STUDY FINDS MEDIA GIANTS NEW YORK TIMES, CNN, AND FOX NEWS PUSHING FOR US WAR IN YEMEN

FEBRUARY 6TH, 2024

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Alan Macleod

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

MintPress study of major U.S. media outlets’ coverage of the Yemeni Red Sea blockade has found an overwhelming bias in the press, which presented the event as an aggressive, hostile act of terrorism by Ansar Allah (a.k.a. the Houthis), who were presented as pawns of the Iranian government. While constantly putting forward pro-war talking points, the U.S. was portrayed as a good faith, neutral actor being “dragged” into another Middle Eastern conflict against its will.

Since November, Ansar Allah has been conducting a blockade of Israeli ships entering the Red Sea in an attempt to force Israel to stop its attack on the people of Gaza. The U.S. government, which has refused to act to stop a genocide, sprang into action to prevent damage to private property, leading an international coalition to bomb targets in Yemen.

The effect of the blockade has been substantial. With hundreds of vessels taking the detour around Africa, big businesses like Tesla and Volvo have announced they have suspended European production. Ikea has warned that it is running low on supplies, and the price of a standard shipping container between China and Europe has more than doubled. Ansar Allah, evidently, has been able to target a weak spot of global capitalism.

Western airstrikes on Yemen, however, according to Ansar Allah spokesperson Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, at least, said that they have had only a “very limited” impact so far. Al-Bukhaiti made these comments in a recent interview with MintPress News.

BIASED REPORTING

MintPress conducted a study of four leading American outlets: The New York Times, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. Together, these outlets often set the agenda for the rest of the media system and could be said to be a reasonable representation of the corporate media spectrum as a whole.

Using the search term “Yemen” in the Dow Jones Factiva global news database, the fifteen most recent relevant articles from each outlet were read and studied, giving a total sample of 60 articles. All articles were published in January 2024 or December 2023.

For full information and coding, see the attached viewable spreadsheet.

The study found the media wildly distorted reality, presenting a skewed picture that aided U.S. imperial ambitions. For one, every article in the study (60 out of 60) used the word “Houthis” rather than “Ansar Allah” to describe the movement which took part in the Yemeni Revolution of 2011 and rose up against the government in 2014, taking control of the capital Sanaa, becoming the new de facto government. Many in Yemen consider the term “Houthi” to be a derogatory term for an umbrella movement of people. As Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, Head of Yemen’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee, told MintPress:

“Houthis’ is not a name we apply to ourselves. We refuse to be called Houthis. It is not from us. It is a name given to us by our enemies in an attempt to frame the broad masses in Yemeni society that belong to our project.“

Yet only two articles even mentioned the name “Ansar Allah” at all.

Since 2014, Ansar Allah has been in control of the vast majority of Yemen, despite a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition attempting to beat them back and restore the previous administration.

Many of the articles studied, however (22 of the 60 in total), did not present Ansar Allah as a governmental force but rather as a “tribal group” (the New York Times), a “ragtag but effective” rebel organization (CNN), or a “large clan” of “extremists” (NBC News). Fourteen articles went further, using the word “terrorist” in reference to Ansar Allah, usually in the context of the U.S. government or American officials calling them such.

Some, however, used it as a supposedly uncontroversial descriptor. One Fox article, for example, read: “For weeks, the Yemeni terrorist group’s actions have been disrupting maritime traffic, while the U.S. military has been responding with strikes.” And a CNN caption noted that U.S. forces “conducted strikes on 8 Houthi targets in Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist-controlled areas of Yemen on January 22.”

Ansar Allah is responding to an Israeli onslaught that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced around 1.9 million Gazans. Yet Israel and its actions were almost never described as “terrorism,” despite arguably fitting the definition far better than the Yemeni movement. The sole exception to this was a comment from al-Houthi, whom CNN quoted as calling Israel a “terrorist state.” Neither the United States nor its actions were ever described using such language.

EYES ON IRAN

Although the perpetrator of the attacks on shipping is unquestionably Ansar Allah, corporate media had another culprit in mind: Iran. Fifty-nine of the 60 articles studied reminded readers that the Yemeni group is supported by the Islamic Republic, thereby directly pointing the finger at Tehran.

It is indeed true that Iran supports Ansar Allah politically and militarily. When directly asked by MintPress if Tehran supplies it with weapons, al-Bukhaiti dodged the question, calling it a “marginal issue.” Why this facet of the story needed to be repeated literally hundreds of times is unclear. Often, the media studied would repeat it ad nauseam, to the point where a reader would be forgiven for thinking Ansar Allah’s official name was the “Iran-backed Houthis.” One CNN round-up used the phrase (or similar) seven times, a Fox News article six times, and an NBC News report five times.

Not only was the “Iran-backed” factoid used constantly, but it was also made a prominent part of how the issue was framed to the American public. The title of one Fox News report, for instance, read (emphasis added throughout): “U.S.-U.K. coalition strike Iran-backed Houthi targets in Yemen after spate of ship attacks in Red Sea,” its subheadline stated that: “Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi militants have stepped up attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea in recent weeks,” and its first sentence read: “The United States and Britain carried out a series of airstrikes on military locations belonging to Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen early Friday in response to the militant group’s ongoing attacks on vessels traveling through the Red Sea.”

From a stylistic point of view, repeating the same phrase continuously is very poor form. It does, however, drive the point home, suggesting perhaps that this was an inorganic directive from above.

This is far from an unlikely event. We know, for example, that in October, new CNN CEO Mark Thompson sent out a memo to staff instructing them to always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gazan Health Ministry and their figures for deaths from Israeli bombardment. This was done with the clear intent to undermine the Palestinian side of the story.

Not only did the four outlets studied constantly remind readers that Ansar Allah is supported by Iran, but they also regularly framed the violence as orchestrated by Tehran and that Ansar Allah is little more than a group of mindless, unthinking pawns of Ayatollah Khamenei. As the New York Times wrote:

“Investing in proxy forces — fellow Shiites in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and the Sunni Hamas in the Gaza Strip — allows Iran to cause trouble for its enemies, and to raise the prospect of causing more if attacked…The Houthi movement in Yemen launched an insurgency against the government two decades ago. What was once a ragtag rebel force gained power thanks at least in part to covert military aid from Iran, according to American and Middle Eastern officials and analysts.”

This “Iran is masterfully pulling all the strings” framing was present in 21 of the 60 articles.

The fearmongering about Iran did not stop there, however, with some outlets suggesting Tehran is building an international terror network or constructing an atomic bomb. The New York Times quoted one analyst who said:

Iran is really pushing it…It’s another reason they don’t want a war now: They want their centrifuges to run peacefully.” The Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon but could enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade in a few weeks, from the current 60 percent enrichment to 90 percent, he said. ”They’ve done 95 percent of the work.’”

The point of all this was to demonize Ansar Allah and ramp up tensions with Iran, leading to the inevitable calls for war. “The U.S. needs to strike Iran, and make it smart,” ran the (since changed) title of a Washington Post editorial. “The West may now have no option but to attack Iran,” wrote neoconservative Iran hawk John Bolton in the pages of The Daily Telegraph. Bolton, of course, is part of a group called United Against Nuclear Iran that, since its inception, has been attempting to convince the U.S. to bomb Iran. Earlier this year, MintPress News profiled the shady think tank.

While the media in the sample reminded us literally hundreds of times that Ansar Allah is Iran-backed, similar phrases such as “U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia” or “America-backed Israel” were never used, despite the fact that Washington props both those countries up, with diplomatic, military and economic support. The Biden administration has rushed more than $14 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, sent a fleet of warships to the region, and blocked diplomatic efforts to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza.

Meanwhile, it is doubtful whether Saudi Arabia would exist in its current form without U.S. support. Militarily alone, the U.S. has sold tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Riyadh, helping the petro-state to convert its oil profits into security. From 2014 to 2023, Saudi Arabia led a U.S.-backed coalition force attempting to remove Ansar Allah from power. This consisted primarily of a massive bombing campaign against civilian targets in Yemen, including farms, hospitals and sanitation infrastructure. The violence turned Yemen into what the United Nations regularly called the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” with around 400,000 people dying and tens of millions going hungry and lacking even basic healthcare.

The U.S. backed Saudi Arabia the whole way, selling the government at least $28.4 billion worth of arms, according to a MintPress study. In 2021, the Biden administration announced it would only sell the kingdom “defensive” technology. However, this has included shipments of cruise missiles, attack helicopters, and support for gunships.

Both Saudi Arabia and Israel featured prominently in the articles studied. But only five of the 60 mentioned U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, and none at all for Israel. This context is extremely important for American audiences to know. Without their government’s political, military, economic and diplomatic support, none of this would be possible, and the current situation would be radically different. Only six articles mentioned U.S. support for the Saudi onslaught against Yemen – and none featured the fact prominently as they did with Iranian support for Ansar Allah.

Only one article in the sample suggested that Ansar Allah might not simply be an Iranian cat’s paw. The New York Times wrote that: “The Houthis are an important arm of Iran’s so-called ‘axis of resistance,’ which includes armed groups across the Middle East. But Yemeni analysts say they view the militia as a complex Yemeni group, rather than just an Iranian proxy.” This was the sum total of information given suggesting Ansar Allah is an independent actor.

A HUMANITARIAN BLOCKADE?

Yemen considers its actions in blocking Israeli traffic from the Red Sea as a humanitarian gesture, similar to the “right to protect” concept the U.S. frequently invokes to justify what it sees as humanitarian interventions across the world. As al-Houthi told MintPress:

“First, our position is religious and humanitarian, and we see a tremendous injustice. We know the size and severity of these massacres committed against the people of Gaza. We have suffered from American-Saudi-Emirati terrorism in a coalition that has launched a war and imposed a blockade against us that is still ongoing. Therefore, we move from this standpoint and do not want the same crime to be repeated.“

Al-Bukhati said that Ansar Allah did not intend to kill anyone with their actions and that they would stop if Israel ceased its attack on Gaza, telling MintCast host Mnar Adley that:

We affirm to everyone that we only target ships associated with the Zionist entity [Israel], not with the intention of sinking or seizing them, but rather to divert them from their course in order to increase the economic cost on the Zionist entity [Israel] as a pressure tactic to stop the crimes of genocide in Gaza.”

However, this “humanitarian” framing of Yemen’s actions was not prominently used and was only introduced by identifying it as a Houthi claim. Many articles only alluded to the position of Ansar Allah. CNN wrote that “The Iran-backed Houthis have said they won’t stop their attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea until the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ends.” Meanwhile, NBC News and Fox News frequently presented Ansar Allah’s actions as purely in support of their ally, Hamas, as the following two examples illustrate:

“The Iran-backed militants, who say their actions are aimed at supporting Hamas, vowed retaliation and said the attacks had killed at least 5 fighters at multiple rebel-held sites” (NBC News).

“Houthi forces have taken credit for continued attacks on merchant vessels and threatened to expand their targets to include U.S. and British vessels — all in a campaign to support Hamas in its war against Israel” (Fox News).

Therefore, humanitarian action was refashioned into support for terrorism.

Other articles also suggested a wide range of reasons for the blockade, including to “expand a regional war” and “distract the [Yemeni] public” from their “failing…governance” (New York Times), to “attempt to gain legitimacy at home,” (CNN), and “revenge against the U.S. for supporting Saudi Arabia,” (NBC News). Many offered no explanation for the blockade whatsoever.

A WAR “NOBODY WANTS”

As al-Bukhaiti’s comments suggest, there would be a very easy way to end the blockade: get Israel to end its operations in Gaza. But only twice in 60 articles was this reality even mentioned; one noting that Omani and Qatari officials advised that “reaching a cease-fire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’ stated impetus for the attacks,” and once in the final sentence of an NBC News article quoting al-Bukhaiti himself saying exactly as much. However, due to the placement of the information and the fact that it came from an organization regularly described as an Iran-backed extremist terrorist group, that idea likely held little weight with readers. Instead, military solutions (i.e., bombing Yemen) were the overwhelming response offered by the corporate press in their reporting.

Despite this, the media consistently presented the United States as a neutral and honest actor in the Middle East, on the verge of being “sucked” into another war against its will. As the New York Times wrote, “President Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw in American forces.” There was a profound “reluctance,” the Times told readers, from Biden to strike Yemen, but he had been left with “no real choice” but to do so.

This framing follows the classic trope of the bumbling empire “stumbling” into war that media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented, where the United States is always “responding” to crises and is never the aggressor. “How America Could Stumble Into War With Iran,” wrote The Atlantic; “Trump could easily get us sucked into Afghanistan again,” Slate worried; “What It Would Take to Pull the US Into a War in Asia,” Quartz told readers.

None of the journalists writing about the U.S.’ frequent misfortune with war ever seem to contemplate why China, Brazil, Indonesia, or any other similarly large country do not get pulled into wars of their own volition as the United States does.

The four media outlets studied regularly presented the U.S. bombing one of the world’s poorest countries as a method of defending itself. CNN wrote that “Administration officials have repeatedly said that they see these actions as defensive rather than escalatory,” without comment. And Fox News ran with the extraordinary headline, “U.S. carries out ‘self-defense’ strike in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi missiles” – a framing which could surely only fly in a deeply propagandized nation.

In reality, the United States’ military meddling in Yemen did not start this winter. Biden is the fourth successive U.S. president to bomb the country. In December, the White House confirmed that there are already American troops in Yemen, though what their precise focus is remains unclear.

HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS

This sort of wildly skewed coverage does not happen by accident. Rather, it is the outcome of structural and ideological factors inherent within corporate media. The New York Times is committed to Zionism as an ideology, and its writers on the Middle East are not neutral actors but protagonists in the ongoing displacement of Palestinians. The newspaper owns property in West Jerusalem that was seized from the family of writer Ghada Kharmi during the 1948 ethnic cleansing. And while many Times writers are openly supportive of the Israeli project and have family members serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, staff who speak out against the ongoing genocide are promptly shown the door.

Fox News is no less complicit in the Israeli project. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is a major owner in Genie Energy, a company profiting from oil drilling in the illegally occupied Golan Heights region. Murdoch is famously hands-on as a boss and makes sure all of his media outlets follow his line on major issues. And on Israel, the Australian billionaire is explicit: “Israel is the greatest ally of democracy in a region beset with turmoil and radicalism,” he said in 2013. The network’s massive Evangelical Christian viewership would expect little else than strong support for the U.S.-Israeli position, either.

