reads. However, Ankara is reluctant to release these recordings as it would reveal the ways Turkish intelligence spies upon foreign nations on its soil, the source said.
Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to the Washington Post, known for his criticism of Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed, has been missing since October 2 after allegedly visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to acquire documentation for his upcoming marriage. The Saudis denied allegations that the journalist has been captured or murdered and insisted he left the building later the same day.
In the meantime, media companies are pulling out of Saudi investment conference over the growing outrage of Khashoggi disappearance, Reuters reported Thursday. Journalists and executives of various major media companies, including New York Times, CNBC, Economist and Viacom have already announced their decision not to attend the event. The Financial Times reportedly announced it is reviewing its involvement as a media partner.
Omidyar’s Intercept Teams Up with War-Propaganda Firm Bellingcat
Despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA.
NEW YORK — The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies. The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins declined to elaborate on the workshop when pressed on social media.The decision on the part of The Intercept is particularly troubling given that the publication has long been associated with the track records of its founding members, such as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, who have long been promoted as important “progressive” and “anti-war” voices in the U.S. media landscape.
Greenwald publicly distanced himself from the decision to host the workshop, stating on Twitter that he was not involved in making that decision and that — if he had been — it was not one “that I would have made.” However, he stopped short of condemning the decision.
Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
For instance, Bellingcat regularly works with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which – according to the late journalist Robert Parry – “engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption.” OCCRP is notably funded by USAID and the controversial George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.
In addition, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council, which is partially funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and U.S. weapons manufacturers. It should come as little surprise then that the results of Bellingcat’s “findings” often fit neatly with narratives promoted by NATO and the U.S. government despite their poor track record in terms of accuracy.
Bellingcat’s funding is even more telling than its professional associations. Indeed, despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA.
Google has also been actively promoting regime change in countries like Syria, a policy that Bellingcat also promotes. As one example, leaked emails between Jared Cohen, former director of Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed that Google developed software aimed at assisting al-Qaeda and other Syrian opposition groups in boosting their ranks. Furthermore, Cohen was once described by Stratfor intelligence analysts as a “loose cannon” for his deep involvement in Middle Eastern regime-change efforts.
Under President Donald Trump, Google’s connections to the U.S. government have become even more powerful, as the current Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence once worked as a corporate lobbyist for Google.
Synergy in the service of empire
Given the clear alliances between Bellingcat and the military-industrial complex, The Intercept’s decision to host a Bellingcat workshop in its New York offices may seem surprising. However, The Intercept has long promoted Bellingcat in its written work and its parent company has actually been associated with Bellingcat since 2015.
Indeed, Google-owned YouTube announced in 2015 the formation of the “First Draft coalition,” which nominally sought to bring “together a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media.” That coalition united Bellingcat with the now-defunct Reported.ly – another venture of The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media.
In the years since, The Intercept has repeatedly promotedBellingcat in its articles, having called the Atlantic Council-connected, Google-funded group “a reputable U.K.-based organization devoted to analyzing images coming out of conflict zones.” Furthermore, prior to the recent workshop in late September between The Intercept and Bellingcat, both jointly participated in another workshop hosted in London earlier this year in April.
$250 million well spent? imagine if the Intercept actually had a team of people trying to poke holes in UK/US narratives about Russia instead of their own paid journalists promoting Bellingcat pic.twitter.com/QJyTXf4fp0
In addition, the Intercept’s main funder – eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar – shares innumerable connections to the U.S. government and has helped fund regime-change operations abroad in the past, suggesting a likely reason behind the publication’s willingness to associate itself with Bellingcat.
For instance, Omidyar made more visits to the Obama White House between 2009 and 2013 than Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He also donated $30 million to the Clinton global initiative and directly co-invested with the State Department — funding groups, some of them overtly fascist, that worked to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014.
Even after Obama left office, Omidyar has continued to fund USAID, particularly its overseas program aimed at “advancing U.S. national security interests” abroad. Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative also cosponsors one of the Pentagon’s most important contractor expos, a direct link between Omidyar initiatives and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Such promotion of the regime-change wars has been reflected in reporting done at The Intercept, particularly in regards to Syria. Indeed, Intercept writers covering Syria frequently promote Syrian “rebels” and the opposition while also promoting pro-regime-change talking points.
Another former Intercept contributor and now Intercept “fact checker,” Mariam Elba, wrote a poorly researched article that sought to link the Syrian government to U.S. white nationalists, claiming that the Syrian government sought to “homogenize” the country despite its support for religious and ethnic minorities in stark contrast to the Syrian opposition. Notably, Elba recently praised the Intercept/Bellingcat workshop, which she had attended.
If that weren’t enough, last year the paper hired Maryam Saleh, a journalist who has called Shia Muslims “dogs” and has taken to Twitter in the past to downplay the role of the U.S. coalition in airstrikes in Syria. Saleh also has ties to the U.S.-financed propaganda group Kafranbel Media Center, which also has close relations with the terrorist group Ahrar al-Sham.
Furthermore, MintPress noted last year that The Intercept had withheld a key document from the Edward Snowden cache proving the Syrian opposition was taking marching orders from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Intercept published that document only after the U.S. State Department itself began to report more honestly on the nature of these so-called “rebels,” even though The Intercept had had that document in its possession since 2013.
Even “anti-interventionist” Intercept journalists like Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have come under fire this past year for allegedly promoting inaccurate statements that supported pro-regime-change narratives in Syria, particularly in regards to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. That attack is now widely believed to have been staged by the White Helmets.
Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”
Author’s Note | John Helsby contributed research, particularly in regards to social media, to this report.
Editors Note: After objection from Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, this story was updated to read: “The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public”, This was updated from the original: “The details of the workshop have not been made public” as Higgins interpreted this to mean details made prior to the event. MintPress was well aware of the pre-event details that were made public prior to the workshop, such as cost to attend, date and location as a link that the announcement of those details can be found in the second sentence of the article, which remains unchanged.
Top Photo | Bana Alabed promotes Bellingcat at an event put on by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Photo | Twitter
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
“The warrior should be wakeful because if he sleeps the enemy does not sleep.” This is advice from Imam Ali (PBUH) gave. Hezbollah’s secretary general memorized it well. He uses it to advise others and repeats it during every Zionist threat to Lebanon.
The “Israeli” media knows exactly what these words mean. It knows that Sayyed is a meticulous follower of the Zionist entity’s news. From time to time, it acknowledges Sayyed’s superiority in terms of the media and psychological warfare that stems from facts rather than illusions. On more than one occasion, the Israeli media recognized the accuracy and quality of the follow-up and translation of the resistance’s media of everything that is published in the usurping entity in an attempt to expose it to the public.
A week ago, Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz, in a piece titled Nasrallah’s Propaganda that
“in a speech at the end of last week (the liberation of the Jroud speech), Nasrallah quoted Brick’s criticism of the “Israeli” army’s performance. He also mentioned Yaniv Kuovich’s ’s article which he published here regarding a 40 percent increase in the percentage of soldiers visiting psychiatric clinics in the army.”
Harel refers back to Sayyed Nasrallah’s famous “Spider Web” speech on the entity and its media when he delivered it in Bent Jbeil in 2000. It still resonates until today.
“Nasrallah’s firm hypothesis is based on the most famous speech, the ‘Spider Web’ speech in Bint Jbeil immediately after the end of the “Israeli” army’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000: the “Israeli” society is weak and pressured. If the Arabs knew how to act against “Israel” with determination and strength, they would be able to demand more concessions.”
We continue with the enemy’s media and “Sayyed’s” impact on it. Channel 10 remarked that “Nasrallah is a brilliant and very clever speaker who did not make a lot of mistakes in analyzing the weaknesses of the “Israeli” society.”
In an interview with the Arab affairs correspondent, Zvi Yehezkeli, the presenter said (while analyzing the second liberation anniversary speech):
“If Nasrallah were not on the side of the ‘bad guys’, we would have said that he was a brilliant speaker and a very intelligent man. In a speech he delivered yesterday, he analyzed the weaknesses of the “Israeli” army and did not made a mistake.”
Yehezkeli replied,
“I agree that Nasrallah is a brilliant speaker in the Arab world. But regarding the content, I see it a bit differently. Nasrallah’s speech reminds us of the speech of the ‘Spider Web’.”
Take note of the choice of the Bint Jbeil speech. Some compared him to Gamal Abdel Nasser for his brilliance in speechmaking. He spoke about the weak society or what he called in 2006 prior to the war as the “Espresso Society”. This description was still present in Yehezkeli’s mind after 12 years. He said that the “Espresso Society” will not go to war for the two captured soldiers. He also said this in a press conference on the day of their capture. The “Espresso Society” went to war. It did not go the way it was planned. It was an implicit recognition of defeat. Once again he says this while speaking about defeatism. I agree with him on this angle at least when he enumerates “Israel’s” failures by saying, “the invincible army may not be the only description for “Israel”.” Then came the recognition that the army is not fit to represent the defeated entity.
“What impressed me is his very modern knowledge of the “Israeli” press. There is someone who reads things to him very carefully, analyzes them very intelligently and never makes mistakes when he points out the weaknesses in “Israeli” society,” the presenter added.
Yehezkeli: There are those who say that the “Israeli” office in Hezbollah is Nasrallah himself. He does not allow others to read it. He sits and reads. In an interview he spoke about how long it takes him to read the “Israeli” press and the “Israeli” society. He is a person whose goal is to analyze things in society that have not been analyzed before. He also has intelligence capabilities. However, he still reads the press, quoting newspapers such as Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth as well as opinion polls, analyses, analysts and experts. But he does not know Hebrew.
This was recognition of Sayyed familiarity with the nature of the Zionist society and its weaknesses. It also praised the monitoring and the Hebrew-to-Arabic translation team. This is not the first time that the enemy’s media deals with the quality, experience and accuracy of the abilities of the resistance’s media to keep track of the Zionist entity. A few years ago before the Zionist withdrawal and the humiliating defeat of the “invincible” army, a media specialist conducted a comparative study between the resistance’s media and the enemy’s one. In it they looked at details including the quality of the paper used by the resistance’s media and the nature of the technical production and covers designs. It concluded that the resistance’s media excelled past that of the enemy. We continue with the presenter when he asks about the fear of death complex gripping the families of the occupation soldiers:
“When he said in this speech that the “Israeli” elite wanted to send their children to the 8200 [cyber warfare] unit and less to the front. He recognized something … (signs of admiration and astonishment on the face of the presenter).”
Here, we pause at the surprise that occurred in the war on Syria, where the number of participants among the ranks of the resistance doubled. Reports were made by families who were insisting to send their children to the battlefronts. Here, we discover the reason behind the admiration and astonishment of the presenter. The resistance’s society does not fear death, especially when martyrdom is one of two choices, victory being the first. This was in contrary to the enemy’s society where the fear of death makes families want to send their son to work behind a desk.