CNN, meanwhile, operates a strict, censorious, top-down approach to its Middle East coverage, with everything the outlet prints having to go through its notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem bureau before publishing. Senior executives send out directives instructing staff to make sure that Hamas (not Israel) is always presented as responsible for the current violence while, at the same time, barring any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”

Therefore, the results of this study, while shocking, should not be surprising, given this context. Through examining the coverage of Yemen in four leading U.S. outlets, it is clear that corporate media are failing to inform the public of many of the basic realities of who Ansar Allah is, why they are carrying out their campaign, and what it would take to end the hostilities, they are perpetuating this war, and therefore are every bit as responsible as the politicians and military commanders who keep the bloodshed going.

HOW US AND UK GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA SPECIALISTS COLLABORATED WITH NAZIS IN UKRAINE

JUNE 20TH, 2023

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By David Miller

A MintPress investigation has found that a host of Western government officials, intelligence agents and assets have been directly involved in intimate collaboration with Nazi groups and individuals since at least 2014. This has included involvement in creating and operating the Nazi-run kill list in Ukraine, which MintPress revealed recently.

While Western media have belatedly been forced to concede that there are Nazi influences in Ukraine, many journalists have insisted that the visible fascist patches on uniforms are only there to troll Russians and that they are insignificant and a gift to Russian propaganda. Still, other journalists admit to asking Ukrainian service members to cover up their Nazi symbols. Yet, as we shall see, this collaboration goes much further.

Perhaps a good place to start is with the ongoing role of a key intelligence-linked official who has taken on a propaganda role on behalf of Ukraine since the launch in February 2022 of what the Russian government calls its “Special Military Operation.” Meet Cormac Smith, a member of the first Irish bobsleigh team to qualify for the Winter Olympics in 1992.  He has appeared in scores of news reports passing on Western propaganda talking points about the role of Russia in Ukraine. But who is Smith working for?

According to his own account, he is a “private citizen” supporting “Ukraine/global freedom.” Yet until December 2018, he was the deputy director of communications for the British Cabinet Office – the official body responsible for supporting the prime minister. He was also previously attached to the UK Foreign Office as the strategic communications advisor to the foreign minister of Ukraine.

Cormac Smith | Who is he working for today?

Last May, The Irish Independent claimed that Smith is “an unlikely key player in the information war,” who “estimates he has given about 100 TV, radio and print interviews with the international media in the past few months to tell Kyiv’s side of the story.” Smith has a nice line in outrageous propaganda gambits, claiming that Russians are the actual Nazis and that they murder, rape and pillage, including the rape of children.

As it turns out, the source of many of the allegations of rape – including multiple alleged cases of rape to death of children – was the Ukraine parliamentary commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova. Her evidence was alleged to be a helpline set up to report allegations of human rights abuses. Her tales were too much even for the Ukrainian government, which dismissed her at the end of May 2022.

Last year, it was comprehensively demonstrated that her stories had little evidential basis. However, even before this, she had already reportedly admitted to “promoting fake news to persuade Western countries to send more arms and aid.” Smith nonetheless carried on making vague allegations of rape (including of children) for months afterward. Naturally, no evidence was ever cited. He repeated the rape allegation almost monthly between April 2022 and January 2023. (In 2022: May, August, September, October, November, and in 2023: January, April, May).

“Systematic rape” of two million women “of all ages” | Disinformation from Cormac Smith

In April 2022, he concluded a tweet about the alleged rapes of “2 million women of all ages” with the line: “Russians are fucking animals, there is no other Russia, they must be defeated.”

Three weeks earlier, Smith asked, “Is there any difference between” Russian tank crews in Mariupol and “Nazi SS murderers who put Jews in the gas chambers.”

In December, he paraded claims that “Russians are much worse than Nazis.”

Only following orders? Cormac Smith retails MI6 talking points

“Russians are much worse than Nazis,” Smith said in December 2022

Of course, Smith denies Maidan was a U.S.-backed coup, that NATO expansion did not cause the Russian intervention and that Ukraine “is not full of Nazis” integrated into the military, police and intelligence services. Thus, we find him at the forefront of Nazi apologism. But who is he working for?

According to his own account, “Since Moscow began threatening a full invasion, he has been in daily contact with former Ukrainian colleagues and friends.” As he told The Irish Independent:

‘I was out there in December [2021] visiting and they said it would be really helpful if you can help as a commentator because you really understand us,’ he says. ‘This is also an information war and I am trying to make a small contribution. Russia is a country that lies on an industrial scale, and we were trying to get people to see that for years, but it’s only now that the scales are falling from people’s eyes.’”

Curiously, this would appear to suggest that Smith is working for actors in Ukraine. However, he has on several occasions insisted he is doing it “pro bono,” meaning without being paid. According to his LinkedIn page, he has been in various self-employed consultancy roles since January 2019.

Cormac Smith’s “Experience” | LinkedIn

Yet in September 2022, he tweeted that he had “six years experience of Ukraine, including two years working at the heart of her government.” This suggests that his self-employed role has involved significant work on Ukraine for an unknown client.

Source | Twitter

Perhaps of more relevance to his actual role is the latter part of that admission: his two years in Ukraine. What was he doing there, and for whom did he work? It turns out that he was a British government agent. Perhaps he still is. Smith joined the U.K. Cabinet Office in April 2016. He gave this account on his LinkedIn page in 2020:

After three months at the Cabinet Office I was asked to travel to Ukraine to lend communication expertise to the country’s government as strategic communication advisor to their foreign minister. I was attached to the British Embassy in Kyiv and became the first foreigner to be embedded in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of Ukraine.”

“Over 18 months I was credited with introducing positive changes to…how the MFA communicated, not just in Kyiv but across the globe. I also worked with the Ministries of Health, Finance, Education & Science and the Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration; as well as advising both the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine and the NATO mission in Kyiv on crisis communication.”

Smith’s eighteen months in Kiev were followed by seven months in London with the National Security Communications Team (NSCT), a body in the U.K. Cabinet Office. Today, his LinkedIn page does not mention the NSCT, referring simply to the Cabinet Office. But back in 2020, it said otherwise.

What is the NSCT? At that point, the unit had just been set up and focused much of its efforts on influencing the public on the alleged Russian poisoning of the defector Sergei Skripal. Smith wrote in his now deleted résumé that “by the end of the Summer [of 2018], the NSCT had played a pivotal role in a ‘hands down’ victory over the Kremlin in the information war.” It is instructive to learn from this his key role in coordinating the lies and misinformation circulated by the British state in that period.

The Counter Disinformation and Media Development program in the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was run by an honorary colonel in military intelligence.  But The NSCT was funded by the U.K. Foreign Office’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) and, as can be seen in documents published by the Foreign Office, the identity of the lead agency (indeed even the “type” of agency) was redacted on “security” grounds. The only agencies liable to redact in these circumstances are intelligence agencies, suggesting that it was MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence agency. NSCT is thus revealed as a potential MI6-directed op.

CSSF document redacted on “security” grounds | Source

Cormac Smith’s Twitter profile circa 2017 | Source

Other NSCT personnel have traveled to Ukraine to advise the government. In 2018, Henry Collis of the NSCT attended and spoke at “The Hybrid War Decade: Lessons Learned to Move Forward Successfully,” held between November 7-8 in Kyiv. Unlike Cormac Smith, Collis also has a known history in military intelligence, having been a reserve officer in the Honourable Artillery Company, one of the constituents of the British Army Intelligence Corps.

STOPFAKE – NAZI APOLOGISTS

While advising the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Smith became involved with the team at StopFake (created just after the 2014 coup), including its “co-founder” Yevhen Fedchenko, an academic. On his return to London in 2018, he posed in his garden with a StopFake t-shirt. My “gaff [British slang for one’ home] is now full of memories from Ukraine,” he said. Unsurprisingly, he signs off the exchange with the Banderite fascist greeting, “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine.”)

While seen by many Ukrainians as a hero and the father of the nation (a position the current government has promoted), Stepan Bandera was a Nazi collaborator whose group, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), helped carry out the systematic extermination of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians during World War Two. The full slogan originally accompanied by a Nazi salute of the kind all too familiar to students of Hitler’s Nazi movement was a call and response: “Slave Ukraini” – “Heroyam Slava!” (Meaning, Glory to Ukraine – Glory to the heroes!). Thus, endorsing this greeting is an indication of what might be seen as Nazi apologism.

Also advising StopFake in 2016-17 was the well-known U.S. official Nina Jankowicz, who, according to her own account, “advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship.” Prior to her Fulbright grant in Ukraine, Jankowicz managed “democracy assistance programs” to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a core part of the “CIA sidekick” organization, the National Endowment for Democracy.

StopFake was created in March 2014, the same month as InformNapalm, which runs the kill list. It claims to have “launched as a volunteer project” “not supported financially or otherwise by any official Ukrainian organization or government agency.” This assertion is undermined a little by the fact that it does admit to receiving funding from a host of Western governments and intelligence-linked agencies, such as the Atlantic Council, the International Renaissance Foundation (the Ukraine branch of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations), the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic, the Embassy of the United Kingdom, and nearly $250,000 from the British Foreign Office.

StopFake has also received funds from the Sigrid Rausing Trust, which states that it paid the Media Reforms Center (the parent of StopFake) £205,000 (around $250,000) between 2015 and 2019. StopFake does not admit to the money which it received from the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA front group.

The claim to be unaffiliated with the government is also undermined by a leaked Ukrainian Defense Ministry PowerPoint presentation from 2015 which lists StopFake as one of their “special projects.”

Support for the idea it is a government cutout also comes from the fact that both Smith and Jankowicz were consulting it in their capacity as government advisers.

StopFake has a deserved reputation for Nazi apologism. For instance, in 2018, the site defended military boot camps for children run by the Neo-Nazi group, the Azov Battalion. In 2017, Jankowicz hosted a StopFake video episode about Russian propaganda and Ukrainian volunteer battalions.

On Jankowicz and StopFake, The Nation stated:

 Painting neo-Nazi paramilitaries with an extensive record of war crimes as patriots helping refugees, all while working with a ‘disinformation’ group that turned out to run interference for violent neo-Nazi formations—that’s the experience Biden’s new disinformation czar brings to the table.”

Multiple established Western media outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on StopFake’s ties to white power or Nazi groups. But when local independent journalist  Ekaterina Sergatskova co-authored a long investigation exploring these links, she received death threats and was forced to flee Kiev. The intimidation tactics suggest that StopFake has more than a passing similarity to the work of InformNapalm, which hosts the kill list Myrotvorets.

Further Nazi connections are visible in the personage of Irena Chalupa, one of three Ukrainian-American sisters deeply involved in pro-NATO propaganda networks. The sisters are – so it is reported – devotees of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his OUN-B fascist militia.

Irena works for the U.S. state propaganda outfit Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty and was also (around 2015) a non-resident fellow at the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. In 2016, she regularly hosted debunking posts on StopFake. According to Ukrainian nationalist sources, both of her sisters, Andrea and Alexandra Chalupa, were founders of a propaganda outlet Digital Maidan, created in New York in January 2014, which agitated for the coup. Their “closest working partners” included EuroMaidanPress which was founded by Banderite thugs and regularly publishes pieces by a wide range of official U.S. propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Alexandra was co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) Ethnic Council and her fingerprints are all over the disinformation that the Russians hacked and leaked the Clinton and Podesta emails – a core claim of the Russiagate deception. In 2015, according to her own account, Andrea was close to Michael Weiss of the Atlantic Council and various other NATO propaganda operations, such as The Interpreter Magazine. The connection of all three to Banderite propaganda networks and of Irena and Andrea to the Atlantic Council is illuminating, given the role that it appears the Atlantic Council played in a further Ukraine related propaganda operation.

PROPORNOT

A supposedly independent website helping users to differentiate between real and fake news, Propornot emerged some eighteen months after the Maidan coup. Its domain name was registered on August 24, 2016, and its first blacklist of websites allegedly purveying Russian propaganda was circulated in October of that year. It complemented the kill list on Myrotvorets (the “peacemaker” website), hacking by the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance and the debunking work of InformNapalm, which MintPress revealed is the parent of both the former operations. Was Propornot part of the same op?

Unlike Myrotvorets or InformNaplam, Propornot redacted the name of the person that registered the domain. But that did not prevent the persistent Donbass-based journalist George Eliason from using basic scanning tools to reveal that Propornot was a product of The Interpreter Magazine.

The Interpreter was set up by Michael Weiss, a longtime Zionist and Neocon who is close to at least one of the Chalupa sisters. Weiss was previously been attached to the controversial U.K. think tank, the Henry Jackson Society – a group that has been widely accused of promoting Islamophobia.

Between 2013 and 2015, The Interpreter was run by the Atlantic Council. In January 2016 it became a project of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a direct U.S. government propaganda operation. The organization even went so far as to encourage colleagues at the Atlantic Council to denounce its activities in the hope that they would not link the two organizations together. The same trick was used on the kill-list Myrotvorets, from which Bellingcat, for example, attempted to distance itself.

Later Weiss also got involved with New Lines magazine (described by journalist Max Blumenthal as hosting “a rogue’s gallery of U.S. regime collaborators, neocons and corporate media hacks”), where he showcased his investigative prowess reporting from “inside Ukraine’s psyops”, when he is himself deeply embedded in the psyops operation.

Propornot, of course, is on the same page as the other Banderite propaganda efforts discussed here. In 2016, it tweeted a puff piece by Radio Free Europe on the “Ukrainian ‘Hacktivist’ Network Cyberbattling The Kremlin” – referring to the work of InformNapalm – with the Banderite slogan “Heroyim Slava!” (“Glory to the heroes.”)

The U.S.-backed coup of February 2014 came after significant Western involvement in Ukrainian politics. The Maidan “uprising” began in November 2013, and the government was replaced by February 2014.

This ushered in a substantial Western effort to advise the government on propaganda and “strategic communications” as well as extensive training of both military and civilian forces in the information and influence operations favored by NATO, the U.S. and the U.K. The evidence is that some of that advisory effort had already started in 2012 – well before the coup.

In 2015, a leaked PowerPoint file titled “Free Russia,” said to be from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, stated there was “co-operation” with two NATO groups (StratCom and Cyber Defense Centers of Excellence); three American groups (U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Cyber Command and Psyops); and two British units (the 15th (U.K.) Psyops and 77th Brigade).

The 15th Psyops ceased to exist in April 2015 when it was merged into the 77th Brigade, a grouping created on 1 January 2015, thus indicating British involvement in early 2015 at the latest. Amongst the revelations in a separate leaked NATO document from this period was that the U.K. military had been (prior to February 2015) training the Ukrainian forces in psyops/propaganda: “Ukrainian MOD [Ministry of Defense] receiving mentoring from JIAG [Joint Information Activities Group] (U.K. MOD) was mentioned as a past successful experience.”

The involvement of Western psyops in Ukraine continued throughout the period, and the U.S. group even posted images of their Ukraine activities on Instagram in 2019.

The U.S.-backed coup of February 2014 came after significant Western involvement in Ukrainian politics. The Maidan “uprising” began in November 2013, and the government was replaced by February 2014.

This ushered in a substantial Western effort to advise the government on propaganda and “strategic communications” as well as extensive training of both military and civilian forces in the information and influence operations favored by NATO, the U.S. and the U.K. The evidence is that some of that advisory effort had already started in 2012 – well before the coup.

In 2015, a leaked PowerPoint file titled “Free Russia,” said to be from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, stated there was “co-operation” with two NATO groups (StratCom and Cyber Defense Centers of Excellence); three American groups (U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Cyber Command and Psyops); and two British units (the 15th (U.K.) Psyops and 77th Brigade).

The 15th Psyops ceased to exist in April 2015 when it was merged into the 77th Brigade, a grouping created on 1 January 2015, thus indicating British involvement in early 2015 at the latest. Amongst the revelations in a separate leaked NATO document from this period was that the U.K. military had been (prior to February 2015) training the Ukrainian forces in psyops/propaganda: “Ukrainian MOD [Ministry of Defense] receiving mentoring from JIAG [Joint Information Activities Group] (U.K. MOD) was mentioned as a past successful experience.”

The involvement of Western psyops in Ukraine continued throughout the period, and the U.S. group even posted images of their Ukraine activities on Instagram in 2019.

A third leaked document also included references to a U.K. government-funded FCO CSSF project worth nearly £250,000 (U.S. $315,000). It was to be run in 2014/5 directly with the Ministry of Defense and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, which expressed full “support” for the project. All activities “will be coordinated with HQ of armed forces, and will be implemented with the participation of Ukrainian official representatives.”

The purpose was to  “discredit” Russian policy towards Ukraine, demonstration of “Putin’s regime responsibility for all Donbass people troubles,” demonstration of “Putin’s inner circle personal interest in destabilization in Ukraine” and “demonisation” or Russian politicians “that are most popular in Ukraine.” This project was led by an organization (the Ukrainian Institute for International Politics) that also claimed a range of additional Western funders. In 2014, for example, it received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.

One Ukraine Ministry of Defense PowerPoint titled “Free Donbass” referred to “The analysis of NATO’s actions in the Balkans, as well as the conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” which  “demonstrated the importance of the so-called ‘perception management.’” This is said to include “public diplomacy, information and psychological operations (IPO), public information, disinformation, and covert action.”

In late 2022, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, Commander of United States Army Special Operations Command, noted that “Our Psychological Operations combination exercise now incorporates synthetic internet and real-time sentiment analysis to educate students on the speed of information.” “The speed of information, the power of information ops, might be one of the greatest lessons learned from the events unfolding in Ukraine,” he said, adding that, “Ukrainians spent the past eight years—since the annexation of Crimea in 2014—learning a lot from special operators and other U.S. trainers.”

One panelist— “speaking under Chatham House rules that forbade reporters to attribute remarks” — said, “We’d spent eight years building rapport… and building deep relationships. And all of a sudden, when it’s game on,” they were called back to the United States.” “That did not go over well… We’re seeing a master class on [strategic communications] and psyops every day. But it started out with our SOF [Special Operations Forces] guys helping them out,” the panelist added; “Two of the first strikes on Feb. 24 into the Kyiv area were on the psyop-production facility…with long-range precision strike missiles. That’s how much value the Russians put into messaging.”

Western propaganda experts and intelligence officials have been deeply involved in advising Ukraine on how best to launder its image. Take the examples of Alicia Kearns, Chris Donnelly, Gerry Osborne, Ewen Murchison and Phil Jones – all of whom have been involved in propaganda and/or intelligence with the British state.

Alicia Kearns is a Conservative MP (since 2019) and was shortly thereafter installed as the youngest chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee as well as vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Ukraine.

Kearns has a history as a British government propagandist, working very closely with (if not in) MI6 at the Foreign Office. She listed herself as “’Cross-Government lead for Counter Daesh, Syria and Iraq Effort’ on her LinkedIn page, which indicates she was running the  Counter-Daesh Coalition Communications Cell at the Foreign Office. There she oversaw overt and, what she has described in a leaked résumé, as “discreet” propaganda on Syria. The résumé was submitted in a bid for a government contract. Her activities at the FCO included working to soften the image of NATO proxy Salafi terror groups and to falsely implicate the Syrian government in chemical weapons attacks with a whole host of MI6 contractors, including ARK, Incostrat, CIJA and, most famously, the White Helmets/May Day Rescue.

The first page of Alicia Kearns’s leaked resume shows her attachment to Torchlight and mentions a trip to Ukraine

Alicia Kearns’s description of her “overt and discreet” propaganda activities

She then spent a period working covertly with MI6 contractors Torchlight in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The tender documents issued by the government specifically state that “you may not mention that the client is HMG [Her Majesty’s Government]” This latter role was never mentioned on Kearns’ LinkedIn page, and she scrubbed all mention of her other derring-do once elected to Parliament in 2019.

Among her contributions on Ukraine, she said, “I remember being stood behind Ukrainian President Poroshenko at the NATO Summit in 2014 as he discussed the Minsk Protocol, a ceasefire agreed with pro-Russia separatist leaders. The atmosphere was full of cautious optimism and hope. Devastatingly, the violence returned.” Notably, She fails to acknowledge the significant Western involvement in the subsequent violence.

She also states that “in 2015… I visited Ukraine to support the Ukrainian Government,” where she spoke at a “Ukraine Government Communications Service” event, according to her leaked résumé.  ‪She went back in March 2023 to meet Zelensky. She also takes pride in using the full Banderite slogan, “Slava Ukraini! Heroyim Slava!” on social media.

Banderite apologism from Alicia Kearns, MI6 asset and Conservative MP | Source

Chris Donnelly is a former advisor to the NATO Secretary General and an Honorary Colonel in the British Army’s shadowy Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). He was involved in advising Ukraine from the first moment after the coup, writing a memo on March 1, 2014 (which was later leaked). “If I were in charge,” he wrote, “I would get the following implemented asap.” This would include “a cordon sanitaire” around Crimea with “troops and mines” and “Min[ing] Sevastopol harbour/bay.” “The government needs a strategic communication campaign,” Donnelly concluded: “I am trying to get this message across.”

In 2016, he oversaw a visit of five Ukrainian military intelligence personnel to the U.K. This was as part of his work with the Integrity Initiative, a Foreign Office-funded project alleged to focus on countering Russian disinformation. However, one of its principal targets was British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Ukrainian spooks were hosted and dined at the British government’s expense. Donnelly billed the Ministry of Defence for £6788 (U.S. $8,500) for the trip. Among those that they met while there were assorted British military intelligence operatives, including a day with the SGMI and with the British Army psyop outfit, the 77th Brigade.

In 2022 Donnelly was involved in plans to blow up the Kerch Bridge to Crimea (which were leaked after the bridge was bombed. The leaks were reported by Kit Klarenberg). It is notable that Donnelly’s Integrity Initiative FCO-funded propaganda project strayed into both Holocaust revisionism in the Baltics and Nazi apologism in relation to Ukraine, notably in the significant work it did with StopFake in 2016-18, during which both Jankowicz and Smith were there.

Leaked Integrity Initiative document on the visit of Ukrainian intelligence officers

Lt. Col. Ewen Murchison worked in Military Strategic Effects, in the Operations Directorate of the U.K. Ministry of Defence, between September 2012 and August 2014. This is the new name for an MoD propaganda unit which it has adopted in part in order to divert attention from the fact that its role is propaganda, all the previous euphemisms (such as “psychological operations”) having been devalued by the discovery of previous lies. Murchison attended the first NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence steering group in Latvia in July 2014, at which Ukraine was a topic of discussion.

Ewen Murchison, second from left, and Gerry Osborne, third from left, in Latvia in July 2014 | STRATCOM COE | CC

Col. Gerry Osborne was Strategic Communications Manager at the U.K. Ministry of Defence between December 2012 and August 2014 and then Strategic Communications Director until December 2014. In the former role, he undertook the following role with regards to Ukraine: “delivered and ran Strategic Communications campaigns for U.K. activity”; “Project Director for Strategic Communication capacity building missions” including to Ukraine and Georgia to address defense priorities and build governance in pre-post conflict environments.

In order to gain “global traction for the U.K. Strategic Communication Approach,” he also “took a leading role as U.K. MoD subject matter expert in the successful brand development of the Multinational Information Operations Experiment and NATO StratCom Center of Excellence and was a principal visiting lecturer to partners,” including in Ukraine. Osborne attended the 1st NATO StratCom Center of Excellence Steering Committee meeting in Riga, Latvia, on July 24-25, 2014 and contributed to its October 2014 study of “Russia’s Information Campaign Against Ukraine” along with Steve Tatham of the SCL Group. (Note that Osborne’s role in relation to Ukraine may have started before the NATO-backed coup in early 2014.)

Phil Jones –  Another British advisor, Jones worked at the U.K. Ministry of Defence between 2005 and 2018. His last five years at the MoD were in the post of U.K. Special Defence Advisor to the Ministry of Defence, Ukraine, 2013 – 2018, in Kiev. We can note that this advisory role began prior to the 2014 NATO-backed coup in Ukraine.

Jones does not boast any particular expertise in strategic communications or influence ops on his LinkedIn page, but he did take part on February 19, 2015, in a NATO StratCom Center of Excellence (COE) “coordination meeting” to assess the “capacity building needs of the Ukrainian, Georgian and Moldovan wider security sector in the area of Strategic Communications (StratCom).”

He was in Kiev through the entire period of the coup and the development thereafter of Ukrainian propaganda activities and institutions and appears to have maintained a connection with the country, including serving as a “personal advisor” to the Minister of Defense in Ukraine under the aegis of the U.K. Government’s Stabilization Unit in early 2020 and since October of that year as a Board Member of the Centre for Defence Strategy, Ukraine.

It is not known how influential he was or was not in the creation of the Ministry’s kill list or the other cut-outs it created, including InformNapalm, StopFake and others. The center is financed by two of its “partners,” the National Endowment for Democracy and UKAid, a British government operation.

Jones, right, at the NATO STRATCOM conference in Latvia in February 2015 | STRATCOM COE | CC

The 2015 NATO StratCom CoE conference was “part of the larger project to improve the strategic communications capabilities of … as well as the institutional strategic communications capacity” of Ukraine and the other countries. Leading that project were two further Western operatives, both of whom have military and intelligence experience, Steve Tatham and Nigel Oakes.

The minutes of the meeting were leaked, and the document was claimed by the chair of the meeting, Steve Tatham, to have been “subtly doctored” in a Russian “hack and leak” operation. It was claimed that one bullet point was added and that a contact name was removed from the document. This statement thus implied that the rest of the document was genuine.

From left: Steve Tatham (Director of Operations, IOTA Global), Amb. Janis Karklins, Nigel Oakes (Commercial Director, IOTA-GLOBAL), February 2015 | STRATCOM COE | CC

Tatham was attached to the NATO center for that year and had previously been the commanding officer of the 15 (U.K.) Psychological Operations Unit in the British military until 2014. He then joined the MoD propaganda unit called Military Strategic Effects until his retirement from the service later in 2014. After that, he joined Strategic Communication Laboratories, a private PR firm that was later implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Oakes had founded the firm and was thus Tatham’s boss. The import of that scandal was that the firm used a huge amount of Facebook data to influence the U.S. presidential elections and also the U.K. Brexit referendum in the interests of Russia. As it turned out, there was absolutely no evidence that this had happened either in the U.S. or in the U.K.  Back in the real world, this document and other public information demonstrate that, on the contrary, SCL Group and its subsidiaries SCL Defence and Iota-Global (led by Tatham) were, in fact, working closely with Ukraine against Russia. This was even reported in the mainstream media, though the conclusion that the Russiagate hysteria was overblown did not percolate through.

So we have established that Western forces have been training and advising the government of Ukraine from before the coup, though noticeably more afterward. What did they do with this advice? They set up a range of cut-outs and front groups which they pretended were independent of government in order to aid plausible deniability.

Each was marked indelibly by Nazi apologism, or was run by Banderite ideologues with whom British and American officials evidently closely co-operated. The prominent role of Banderite Neo-Nazis in all of these Ukraine government propaganda operations suggests that Nazi apologism has spread into the core institutions of the government of Ukraine– perhaps more than the dominant Western view is able to admit.

EXPOSED: DISTURBING DETAILS OF NEW PENTAGON “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT OFFICE”

JUNE 9TH, 2023

Source

Kit Klarenberg

Ken Klippenstein, an investigative journalist at The Intercept, has exposed how the Pentagon very quietly launched a new internal division, dubbed the “Influence and Perception Management Office” (IPMO), in March.

Its existence is not strictly secret, although there has been no official announcement of its launch, let alone an explanation from Department of Defense (DoD) officials as to its raison d’être or modus operandi. Its budget likewise remains a mystery but purportedly runs into the “multimillions.”

Pentagon financial documents from 2022 offer a laconic and largely impenetrable description of IPMO. The Office, it is said, “will serve as the senior advisor” to Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, Ronald S. Moultrie, on “strategic and operational influence and perception management (reveal and conceal) matters”:

It will develop broad thematic influence guidance focused on key adversaries; promulgate competitive influence strategies focused on specific defense issues, which direct subordinate planning efforts for the conduct of influence-related activities; and fill existing gaps in policy, oversight, governance, and integration related to influence and perception management matters. [IPMO]…provides necessary support to National Defense Strategy…to address the current strategic environment of great power competition.”

Nonetheless, references to “reveal and conceal” and “influence and perception management” are tantalizing in the extreme. So too, is IPMO’s position within the U.S. national security structure and the Office’s acting director being intimately tied to the Pentagon’s spookiest operations.

Despite its low-key rollout, IPMO looks set to be a hugely influential new DoD agency in the future, waging ceaseless information warfare at home and abroad. What makes the new venture all the more sinister is that such capabilities are nothing new; the Pentagon has managed multiple similar, if not identical, operations in the past and continues to do so, despite significant controversy and public backlash.

Indeed, the DoD’s official dictionary has a dedicated definition of “perception management”, linking the practice to “psychological operations,” which are defined as actions intended to influence the “emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior” of target governments, organizations, groups, and individuals:

Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”

This, of course, begs the question of why a new incarnation of what came before and never went away is now being inaugurated by the U.S. defense establishment. As we shall see, no reassuring answers are forthcoming.

“SIGNATURE REDUCTION”

Despite the lack of a public paper trail, a memo outlining IPMO’s modus operandi was acquired by Klippenstein. It offers a hypothetical scenario in which the Pentagon “wants to influence Country A’s leaders to stop purchasing a weapon system from Country B” because it believes the sale “might jeopardize DoD’s military advantage, in some way, if the U.S. ever had to engage in armed conflict with Country A.”