Attempting to create a fabricated picture of the truth Yehezkeli concludes:
“Certainly, I think what he said is part of psychological warfare that shows distress ahead of the next confrontation.”
“But nevertheless, he certainly brought something painful to our stomachs.”
He ends the interview with a passage from Sayyed Nasrallah’s speech about the soldiers seeing psychiatrists.
The speech on the anniversary of the Second Liberation Day opened a deep wound. It was painful for the enemy. It reopened an old wound, which is the May 25, 2000 [“Israeli”] withdrawal from Lebanon.
By Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog — August 15, 2018
William Binney, the U.S. National Security Agency’s former technical director for global analysis, has, for the past year, been globe-trotting to investigate the actual evidence regarding the official Russiagate investigations, and he finds that the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, who is prosecuting Russia’s Government, can only accuse Russian officials, not convict any of them on at least the important charges, because conclusive evidence exists and has already been made public online, making clear that the important accusations against those officials are false. However, Binney can’t get any of the U.S. major ‘news’ media’s interest in this fact, nor even into openly discussing it with them. Apparently, they don’t want to know. Binney is knocking on their doors, and they refuse to answer.
Patrick Lawrence, at the non-mainstream U.S. news medium Consortium News, headlined on Monday August 13th, “‘Too Big to Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack” and he reported what Binney has found and has been trying to get the major U.S. ‘news’ media to present to the American public.
The “VIPS” there is Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and they are 17 whistleblowing former high officials of the CIA, NSA, State Department, and other U.S. officials with top-secret national-security clearances, who jointly signed and published on 24 July 2017, their report, which likewise was at Consortium News, “Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence”, in which they confirmed the validity of a 9 July 2017 report that had been published by Elizabeth Vos of Disobedient Media . com, which was titled “New Research Shows Guccifer 2.0 Files Were Copied Locally, Not Hacked” and which I then reported in more ordinary language seven days later under the headline “Russiagate Exposed: It’s a Fraud”. I quoted there the analysis’s basic finding “that the DNC computer network which the media tells us and the DNC tells us was hacked by the Russians, … was physically accessed by someone within close proximity of the DNC” and not outside the United States (Russia or anywhere else). The original research-report had been done by an anonymous person who called himself “the forensicator,” and he had sent it to Adam Carter, another highly technically knowledgeable person, who happened to be at Disobedient Media, and who then worked with Vos to prepare her article on it.
Binney, as the nation’s now-retired top NSA expert in the analysis of such matters, then followed up, during the past year, in order to probe more deeply, by contacting various individuals who had been involved behind the scenes; and Patrick Lawrence’s article was a report of what Binney had found. It’s this:
The forensic scientists working with VIPS continued their research and experiments after VIPS50 was published. So have key members of the VIPS group, notably William Binney, the National Security Agency’s former technical director for global analysis and designer of programs the agency still uses to monitor internet traffic. Such work continues as we speak, indeed. This was always the intent: “Evidence to date” was the premise of VIPS50. Over the past year there have been confirmations of the original thesis and some surprises that alter secondary aspects of it. Let us look at the most significant of these findings.
At the time I reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists, that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016 constituted a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate—the speed at which data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per second. …
The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the New Jersey–to–Britain test, was 12.0 megabytes of data per second. Since this time it has emerged from G-2.0’s metadata that the detected average speed—the 22.7 megabytes per second—included peak speeds that ran as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. “You’d need a dedicated, leased, 400–megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that result,” Binney said in a recent interview. … That remains the bedrock evidence of the case VIPS and others advance without qualification. “No one—including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA—has come out against this finding,” Binney said Monday. …
The identity of Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a Romanian hacker but which the latest Mueller indictment claims is a construct of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, has never been proven. The question is what G–2.0 did with or to the data in question. It turns out that both more, and less, is known about G–2.0 than was thought to have been previously demonstrated. This work has been completed only recently. It was done by Binney in collaboration with Duncan Campbell, a British journalist who has followed the Russia-gate question closely.
Peak Speed Established
Binney visited Campbell in Brighton, England, early this past spring. They examined all the metadata associated with the files G–2.0 has made public. They looked at the number of files, the size of each, and the time stamps at the end of each. It was at this time that Binney and Campbell established the peak transfer rate at 49.1 megabytes per second. … “Now you need to prove everything you might think about him,” Binney told me. “We have no way of knowing anything about him or what he has done, apart from manipulating the files. …
The conclusions initially drawn on time and location in VIPS50 are now subject to these recent discoveries. “In retrospect, giving ‘equal importance’ status to data pertaining to the locale was mistaken,” Ray McGovern, a prominent VIPS member, wrote in a recent note. “The key finding on transfer speed always dwarfed it in importance.” …
How credible are those indictments in view of what is now known about G–2.0?
Binney told me: “Once we proved G–2.0 is a fabrication and a manipulator, the timing and location questions couldn’t be answered but really didn’t matter. I don’t right now see a way of absolutely proving either time or location. But this doesn’t change anything. We know what we know: The intrusion into the Democratic National Committee mail was a local download—wherever ‘local’ is.” That doesn’t change. As to Rosenstein, he’ll have a lot to prove.”
However, yet another technically knowledgeable analyst of the available evidence, George Eliason, claims that to assert that there were only “leaks” and not also “hacks” would clearly be wrong because there were both. On August 14th, he bannered at Washington’s Blog, “Beyond The DNC Leak: Hacks and Treason” and he wrote:
There were multiple DNC hacks. There is also clear proof supporting the download to a USB stick and subsequent information exchange (leak) to Wikileaks. All are separate events.
Here’s what’s different in the information I’ve compiled.
The group I previously identified as Fancy Bear was given access to request password privileges at the DNC. And it looks like the DNC provided them with it.
I’ll show why the Podesta email hack looks like a revenge hack.
The reason Republican opposition research files were stolen can be put into context now because we know who the hackers are and what motivates them.
At the same time this story developed, it overshadowed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. It is a matter of public record that Team Clinton provided the DNC hackers with passwords to State Department servers on at least 2 occasions, one wittingly and one not. I have already clearly shown the Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators.
This gives some credence to the Seth Rich leak (DNC leak story) as an act of patriotism. If the leak came through Seth Rich, it may have been because he saw foreign Intel operatives given this access from the presumed winners of the 2016 US presidential election. No political operative is going to argue with the presumed president-elect over foreign policy. The leaker may have been trying to do something about it. I’m curious what information Wikileaks might have.
Eliason’s analysis doesn’t support Robert Mueller’s indictments any more than the others do. All are essentially incompatible with the accusations (including ones which now have become also indictments) from Mueller. Moreover, as Patrick Lawrence noted, “Indictments are not evidence and do not need to contain evidence. That is supposed to come out at trial, which is very unlikely to ever happen. Nevertheless, the corporate media has treated the indictments as convictions.” Maybe that’s the biggest crime of all.
Numerous well funded, organized projects by and for Israel work to flood social media with pro-Israel propaganda, while blocking facts Israel dislikes. The projects utilize Israeli soldiers, students, American teens and others, and range from infiltrating Wikipedia to influencing YouTube. Some operate out of Jewish Community Centers in the U.S.
Another project to do battle on the Internet was initiated in 2011 by the 300,000-strong National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS). The goal was “to deepen and expand hasbara [state propaganda] activities of students in the State of Israel.”
Under this program, Israeli students are paid $2,000 to work five hours per week to “lead the battle against hostile websites.”
An announcement for the program (translated here into English) noted that “many students in Israel master the Internet and are proficient at using the Internet and social networking and various sites and are required to write and express themselves in English.” Students can work from the comfort of their own homes, points out the announcement.
“Students work in four teams: Content, Wikipedia, Monitoring and New Media,” according to the program description. It details the responsibilities for each team:
The content team is responsible for creating original content in a news format.
The monitoring team is responsible for “monitoring efforts while reporting and removing anti-Semitic [sic] content from social networks in a variety of languages.” (The program conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism; see below.)
The New Media team is responsible for social media channels, “including Facebook accounts in English, French and Portuguese, Twitter, YouTube channels, and so on.”
The Wikipedia team is “responsible for writing new entries and translating them into languages that operate in the program, updating the values of current and relevant information, tracking and preventing bias in the program’s areas of activity.”
This program sometimes claims it is working against antisemitism, but it conflates antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel. This is in line with an Israel-backed initiative to legally define “antisemitism” to include discussing negative facts about Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.
The campaign to infiltrate Wikipedia
Several years ago, another project came to light that targeted Wikipedia. While manipulating Wikipedia entries doesn’t directly impact YouTube, it provides a window into some of these efforts to manipulate online content.
A 2008 exposé in the Electronic Intifada revealed: “A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.”
While it is common and appropriate for individuals to edit Wikipedia entries to add factual information and remove inaccurate statements, this project was the antithesis of such editing. As EI, reported, its purpose was “to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.”
Author Ali Abunimah reported that a source had provided EI with a series of emails from members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) that showed the group “was engaged in what one activist termed a ‘war’ on Wikipedia.”
CAMERA Senior Research Analyst Gilead Ini organized a project to infiltrate Wikipedia
CAMERA called for volunteers to secretly work on editing Wikipedia entries. It emphasized the importance of keeping the project secret. Volunteers were schooled in ways to elude detection. After they signed up as editors, they were to “avoid editing Israel-related articles for a short period of time.”
They were also told to “avoid, for obvious reasons, picking a username that marks you as pro-Israel, or that lets people know your real name.”
CAMERA also warned them: “Don’t forget to always log in… If you make changes while not logged in, Wikipedia will record your computer’s IP address.”
A Wikipedia editor known as Zeq helped in the effort, telling volunteers: “Edit articles at random, make friends not enemies—we will need them later on. This is a marathon not a sprint.” He emphasized the importance of secrecy: “You don’t want to be precived [sic] as a ‘CAMERA’ defender’ on Wikipedia that is for sure.”
Zeq recommended that they work with and learn from an independent, pro-Israel Wikipedia editor known as Jayjg, but directed them to keep the project secret even from him.
When this all came to light, Wikipedia took measures against such manipulation of its system and the CAMERA program may have ended.
If it did, others stepped into the breach. In 2010 two Israeli groups began offering a course in “Zionist editing” of Wikipedia entries. The aim was “to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflects the worldview of Zionist groups.” A course organizer explained that the use of the word “occupied” in Wikipedia entries “was just the kind of problem she hoped a new team of editors could help fix.”
Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reported: “The organizers’ aim was twofold: to affect Israeli public opinion by having people who share their ideological viewpoint take part in writing and editing for the Hebrew version, and to write in English so Israel’s image can be bolstered abroad.”
There was to be a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor”—the person who over the next four years incorporated the most “Zionist” changes in the encyclopedia. The winner would receive a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.
Watch | Millionaire Naftali Bennett, a right-wing minister close to the settler movement, describes the program:
The UK Guardian reports: “One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn’t want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. ‘Going public in the past has had a bad effect,’ she says. ‘There is a war going on and unfortunately, the way to fight it has to be underground.’”