“Assuming IPMO has worked to establish the desired behavior change, how might key influencers be identified that have sway over these leaders’ thought processes, beliefs, motives, reasoning, etc. (including ascertaining their typical modes and methods of communication)?” the memo reads. “Thereafter, assuming an influence strategy is developed, how might the DIE [Defense Intelligence Estimate] or IC [Intelligence Community] determine if DoD’s influence activities are working (aside from waiting and watching hopefully that Country A eventually stops purchasing the weapons system in question from Country B)?”

The document was signed by IPMO director James Holly, previously Director of Special Programs for the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). During this time, he ran espionage operations for an unnamed paramilitary organization in Iraq and was an intelligence officer for a Combined Joint Task Force in Afghanistan.

Precisely what these roles entailed is not certain. However, that he made the leap from JSOC to IPMO is striking, given the Command is the nucleus of all the Pentagon’s spookiest, most sensitive operations. The division very rarely makes the news, but when it does, the stories are invariably remarkable and disturbing. For example, in May 2021, Newsweek exposed how the Command operates “the largest undercover force the world has ever known” under a program named “Signature Reduction.” In all, 60,000 people – “more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA” – are part of this secret army, “many working under masked identities and in low profile.” Working both at home and overseas, its operatives carry out covert assignments using civilian cover “in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.”

“Dozens of little-known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. Altogether, the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the clandestine force, doing everything from creating false documentation and paying the bills and taxes of individuals operating under assumed names to manufacturing disguises and other devices to thwart detection and identification, to building invisible devices to photograph and listen in on activity in the most remote corners of the Middle East and Africa.”

A series of photos from the Signature Reduction program provided to Newsweek by William Arkin | Editing by MintPress News

This cloak-and-dagger militia moves entirely in the shadows and may contravene U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, basic standards of accountability, and various codes of military conduct. Chief among the latter is the longstanding principle that the military does not conduct covert operations on American soil. Yet, JSOC has circumvented this restriction ever since its founding in December 1980, operating under a veil of almost total official secrecy, all the while often in tandem with the CIA.

In June 1984, The New York Times outlined how JSOC effectively acted as a law unto itself, quickly evolving far beyond its original remit to “collect intelligence to plan for special military operations” into “a nighttime operation, with its own weapons procurement and research, as well as communications.”

Two months earlier, a senior Pentagon official told elected lawmakers that the Command was not “an agency of interest to the intelligence oversight committee” and refused to answer questions about its activities.

Nonetheless, the Times offered a brief overview of what was known about JSOC’s activities over the prior four years. In addition to assisting the illegal invasion of Grenada, the Command had provided extensive assistance to CIA cloak-and-dagger operations in Central America. In particular, it supported the fascist Contras in Nicaragua, helping the Agency sidestep Congressional restrictions on its brutal efforts to topple the elected left-wing Sandinista government.

“PROHIBITED, COVERT PROPAGANDA”

JSOC’s involvement in that CIA dirty war is particularly notable given this period gave rise to the very concept of “perception management” as a legitimate form of psychological warfare to be waged by the CIA, Pentagon, and other government agencies against the domestic population.

The overriding objective of this Reagan administration push was to falsely paint the murderous Contras as heroic freedom fighters. In reality, the Contras, with CIA direction, funding and arms, deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, slaughtered priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous citizens.

In turn, the social democratic Sandinistas were transformed into viciously repressive autocrats, ruling Nicaragua with an iron fist and transforming their country into a “beachhead” for Soviet invasion of the U.S. Similar propaganda messaging has been employed in every American proxy war since, from Yugoslavia to Ukraine. All this activity, the full extent of which may never be known, represented egregious violations of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which places strict restrictions on the domestic dissemination of state propaganda.

Take, for instance, the Office of Public Diplomacy, a dedicated pro-Contra propaganda unit run by Reagan’s top National Security Council aide Oliver North, who was simultaneously working with cocaine traffickers to arm the Nicaraguan “rebels.” The unit was found to have broken a welter of U.S. laws by separate official investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal. The U.S. Comptroller General, for example, concluded the Office engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda…beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”

An ad placed by the Young Republicans under the cognizance of the Office of Public Diplomacy, March 20, 1985. Credit | NSA Archive

Yet, despite such damning findings, the “perception management” techniques honed by these assorted units, and many of the formal and informal structures contemporaneously created to disseminate CIA, Pentagon, and White House propaganda, did not go anywhere.

Two decades later, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld’s leadership struck upon the bright idea of creating the Office of Strategic Influence to deliberately plant “misleading” black propaganda in the foreign media, which would then be picked up by the U.S. media.

In a perverse twist, precisely this strategy was used by British foreign intelligence service MI6 as far back as 1998 to lay the foundations for the Iraq War. Under “Operation Mass Appeal”, the agency circulated dubious or even fabricated “intelligence” to editors and journalists on its payroll the world over, influencing the output of leading international news outlets. The spooks sought to “shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMD.”

The Office of Strategic Influence operated in secret from its launch in October 2001 until February of the next year, when the mainstream media caught wind of its existence. Due to intense outcry, just a week later, it was officially shuttered at Rumsfeld’s request. Yet, at a November 2002 press conference, the defense secretary made unguarded remarks starkly indicating it very much lived on thereafter:

The Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And ‘oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall.’ I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have.”

OF WORLD WAR III AND UFOS

The Klippenstein-secured memo suggests IPMO is involved in identical propaganda operations to those described here. It notes the Office “is tasked with the development of broad thematic messaging guidance and specific strategies for the execution of DoD activities designed to influence foreign defense-related decision-makers to behave in a manner beneficial to U.S. interests.”

Given that Washington is again heavily engaged in a Nicaragua-style proxy war in Ukraine, an accompanying propaganda unit would be of enormous use. After all, despite the Western media’s best efforts to whitewash the issue, Nazi sympathies of soldiers and military units remain stubbornly flagrant.

The phenomenon of Swastika tattoo and military patch-toting fighters is so profuse that, earlier this month, the New York Times was prompted to publish an article bemoaning how such National Socialist iconography leaves “diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult position.” On the one hand, “calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda,” on the other, “saying nothing allows it to spread.” The wider question of why so many Ukrainian nationalists eagerly elect to exhibit such emblems was unexplored.

Fittingly too, in December 2022, independent journalist Jack Murphy published an investigation alleging the CIA was “using a European NATO ally’s spy service to conduct a covert sabotage campaign inside Russia under the agency’s direction,” in which JSOC was a key player. The Command purportedly supports these operations “with targeting information from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, such as drones, that can see and hear deep into Russia.”

Further clues as to the sudden push to formally codify what the Pentagon has been doing with total impunity for so long may likewise be provided by the online records of private security company Sancorp Consulting, which offers “counter-insider threat solutions, artificial intelligence and machine learning, IT solutions, identity and data activities, intelligence and counterintelligence solutions” to private sector and state clients.

An index of Sancorp’s “past performance” for customers lists providing “specialized and sensitive administrative, security, policy, operations, and analytic support services” to none other than IPMO. Since-deleted records from the company’s website indicate it also counts the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) as a client.

This DoD division is charged with investigating UFOs and other unexplained aerial phenomena. The Pentagon has of late exhibited a pronounced interest in flying saucers, just as it did during the Cold War. Then, the purpose was to bamboozle and bedevil the public while providing cover for experimental U.S. military innovations, aircraft, and testing. There is little cause to believe the DoD’s motives have changed in the present day.

Declassified documents show that for years, the Navy Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, known as N2N6, currently exercises complete control over the dissemination of UFO-related information to American audiences on behalf of the Pentagon. This extends to directing Pentagon divisions to respond to media inquiries and FOIA requests from journalists and the public and how.

Perhaps the Pentagon has decided to bring these responsibilities in-house. Coincidentally, on June 6, an Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency went public with claims that extraterrestrial craft are routinely recovered in secret by the U.S. government.

This shock exposé couldn’t have come at a better time. As the New Cold War ramps up, and ever-more threatening tech is inevitably road-tested in the skies above Area 51 and other shadowy military installations in the U.S. and elsewhere, it is necessary to misdirect public attention away from the known to the unknown and unknowable. Meanwhile, U.S. military chiefs regularly and openly talk about waging war on China in the very near future – which makes constructing a dedicated propaganda office in advance all the more expedient.

US launches another ministry of truth

May 7, 2023

Jaime C.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has set up a body to counter foreign ‘disinformation’

The US has established a Foreign Malign Influence Center to address foreign threats to elections as well as the “public opinion” within the country, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines revealed in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday.

Operating under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FMIC has access to “all intelligence possessed or created pertaining to foreign malign information, including election security.” Its director, Jeffrey Wichman, was formerly chief of analysis for the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center.

For the agency’s purposes, ‘foreign’ means originating in Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, or “any other foreign country that the Director of the Center” deems appropriate, while ‘foreign malign influence’ is defined as “any hostile effort undertaken by, or at the direction of, or on behalf of or with the substantial support of,” one of the named countries in order to influence, covertly or overtly, US government or state policy or the “public opinion within the United States.” 

Read more
 Ukraine working with FBI to censor social media – official

While the FMIC was apparently founded in September at the behest of recent legislation, Thursday’s hearing was the first public mention of its existence. Its establishment was controversial, as some senators and intelligence officers questioned the need for another agency with the same remit as the Global Engagement Center, the State Department subsidiary tasked with disseminating American propaganda to fight the foreign variety.

Haines addressed some of those concerns in Thursday’s hearing, insisting the FMIC was working to “support the Global Engagement Center and others throughout the US government in helping them to understand what are the plans and intentions of the key actors in this space: China, Russia, Iran, etc.”

Countering ‘foreign disinformation’ has become something of an obsession for government bureaucrats since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, with half a dozen agencies springing up since then. In addition to the GEC, launched in 2017, the Pentagon quietly launched an Influence and Perception Management Office last year, joining the Department of Homeland Security’s Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, Countering Foreign Influence Task Force, and the ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, as well as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.

However, Pentagon contractor RAND Corporation recently acknowledged Russia’s role is probably overstated. The think tank warned in a study conducted last year that blaming Moscow for all information Washington doesn’t like is likely to backfire, urging the Defense Department to reduce “overattribution of disinformation on social media to Russia.”

“Pointing the finger at Russia in every instance of activity on social media resembling Russian interference distorts the understanding of the threat,” the report stated.

https://www.rt.com/news/575936-us-foreign-disinformation-intelligence-redundant/

Published by Jaime C.

Uncovering the mainstream media lies View all posts by Jaime C.

Tons of thanks, a SMO update and some beautiful week-end music!

August 31, 2022

First, my deepest gratitude to you all!

I want to being today’s report by thanking all those of you who have reached out to help me and the blog.  In spite of the hard economic times, many of you have sent donations, offered to volunteer and, last but not least, said prayers for me.  Of course, your donations will help financially, but it is your moral support which most deeply touched me and which give me the courage and determination to keep on fighting this fight, in spite of the apparent futility of taking on an entire obscenely rich and powerful ruling classes which waging merciless warfare on all of mankind.  I wish I could thank each and every one of you personally, but I simply don’t have the material time to do so, so all I can do is thank you all here for your unwavering and kind support!  You are truly the best community any person can hope to have!

Now let’s turn to the latest news next.

The Ukrainian so-called “counter-offensive” in the south:

The biggest news out of the Ukraine is the failure if the much announced Ukrainian “counter-offensive”.  Here are the latest reports from the Russian MoD: (emphasis added)

The enemy suffered losses and was pushed back from Olginka, Thorn Ponds and Arkhangelsk.
A battalion of the 57th Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was defeated near the settlement of Sukhoi Stavki. Currently, the destruction of its remains is being completed.
To unblock the AFU units, 12 tanks supplied to the Kiev regime by Poland were transported across the Ingulets River. Some of the tanks were destroyed by the powerful fire action of the Russian troops. Several tanks were blown up in their minefield during a disorderly withdrawal. Only five Ukrainian tanks were able to break back, deep into the territory controlled by the AFU. During two days of unsuccessful attacks on Mykolaiv-Krivoy Rog and other directions, Ukrainian troops lost four combat aircraft: two Su-25, one Su-24 and one MiG-29. Three Ukrainian Mi-8 helicopters were shot down in the air. Russian troops also destroyed 63 Ukrainian tanks, 59 infantry fighting vehicles, 48 other armored combat vehicles, 14 pickups with heavy machine guns and more than 1,700 Ukrainian servicemen.

But this does not tell the full story.  1’700 KIAs might not sound like much, but in reality this is a huge deal for the following reasons:

• These 1’700 soldiers were supported by armor, artillery and even some aviation and the USA/UK had huge hopes that this much announced “counter-offensive” would yield some good PR.  The Brandon administration is absolutely desperate to show at least something vaguely successful, yet this so-called “counter-offensive” resulted in only a few tactical attacks which brought no tangible results whatsoever.
• The size of this force shows that this operation was mostly about PR (and not a real counter-offensive!).  The Ukrainians never had a chance, not on the tactical level and, even less so, to develop tactical attack into an operational counter-offensive.  Considering that it took them months to prepare this rather modest operation, this shows how much the Ukrainian armed forces have been degraded over the past months.
• Even worse for the Nazis and their US patrons is the fact that now the entire southern front just lost a lot of its best soldiers and hardware.  Considering that the Russians are reinforcing their southern forces (see below), this is an especially dangerous development for the regime in Kiev.

Also, 1’700 KIA in one single maneuver is the biggest defeat for the Nazis since 2014, even bigger than the Ilovaisk “cauldron”!

I noticed with absolute dismay that, apparently, the Ukrainians tried one more time.  The result? Another  350 personnel, 31 tanks, 22 infantry fighting vehicles, 18 of other types of armored vehicles, eight armed pickup trucks, and 17 of other types of military vehicles destroyed by Russian artillery and airpower.

This is what is left of the Ukrainian “assault barge”

And today (Thursday) there are report that the Ukrainians tried to seize control of the ZNP.  First they fired over 100 artillery shells.  Then 2 diversionary groups totaling 60 soldiers on two crafts landed near the ZNP.  They were detected and destroyed by the Russian aviation.  Two hours later, the Ukrainians used two barges carrying an entire battalion (200-300 soldiers).  They were detected and sunk.

All that while the IAEA inspectors were already at the nuclear power plant!  (I wonder if they will have the courage to report what they must have seen).

Crucially, it showed, yet again, that all that nonsense coming out of Kiev and the other Nazi capitals in the West is just total, utter and terminal nonsense with no connection to the real world.  None whatsoever.  Hence the mass freakout of the western ruling classes.

And then there is this: CNN confirms that the USA helped the Ukrainians prepare this “counter-offensive”!  Oh wow! Who would have thought 😉  But then, what else could we expect from a US military busy with “increasing its lethality” by “embracing, promoting and unleashing the potential of diversity and inclusion“?

Now, just to clarify: did the Ukrainians take a few villages and positions?  Yes.  Absolutely.  Why?  Because the Russians had absolutely NO reason in the world to do what the Nazis do and “stand immobile to their last breath” in a static defensive line.  So they did the following:

• Where the Ukrainian attack was weak, they used their infantry and armor to beat them back.
• Where the Ukrainian attack was strong, they simply moved back, let the Ukrainians advance, and then wiped them off in what can only be called a “turkey shoot” (not to mention a useless butchery).

This is nothing new.  The Russians have done that since the beginning of the SMO.  In every case, the villages or positions the Ukrainians took (and triumphantly presented as a huge “peremoгa” or victory) saw the Ukrainian forces destroyed by Russian artillery, follow by a withdrawal (or total annihilation).

So next time when you hear that the Ukrainians took control of village/location X, always make sure to follow what happens in the next 48 hours and see for yourself if this Ukrainian “victory” then developed into anything meaningful.  As soon as you do that, everything becomes quite obvious.

Western weapon deliveries to the Ukraine

This is one of the biggest canards in this war.  Today, I will deal only with one aspect: the planned delivery of ex-Soviet aircraft to the Ukraine.  Basically, this is utter nonsense.  Like with ANY advanced weapons system, combat aircraft need all of the following things to be effective:

• They need to be fully integrated into a combined arms operation.
• They need to be operated by a highly trained crews.
• They need to be used in sufficient numbers to achieve any meaningful effect, which in the case of the Ukraine means real military airfields, not dirt roads, highways or field refueling stations.
• They need to be maintained/supported by a complex and advanced supply chain and qualified specialists.

Since none of that can happen, the deliveries of MiG-29s (or any other aircraft, really) to the Ukraine will make for semi-decent PR and that’s about it.  There are even rumors that the US is now training Afghan pilots to train them on ex-Soviet fighters…  Let’s see how many pilots the US and NATO actually can convince to fly these one way missions.

In reality, it takes MANY YEARS to form a capable military pilot, and there is no substitute for this.  So no, even if the US finds enough suicidal pilots to try to fly MiG-29s (or other aircraft) against Russian Su-35S, this will achieve exactly nothing other than marginally slowing down the Russians (who will have to deal with this new threat just like they dealt with all the others Wunderwaffen: HIMARS, M777, CAESARs, etc. etc. etc.).  Even the (so far hypothetical) delivery of, say, F-16s, will make very little difference.  There is no Wunderwaffe, least of all old Soviet kit (even when somewhat upgraded with NATO equipment).

Rumors of a major Russian offensive

Okay, as of right now, this is a rumor, but there is strong evidence of two things happening:

• The Russians appear to have assembled one (some rumors say two) Army Corps composed of volunteers and equipped with modern weapons.
• These forces seem to be deployed through and near the city of Rostov-on-the-Don.

Whether these forces were deployed as reserve force in case of a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive (however unlikely) or whether these forces will be used to attack the southern front is anyone’s guess.  In fact, it could be that these forces had and still might have both tasks.  And now that the Ukrainian counter-attack was defeated, they might well be used to move towards Nikolaev along the coast (supported by the BSF) which would put immense pressure on the over-extended and weakened Ukrainian forces.

In this context, I was recently sent a pretty interesting document:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17RsQ2GgAJVrJ0JqCHTeMOZyMCKHHh2iB/preview

This is a letter from the Mayor of the Siberian City of Omsk who announces that at three battalions of volunteers have been formed in this city alone.  It is reasonable to assume that similar things are happening in most other Russian cities.

Speaking of which, there is another canard which I have to debunk:

Will Russia declare a full mobilization?

The short answer is no.  Unless NATO moves forces into the Ukraine, then all bets are off (but even in that case I doubt that a full mobilization would be needed and, not to mention, rather hard to execute) Furthermore, this question is based on a flawed assumption: that Russia’s so-called “slow progress” is due to lack of manpower (about the “slow progress” see here).  That assumption, in turn,  is based on two major mistakes: the first it conflates overall manpower with manpower available at any specific moment in time on a specific sector of the line of contact.  What matters is not overall numerical superiority, but local superiority, superiority on your main axes of attack/defense.  This is how Ze’s MILLION solider army ended up being defeated with only 1700 KIAs: there never was a million soldiers army anywhere near Zaporozhie in the first place.

Second, the Russians have been fighting this entire SMO with less than 10% of the Russian military and with a 3:1 advantage for the Nazi forces almost everywhere.  You could say that the Ukrainians are fighting a positional war while the Russians are fighting a mobile war, counting on their qualitative superiority (in most fields, with a few exceptions – such as counter-battery radars and squad level need for commercial quad-copters similar to the famous DJI Mavic series, see below – and these limited disadvantages are now being quickly addressed).

Yes, I know, there are some LDNR officials who constantly whine about the fact that Russia is not fighting this war the way they would.  But with all due respect, it is one thing to be a deputy commander of an LDNR battalion and quite another a specialist in the Russian General Staff with several academies and years of command experience under your belt.  Furthermore, the LDNR forces, for all their undisputed heroism, courage and skills do not fight the same war as the Russians.  The LDNR forces are fighting to liberate the Donbass, and they have just recently acquired the kind of capabilities needed to even contemplate an operational level offensive.  In sharp contrast, the Russians are fighting a strategic war against NATO and the US, so it is no wonder that their notions of what ought to be done differ.  Here is just one example:

What about the supposed lack of UAV/drones/quadcopter?  Did/will Russia by UAV from Iran?

The problem here is that UAV/drones/quads come in all sort of sizes, from truly tiny one which you can fit in the palm of your hand, to large, strategic ones with advanced electronics/optoelectronics/EW/etc. and even weapons of various types.  So let’s separate the two.

Example one: a reconnaissance unit from the LDNR forces is tasked with finding out what is happening, or not, behind a small forest.  You can use a relatively cheap and simple, off the shelf, DJI Mavic (even a mini model!), which you can send a kilometer or two over the forest and to take a peek what might be hiding inside/behind the trees.  If you do not have that Mavic, you have to sent a reconnaissance patrol.  Going on such a mission is very dangerous, because not only can the Nazis plant all sorts of mines in the forest and under the leaves/grass, they can also set up an ambush (the Ukrainians are pretty good at that).  So if you are the commander of this reconnaissance unit, you are going to be absolutely furious that the lack of Mavics forces you to send you soldiers into a very dangerous situation, day after day after day.  And if you are young and inexperienced, you are going to blame the Russian military’s procurement system for not sending boxes of Mavics to the LDNR.

So to the question “did the LDNR forces have enough Mavic-type quads before the SMO began?” the answer is “no they did not”.  Once the LDNR officials and their supporters raised a big enough stink over that, volunteers from all over Russia began sending quads to the LDNR and things slowly (especially for those who had to risk their lives every day!) began to improve.  But this never was the “fault” or “lack of care” from the Russian armed forces whose job is very different.

Now the Russian military has exactly *zero* need for Mavic-type quads.  Not only that, but Russia has large stores of all sorts of advanced UAVs (see here for details).  As for the Russian military, it is not in the business of supplying LDNR forces with whatever they might need, it is in the business of fighting a war against the consolidated West, this requires a totally different kind of kit and training than the LDNR forces.

Example two: Russia needs long range UAVs to detect Ukrainian columns on the move, force concentrations, assembly position, battle formations, etc.  The good news is that Russia has plenty of those more advanced UAVs.  These advanced UAVs do not fly 1-8km in distance, but for hundreds of kilometers and their flight time is not counted in minutes, but in tens of hours.  In this kind of warfare, Mavics are totally useless.

Is it possible that Russia might buy some Iranian UAV?

I would say that it is not very likely, but quite possible.  Why?  First, Russia and Iran are (informal but strong) allies and the Iranians would probably love to test their gear in real, modern, warfare conditions (Syria, Iraq or Yemen do not qualify).  Second, the Iranians have superb UAVs, not necessarily better than Russian ones (it really depends on the mission and what the rest of the forces are doing), but very good ones indeed.  Since Russia is flush with cash thanks to the western sanctions, Russia could do worse than purchase an X number of Iranian UAV and use them (or even give them to the LDNR).  Again, I don’t think that this will happen because of a simple problem: the more primitive a UAV is, the more you can use commercial, off the shelf, equipment (this is what the (in)famous Bayraktars are – assembled off the shelf commercial hardware).  But the more advanced a UAV is, the more it needs to be able to “talk” to a lot of highly specialized networks and equipment, most of which are secret to begin with.

[Sidbar: I happen to personally fly both cinematic quads – a DJI Mavic mini – and first-person-view (FPV) acrobatic/freestyle quads and, as a result, even a private civilian like myself can have equipment which could used in a reconnaissance situation like the one I describe above.  This is not different than LDNR forces using family and consumer radios (FRS and GMRS) to communicate, or the purchase of commercial laser rangefinders, GPS/GLONASS/GNSS navigation equipment and the like.  Nowadays recreational and commercial microelectronics are so capable, that you can buy most of what a reconnaissance unit might need online and for relatively cheap.  And if your pockets are deep enough, you even purchase get all sorts of very good thermal imaging systems.  So what the LDNR forces needed the most, is simply money to get all that good stuff.  Some of this is already being built in Russia but, if needed, Russia can get it all from China directly or through Kazakhstan.  For the LDNR the issue was always money, and this is why the Mayor of Omsk is asking for donations at the end of this open letter above]

In sharp contrast to the LDNR forces, the Russian military has plenty of money and capabilities which the LDNR can only dream about, including a high tech military industrial base which dwarfs anything Iran might have.

Conclusion:

Initially, the Russians got absolutely destroyed in the propaganda war, at least that was true during the early months of the SMO.  Now this entire narrative is tanking (as evidenced, for example, this interview of Jeffrey Sachs on Democracy Now! or this video by Tucker Carlson).  Of course, the Neocons and the “extreme center” of the Uniparty (call them Republicrats or Demolicans – same difference) are still in deep denial and they are going through all the usual stages of grief (how is that headline: “German minister vows to back Ukraine ‘no matter what voters think’”?).  My biggest fear is that this hate-saturated narcissistic imbeciles will do something really dumb and trigger a much larger conflict.  The Kremlin is acutely aware of this riks, and this is why the Russians are only using about 10% of their current capabilities (that is before even a mobilization).

Most of the nonsense we now hear about the Ukraine (all the plain silly theories) is now quickly falling apart.  All the hysterics of the Russian 6th columnists (à la Girkin-Strelkov & Co.) have failed to force the Russian General Staff to fight the war like the 6th column would have preferred.  Instead of listening to these “allislosters”, Putin decided to listen to his generals.  What a surprise!

Furthermore, as Putin and others have repeated innumerable times, the SMO is going pretty much according to plan (besides the undeniable mistakes made in specific locations, like moving Russian forces in columns towards the Gostomel airfield without first suppressing the Ukrainian artillery and diversionary forces along the road; but the Kiev faint itself, however, was a total success and it achieved all its goals).  All the recent developments further show that Russia will methodically achieve all of her objectives in the coming months (though the denazification of Europe will, of course, take longer, not to mention the need to denazify the USA itself).

***

Finally, since this will be a long week-end, I leave you again with some beautiful music I love.

First, I want to introduce you to an Argentinian singer and guitarist whom I consider to be the most brilliant musician of traditional Argentinian (gaucho) music: Eduardo Falu.  Listen to this track, the song, entitled “Zamba de la Candelaria“, is absolutely beautiful (as are the lyrics for those who understand Spanish) and his guitar playing is nothing short of stellar (the other two songs in this video are also quite beautiful, I think)

Next, I want to introduce you to one of my absolutely favorite US Jazz/Improvised music group, named Oregon.  In this tune, entitled “Hand in Hand“, you will hear one of their most beautiful, yet understated, compositions.  The way the harmony “moves” here is so poignantly beautiful!  Also, listen to Ralph Towner‘s guitar solo and try to sing the melody over his improvisations, and you will discover a very beautiful “improvised contrapunctus”.   I had the privilege to once see Oregon at the Blues Alley in Washington DC and it was for sure one of the most amazing performances I have ever seen.

Next, a beautiful composition by Larry Coryell which he interprets here with the (always brilliant) Joe Beck and Joe Scofield entitled “Thurman Munson“.  This is also a very understated composition, but it gives ample opportunities for some truly beautiful and poignant improvisations (including some beautifully weaved through polytonalities).

Next, I want to introduce you to a French guitarist named Pierre Bensusan.  The guy is an absolute genius both as a composer and as in interpreter.  Today I want to share one of my favorite compositions by Bensusan entitled simply “4am“.  I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I do!

Lastly, I want to introduce you to a ridiculously talented group from, I think, New York: they are called the “Nation of Five“.  Here they play one of my favorite tunes, called “The Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers” aka “Poem For No. 15.” composed by the Jazz pianist Steve Kuhn.  It is a most interesting Jazz waltz built around distinct keys (this is modal music at its best!) and which includes a very original use of something called a “hemiola“, that is “the articulation of two bars in triple time as if they were three bars in duple time” or, to quote Wikipedia’s fuller definition “a hemiola is the ratio 3:2. In pitch, hemiola refers to the interval of a perfect fifth. In rhythm, hemiola refers to three beats of equal value in the time normally occupied by two beats.  This makes the improvisation over this melody both very interesting and somewhat challenging.  I just love to explore all the possibilities this 1972 composition offers for improvisation and this is a fantastic performance by all these musicians!

MTV and and so-called “conservatories” have tried their best to stamp out real, improvised, music, and they failed.  What a joy for the rest of us, no?

Enjoy and have a wonderful week-end!

TO TIMES OF ISRAEL WRITER, APARTHEID IS OK, SYMPATHY FOR PALESTINIANS “LOATHSOME”

MAY 26TH, 2022

Source

By Miko Peled

JERUSALEM – Zionists like to admonish Palestinians by saying that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But, according to Zionist talking points, Palestinians missed several opportunities when Israel was willing to graciously “give” them pieces of their own land. Moreover, it is alleged that Palestinians have missed so many of these great opportunities that they have no one to blame but themselves for their misfortunes.

BLAMING THE VICTIMS

A piece by Richard Cravatts published in the Times of Israel, and later republished in other publications, is a particularly asinine example of this admonition. In his piece, “An Open Letter to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Your Fellow Travelers,” Cravatts writes: “Millions of Palestinian refugees [have been] created by your people’s repeated rejection of offers of statehood – in 1937, 1947, 1967, 2000, and other occasions….”