Again in 2013, there was evidence of pro-Israel tampering with Wikipedia. Israel’s Ha’aretz reported that a social-media employee of NGO Monitor edited articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an allegedly biased manner. “Draiman concealed the facts that he was an employee of NGO Monitor, often described as a right-wing group, and that he was using a second username, which is forbidden under Wikipedia’s rules,” according to the paper.
Such actions have had an impact. A website critical of Wikipedia said in 2014 that there were “almost ten times as many articles about murdered Israeli children as there are articles about murdered Palestinian children,” even though at least 10 times more Palestinian children had been killed.
The website also pointed out: “While editors like Zeq (T–C–L) and CltFn (T–C–L) may get banned in the end, the articles theystarted remain.”
If YouTube reviewers and others use Wikipedia in their determination about whether content should be removed or not, these efforts to censor Wikipedia could adversely affect their decisions.
Image from Forward article about the Act.IL campaign.
In 2017 yet another project to target Internet platforms was launched. Known as Act.il, the project uses a software application that “leverages the power of communities to support Israel through organized online activity.”
The software is a joint venture of three groups: Israel’s IDC University; the Israeli American Council, which works to “organize and activate” the half million Israeli-Americans who live in the U.S.; and another American group called the Maccabee Task Force, created to combat the international boycott of Israel, which it terms “an anti-Semitic movement.” Maccabee says it is “laser focused on one core mission—to ensure that those who seek to delegitimize Israel and demonize the Jewish people are confronted, combatted and defeated.”
In addition, the project is supported by Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry and Israel’s intelligence community. Its CEO is an eight-year veteran of Israeli army intelligence.
Israel’s Jerusalem Post reports that Act.IL is “a wide-ranging grassroots campaign app that lets individuals combat BDS in the palm of their hand” or, as we will see, from public computers in the US.
“Act.IL is more than just an app,” the Post article explains. “It is a campaign that taps into the collective knowledge of IDC students who together speak 35 languages, hail from 86 countries and have connections to the pro-Israel community all over the world.”
The article claims: “A platform like Act.IL offers world Jewry an opportunity to fight for one thing the majority can rally behind: Israel.” (This ignores the fact that there are many Jewish individuals who oppose Israeli policies.)
Israel partisans around the world download the app, and then “in this virtual situation room of experts, they detect instances where Israel is being assailed online and they program the app to find missions that can be carried out with a push of a button.”
An organizer notes: “When you work together, with the same goals and values, you can be incredibly powerful in the social media landscape.”
Some missions ask users to report videos. Israeli government officials say that the Act.il app “is more effective than official government requests at getting those videos removed from online platforms.”
The project is led by former Israeli intelligence officers and has close ties to American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Another funder is the Paul R. Singer Foundation, funded by the Republican hedge fund billionaire.
The Forward calls Act.IL a new entry into the “online propaganda war” that “has thousands of mostly U.S.-based volunteers who can be directed from Israel into a social media swarm.”
According to the Forward, “Its work so far offers a startling glimpse of how it could shape the online conversations about Israel without ever showing its hand.”
The Forward reports: “Act.il says that its app has 12,000 sign-ups so far, and 6,000 regular users. The users are located all over the world, though the majority of them appear to be in the United States. Users get ‘points’ for completed missions; top-ranked users complete five or six missions a day. Top users win prizes: a congratulatory letter from a government minister, or a doll of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister.”
Act.IL’s CEO, a veteran Israeli army intelligence officer, said the Israeli military and its domestic intelligence service “‘request’ Act.il’s help in getting services like Facebook to remove specific videos that call for violence against Jews or Israelis.” This according to the Forward report.
The officer later tried to walk back his statement, “saying that the Shin Bet [intelligence service] and the army don’t request help on specific videos but are in regular informal contact with Act.il. He said that Act.il’s staff is largely made up of former Israeli intelligence officers.
Teens in American JCCs carry out missions assigned from Israel
The project recruits Jewish teens and adults and sometimes operates out of local Jewish community centers, the Forward says. The paper describes one example:
“The dozen or so Israelis sitting around a conference table at a Jewish community center in Tenafly, New Jersey, on a recent Wednesday night didn’t look like the leading edge of a new Israeli government-linked crowdsourced online propaganda campaign.
“Tapping on laptops, the group of high school students and adult mentors completed social media ‘missions’ assigned out of a headquarters in Herzliya, Israel.”
In addition to the Tenafly “media room” another operates in Boston in cooperation with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. There are also regular Act.il advocacy-training sessions at The Frisch School, a Jewish day school in Paramas, New Jersey. Other media rooms are reportedly in the works, with one in Manhattan, hosted by The Paul R. Singer Foundation, scheduled to open soon.
The Forward reports: “In November, the Boston media room created a mission for the app that asked users to email a Boston-area church to complain about a screening there of a documentary that is critical of Israel. The proposed text of the email likens the screening of the film to the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and calls the film’s narrator, Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a ‘well-known anti-Semite.’”
Photo of Boston Media Room published by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, which states: “Media Room Ambassadors are students and adult mentors who are trained with the knowledge, skills, and tools to positively influence public discourse by developing pro-Israel social media campaigns.”
According to the Forward, Act.il also produces “pro-Israel web content that carries no logo. It distributes that content to other pro-Israel groups, including the Adelson-funded Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and The Israel Project, which push them out on their own social media feeds.”The Forward predicts: “Initiatives in cyberspace seem likely to increase.”
Screenshot from video promoting the project, posted on the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston website.
Israeli media report that the Israeli military “has begun scouring Jewish communities abroad for young computer prodigies” to recruit for its ranks.
An Israeli official described the process: “Our first order of business is to search Jewish communities abroad for teens who could qualify, Our representatives will then travel to the communities and begin the screening process there.”
Israeli Government Ministry backs secret online campaigns
General Sima Vaknin-Gil told Israeli tech developers to “flood the Internet” with pro-Israel propaganda. As Israel’s Chief Censor, she said: ” “We censor information that is critical to our enemies, who have no capabilities like us, do not have a Jewish brain, and therefore our enemy relies to a large extent on open information…”
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry, which is behind this and similar projects, has mobilized substantial resources for online activities.Israel’s Ynet news reports that the Ministry’s director “sees it as a war for all intents and purposes. ‘The delegitimization against the State of Israel can be curbed and contained through public diplomacy and soft tools,’ she says. ‘In order to win, however, we must use tricks and craftiness.’”
The director, General Sima Vaknin-Gil, told a forum of Israeli tech developers at a forum: “I want to create a community of fighters.” The objective is to “curb the activities of anti-Israel activists,” and “flood the Internet” with pro-Israel content.
The 29th floor of Tel Aviv’s Champion Tower is the nerve center of a 24-7 ‘war’ in which Israeli agents working behind the scenes advance U.S. legislation, torpedo events, organize counter-protests, & close bank accounts.. The Director says: ‘In order to win we must use tricks and craftiness.’
An Israeli report in December stated that the ministry has acquired a budget of roughly $70 million to “stand at the forefront of the battle against delegitimization, adopting methods from the fields of intelligence and technology. There is a reason why ministry officials define it as ‘a war on consciousness terrorism.’” [‘Delegitimization’ is a common Israeli term for criticism of Israel. See here for a discussion of the term.]
A Ha’aretz article reports: “The Strategic Affairs Ministry’s leaders see themselves as the heads of a commando unit, gathering and disseminating information about ‘supporters of the delegitimization of Israel’—and they prefer their actions be kept secret.”
The article reports that the Ministry includes a job role entitled “Senior official—new-media realm,” responsible for surveillance and activities “in the digital realm.”
This individual head is responsible for analyzing social media and formulating a social media campaign against sites and activists who are deemed a threat to Israel.
Among the job’s responsibilities are:
Analysis of the world of social media, in terms of content, technology and network structure, emphasizing centers of gravity and focuses of influence, methods, messages, organizations, sites and key activists, studying their characteristics, areas, realms and key patterns of activities of the rival campaign and formulating a strategy for an awareness campaign against them in this realm and managing crises on social media. That is, surveilling of activities mainly in the digital arena.”
Officials at the ministry are charged with “construction and promotion of creative and suitable programs for new media.”
The unit works to keep its activities secret from the public. For example, a program to train young Israelis for activities on social media was exempted from publishing a public bid for funding. Similarly, the ministry’s special unit against delegitimization, “Hama’aracha” (The Battle), is excluded from Israel’s Freedom of Information Law.
Its activities reportedly include a “24/7 operations room monitoring all the delegitimization activities against Israel: Protests, conferences, publications calling for an anti-Israel boycott and international bodies’ boycott initiatives. The operations room will transfer the information to the relevant people to provide a proper response to these activities, whether through a counter-protest or through moves to thwart the initiative behind the scenes.”
Other programs include a 22-million-shekel project to work among labor unions and professional associations abroad “to root out the ability of BDS entities to influence the unions,” and a 16-million-shekel program focused on student activities throughout the world.
Photo from article about Unit 8200 on Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre website.
Another Israeli entity that plays a role in covert Internet activity is the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy branch, Unit 8200. This unit is composed of thousands of “cyber warriors” primarily 18 to 21 years of age; some even younger. A number of its graduates have gone on to top positions at tech companies operating in the U.S., such as Check Point Software (where the spouse of the Jewish Voice for Peace head is employed as a solutions architect).
In 2015 Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced plans “to establish a special command to combat anti-Israel incitement on social media.” The command would operate under the foreign ministry’s hasbara [propaganda] department and would especially recruit from graduates of Unit 8200.
An article in the Jewish Press about the new command reports that Unit 8200 “has developed a great reputation for effectiveness in intelligence gathering, including operating a massive global spy network. Several alumni of 8200 have gone on to establish leading Israeli IT companies, including Check Point, ICQ, Palo Alto Networks, NICE, AudioCodes, Gilat, Leadspace, EZchip, Onavo, Singular and CyberArk.”
Check Point Software headquarters in Tel Aviv. Founded by a former Unit 8200 member, it also has offices throughout the U.S. Israeli tech companies sometimes assist in online spying efforts.
Numerous Israeli tech companies, many of them headed by former military intelligence officers, assist in these online spying efforts, sometimes receiving Israeli government funding “for digital initiatives aimed at gathering intelligence on activist groups and countering their efforts.”
According to the ministry’s statement, among the Command’s activities is “finding videos with inflammatory content and issuing complaints to the relevant websites.”
To be clear, this is an occupying military working covertly to achieve censorship of reporting on its atrocities.
YouTube & Google officials meet with Israeli Minister
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki speaking to the Israel Collaboration Network’s Israeli Women in Tech Group on August 25, 2016.
Major Internet companies have reportedly been cooperating in this effort.
In 2015 Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely announced that she had visited Silicon Valley and met with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Google’s Director of Public Policy (it is unclear whether this was was Jennifer Oztzistzki or Juniper Downs; Hotovely’s announcement referred to “Jennifer Downs”).
“At the end of the meeting,” Israeli media reported, “it was agreed that Google would strengthen bilateral relations with the Foreign Ministry and build a collaborative work apparatus.”
Another Israeli news report about the meeting states: “…it was agreed that the companies would strengthen ties with the Foreign Ministry and build a regular mechanism of control to prevent the distribution of those incendiary materials on the network.”
Google, which owns YouTube, denied the Foreign Ministry’s report. The Ministry accordingly “clarified” its statement somewhat, but continued to say that Israeli officials would be in “regular contact with Google’s employees in Israel who deal with the problematic materials.”
Such officials often have close ties to Israel. For example, Facebook’s Head of Policy in Israel,Jordana Cutler, had previously been employed for many years by the Israeli government. (More about Facebook can be found here.)
The meetings seem to have had a significant effect.
In 2016 Fortune magazine reported: “Facebook, Google, and YouTube are complying with up to 95% of Israeli requests to delete content that the government says incites Palestinian violence, Israel’s Justice Minister said on Monday.”
More recently, the Israeli Ministry of Justice said that its cyber unit handled 2,241 cases of online content and succeeded in getting 70 percent of it removed.
According to a 2017 report, Google, in its capacity as the operator of Youtube, announced that it was updating the steps it was already taking on this score.
Among other things, Google said it would increase the number of members of the “Trusted Flagger program,” which enables certain organizations and government agencies to report content. It also said it would “increase support for NGOs and organizations working to present a ‘corrective voice.’”
Given the record of infiltration and orchestrated activities described above—many financed by a combination of certain influential billionaires and the Israeli government itself—it’s hard to imagine that Israeli organizations and partisans are not thoroughly embedded in this program. In fact, one of the NGOs already working with YouTube as a “trusted flagger” is the Anti-Defamation League, whose mission includes ‘standing up for Israel.’
Anti-Defamation League celebrates Israel at 2017 New York City parade.
A leaked secret January 2017 ADL working paper detailed how to counter the pro-Palestine movement. Among its many strategies were some focused on the importance of efforts in cyber space.
The paper was produced in collaboration with the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, and included an endorsement by Sima Vaknin-Gil, who stated that “the correlation between the Ministry’s mode of operation and what comes out of this document is very high, and has already proven effective… ”
The document’s executive summary noted: “Cyberspace, broadly defined, stands out as a crucially important arena (for monitoring and counter and pro-active strategies) which requires more resources and attention due to its current influence, rapid growth and growing complexity.”
The paper called for “a mix of policy advocacy and industry engagement with corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter in a manner consistent with the ADL Center for Technology and Society and its Anti-Cyberhate Working Group.”
The paper also recommended: “‘Bottom-up efforts’ of crowd-sourcing to enhance the adaptive capacity of the pro-Israel network.”
At the same time, it urged:
Strengthening pro-Israel organizations that mobilize and coordinate a network of ‘nodes’ e.g. Jewish Community Public Affairs (JCPA) and its network of Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRCs) in the USA; Hillel, which is present in nearly five hundred locations in the U.S. and globally; the Israel Action Network (IAN) that reaches nearly 160 federations in the U.S.; or the Jewish Congress (WJC) that represents dozens of Jewish communities around the world.”
The detailed, 32-page document reported that in recent years “a massive investment of resources and talent” had been directed against the pro-Palestine movement. One of the results, the paper said, was to create a “world-wide pro-Israel network.” It was this network that the report wished to mobilize. One of the paper’s concerns was that since Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza “a growing number of Jews have become more critical of Israel.”
The document recommended a degree of stealth, noting: “high-visibility response by the pro-Israel side can be counterproductive.”
Read the ADL’s 2017 report The Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy
What this means
Nevertheless, despite all these forces arrayed against information about Palestine reaching the American public, our channel is back up on YouTube. In fact, we’ve just uploaded a new video:
This one is about the death of a nine-year-old boy. [Perhaps the Israeli government would consider this incitement to Palestinians to rebel against occupation; we see it as incitement to the world in general, and Americans in particular, to care.]
In other words, Israel’s efforts at censorship don’t always succeed.
But sometimes they do, and other YouTube users have not always been so fortunate. For example, YouTube has terminated several Palestinian news organizations.
One was the al-Quds network, which, according to a report in Middle East Eye, “relies on young reporters and volunteers using phones and other digital devices to cover local news across the Palestinian territories.” They would often report Israeli soldiers committing various human rights violations.
Its YouTube channel was terminated in 2011, and its editor says they had to “to create a new channel from scratch.” By 2017 its new channel had gained almost 10 million views before it was suddenly suspended without warning again last October. It now, however, appears to have a YouTube channel in operation.
According to the MEE report, YouTube also suspended the Filisten al-Youm TV channel last August, and in 2013, apparently following complaints by the Anti-Defamation League, YouTube closed down Iran’s PressTV channel. (A Press TV YouTube channel now also appears to be available again.)
Palestinian social media users risk even greater consequences.
The Israeli government has arrested Palestinians for videos, poems, and other posts it dislikes. A 2016 report estimated that “more than 150 arrests took place between October and February 2016 based on Facebook posts expressing opinions on the uprising. A recent video posted on social media led to the imprisonment of a 16 year old girl, her mother and cousin.
In addition, Palestinian access to social media is somewhat controlled by Israel. As a Huffington Post article reports, ”Palestinians’ digital rights and access to the Internet are compromised in very basic ways, because Israel controls the infrastructure and services of Palestinian telecommunication companies in the West Bank.”
While the situation has greatly improved in recent years – the Israeli government finally announced in 2016 that it would allow Palestinians in the West Bank to access 3G wireless networks, making this one of the last regions in the world with such access after years of Israeli restrictions – it is important to remember the enormous power Israel wields over this largely captive population.
While Israel is able to organize entire campaigns to filter and flood social media, its immense control over Palestinians impedes their access to the same media.
Given these facts, it is extremely important for people to search out information for themselves, go directly to our websites and others, subscribe to diverse email lists, and not rely on social media for information. [Please subscribe to our news posts here.]
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others are private companies. In the end, they have the power to censor information, and they periodically do so. For a few days, we felt acutely what that was like. If Facebook had joined the ban, as has happened with others, we would have been even more cut off from what is essentially today’s “public square.”
The Internet and social media give us far more access to information and tools for communication and activism than ever before, but they, too, can be controlled—and they are.
It is up to us, as always, to overcome.
Top Photo | An Israeli soldier looks at the Facebook page of the IDF, at the IDF spokesperson’s office in Jerusalem, in the Occupied Territories. (AP/Sebastian Scheiner)
Students at the Israeli military’s Computing and Cyber Defense Academy. Israel is also “scouring Jewish communities abroad for young computer prodigies willing to join its ranks.”
Numerous well funded, organized projects by and for Israel work to flood social media with pro-Israel propaganda, while blocking facts Israel dislikes. The projects utilize Israeli soldiers, students, American teens and others, and range from infiltrating Wikipedia to influencing YouTube. Some operate out of Jewish Community Centers in the U.S.
By Alison Weir
Recently, YouTube suddenly shut down the If Americans Knew YouTube channel. This contained 70 videos providing facts-based information about Israel-Palestine.
People going to the channel saw a message telling them that the site had been terminated for “violating YouTube guidelines”—implying to the public that we were guilty of wrongdoing. And ensuring they didn’t learn about the information we were trying to disseminate.
When we tried to access our channel, we found a message saying our account had been “permanently disabled.” We had received no warning and got no explanation.
After five days, we received a generic message saying YouTube had reviewed our content and determined it didn’t violate any guidelines. Our channel became live once more.
So why was it shut down in the first place? What happened and why?
As it turns out, Israel and Israeli institutions employ armies of Internet warriors—from Israeli soldiers to students—to spread propaganda online and try to get content banned that Israel doesn’t want seen.
Perhaps like our videos of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
What happened
A few days before the termination of our channel, we received a form email from YouTube, telling us we had gotten “one strike” for a short video about a Palestinian man killed by Israeli soldiers. The video was part of our series of videos to make Palestinian victims, usually ignored by US media, visible to Americans.
It takes three minutes to view the video and see that it contains nothing objectionable, unless revealing cruelty and oppression is objectionable:
YouTube’s email claimed we had somehow violated their long list of guidelines but did not tell us which one, or how. It simply stated:
“Your video ‘Ahmad Nasser Jarrar’ was flagged for review. Upon review, we’ve determined that it violates our guidelines. We’ve removed it from YouTube and assigned a Community Guidelines strike, or temporary penalty, to your account.”
Such a penalty is not public and does not terminate the channel.
Three days later, before we’d even had a chance to appeal this strike, YouTube suddenly took down our entire channel. This was done with no additional warnings or explanation.
This violated YouTube’s published policies.
YouTube policies say there is a “three-strike” system by which it warns people of alleged violations three times before terminating a channel. If a channel is eventually terminated, the policies state that YouTube will send an email “detailing the reason for the suspension.”
None of this happened in our case.
We submitted appeals on YouTube’s online form, but received no response. Attempts to find a phone number for YouTube and/or email addresses by which we could communicate with a human being were futile.
YouTube’s power to shut down content without explanation whenever it chooses was acutely apparent. While there are other excellent video hosting sites, YouTube is the largest one, with nearly ten times more views than its closest competitors. It is therefore enormously powerful in shaping which information is available to the public–and which is not.
We spent days working to upload our videos elsewhere, update links to the videos, etc. Finally, having received no response or even acknowledgment of our appeal from YouTube, we decided to write an article about the situation. We emailed YouTube’s press department a list of questions about its process. We have yet to receive any answers.
Finally that evening we received an email with good news:
“After a review of your account, we have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account. This means your account is once again active and operational.”
Our channel was visible once more. And YouTube had now officially confirmed that our content doesn’t violate its guidelines.
Ultimately, the YouTube system seems to have worked, in our case. Inappropriate censorship was overruled, perhaps by saner or less biased heads. In fact, we felt that there might at least be one positive result of the situation—additional YouTube employees had viewed our videos and perhaps learned much about Israel-Palestine they had not previously known.
But the whole experience was a wakeup call that YouTube can censor information critical of powerful parties at any time, with no explanation or accountability.
Israeli soldiers paid to “Tweet, Share, Like and more”
Israel and partisans of Israel have long had a significant presence on the Internet, working to promote the Israel narrative and block facts about Palestine, the Israel lobby, and other subject matter they wish covered up.
Opinionated proponents of Israel post comments, flag content, accuse critics of “antisemitism,” and disseminate misinformation about Palestine and Palestine solidarity activists. Many of these actions are by individuals acting alone who work independently, voluntarily, and relentlessly.
In addition to these, however, a number of orchestrated, often well-funded projects sponsored by the Israeli government and others have come to light. These projects work to place pro-Israel content throughout the Internet, and to remove information Israel doesn’t wish people to know.