An Open Letter to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Her Fellow Travelers | FrontpageMag https://t.co/1pLj8hLCjk

— Richard Cravatts (@rcravatts) May 25, 2022

Blaming the Palestinians for the ongoing tragedy of the refugees is not only callous but as outrageous as blaming the victims of the Holocaust for the horrors of the Nazis. I can testify that I have heard more than one Zionist claim that the Jews whom the Nazis killed had it coming because they did not heed the call of the Zionists. Had the Jews of Europe come to Palestine to steal and live on other people’s land, the Nazis would have spared them, a theme found throughout Yoav Shamir’s 2009 documentary, “Defamation.”

The claim that Palestinians are prone to missing opportunities is one of the most common Zionist lines, and they still use it because it works – because unfortunately there exists such a lack of knowledge regarding the history of Palestine that Zionists can loudly proclaim that “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity!” and go unchallenged. Another iteration of this claim is, “If only the Palestinians had the foresight to accept Zionist offers, or at least offers that the Zionists were agreeable to, things would have been so much better for them.” “Them” being the Palestinians.

Anyone familiar with the Zionist talking points has heard the claim that the Palestinians “missed opportunities” so they have no one to blame for their lot but themselves. In a recent lecture I gave in southern California, a Palestinian student asked me how to reply to this argument. His question was specifically about the Zionist accusation that Palestinians rejected the Two-State Solution.

AN OUTRIGHT LIE

We will set aside the fact that this is an outright lie for a moment. We will not get into this issue in-depth, only to say that in fact, since the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO) has been the only party striving to achieve a Two-State Solution and that their willingness to make this enormous sacrifice cost them a great deal and made things worse for Palestinians the world over.

This argument typically comes from Zionists who live in the United States or the U.K. and who think it is OK that Israel has taken all of Palestine. They never admonish Israel for annexing the Syrian Golan Heights or East Jerusalem. They have no issue with Israel’s building entire cities on Palestinian land. This accusation comes from Zionists who believe Israel has a right to colonize all of historic Palestine.

Israel has a right to do this because, so they tell us, Jewish people around the world may (or may not) be related to a tribe that resided in Palestine some two or three thousand years ago. They tell us that this tribe, called the Hebrews, which may or may not have any historical connection to modern-day Israel and the Jewish people, is the reason it is OK for the modern State of Israel to commit unspeakable crimes against an entire nation.

LEGITIMIZING THE OPPRESSOR

What is implied in the admonitions by Zionists is that Zionism and the colonization of Palestine by Zionist Jews are legitimate and that the Palestinians refuse to accept this legitimacy. However, these admonitions present us with opportunities to raise a larger question. The question that ought to be asked is: Why in the world would Palestinians accept any offer by their colonizers? Why would any colonized nation accept anything but the total defeat of their colonizers and oppressors, especially considering that these “offers” fail to include the liberation of all of historic Palestine?

The answer is that there is no reason. The attempts at partitioning and slicing Palestine have all been part of a strategy meant to legitimize the violent Zionist takeover of Palestine and delegitimize the Palestinian rejection of it.

The aforementioned senseless, mindless Zionist propaganda piece starts by addressing Rep. Tlaib as follows:

On May 16th, you and some other members of The Squad, including Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, McCollum, and others, introduced a loathsome resolution, H. RES. 1123, which had as its purpose “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights” and to “commemorate the Nakba,” the catastrophe you assign to Israel’s creation, “through official recognition and remembrance.” According to your baleful resolution, the Nakba not only took place at Israel’s founding “but [refers] to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day.”

In this typical Zionist propaganda piece, Cravatts calls the proposed legislation to recognize the Nakba “loathsome.” Amnesty International recently published a report accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid — a crime so heinous it is designated as a “crime against humanity.” Interestingly, the writer does not find those who commit the crime of apartheid loathsome, only the legislation recognizing the victims of the crime.

What is loathsome, however, is that the United States is complicit in the crimes against the Palestinians. It is loathsome to live in the United States and to justify, explain and provide cover – thin as it may be – for the brutal regime that has been tearing Palestine apart for over seven decades. And it is loathsome to stand by and applaud as the state of Israel continues to brutalize an entire nation while the world, and Israeli society, look the other away.

The risks, challenges, and crisis of the Ukraine war.

April 21, 2022

Source

By Zamir Awan

The last few decades have witnessed several wars, like the Iraq war, Libya war, Yemen war, Syria war, the Afghan war, etc. But all of such wars were designed by the US and executed along with NATO/ US allies. The US-style of wars, was first building a narrative, using media as propaganda, and then, involving the UN and international community, or convincing the rest of the world for its war acts. As a result, the US achieved its objectives without getting blamed for wars, aggressions, invasions, etc. Although millions were killed, millions were injured, many serious with lifetime disabilities, millions of houses were destroyed making millions of people homeless, forcing millions of people to live in refugee camps or take asylum in other countries and spend the rest of their lives in misery. Infrastructure was damaged, the economy was destroyed, social systems were damaged totally, changed regime installed puppets and dictated them to serve American interests, etc.

All wars are equally bad and harmful to humankind. Either the victims are Muslims, Christians, Jews, or any other religion. Whether, the victims are black, yellow, or white, are equally precious. Irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or social status, all lives deserve equal treatment and respect. The UN charter guarantees the protection of all humankind equally.

But Ukraine war is very special and bears different consequences:-

• The Russia-Ukraine conflict has not only created a worldwide political, diplomatic, economic, food, and energy crisis but has also exposed the double standards of the world powers towards the principles of international politics and global governance.
• It is expected the conflict to be a long-drawn-out affair. This is reinforced by the fact that despite the inclination of the Russian leadership or military to end the war at an early stage, on the ground trends in the shape of military armament and around 50,000 non-state actors in Ukraine offer a very alarming specter.
• The war is not a choice but perhaps a strategic compulsion that Moscow felt for several reasons like challenges ranging from the global world order to the expansion of NATO and also concerns regarding the political leadership of Ukraine and its policies.
• It is an ideational conflict that shows the level of violence and degree of pain and cost that could be inflicted on Russia by the US-led western alliance. The war seems to be a grave miscalculation on Russia’s part because the ability of the western world to cause pain in an enduring fashion across several domains beyond the kinetic tactical or operational battlefield of Ukraine will make it very difficult for Moscow to sustain and achieve its objectives.
• China views this conflict with a lot of concern because it offers more challenges than opportunities. A weakened Russia is not in the Chinese interest. Moreover, the revival and rearmament of NATO also indirectly do not augur well for Beijing in terms of future prospects. Another aspect is that although China wants to sustain its global economic growth but not at the cost of disturbing its trade relations with the west.
• It is highlighted the buildup of the Quad, the Indo-Pacific strategy, and the recent rise of QUAD 2.0. If all these are added up most of these things are aimed at containing China and disrupting its global rise. This conflict has perhaps reminded Washington that they cannot afford to only concentrate the major share of their hard power only on Asia-Pacific and need to maintain their security commitment towards the west and Europe as well.
• In the regional context, India was seen in flux because its military forces are heavily dependent on Russia for meeting its technological and operational needs but it is facing a very difficult challenge due to its growing diplomatic and economic ties with the US. As such Delhi will find it rather difficult to balance these contrasting challenges.
• The Muslim world was urged to introspect because they have been accused of over 20 years of terrorism but this reality dawning in eastern Europe allows them to look at how other civilizations and value systems call upon non-state actors and militant organizations when they are challenged and how they are presented in the Western-dominated media.
• In terms of identity, it poses a simultaneous challenge in terms of race, religion, and nationalism. The western alliance sees this as the frustration of the Russian orthodox Christianity facing the challenge of the western world order which is characterized by the Protestants and Catholics.
• The societal aspect should be seen in the context of globalization and the perpetual process of the interconnectedness of the different civilizations, societies, peoples, cultures, and economies. This is perhaps the biggest challenge globalization has received in terms of a counter-globalization movement.
• The economic aspect is not just playing out in the sanctions regime but also the trade and currency wars, and the grave concern that Beijing has because to sustain its economic expansion and global influence it is heavily dependent on Western Europe and America for maintaining its export market which is worth over $600 billion. The increasing energy prices pose a huge challenge for the developing world and the governments, especially immediately after the COVID crisis.
• In the political domain, it is the greatest test of the current world order and a complex contest between the ideational powers, revivalist powers, and states that want to be identified based on nationalism. It is an ideational challenge to the status quo world order by a frustrated and provoked Russia which wants to be respected for its economic, political and strategic revival.
• In terms of the security domain, the conflict has led to the revival and rearmament of NATO, which does not augur well for China and Russia. It also has reduced Russian energy leverage and soft power on Western Europe and revived sub-conventional warfare as a means of great power contest in the east European theater.
• Russia is angered by the eastward expansion of NATO and has challenged the Western-led world order. He also said that Western sanctions could affect Pakistan’s ability to benefit from improving ties with Moscow, in terms of meeting its energy needs.
• Ukraine conflict has created a worldwide economic, energy, and food crisis that has affected all the countries including Pakistan.
• The conflict represents a Russian challenge to the US exceptionalism which the Western world is contesting by supporting the Ukraine government through militants which presents the world an opportunity to recover from its excessive focus on the Muslim world.
• The Western powers cannot have one set of rules for themselves and another for other countries in terms of security and prosperity and Russia is no longer willing to access this contradictory Western approach.
• Ukraine War is an ideational conflict for the US which should not merely be seen in a geopolitical context while Russia, through this military operation, wants to show the world that it is back on the world stage.
• This conflict offers more challenges than opportunities for Beijing and although the Western powers view China as standing on the Russian side a weakened Russia is not in Chinese interests.
• India faced a complex dilemma of maintaining its very close defense cooperation with Russia and simultaneously building deep and long-term strategic and diplomatic ties with the United States.
• Muslim societies should start thinking of alternative arrangements, such as a monetary union and common market, to address their concerns during international crises.
• The world banking system and global energy supply chain have badly suffered due to this conflict. He said that more than one trillion dollars have been stuck in the global banking system due to the war.

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Author: Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan, Sinologist (ex-Diplomat), Editor, Analyst, Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization). (E-mail: awanzamir@yahoo.com).

Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists and CIA Cutouts

March 22, 2022

By Dan Cohen

WASHINGTON DC — Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.

The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.

Behind Ukraine’s public relations effort is an army of foreign political strategists, Washington DC lobbyists, and a network of intelligence-linked media outlets.

Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.” The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”

Key to the propaganda effort is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to wage information warfare.

According to the industry news site PRWeek, the initiative was launched by an anonymous figure who allegedly founded a Ukraine-based public relations firm.

“From the first hour of war, we decided to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them distribute the official sources to show the truth,” the nameless figure told PR Week. “This is a hybrid war: the mix of bloodily struggling fight with a huge disinformation and fake campaign lead by Russia [sic].”

According to the anonymous figure, more than 150 public relations firms have joined the propaganda blitz.

The international effort is spearheaded by public relations firm PR Network co-founder Nicky Regazzoni and Francis Ingham, a top public relations consultant with close ties to the UK’s government. Ingraham previously worked for Britain’s Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, and leads the membership body for UK local government communicators, LG Comms.

“We’ve been privileged to help coordinate efforts to support the Ukrainian Government in the last few days, “ Ingham told PRovoke Media. “Agencies have offered up entire teams to support Kyiv in the communications war. Our support for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is unwavering and will continue for as long as needed.”

With an anonymous Ukrainian figure joining two of the top public relations figures in the Kiev government’s propaganda blitz, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs distributed a dossier folder (archived)  with materials instructing public relations agencies on “key messages,” approved language, content for debunked propaganda constructs, far-right and Neo-Nazi propaganda.

The folder is run by Yaroslav Turbil, described on his LinkedIn page as “Head of Ukraine.ua — Ukraine’s digital ecosystem for global communications. Strategic Communications & Country Brand Promotion.” Turbil has worked at multiple “civil society” organizations closely linked to the U.S. government and interned at Internews, a U.S. intelligence-linked organization that operates under the guise of promoting press freedom.

Among the propaganda constructs distributed in the dossier, is a video of the Snake Island incident, which was quickly proven false, in which Ukrainian border guards stationed on a small island were reported to have been killed after they told an approaching Russian warship that had urged them to surrender to “Go f*** yourself.” President Zelensky held a press conference announcing he would award the men the Hero of Ukraine medal as mainstream media spread the story widely. However, the supposedly-dead soldiers quickly turned up alive and well, proving their heroic stand to be a farce.

Despite the story being proven as fake, the dossier contains a propaganda video promoting it.

Another folder in the dossier is run by Ukrainian MFA graphic artist Dasha Podoltseva and contains hundreds of propaganda graphics submitted by artists in Europe and the United States.

Some feature generic “no war” messages, while dozens of other images celebrate “The Ghost of Kiev” – a heroic Ukrainian pilot who turns out to be non-existent – and the phony “Snake Island 13” incident.

Many use xenophobic and racist language, and some are explicit in their praise of prominent Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, including C14 leader Yevhen Karas, the Right Sector fascist paramilitary, and the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Multiple images call for “Banderite smoothies” – a reference to Molotov cocktails named for the late OUN-B commander Stephan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany in the mass murder of Jews and ethnic Poles during World War II. Another image depicts a book titled the: ”Encyclopedia of Incurable Diseases,” listing Russia, Belorussia, North Korea, Syria, and Eritrea.

“I love NLAW” – Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapon, provided by western governments to the Ukrainian military

Graphic implying fertilizing the fields with bodies reads, “Grandma advice to Moskovites: Hide in the fields, When you die in hands of our army, Sunflowers will grow better”’

“Thank You Ukrainian Army” with an Azov Battalion Wolfsengel patch emblazoned on the sleeve”

“The Encyclopedia of Incurable Disease: Russia, Belorussia, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea”

“Against Moscovian Occupation.” Moscovian is a xenophobic term used to describe Russians

Graphic calling Czar Nicholas, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin incarnations of the same “Mental Moskovian Dragon”

“Putin’s orcs got whipped” – Orc is a xenophobic term for Russian used by Ukrainian nationalists

Flag of Neo-Nazi paramilitary Right Sector. Red represents “blood” and black represents “soil”

Ukraine or Valhalla – a reference to the where heroes of Norse mythological go after death, a theme commonly appropriated by neo-Nazis

A call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine with an image of a building used by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion that Russia bombed

A call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine with an image of a building used by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion that Russia bombed

Foreign extremists flock to Ukraine

The dossier also contains a link to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs page called “Fight for Ukraine,” which provides instructions for foreigners who wish to join Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi-infested armed forces – termed the “International Defense Legion of Ukraine.”

Following Zelensky’s call for foreign fighters to form a brigade, fighters from all over the world, including the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and more have traveled to face Russian forces. Others with no combat training or experience have arrived for “war tourism” – what one British soldier called “bullet-catchers.”