One such Israeli project targeting the Internet came to light when it was lauded in an article by Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news organization headquartered in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
The report described a new project by Israel’s “New Media desk” that focused on YouTube and other social media sites. The article reported that Israeli soldiers were being employed to “Tweet, Share, Like and more.”
The article noted, “It is well known nowadays that what happens on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has great influence on events as they occur on the ground. The Internet, too, is a battleground.” It was “comforting,” the article stated, to learn that the IDF was employing soldiers whose job was specifically to do battle on it.
Israeli students paid to promote Israel on social media
Screen shot from a video about student program to spread pro-Israel content on the Internet and social media.
Another project to do battle on the Internet was initiated in 2011 by the 300,000-strong National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS). The goal was “to deepen and expand hasbara [state propaganda] activities of students in the State of Israel.”
Under this program, Israeli students are paid $2,000 to work five hours per week to “lead the battle against hostile websites.”
An announcement for the program (translated here into English) noted that “many students in Israel master the Internet and are proficient at using the Internet and social networking and various sites and are required to write and express themselves in English.” Students can work from the comfort of their own homes, points out the announcement.
“Students work in four teams: Content, Wikipedia, Monitoring and New Media,” according to the program description. It details the responsibilities for each team:
The content team is responsible for creating original content in a news format.
The monitoring team is responsible for “monitoring efforts while reporting and removing anti-Semitic [sic] content from social networks in a variety of languages.” (The program conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism; see below.)
The New Media team is responsible for social media channels, “including Facebook accounts in English, French and Portuguese, Twitter, YouTube channels, and so on.”
The Wikipedia team is “responsible for writing new entries and translating them into languages that operate in the program, updating the values of current and relevant information, tracking and preventing bias in the program’s areas of activity.”
This program sometimes claims it is working against antisemitism, but it conflates antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel. This is in line with an Israel-backed initiative to legally define “antisemitism” to include discussing negative facts about Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.
Campaign to infiltrate Wikipedia
The pro-Israel organization CAMERA infiltrated Wikipedia for a time. (Illustration by Electronic Intifada.)
Several years ago, another project came to light that targeted Wikipedia. While manipulating Wikipedia entries doesn’t directly impact YouTube, it provides a window into some of these efforts to manipulate online content.
A 2008 exposé in the Electronic Intifada revealed: “A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.”
While it is common and appropriate for individuals to edit Wikipedia entries to add factual information and remove inaccurate statements, this project was the antithesis of such editing. As EI, reported, its purpose was “to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.”
Author Ali Abunimah reported that a source had provided EI with a series of emails from members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) that showed the group “was engaged in what one activist termed a ‘war’ on Wikipedia.”
CAMERA Senior Research Analyst Gilead Ini organized a project to infiltrate Wikipedia.
CAMERA called for volunteers to secretly work on editing Wikipedia entries. It emphasized the importance of keeping the project secret. Volunteers were schooled in ways to elude detection. After they signed up as editors, they were to “avoid editing Israel-related articles for a short period of time.”
They were also told to “avoid, for obvious reasons, picking a username that marks you as pro-Israel, or that lets people know your real name.”
CAMERA also warned them: “Don’t forget to always log in… If you make changes while not logged in, Wikipedia will record your computer’s IP address.”
A Wikipedia editor known as Zeq helped in the effort, telling volunteers: “Edit articles at random, make friends not enemies—we will need them later on. This is a marathon not a sprint.” He emphasized the importance of secrecy: “You don’t want to be precived [sic] as a ‘CAMERA’ defender’ on wikipedia that is for sure.”
Zeq recommended that they work with and learn from an independent, pro-Israel Wikipedia editor known as Jayjg, but directed them to keep the project secret even from him.
When this all came to light, Wikipedia took measures against such manipulation of its system and the CAMERA program may have ended.
If it did, others stepped into the breach. In 2010 two Israeli groups began offering a course in “Zionist editing” of Wikipedia entries. The aim was “to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflects the worldview of Zionist groups.” A course organizer explained that the use of the word “occupied” in Wikipedia entries “was just the kind of problem she hoped a new team of editors could help fix.”
Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reported: “The organizers’ aim was twofold: to affect Israeli public opinion by having people who share their ideological viewpoint take part in writing and editing for the Hebrew version, and to write in English so Israel’s image can be bolstered abroad.”
There was to be a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor”—the person who over the next four years incorporated the most “Zionist” changes in the encyclopedia. The winner would receive a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.
High tech millionaire Naftali Bennett, a right-wing minister close to the settler movement, describes the program:
The UK Guardian reports: “One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn’t want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. ‘Going public in the past has had a bad effect,’ she says. ‘There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground.’”
Again in 2013, there was evidence of pro-Israel tampering with Wikipedia. Israel’s Ha’aretz reported that a social-media employee of NGO Monitor edited articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an allegedly biased manner. “Draiman concealed the facts that he was an employee of NGO Monitor, often described as a right-wing group, and that he was using a second username, which is forbidden under Wikipedia’s rules,” according to the paper.
Such actions have had an impact. A website critical of Wikipedia said in 2014 that there were “almost ten times as many articles about murdered Israeli children as there are articles about murdered Palestinian children,” even though at least 10 times more Palestinian children had been killed.
The website also pointed out: “While editors like Zeq (T–C–L) and CltFn (T–C–L) may get banned in the end, the articles theystarted remain.”
If YouTube reviewers and others use Wikipedia in their determination about whether content should be removed or not, these efforts to censor Wikipedia could adversely affect their decisions.
Social Media Missions for Israel
Title image from Forward article about the Act.IL campaign.
In 2017 yet another project to target Internet platforms was launched. Known as Act.il, the project uses a software application that “leverages the power of communities to support Israel through organized online activity.”
The software is a joint venture of three groups: Israel’s IDC University; the Israeli American Council, which works to “organize and activate” the half million Israeli-Americans who live in the U.S.; and another American group called the Maccabee Task Force, created to combat the international boycott of Israel, which it terms “an anti-Semitic movement.” Maccabee says it is “laser focused on one core mission—to ensure that those who seek to delegitimize Israel and demonize the Jewish people are confronted, combatted and defeated.”
In addition, the project is supported by Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry and Israel’s intelligence community. Its CEO is an eight-year veteran of Israeli army intelligence.
Israel’s Jerusalem Post reports that Act.IL is “a wide-ranging grassroots campaign app that lets individuals combat BDS in the palm of their hand” or, as we will see, from public computers in the US.
“Act.IL is more than just an app,” the Post article explains. “It is a campaign that taps into the collective knowledge of IDC students who together speak 35 languages, hail from 86 countries and have connections to the pro-Israel community all over the world.”
The article claims: “A platform like Act.IL offers world Jewry an opportunity to fight for one thing the majority can rally behind: Israel.” (This ignores the fact that there are many Jewish individuals who oppose Israeli policies.)
Israel partisans around the world download the app, and then “in this virtual situation room of experts, they detect instances where Israel is being assailed online and they program the app to find missions that can be carried out with a push of a button.”
An organizer notes: “When you work together, with the same goals and values, you can be incredibly powerful in the social media landscape.”
Some missions ask users to report videos. Israeli government officials say that the Act.il app “is more effective than official government requests at getting those videos removed from online platforms.”
The project is led by former Israeli intelligence officers and has close ties to American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Another funder is the Paul R. Singer Foundation, funded by the Republican hedge fund billionaire.
The Forward calls Act.IL a new entry into the “online propaganda war” that “has thousands of mostly U.S.-based volunteers who can be directed from Israel into a social media swarm.”
According to the Forward, “Its work so far offers a startling glimpse of how it could shape the online conversations about Israel without ever showing its hand.”
The Forward reports: “Act.il says that its app has 12,000 sign-ups so far, and 6,000 regular users. The users are located all over the world, though the majority of them appear to be in the United States. Users get ‘points’ for completed missions; top-ranked users complete five or six missions a day. Top users win prizes: a congratulatory letter from a government minister, or a doll of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister.”
Photo of group that participated in Act.IL training
Act.IL’s CEO, a veteran Israeli army intelligence officer, said the Israeli military and its domestic intelligence service “‘request’ Act.il’s help in getting services like Facebook to remove specific videos that call for violence against Jews or Israelis.” This according to the Forward report.
The officer later tried to walk back his statement, “saying that the Shin Bet [intelligence service] and the army don’t request help on specific videos but are in regular informal contact with Act.il. He said that Act.il’s staff is largely made up of former Israeli intelligence officers.”
Teens in American JCCs carry out missions assigned from Israel
New Jersey “Media Room,” a project of IAC New Jersey in partnership with Act.IL.
The project recruits Jewish teens and adults and sometimes operates out of local Jewish community centers, the Forward says. The paper describes one example:
“The dozen or so Israelis sitting around a conference table at a Jewish community center in Tenafly, New Jersey, on a recent Wednesday night didn’t look like the leading edge of a new Israeli government-linked crowdsourced online propaganda campaign.
“Tapping on laptops, the group of high school students and adult mentors completed social media ‘missions’ assigned out of a headquarters in Herzliya, Israel.”
In addition to the Tenafly “media room” another operates in Boston in cooperation with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. There are also regular Act.il advocacy-training sessions at The Frisch School, a Jewish day school in Paramas, New Jersey. Other media rooms are reportedly in the works, with one in Manhattan, hosted by The Paul R. Singer Foundation, scheduled to open soon.
The Forward reports: “In November, the Boston media room created a mission for the app that asked users to email a Boston-area church to complain about a screening there of a documentary that is critical of Israel. The proposed text of the email likens the screening of the film to the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and calls the film’s narrator, Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a ‘well-known anti-Semite.’”
Photo of Boston Media Room published by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, which states: “Media Room Ambassadors are students and adult mentors who are trained with the knowledge, skills, and tools to positively influence public discourse by developing pro-Israel social media campaigns.”
According to the Forward, Act.il also produces “pro-Israel web content that carries no logo. It distributes that content to other pro-Israel groups, including the Adelson-funded Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and The Israel Project, which push them out on their own social media feeds.”
The Forward predicts: “Initiatives in cyberspace seem likely to increase.”
Screenshot from video promoting the project, posted on the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston website.
Israeli media report that the Israeli military “has begun scouring Jewish communities abroad for young computer prodigies” to recruit for its ranks.
An Israeli official described the process: “Our first order of business is to search Jewish communities abroad for teens who could qualify, Our representatives will then travel to the communities and begin the screening process there.”
Israeli Government Ministry backs secret online campaigns
General Sima Vaknin-Gil told Israeli tech developers to “flood the Internet” with pro-Israel propaganda. As Israel’s Chief Censor, she said: ” “We censor information that is critical to our enemies, who have no capabilities like us, do not have a Jewish brain, and therefore our enemy relies to a large extent on open information…”
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry, which is behind this and similar projects, has mobilized substantial resources for online activities.
Israel’s Ynet news reports that the Ministry’s director “sees it as a war for all intents and purposes. ‘The delegitimization against the State of Israel can be curbed and contained through public diplomacy and soft tools,’ she says. ‘In order to win, however, we must use tricks and craftiness.’”
The director, General Sima Vaknin-Gil, told a forum of Israeli tech developers at a forum: “I want to create a community of fighters.” The objective is to “curb the activities of anti-Israel activists,” and “flood the Internet” with pro-Israel content.
An Israeli report in December stated that the ministry has acquired a budget of roughly $70 million to “stand at the forefront of the battle against delegitimization, adopting methods from the fields of intelligence and technology. There is a reason why ministry officials define it as ‘a war on consciousness terrorism.’” [‘Delegitimization’ is a common Israeli term for criticism of Israel. See here for a discussion of the term.]
A Ha’aretz article reports: “The Strategic Affairs Ministry’s leaders see themselves as the heads of a commando unit, gathering and disseminating information about ‘supporters of the delegitimization of Israel’—and they prefer their actions be kept secret.”
The article reports that the Ministry includes a job role entitled “Senior official—new-media realm,” responsible for surveillance and activities “in the digital realm.”
This individual head is responsible for analyzing social media and formulating a social media campaign against sites and activists who are deemed a threat to Israel.
Among the job’s responsibilities are:
“Analysis of the world of social media, in terms of content, technology and network structure, emphasizing centers of gravity and focuses of influence, methods, messages, organizations, sites and key activists, studying their characteristics, areas, realms and key patterns of activities of the rival campaign and formulating a strategy for an awareness campaign against them in this realm and managing crises on social media. That is, surveilling of activities mainly in the digital arena.”
Officials at the ministry are charged with “construction and promotion of creative and suitable programs for new media.”
The unit works to keep its activities secret from the public. For example, a program to train young Israelis for activities on social media was exempted from publishing a public bid for funding. Similarly, the ministry’s special unit against delegitimization, “Hama’aracha” (The Battle), is excluded from Israel’s Freedom of Information Law.
The 29th floor of Tel Aviv’s Champion Tower is the nerve center of a 24-7 ‘war’ in which Israeli agents working behind the scenes advance U.S. legislation, torpedo events, organize counter-protests, & close bank accounts.. The Director says: ‘In order to win we must use tricks and craftiness.’
Its activities reportedly include a “24/7 operations room monitoring all the delegitimization activities against Israel: Protests, conferences, publications calling for an anti-Israel boycott and international bodies’ boycott initiatives. The operations room will transfer the information to the relevant people to provide a proper response to these activities, whether through a counter-protest or through moves to thwart the initiative behind the scenes.”
Other programs include a 22-million-shekel project to work among labor unions and professional associations abroad “to root out the ability of BDS entities to influence the unions,” and a 16-million-shekel program focused on student activities throughout the world.
Israel’s UNIT 8200
Photo from article about Unit 8200 on Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre website.
Another Israeli entity that plays a role in covert Internet activity is the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy branch, Unit 8200. This unit is composed of thousands of “cyber warriors” primarily 18 to 21 years of age; some even younger. A number of its graduates have gone on to top positions at tech companies operating in the U.S., such as Check Point Software (where the spouse of the Jewish Voice for Peace head is employed as a solutions architect).
In 2015 Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced plans “to establish a special command to combat anti-Israel incitement on social media.” The command would operate under the foreign ministry’s hasbara [propaganda] department and would especially recruit from graduates of Unit 8200.
An article in the Jewish Press about the new command reports that Unit 8200 “has developed a great reputation for effectiveness in intelligence gathering, including operating a massive global spy network. Several alumni of 8200 have gone on to establish leading Israeli IT companies, including Check Point, ICQ, Palo Alto Networks, NICE, AudioCodes, Gilat, Leadspace, EZchip, Onavo, Singular and CyberArk.”
Check Point Software headquarters in Tel Aviv. Founded by a former Unit 8200 member, it also has offices throughout the U.S. Israeli tech companies sometimes assist in online spying efforts.
Numerous Israeli tech companies, many of them headed by former military intelligence officers, assist in these online spying efforts, sometimes receiving Israeli government funding “for digital initiatives aimed at gathering intelligence on activist groups and countering their efforts.”
According to the ministry’s statement, among the Command’s activities is “finding videos with inflammatory content and issuing complaints to the relevant websites.”
To be clear, this is an occupying military working covertly to achieve censorship of reporting on its atrocities.
YouTube & Google officials meet with Israeli Minister
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki speaking to the Israel Collaboration Network’s Israeli Women in Tech Group on August 25, 2016.
Major Internet companies have reportedly been cooperating in this effort.
In 2015 Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely announced that she had visited Silicon Valley and met with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Google’s Director of Public Policy (it is unclear whether this was was Jennifer Oztzistzki or Juniper Downs; Hotovely’s announcement referred to “Jennifer Downs”).
“At the end of the meeting,” Israeli media reported, “it was agreed that Google would strengthen bilateral relations with the Foreign Ministry and build a collaborative work apparatus.”
Another Israeli news report about the meeting states: “…it was agreed that the companies would strengthen ties with the Foreign Ministry and build a regular mechanism of control to prevent the distribution of those incendiary materials on the network.”
Google, which owns YouTube, denied the Foreign Ministry’s report. The Ministry accordingly “clarified” its statement somewhat, but continued to say that Israeli officials would be in “regular contact with Google’s employees in Israel who deal with the problematic materials.”
Such officials often have close ties to Israel. For example, Facebook’s Head of Policy in Israel, Jordana Cutler, had previously been employed for many years by the Israeli government. (More about Facebook can be found here.)
– ليس المكان ولا المجال ولا الوقت ولا المصلحة للخوض في التفاصيل، فالخبر كافٍ بذاته للاحتفال. عودة قناة «المنار» إلى مشاهديها وجمهورها على الأقمار الصناعية، بعد تغييب مفتعَل وعقابي على خيارها المقاوم. وهي تعود شعلة لا تنطفئ كصوت للمقاومة إلى جانب زميلات لها وقفت مع خط المقاومة، ولا تزال، وقدّمت تعويضاً مميّزاً ولافتاً لغياب «المنار» وستواصل الإضافة النوعية. وهنا تحضر قناة «الميادين» في المقام الأول، لكن عودة «المنار» حدث لا ينعزل عن حاجة جمهورها لحضورها، وما تقدّم له من خدمة إعلامية حية مميّزة في ميادين الإعلام الحربي الذي تفوّقت به، كما في مجال الإعلام الملتزم بشرح خط سياسي مقاوم وتحليل مواقف وخلفيات، بلا الحاجة للمرور في اختبارات إثبات الحياد كمظلة لا بدّ منها لسواها.
– يذكر جمهور المقاومة «المنار» في حرب تموز ويذكرها في الحرب السورية، ويحفظ لها المقاومون في قلوبهم مكانة خاصة، كما لا يعوّض غيابها أداء مميّز لزميلة أو شقيقة، كقناة «العالم» التي تستحق التحية ومعها مراسلوها في ميادين القتال، كما مراسلو قناة «الميادين» والقنوات السورية التي تحوّل مراسلوها إلى محاربين ارتقى بعضهم شهداء، وفي لبنان شقيقتها «أن بي أن»، لكن التميّز عند الزميلات والشقيقات، وقد توسّعت العائلة كثيراً بقنوات تنتمي لخط المقاومة كـ»الاتجاه» و«الغدير» و«النجباء» في العراق و«اللؤلؤة» في البحرين و«المسيرة» و«الساحات» في اليمن، لا يلغي حقيقة أنّ لحضور المنار نكهة مميّزة، تماماً كما لا يلغي حضور فصائل المقاومة العراقية واليمنية، المكانة المميّزة للمقاومة اللبنانية. وعودة «المنار» كيفما كانت معطياتها وظروفها، تجارياً وسياسياً، وتعاقدياً وقانونياً، فهي عودة احتفالية تستحق التحية.
– القضية التي طرحها تغييب «المنار» كانت الحاجة إلى قمر صناعي لا تخضع إدارته لضغوط سياسية تستهدف قوى المقاومة، قادر على توفير التغطية للمنطقة بطريقة فنية مناسبة لا ترهق المشاهدين بترتيبات معقدة أو مكلفة، ويجب التنويه بجهود بذلتها إدارة الأقمار الصناعية الروسية، ونجاحها بتخصيص أحد أقمارها لتغطية المنطقة على محاور الأقمار العاملة في سماء المنطقة، والتي تحمل القنوات التلفزيونية الوجهة إليها، وبدء التعاقد بأسعار مخفضة مع قنوات عاملة لتنويع باقات البث من أقمار آمنة لا تعرّضها لخطر الإيقاف والضغوط.
– واحدة من إيجابيات المبادرة الروسية خلق سوق تنافسية جعلت التفكير بمعادلة العقوبات موضع نقاش، بعدما بدأت العقوبة تتحوّل عقوبات على شركات الأقمار الصناعية التي تلتزم بالعقوبات، كما تصف ألمانيا العقوبات الأميركية على روسيا بالعقوبات على الشركات الألمانية. وهذا حرّر هذه الشركات من كثير من الضغوط كانت تتذمّر منها ضمناً وتعتبرها مخالفة للأصول التجارية التعاقدية ولقواعد العمل المهني، التي يفترض أن تؤدّي لحجب قنوات التحريض على الفتن، وقنوات تشجيع التطرف، وقنوات الإباحية، بدلاً من استهداف قنوات المقاومة، التي تبذل جهدها لتفادي التصادم مع قواعد السلوكيات المتفق عليها.
– مع عودة «المنار» إلى جمهورها، تحية الزمالة، وتحية خنادق القتال، وتحية المقاومين… وألف «مبروك» لإدارتها والعاملين فيها… والعود أحمد.
قناة «المنار» – عودة البث على قمر نايل سات H10971- 6/5
On January 22, 2018, I had the opportunity to speak with the well-respected, highly-informed, longtime rights activist and writer, Ajamu Baraka.
A human rights defender whose experience spans four decades of domestic and international education and activism, Ajamu Baraka is a veteran grassroots organizer whose roots are in the Black Liberation Movement and anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles. Please see his extended bio on his website.
He was the 2016 Green Party vice presidential candidate, and is a lead organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace. Mr. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report, and also publishes at Black Commentator, Commondreams, Pambazuka, and Dissident Voice.
As the Syrian military makes massive gains across the Idlib governorate, the last major bit of territory controlled by Western-backed terrorists, mainstream media is once again alight with “Assad is bombing his own people” stories. It is the exact same playlist that was used when the Syrian government liberated Homs, Deir ez-Zour, and Aleppo only this time it is updated for Idlib. Soon, we should be hearing stories of how Assad and Putin personally ordered the bombing of the “last hospital in Idilb.” No doubt there will be a lot of hospitals in Idlib since we may hear the story ten times before the region is liberated just as we did in Aleppo.