Official Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruitment graphics from the dossier

Official Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruitment graphics from the dossier

While the Ukrainian government says tens of thousands have answered their call, some commentators expressed doubt at those figures, calling it a “PR exercise.”

However, the foreigners who have traveled to Ukraine have encountered a much more severe reality than they anticipated.

Russia’s air force bombed military installations adjacent to where the foreign fighters were sleeping. Having fled to neighboring Poland, a Spanish fighter described the bombing as a “message” that could have killed thousands.

Similarly, an American fighter who hid in an ambulance to escape the frontlines warned that Ukrainian authorities were killing foreigners who decided not to fight, calling it a “trap.”

Correct wording

One document inside the dossier delineates acceptable language on the conflict with Russia as determined by the Ukrainian government.

“Such Russian clichés like ‘referendum in Crimea’ or ‘will of the people of Crimea’ are absolutely unacceptable,” the document states, in reference to the 2014 overwhelmingly successful referendum to separate from Ukraine.

The document deems unacceptable the terms “Civil war in Donbass,” “Internal conflict,” “Conflict in Ukraine” and “Ukrainian crisis” to describe the Ukrainian military’s war with the breakaway republics of the Donbass region. This, despite the fact that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 14,200 people, including 3,404 civilians, have been killed in internal fighting in Ukraine since 2014.

In place of these phrases, the document calls for the use of the terms “Armed aggression by the Russian Federation in Donbass, international armed conflict, Russian war against Ukraine, Russian-Ukrainian conflict armed conflict.”

Key Messages

Another document titled “Key Messages” contains specific propaganda claims that were widely disseminated in mainstream western media, but which have since been discredited. One section claims the “entire Europe was put on the brink of nuclear disaster, when the Russian troops began shelling the largest in Europe Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”

However, International Atomic Energy Agency’s director-general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said that the building hit by a Russian “projectile” at the Zaporizhzhia plant was “not part of the reactor” but instead a training center. Russian troops also left Ukrainian workers to continue operating the plant.

“If I were a Russian worried about the potential of Nazi extremists coming up with a dirty bomb, I’d need to take control of this very facility” – @realscottritter deconstructs the Ukrainian nuclear plant takeover

With @dancohen3000

Full Interview: https://t.co/KOMDd6018Y pic.twitter.com/lpANwW2rt4

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) March 8, 2022

Another section thanks Turkey for the decision “to block the access of Russian warships to the Black Sea.”

However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan closed the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to all military vessels, preventing both NATO and Russian vessels from accessing the Black Sea.

Among the document’s key messages is a statement of gratitude to the “Anti-war demonstrations held by citizens of many nations throughout the world demonstrate strong support to Ukraine in defending against Russia.”

This refers to large pro-Ukraine demonstrations in Europe which have featured calls for the U.S. and NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine and shoot down Russian military aircraft, potentially transforming the conflict into a world war between nuclear-armed powers.

The NED published video of its CEO, Damon Wilson, at a rally outside the White House, declaring "Glory to Ukraine" – the salute used by Nazi collaborator Stephan Bandera's OUN-B, which carried out mass murder of Jews and Poles during World War 2. pic.twitter.com/a5hWSn9txo

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) March 7, 2022

“Despite Russia’s propaganda, there is no discrimination based on the race or nationality, including when it comes to the crossing of the state border by foreign citizens,” claims the Ukrainian document.

However, numerous videos and reports have documented Ukrainian authorities preventing Africans from fleeing the fighting. Even the New York Times – hardly a bastion of Kremlin propaganda – published a report documenting these racist practices.

One message says that “On 16 March, the Russian forces dropped a bomb on a drama theatre where up to 1300 civilians were being sheltered. The number of casualties is still unknown.”

However, as Max Blumenthal reported the explosion appears to be the result of a false flag operation designed by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and aimed at triggering a NATO intervention.

NATO-backed troll farms

Another anonymously-penned investigation shows how Ukrainian public relations firms have used targeted advertisements to astroturf Russian internet and social media networks with messaging calling to economically isolate Moscow and “stop the war.” This effort is led by Bezlepkin Evgeny Vitalievich, who uses the alias Evgeny Korolev, along with Pavel Antonov of the Targetorium organization. From behind his Korolev pseudonym, the Ukrainian information warrior composed a post on his Facebook page (now private) boasting that his firm’s Facebook ads achieved 30 million hits in three days.

At the same time, Facebook has blocked Russian state-owned media outlets from running ads and monetizing content. Several fake accounts for media outlets like Russia 24 have sprung up, burying the authentic account under a series of impostors. Facebook has also marked statements from Russian officials, including the Ministry of Defense, as “false.”

This campaign has reportedly been carried out upon recommendation from StopFake, a self-described “fact checking” outlet that is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, Atlantic Council, Czech and UK foreign ministries, and the International Renaissance Foundation, which is funded by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

StopFake was hired by Facebook in March 2020 to “curb the flow of Russian propaganda” but was found to be employing multiple figures closely tied to violent Neo-Nazis. The journalist who co-authored the exposé received death threats and ultimately fled Ukraine.

Those revelations have apparently not prevented Facebook from relying on the organization for censorship guidance.

Meanwhile, Russian hackers located a public Google document (since made private, uploaded here) detailing the propaganda operation, which has been distributed in Telegram channels of “creative farms.”

“Here you can find links to Ukrainian media that need promotion, bot accounts with logins and passwords from which anti-war messages and messages with fakes about the Ministry of Defense were sent to users, theses and specific instructions on which posts and which audiences to embroider,” the investigation reads.

Another campaign is run by Nataliya Popovych, the founder of the public relations agency, One Philosophy, in Kiev. Popovych’s LinkedIn profile shows she has worked with the U.S. State Department and advised former President Petro Poroshenko. She is also co-founder and board member of Ukraine Crisis Media Center, a propaganda arm funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Embassy, and NATO, among many others.

A Campaign Asia article profiles several public relations firms involved in the effort. Among them is Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR. Edelman is also a member of the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors and the World Economic Forum.

“Geopolitics has become the new test for trust. We saw this with the allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the war between Ukraine and Russia has only reinforced it,” he said, linking the U.S. propaganda campaign surrounding China’s deradicalization campaign for Uyghur Muslims.

PR approved media outlets

An article in PRWeek profiles several figures partaking in what they describe as a “PR army” that is “fighting on the informational frontline” against Russia’s “barbaric genocide of Ukrainians.”

“Propaganda is the same as real lethal weapons,” declares Marta Dzhumaha, PR manager at healthcare company BetterMe.

Julia Petryk, head of public relations at MacPaw, offers a list of approved media outlets, authored by her colleague Tetiana Bronistka, a former employee of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office. The list includes Russian and English language sources, as well as Telegram channels. However, these “verified sources that objectively cover what is happening in Ukraine” are anything but independent. Most of them are tied to the U.S. and European governments and billionaire foundations.

She also lists several Russian-language websites:

• Novaya Gazeta – Tied to and reportedly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy
• Meduza – Funded by the government of Latvia, OAK Foundation, Open Society Foundation ​​oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorovsky, and Sweden
• Dozhd – SREDA foundation, European Commission
• Holod Media – Offshoot of Meduza – praised in PBS and CNN as “independent media”
• Proposed that Leningrad should have been surrendered to the Nazis in World War 2 and has complained that they are called a “fifth column” for being funded by western powers
• BBC Russia – British government media
• Current Time TV – Created by CIA-founded propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in collaboration with Voice of America
• Censor – funded by, editor in chief Yuri Butusov, former advisor to the Minister of Defense of Ukraine
• 200RF – A Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website that claims to publish publishes photos and documents of the Russian soldiers captured and killed in action

Among the Telegram channels listed are:

• Radio Svoboda – CIA-founded propaganda organ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
• Espresso TV, largely owned by the wife of former Ukrainian member of parliament Mykola Knyazhytsky
• Censor.net, formerly the largest media site in Ukraine, whose motto is “To bring down Russia”, and whose owner operates a “parade of international trolls.”

Intelligence operations

While the public relations firms distribute content, CIA cutouts and billionaire foundations run the media outlets they derive it from. At the core of this operation is a project called the Russian Language News Exchange that was the product of a network of opposition media outlets founded in 2016 that operate in post-Soviet countries, as revealed by an investigation by the Russian media agency, RIA FAN.

In July 2021, a group of journalists flew to Warsaw for media training after being exempted from coronavirus-related restrictions and quarantine orders by Poland’s top medical authorities.

Among the six journalists were Andrey Lipsky, deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, and Yuliia Fediv, CEO of Hromadske TV media, one of the most-watched networks in Ukraine.

Hromadske’s financial reports show it is funded by numerous governments and foundations, including the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the European Endowment for Democracy, and Free Press Unlimited. Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidary was also involved in creating the outlet.

Hromadske recently hosted a commentator demanding genocide of ethnic Russians in the Donbass, saying it is populated with 1.5 “superfluous” people that “must be exterminated.”

The training, held behind closed doors from July 19 to July 21, was titled “Media Network 2021+” and closely tied to Mediaset, also known as the Russian Language News Exchange, a network founded in 2015. Russian Language News Exchange’s website is sparse, with little available information on its activities – apparently made private since the publication of RIA FAN’s investigation.

While it claims to be independent, Russian Language News Exchange is a project of Free Press Unlimited, funded by the Dutch government and the European Commission.

Today, it includes 14 media outlets that act as “nodes,” cross-publishing each other’s articles in various countries.

The website’s introductory video is hosted by Maxim Eristavi, a former Radio Free Europe reporter and founder of Hromadske. Today, he heads the Millennium Leadership Program at the NATO and arms industry-backed think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Since its inception, Mediaset has coordinated between outlets in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. In March 2021, Mediaset expanded with the Colab Medios Project, created through the Free Press Unlimited Viable Media for Empowered Societies (VIMES) program. This program created training for journalists and saw articles from the El Salvadoran outlet El Faro published in Euroradio (Belarus), Coda (Georgia), and Ziarul de Garda (Moldova).

On March 4, several days after Russia launched its military offensive, a new project called the Media Lifeline Ukraine was created.

The next day, Free Press Unlimited held an emergency conference for Ukraine featuring Hromadske co-founders Maxim Eristavi and Nataliya Gumenyuk. The meeting called to raise 2 million euros for the project. “Only with ongoing external support, will local media entities be able to continue to do their work,” its introductory page asks.

Days later, Free Press Unlimited announced a partnership to support a new joint project of  Reporters Without Borders and its Ukrainian partner, the Institute for Mass Information, called The Lviv Press Freedom Center. The Institute for Mass Information is headed by USAID communications officer Oksana Romaniuk and funded by USAID and the UK government.

Washington DC lobbyists wag the dog

While public relations firms and intelligence-linked propaganda operations target the public, Washington DC lobbyists are agitating in Congress to extend the war in Ukraine

Daniel Vajdich, a registered foreign agent and lobbyist for the Ukrainian Federation of Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry, the largest in Ukraine, is working on behalf of Volodymyr Zelensky to lobby members of Congress to approve more weapons shipments to Ukraine. Now the head of Yorktown Solutions, he previously advised Ted Cruz and Scott Walker’s campaigns and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“Stingers, Javelins, and let’s figure out the fighter aircraft issue,” he told Politico, claiming Russia is attempting to carry out a “genocide” and “depopulate certain areas of Ukraine.”

Vajdich also wrote Zelenskyy’s March 16 speech to U.S. Congress, in which he quoted Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Ukrainian Permanent Representative at the United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya’s February 23 speech to the United Nations General Assembly was written by DC lobbying firm SKDKnickerbocker Managing Director Stephen Krupin, a former senior speechwriter to President Barack Obama who worked extensively on Biden’s 2020 campaign.

Most prominent among the registered lobbyists promoting Ukrainian government and business interests is Andrew Mac, who also contributed to writing Zeleneksyy’s speech to Congress. Mac registered as a lobbyist for Zelensky in 2019 and runs the Washington DC office of Ukrainian law firm Asters Law.

The lobbying firm Your Global Strategy, founded by Shai Franklin, who has been affiliated with numerous Zionist organizations including the World Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League, is also using its influence with local officials in the U.S. Franklin has set up meetings between Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov and U.S. mayors, including Eric Adams in New York City, Michelle Wu in Boston and Lori Lightfoot in Chicago. He is also attempting to set up a meeting between U.S. officials and the mayors of Odessa and Kiev. A media outlet owned by the mayor of Kiev’s wife recently featured a presenter calling for genocide against Russians, beginning with children.

Franklin said he’s working with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration to help set up virtual meetings between mayors of Odessa and Kiev and U.S. counterparts.

Maryland-based lawyer Lukas Jan Kaczmarek is also working on behalf of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to increase U.S. weapons shipments, specifically seeking to arrange shipments of guns from Kel-Tec CNC Industries based in Cocoa, Florida, to the city of Odessa, Ukraine.

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul described the network of public relations professionals and lobbyists surrounding Zelenskyy. “These are people around Mr. Zelenskyy who are like the intermediaries and interlocutors. They’ve been interacting with the American elites and American media for a long time,” he said.

McFaul and John E. Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, act as informal advisors to Zelenskyy. McFaul told Politico that he speaks to Ukrainian government officials “probably everyday,” and “has helped them make connections with NBC or MSNBC producers.”

McFaul recently told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that “Hitler did not kill German-speaking people, facing accusations of Holocaust denial.

Zelenskyy also held a “strategic video call” with McFaul before he spoke to House democrats.

With a powerful Russian military fighting alongside DPR and LPR forces, the Ukrainian military’s defeat seems to be imminent unless the United States and NATO directly confront Russian forces, a scenario President Biden has already ruled out. Lobbyists nevertheless persist in their campaign to portray the Ukrainian military as underdogs scoring blow after blow against Russian hordes. In doing so, they help extend the war and continue the carnage.

Dan Cohen is the Washington DC correspondent for Behind The Headlines. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. He tweets at @DanCohen3000.

This is too funny to miss!!! (MUST SEE!)

March 14, 2022

First, a video from our heroic information warriors:

Then realize this:

https://www.rt.com/news/550717-snake-island-guards-surrendered/

Then look at this:

This is a satellite view of Snake Island AFTER the Russian either killed all the Ukie martyrs or evacuated the Ukie traitors (you pick).

And, finally, the commentary by Andrei Maryanov:

They invent a “story” of some defiant ukie grunts (long since debunked), and now, by showing some MLRS (Grad most likely) salvo, they claim the sinking of Vasily Bykov patrol ship. By MLRS no less)). “In accordance to reports”, without mentioning, of course, that these are not “reports” but propaganda fake by ukies and their masters. Of course, no video or photographic evidence of sinking of Vasily Bykov is provided. Of course, it is not provided. 