In this current propaganda campaign against the Syrian military’s operation in Idlib, a recent article by Sarah Abed reveals a terrorist-based group which has organized a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #Outrage4Idlib in order to denigrate the Syrian military operation and to push fake “atrocities” committed by the Syrian military.
As the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) makes some vast advances in liberating Idlib and the surrounding areas, groups supporting Syrian Al Qaeda (HTS) take to twitter to ramp up a propaganda campaign against the SAA. A mass produced list of pre-made tweets highlighting ‘atrocities’ that are yet to happen was posted by opposition groups to garner support for Syrian Al Qaeda currently in Idlib fighting Syrian government forces.
Entirely fictitious tweets such as these serve the purpose of promoting anti-Syrian government sentiments across social media, in hopes of prolonging the devastating war which has claimed the lives of over half a million Syrians and displaced millions in almost seven years.
The archive of pre-made tweets states “Today ( January 9th) a list of suggestions of pre-made tweets will be released. All you have to do is click to tweet to join the campaign and invite people to join us. Please use this site to tweet: RT are not counting in the trend, only originals tweets count.”
Al-Sura itself tweeted a screenshot of some of the tweets that contain premade headlines and headlines of atrocities and events that have yet to happen. Other tweets contain headlines of events that were reported years ago but are being falsely attributed to the current military operation in Idlib.
No doubt, the propaganda machine will be ramping up for the last battle to eliminate Western-backed terrorists from a major city in their largest concentration in Syria. The discovery of the tweet campaign just demonstrates the nature of Western pro-terrorist propaganda and should serve as a warning to distrust anything coming out of the mainstream corporate press and “activist” twitter storms during the liberation process.
[ Ed. note – The article below was initially published in Vogue Magazine in early 2011. I am re-posting it here as it provides a striking look back at Syria as it was just prior to the outbreak of the neocon-instigated regime-change war which so devastated the country.
Asma Assad, the wife of President Bashar Assad, is a woman of grace and beauty, and it’s probably not surprising that a fashion magazine would have decided to publish an article on her. But after the article appeared, Vogue, along with Joan Juliet Buck, the writer of the piece, were attacked by certain mainstream media outlets, such as The Atlantic, presumably for not sufficiently demonizing the Syrian government.
“Asma al-Assad has British roots, wears designer fashion, worked for years in banking, and is married to the dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed over 5,000 civilians and hundreds of children this year,” wrote Max Fisher in a sarcastically-worded lead paragraph for The Atlantic.
Fisher also criticized Vogue’s “fawning treatment of the Assad family and its portrayal of the regime as tolerant and peaceful,” noting that this treatment had “generated surprise and outrage in much of the Washington foreign policy community.”
The article by Buck had appeared in Vogue’s February 2011 issue. The Syrian regime-change operation got underway in March, a month later, when protests broke out in Daraa. And the timing of the two probably was nothing more than coincidental.
But of course the neocons in the State Department would have already begun executing their scheme, and a media vilification campaign would have been deemed necessary, or at any rate helpful, in greasing the wheels–and the sudden appearance of the Vogue article (the magazine reportedly has over 11 million readers) probably was looked upon as something of a monkey wrench in the plans. You could think of it as one of the rare moments that a mainstream media organ stepped out of bounds.
Fisher, who now holds a position with the New York Times, went on to kvetch that “the glowing article praised the Assads as a ‘wildly democratic’ family-focused couple who vacation in Europe, foster Christianity, are at ease with American celebrities, made theirs the ‘safest country in the Middle East,’ and want to give Syria a ‘brand essence.’”
It is of course true that the Assads “foster Christianity,” as Fisher contemptuously puts it (indeed–you can go here to see a video I posted two years ago of the first couple attending a Christmas service at a church in Damascus in 2015), but of course it would not do to have this kind of information put out in the mainstream just before the launch of a long-planned regime change operation.
Other mainstream media attacks upon Vogue came from Gawker, where writer John Cook also accused the publication of “fawning”; the New York Times, which published a piece headlined “The Balance of Charm and Reality“; and Slate, whose writer, Noreen Malone, damned Vogue for paying “besotted compliments” to the Assads and for “unwittingly exacerbating” a “modern day Marie Antoinette problem.”
Buck should now be proud of the mainstream media attacks upon her work–but aside from this, her article, as I say, is important also in that it provides a valuable glimpse into life in the country just before the outset of the war.
Syria, she notes, was known as “the safest country in the Middle East.” Buck was roundly excoriated for making this observation, but certainly at the time, in 2011, it was true in spades: Syria was eminently safer than either US-occupied Iraq or Israeli-occupied Palestine.
Buck also notes that Syria is “a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings”–which would have run completely counter to the narrative of Assad being the ubiquitous “brutal dictator who kills his own people” and who serves as a “magnet to jihadis”–but perhaps most noteworthy of all are Buck’s revelations about programs set up for children in the country.
When I visited Syria in 2014, one of the things I heard about were Asma Assad’s charity efforts on behalf of children, so it was not surprising for me, upon reading the Vogue article, to learn of Massar, an organization founded by the First Lady and “built around a series of discovery centers,” or to learn that at these centers children and young adults, ages five to twenty-one, were taught “creative, informal approaches to civic responsibility.”
Buck also tells of Asma’s jaunts around the country visiting local schools and interacting with children in what seems to have been a very life-fulfilling manner.
All of this, of course, would have come to a dramatic halt, or a dramatic curtailment at any rate, when the nightmare began and the country suddenly found itself invaded by armies of US-backed terrorists.
Another fascinating aspect of the article is what it reveals regarding Asma’s contributions toward safeguarding Syria’s cultural heritage. While in Syria I attended, along with several members of the staff of Veterans Today, an anti-terrorism conference held at the Dama Rose Hotel in Damascus. Among the subjects discussed at the conference were the ongoing attacks upon cultural heritage sites. It was disclosed that at the outset of the conflict, the country’s Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM), in anticipation of terrorist looting of cultural heritage sites, had begun securing priceless artifacts by placing them in secure storage sites around the country.
The effort was a herculean one, involving DGAM’s 2500 employees spanning out across the country, and while most of the credit has gone to Dr. Maamoun Abdulkarim, the director of DGAM, it would appear, if Buck’s article is any indication, that Asma Assad played a role in the effort as well:
There are 500,000 important ancient works of art hidden in storage; Asma al-Assad has brought in the Louvre to create a network of museums and cultural attractions across Syria, and asked Italian experts to help create a database of the 5,000 archaeological sites in the desert. “Culture,” she says, “is like a financial asset. We have an abundance of it, thousands of years of history, but we can’t afford to be complacent.”
The reference to works of art being “hidden in storage” would suggest that already at that time–February of 2011–Syrian officials had begun to anticipate the hellfire that was about to be unleashed upon their country.
One other thing I might mention is a small criticism I have of Buck’s piece. She speaks of “minders” who she claims accompanied her throughout her visit, commenting as well that “on the rare occasions I am out alone, a random series of men in leather jackets seems to be keeping close tabs on what I am doing and where I am headed.”
All I can say in response to this is that I never experienced anything of the like during my own visit to Syria. I stayed at the Dama Rose Hotel–the location where the conference was held–and while I occasionally went out for strolls through the neighborhood, I never once was followed by any “random series of men in leather jackets.” Yes–there were Syrian soldiers in the streets. But they were stationed at certain locations, busy street corners for instance, and they did not begin tailing me suspiciously after I had passed them by. They remained at their posts. Moreover, their presence, rather than threatening, was a comforting assurance I would not be attacked or kidnapped by terrorists, at least while the soldiers were around.
Lastly, I would also mention that Vogue succumbed to the withering barrage of criticism and removed Buck’s article from their website. Less than a year later, the only trace of it that remained on the Internet was at a pro-Syrian site called PresidentAssad.net–something which was made note of in a January 3, 2012 article by Fisher at The Atlantic.
The PresidentAssad.net site is still around, but for some reason the Vogue article seems to have gotten dropped over the years. However, it has re-surfaced–at Gawker. There you may find it (at least for the time being) along with a link back to the attack piece I mentioned above, written by Cook and posted in February of 2011. ]
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Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert
By Joan Juliet Buck
Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.
Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary. The country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons. Its number-one enmity is clear: Israel. But that might not always be the case. The United States has just posted its first ambassador there since 2005, Robert Ford.
Iraq is next door, Iran not far away. Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is 90 minutes by car from Damascus. Jordan is south, and next to it the region that Syrian maps label Palestine. There are nearly one million refugees from Iraq in Syria, and another half-million displaced Palestinians.
“It’s a tough neighborhood,” admits Asma al-Assad.
It’s also a neighborhood intoxicatingly close to the dawn of civilization, where agriculture began some 10,000 years ago, where the wheel, writing, and musical notation were invented. Out in the desert are the magical remains of Palmyra, Apamea, and Ebla. In the National Museum you see small 4,000-year-old panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl that is echoed in the new mother-of-pearl furniture for sale in the souk. Christian Louboutin comes to buy the damask silk brocade they’ve been making here since the Middle Ages for his shoes and bags, and has incidentally purchased a small palace in Aleppo, which, like Damascus, has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years.
The first lady works out of a small white building in a hilly, modern residential neighborhood called Muhajireen, where houses and apartments are crammed together and neighbors peer and wave from balconies. The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”
Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian Harley Street cardiologist and his diplomat wife, both Sunni Muslims. They spoke Arabic at home. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College, and spent holidays with family in Syria. “I’ve dealt with the sense that people don’t expect Syria to be normal. I’d show my London friends my holiday snaps and they’d be—‘Where did you say you went?’ ”
She studied computer science at university, then went into banking. “It wasn’t a typical path for women,” she says, “but I had it all mapped out.” By the spring of 2000, she was closing a big biotech deal at JP Morgan in London and about to take up an MBA at Harvard. She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash. They had known each other forever, but a ten-year age difference meant that nothing registered—until it did.
“I was always very serious at work, and suddenly I started to take weekends, or disappear, and people just couldn’t figure it out,” explains the first lady. “What do you say—‘I’m dating the son of a president’? You just don’t say that. Then he became president, so I tried to keep it low-key. Suddenly I was turning up in Syria every month, saying, ‘Granny, I miss you so much!’ I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get married at some stage. I couldn’t say why I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a really big deal. He wouldn’t accept my resignation. I was, like, ‘Please, really, I just want to get out, I’ve had enough,’ and he was ‘Don’t worry, take time off, it happens to the best of us.’ ” She left without her bonus in November and married Bashar al-Assad in December.
“What I’ve been able to take away from banking was the transferable skills—the analytical thinking, understanding the business side of running a company—to run an NGO or to try and oversee a project.” She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch, and runs home to her children at four. “It’s my time with them, and I get them fresh, unedited—I love that. I really do.” Her staff are used to eating when they can. “I have a rechargeable battery,” she says.
The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”
In 2005 she founded Massar, built around a series of discovery centers where children and young adults from five to 21 engage in creative, informal approaches to civic responsibility. Massar’s mobile Green Team has touched 200,000 kids across Syria since 2005. The organization is privately funded through donations. The Syria Trust for Development, formed in 2007, oversees Massar as well as her first NGO, the rural micro-credit association FIRDOS, and SHABAB, which exists to give young people business skills they need for the future.
And then there’s her cultural mission: “People tend to see Syria as artifacts and history,” she says. “For us it’s about the accumulation of cultures, traditions, values, customs. It’s the difference between hardware and software: the artifacts are the hardware, but the software makes all the difference—the customs and the spirit of openness. We have to make sure that we don’t lose that. . . . ” Here she gives an apologetic grin. “You have to excuse me, but I’m a banker—that brand essence.”
That brand essence includes the distant past. There are 500,000 important ancient works of art hidden in storage; Asma al-Assad has brought in the Louvre to create a network of museums and cultural attractions across Syria, and asked Italian experts to help create a database of the 5,000 archaeological sites in the desert. “Culture,” she says, “is like a financial asset. We have an abundance of it, thousands of years of history, but we can’t afford to be complacent.”
In December, Asma al-Assad was in Paris to discuss her alliance with the Louvre. She dazzled a tough French audience at the International Diplomatic Institute, speaking without notes. “I’m not trying to disguise culture as anything more than it is,” she said, “and if I sound like I’m talking politics, it’s because we live in a politicized region, a politicized time, and we are affected by that.”
The French ambassador to Syria, Eric Chevallier, was there: “She managed to get people to consider the possibilities of a country that’s modernizing itself, that stands for a tolerant secularism in a powder-keg region, with extremists and radicals pushing in from all sides—and the driving force for that rests largely on the shoulders of one couple. I hope they’ll make the right choices for their country and the region. ”
Damascus evokes a dusty version of a Mediterranean hill town in an Eastern-bloc country. The courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque at night looks exactly like St. Mark’s square in Venice. When I first arrive, I’m met on the tarmac by a minder, who gives me a bouquet of white roses and lends me a Syrian cell phone; the head minder, a high-profile American PR, joins us the next day. The first lady’s office has provided drivers, so I shop and see sights in a bubble of comfort and hospitality. On the rare occasions I am out alone, a random series of men in leather jackets seems to be keeping close tabs on what I am doing and where I am headed.
“I like things I can touch. I like to get out and meet people and do things,” the first lady says as we set off for a meeting in a museum and a visit to an orphanage. “As a banker, you have to be so focused on the job at hand that you lose the experience of the world around you. My husband gave me back something I had lost.”
She slips behind the wheel of a plain SUV, a walkie-talkie and her cell thrown between the front seats and a Syrian-silk Louboutin tote on top. She does what the locals do—swerves to avoid crazy men who run across busy freeways, misses her turn, checks your seat belt, points out sights, and then can’t find a parking space. When a traffic cop pulls her over at a roundabout, she lowers the tinted window and dips her head with a playful smile. The cop’s eyes go from slits to saucers.
Her younger brother Feras, a surgeon who moved to Syria to start a private health-care group, says, “Her intelligence is both intellectual and emotional, and she’s a master at harmonizing when, and how much, to use of each one.”
In the Saint Paul orphanage, maintained by the Melkite–Greek Catholic patriarchate and run by the Basilian sisters of Aleppo, Asma sits at a long table with the children. Two little boys in new glasses and thick sweaters are called Yussuf. She asks them what kind of music they like. “Sad music,” says one. In the room where she’s had some twelve computers installed, the first lady tells a nun, “I hope you’re letting the younger children in here go crazy on the computers.” The nun winces: “The children are afraid to learn in case they don’t have access to computers when they leave here,” she says.
In the courtyard by the wall down which Saint Paul escaped in a basket 2,000 years ago, an old tree bears gigantic yellow fruit I have never seen before. Citrons. Cédrats in French.
Back in the car, I ask what religion the orphans are. “It’s not relevant,” says Asma al-Assad. “Let me try to explain it to you. That church is a part of my heritage because it’s a Syrian church. The Umayyad Mosque is the third-most-important holy Muslim site, but within the mosque is the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. We all kneel in the mosque in front of the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. That’s how religions live together in Syria—a way that I have never seen anywhere else in the world. We live side by side, and have historically. All the religions and cultures that have passed through these lands—the Armenians, Islam, Christianity, the Umayyads, the Ottomans—make up who I am.”
“Does that include the Jews?” I ask.
“And the Jews,” she answers. “There is a very big Jewish quarter in old Damascus.”
The Jewish quarter of Damascus spans a few abandoned blocks in the old city that emptied out in 1992, when most of the Syrian Jews left. Their houses are sealed up and have not been touched, because, as people like to tell you, Syrians don’t touch the property of others. The broken glass and sagging upper floors tell a story you don’t understand—are the owners coming back to claim them one day?
The presidential family lives surrounded by neighbors in a modern apartment in Malki. On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery “because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.”
The old al-Assad family apartment was remade into a child-friendly triple-decker playroom loft surrounded by immense windows on three sides. With neither shades nor curtains, it’s a fishbowl. Asma al-Assad likes to say, “You’re safe because you are surrounded by people who will keep you safe.” Neighbors peer in, drop by, visit, comment on the furniture. The president doesn’t mind: “This curiosity is good: They come to see you, they learn more about you. You don’t isolate yourself.”
There’s a decorated Christmas tree. Seven-year-old Zein watches Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on the president’s iMac; her brother Karim, six, builds a shark out of Legos; and nine-year-old Hafez tries out his new electric violin. All three go to a Montessori school.
Asma al-Assad empties a box of fondue mix into a saucepan for lunch. The household is run on wildly democratic principles. “We all vote on what we want, and where,” she says. The chandelier over the dining table is made of cut-up comic books. “They outvoted us three to two on that.”
A grid is drawn on a blackboard, with ticks for each member of the family. “We were having trouble with politeness, so we made a chart: ticks for when they spoke as they should, and a cross if they didn’t.” There’s a cross next to Asma’s name. “I shouted,” she confesses. “I can’t talk about empowering young people, encouraging them to be creative and take responsibility, if I’m not like that with my own children.”
“The first challenge for us was, Who’s going to define our lives, us or the position?” says the president. “We wanted to live our identity honestly.”
They announced their marriage in January 2001, after the ceremony, which they kept private. There was deliberately no photograph of Asma. “The British media picked that up as: Now she’s moved into the presidential palace, never to be seen again!” says Asma, laughing.
They had a reason: “She spent three months incognito,” says the president. “Before I had any official engagement,” says the first lady, “I went to 300 villages, every governorate, hospitals, farms, schools, factories, you name it—I saw everything to find out where I could be effective. A lot of the time I was somebody’s ‘assistant’ carrying the bag, doing this and that, taking notes. Nobody asked me if I was the first lady; they had no idea.”
“That way,” adds the president, “she started her NGO before she was ever seen in public as my wife. Then she started to teach people that an NGO is not a charity.”
Neither of them believes in charity for the sake of charity. “We have the Iraqi refugees,” says the president. “Everybody is talking about it as a political problem or as welfare, charity. I say it’s neither—it’s about cultural philosophy. We have to help them. That’s why the first thing I did is to allow the Iraqis to go into schools. If they don’t have an education, they will go back as a bomb, in every way: terrorism, extremism, drug dealers, crime. If I have a secular and balanced neighbor, I will be safe.”
When Angelina Jolie came with Brad Pitt for the United Nations in 2009, she was impressed by the first lady’s efforts to encourage empowerment among Iraqi and Palestinian refugees but alarmed by the Assads’ idea of safety.
“My husband was driving us all to lunch,” says Asma al-Assad, “and out of the corner of my eye I could see Brad Pitt was fidgeting. I turned around and asked, ‘Is anything wrong?’ ”
“Where’s your security?” asked Pitt.
“So I started teasing him—‘See that old woman on the street? That’s one of them! And that old guy crossing the road?
That’s the other one!’ ” They both laugh.
The president joins in the punch line: “Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training!”
After lunch, Asma al-Assad drives to the airport, where a Falcon 900 is waiting to take her to Massar in Latakia, on the coast. When she lands, she jumps behind the wheel of another SUV waiting on the tarmac. This is the kind of surprise visit she specializes in, but she has no idea how many kids will turn up at the community center on a rainy Friday.
As it turns out, it’s full. Since the first musical notation was discovered nearby, at Ugarit, the immaculate Massar center in Latakia is built around music. Local kids are jamming in a sound booth; a group of refugee Palestinian girls is playing instruments. Others play chess on wall-mounted computers. These kids have started online blood banks, run marathons to raise money for dialysis machines, and are working on ways to rid Latakia of plastic bags. Apart from a few girls in scarves, you can’t tell Muslims from Christians.
Asma al-Assad stands to watch a laborious debate about how—and whether—to standardize the Arabic spelling of the word Syria. Then she throws out a curve ball. “I’ve been advised that we have to close down this center so as to open another one somewhere else,” she says. Kids’ mouths drop open. Some repress tears. Others are furious. One boy chooses altruism: “That’s OK. We know how to do it now; we’ll help them.”
Then the first lady announces, “That wasn’t true. I just wanted to see how much you care about Massar.”
As the pilot expertly avoids sheet lightning above the snow-flecked desert on the way back, she explains, “There was a little bit of formality in what they were saying to me; it wasn’t real. Tricks like this help—they became alive, they became passionate. We need to get past formalities if we are going to get anything done.”
Two nights later it’s the annual Christmas concert by the children of Al-Farah Choir, run by the Syrian Catholic Father Elias Zahlawi. Just before it begins, Bashar and Asma al-Assad slip down the aisle and take the two empty seats in the front row. People clap, and some call out his nickname:
Two hundred children dressed variously as elves, reindeers, or candy canes share the stage with members of the national orchestra, who are done up as elves. The show becomes a full-on songfest, with the elves and reindeer and candy canes giving their all to “Hallelujah” and “Joy to the World.” The carols slide into a more serpentine rhythm, an Arabic rap group takes over, and then it’s back to Broadway mode. The president whispers, “All of these styles belong to our culture. This is how you fight extremism—through art.”
Brass bells are handed out. Now we’re all singing “Jingle Bell Rock,” 1,331 audience members shaking their bells, singing, crying, and laughing.
“This is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East,” says the president, ringing his bell. “This is how you can have peace!”
The Damask Rose
It’s interesting that the title of the Vogue article would have contained the words “Rose of the Desert.” Syria, of course, is a major cultivation center of the Damask rose, a species of flower highly prized for its fragrance and used in the production of rose oil and rose water.
Below is a report on the rose harvest in Syria posted by China TV earlier this year. The reporter makes a good point: “Life and light are stronger than death and darkness.”
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