But this whole BS, together with hundreds of Russia’s combat aircraft “destroyed” and thousands upon thousands of Russkies killed on the battlefield,  exists only in the inflamed imagination of the US “journalists”, who, apart from being whores (sorry, whores, for comparing you to US propaganda–I know, it is a huge insult to whores) and the brainwashed Western public which is utterly illiterate on such matters as operations of combat fleets and basic targeting. Obviously, the destruction of the moving target (ships do move in the sea and do not really stop during combat) by MLRS in the absence of targeting (most ukie radar, including those along the coast of the Black Sea are gone now) is something out of fantasy or cheap war-gaming on Commodore computer. Obviously for morons from ABC it is unknown that MLRS ukies have are classic “area impact” weapons designed only to work at the spread out ground targets based on accurate targeting. 

No doubt, the United States may try to provide targeting to ukies (you see–I am going now into a full blown “what if” BS scenario), but the main issue here is that the Black Sea Fleet currently completely blocked the 404 coast and with it it also brought to bear some damn effective AD ranging from Fort at RKR Moskva to Shtil on pr. 11356 frigates for which slow ballistic MLRS rockets are an easy target and no ship of the Black Sea Fleet operates out of the AD areas of the task group. At this stage one can only do a facepalm and admit that the West cannot even provide a believable BS. Not surprising, once one looks at the “elites” Western “education” provide for this kind of psyops. Recall, I already discussed this issue before. They are simply that incompetent and have no grasp of modern warfare, especially involving issues of C4ISR. 

So please visit Andrei’s website: https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
and support him here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=60459185

Nikita Mikhalkov: BesogonTV.

This needs to be watched with Telegram.

The subtitles are excellent.

https://t.me/MFARussia/11938?embed=1&tme_mode=1

https://telegram.org/js/telegram-widget.js?16

The Modernization of “Traditional Society”

Nov 13 2021

Source: Al Mayadeen

By Karim Sharara

This is how the US used its propaganda and influence to spread its ideals during the Cold War to “modernize” (i.e Americanize) the Middle East.

The Modernization of “Traditional Society”

At the height of the Cold War, print media, and more importantly, the radio, proved to be extremely important tools of influence. The Voice of America, Radio Free Liberty, and Radio Free Europe, were all, for example, very efficient tools of US propaganda, though they all adopted different forms of influence. The VOA, being the media machine of the Department of State, was constrained by bureaucracy and official policy.

The RFL and RFE, on the other hand, were founded as private enterprises by ex-intelligence and military operatives, and employed foreign nationals. The US didn’t just want to influence people from various countries as the USSR’s reach was growing, it sought to employ people from inside those communities in order to have Ukrainians speaking to Ukrainians, Poles to Poles. Why? Because if “reform” was to happen, it would happen from within, through voices sympathetic to the US and the “liberties” it espoused.

This is where Daniel Lerner’s chef-d’oeuvre comes into play. Lerner was tasked by the University of Columbia, which was in turn tasked by the Voice of America (as an extension of the State Department), to conduct a comprehensive study of media consumption in the “Middle East.” The aim was to propagate Western ideals in the “Middle East” through media. Hollywood films, radio music broadcasts, news broadcasts, print media, were all heavily consumed tools of influence. On the receiving end, peoples in different “Middle Eastern” countries needed to be studied: their aspirations, thoughts, political leanings were to be discerned, to best learn how best to approach them. This resulted in what is now known as one of the “bibles” of modernization, Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East.

Interviewing the “Middle East”

A total of 1600 interviews were conducted in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, and Syria by local anthropologists in 1950-1951. Through these interviews, three personality types were constructed, based on their degree of “empathy”, the gold standard for judging how modern a person is (according to the author), thereby informing Lerner how modern a society is. The more empathy one possesses, the more they are able to imagine themselves as other people. Lerner categorized people into 3 classes: the empathetic modern, the semi-empathetic “transitional”, and the unempathetic traditional.

For Lerner, the features of modernity lay in urbanization, literacy, and a participant lifestyle. The literate urban dweller, who is engaged in democracy and has opinions exceeding his immediate needs, is the modern. The modern is presented as being the polar opposite of the illiterate country dweller who only cares about his immediate needs, thus presenting a clear dichotomy that the “aspiring” transitional lies in between. This helped him classify societies in his “Middle East” along these lines. 

Lerner’s model of modernization, that of communication, was in fact the dominant model throughout the golden age of modernization, so much so that it is in fact still in use by UN organizations and US NGOs (USAID being a major example). Its basic premise was that for modernization to take place, people must be influenced to adopt modern ideals, and let go of tradition, either through communication and media or through government (and non-government) influence. The interviews were not only meant to classify people, but to study them in a manner so detailed as to see what their wants and leanings are, and adjust propaganda efforts accordingly. 

The message that needed to be delivered to receivers, was that the West’s “superiority” and their “inferiority” were largely thanks to the US’ ideals and way of life, the driving forces behind its progress. Tradition, and everything associated with it, is restrictive and constraining, it is outdated and backward, rather it is destructive and counter-progressive. If societies are to move forward and emulate the West, they need to adopt its ideals.  Practically speaking, this would further propagate cultural and economic consumerism in these societies, increasing dependency on the West, instead of the independence they claim to propagate.

The Grocer and the Chief

The story of the book, to sum it up, lies in the author’s parable of the Grocer and the Chief. Lerner learned of the small village of Balgat as he was reading the interview conducted by one Tosun B., which he dispatched to the village. 

Balgat was a small village, located some eight kilometers outside of Ankara, and the interview in question was conducted in 1950, long after Ataturk’s modernization policies began to take root. However, Balgat was still a village, its youth were still farmers, and they all followed the Chief (the Muhtar), who Lerner described as a traditional leader (despite his being an adamant supporter of Ataturk), who wears traditional clothing, and thinks along traditional (read, unempathetic) lines.

Though everyone followed the Muhtar’s word, as he was the leader, the village did have one “dissident”, the grocer. 

The grocer is portrayed as the village’s most “modern” person: a tradesman who enjoys his trips to the city – where he wishes he can live later on – and loves the fact he can put on Western clothing there, who goes to the cinema and loves watching American flicks. 

Four years later, in 1954, Balgat is revisited, but this time it’s changed. The village has roads, transmission towers, power lines, and its youth live in the city where they went to lead an urban lifestyle and make more money. The Muhtar is portrayed as having lost his traditional power, with the grocer, the transitional, having ultimately won. The lesson to be learned is: if we can change the grocer, we can change the “Middle East.”

The book’s ideological underpinnings

Lerner is a veteran of propaganda, serving as a “propaganda officer” in the US Psychological Warfare department during World War II. He is a seasoned propagandist who knows how best to target “the other” in influence campaigns.

Looking into Lerner’s other writings, one can clearly see how Lerner’s worldview and his ideological biases are present. This is a man who, citing other works, believes that a group of psychological conditions and cultural behaviors form an “oriental mentality”. This mentality, according to Lerner, acts as an impediment to “development”, and comprises religion, language, writing, tradition (culture), and fashion (how they dress).

One can clearly see his anti-Islam and anti-Arab bias when he describes them as impediments to change when discussing Ataturk’s approach to modernization:

Cultural rather than phonetic languages were what he [Attaturk] sought in the change. He knew that so long as Turkish was written from right to left it could never properly diffuse the ideals of European civilization. The picturesque involutions and intricacies of Arabic script afforded a psychological background to the Oriental mentality which stood as the real enemy of the republic; its mere difficulty acted as a barrier against the universal diffusion of reading and writing. 

How does he conclude that religion is complicit in this backwardness? Quite simply because the more “modernized” or “developed” social groups in the “Middle East” were the “non-Muslim” ones, according to his understanding.

Christianity and Westernization grew together. Channels of communication with the West were ready-made for members of the Uniate,
Orthodox and Protestant sects [in the Middle East, specifically Lebanon].
They, in turn, relayed Western influence internally.

Quite simply, Lerner is another orientalist, who made use of the scientific method and academic know-how to justify the Americanization of the world at the height of the Cold War. He constructed an “other” and sought to show them as inferior, and in need of the helping hand of change that the US can offer. 

Sure, this is yet another example of the West’s mission civilisatrice at play, but that doesn’t mean that the book isn’t a valuable piece of work. It offers a very real and very important study into how “Middle East” was at the time, how people’s political and media leanings were, and most importantly, a tangible example of how the US was able to employ media so effectively in the Cold War to gain such an important foothold in the “Middle East” and influence its people.

Sources: 

– Daniel Lerner (1964) The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, First Free Press Paperback Edition.

– Hemant Shah (2011), The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and The Passing of Traditional Society, Temple University Press.

– Umaru Bah (2008), Rereading The Passing of Traditional Society, Cultural Studies, 22:6, 795-819.

– John Gulick (1959), Review: The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East by Daniel Lerner, American Anthropologist, Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 135-138

Top New York Times, WaPo Experts Affiliated With Pentagon-Funded CNAS Think Tank

August 04th, 2021

By Dan Cohen

Source

Watch Behind The Headlines correspondent Dan Cohen explain how top foreign policy reporters are linked to the U.S. government, weapons industry and oil corporations – the very forces they are supposed to hold accountable. 

Imagine a country where there’s no separation between the government, the military, and the media. A lot of Americans would think of China, Russia or North Korea, but it’s a perfect description of the United States today. And here in Washington, the think tank inside this nondescript building – Center For A New American Security (CNAS) – is the clearest example of just that.

CNAS is a premier militarist think tank in the nation’s capital, especially for Democratic Party administrations. It is funded by the State Department and Pentagon and has taken more money from weapons companies over the last several years than any other think tank. On top of that, it’s funded by oil companies, big banks, and right wing governments – basically the most destructive forces on the planet.

For President Joe Biden, CNAS serves as a farm, from which key positions in his administration are cultivated. In fact, at least 16 CNAS alumni are now in key positions in the Biden Pentagon and State Department.

But what’s most shocking is that several national security and foreign policy reporters from elite U.S. media outlets are affiliated with CNAS – and therefore indirectly affiliated with, and likely paid by, the U.S. government and corporations – the very forces that they should be holding accountable.

For more than twenty years, New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger has relentlessly pushed deceptions to con the public into supporting U.S. aggression and war.

From the George W. Bush administration’s lies about WMDs in Iraq to lies about Iran attempting to create nuclear weapons and evidence-free claims from intelligence agencies about Russian cyberattacks – these incendiary allegations were taken at face value with a clear goal to pressure then-President Donald Trump to ramp up aggression against Moscow while conveniently filling the pockets of Sanger’s weapons-industry benefactors.

Sanger’s neocon cyberwar fantasy was even turned into a movie by HBO. Today, David Sanger is onto the COVID-19 lab leak theory. He’s been at the forefront of every propaganda campaign that not only provides justification for aggression and war but also helps generate huge profits for CNAS funders.

Sanger is just one of several New York Times, Washington Post and Foreign Policy reporters who have residencies at CNAS. Presumably, that comes with a sizable financial component. I emailed CNAS to ask whether it pays these reporters but they didn’t respond.

Sanger’s colleague Eric Schmitt, senior correspondent covering national security for The New York Times, is also in residence at CNAS.

Back in 2020, Schmitt was promoting the obviously false Russian bounties story, which was later retracted after it had served its political purpose to force Trump to take a harder anti-Russia stance.

Of course, Schmitt was a reliable promoter of intelligence claims about Russian hacking – never displaying a scintilla of skepticism.

And he dutifully portrayed the Trump administration’s aggression against Iran as defensive.

The Washington Post, at one point, found this kind of blatant media corruption at least questionable. In 2011, Time magazine launched a series in collaboration with CNAS to promote war propaganda; the Post published an article questioning the ethics of that partnership.

Fast-forward to 2013: billionaire Jeff Bezos buys the Post, and its correspondent, David Finkel, becomes a writer in residence at CNAS. During that time, Finkel wrote two books on the U.S. war in Iraq: “The Good Soldiers” and “Thank You For Your Service.” Just the kind of whitewash of the war that CNAS’s funders would want the public to consume.

Michael Gordon is another. He spent three decades at the Times. Among his greatest accomplishments was, alongside Judith Miller, promoting the Bush administration’s Iraqi WMD deception. Gordon wrote that “Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb” – citing anonymous U.S. officials.

Now at The Wall Street Journal, Gordon has spent months pumping out Wuhan lab-leak propaganda – once again promoting claims of intelligence officials without any skepticism.

Greg Jaffe is a Washington Post national security reporter and another writer in residence at CNAS. His article on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan quotes Eliot Cohen – a former Bush administration official who is now a fellow at CNAS. Jaffe and Cohen’s shared affiliation is never disclosed in the article – an obvious breach of the most basic journalistic ethics.

Thom Shanker used to be part of the CNAS writer-in-residence program when he was at the Times writing on U.S. wars. In 2012, Shanker wrote this blog post promoting a CNAS study without revealing his affiliation. Once again, a major conflict of interest and ethics out the window.

There’s also Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who spent two decades doing public relations for U.S. wars at the Post and is now doing PR for Starbucks.

And Thomas Ricks, whose career has spanned posts at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine. Ricks is a cold-warrior who has publicly stated that Putin is attacking the United States just like Osama Bin Laden did and that Americans defending Putin are no different from those defending Bin Laden.

Some of this information isn’t new. It was reported in The Nation more than a decade ago, but the issue has only gotten worse as U.S. politics have shifted right, spy agencies have gained more power in the media, and the new cold war has accelerated.

There’s no real separation between the myriad of revolving doors and cash flow between the weapons manufacturers, think tanks, the U.S. government and media. It’s an incestuous, bloviating blob capable of producing one thing and one thing only: war.

So when you think of the military industrial complex and the permanent war state, don’t forget about what might be the most important component of all: the media.

Demonize first, then kill: a note on the role of media and social networks in imperialist domination

Sociologist, political scientist, and journalist.

Atilio A. Boron

5 Jul 2021

Source: Al Mayadeen

“Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to dictatorship” – Noam Chomsky 

The sentence of the great American linguist offers a good starting point for these reflections that we intend to propose as inputs for a discussion as crucial as pressing. This is so because, according to experts in hybrid or Fifth-Generation Wars, the capacity to control consciences and hearts – or “minds and souls” to put it in a poetic form- has reached unmatched levels, unthinkable until a decade ago. The progress of neurosciences and political neuro-marketing has enormously increased the ability of the dominant classes and imperialist powers to control the beliefs, desires, and behavior of millions of people worldwide.

Demonize first, then kill

The revolutionary advances in Artificial intelligence, the “Internet of Things”, communications technologies (5G), along with the unprecedented penetration of Social Networks and the mass media, have created a new battlefield in which popular movements of national liberation will have to wage their struggles. 

Unfortunately, this transition from conventional warfare to media and cyber warfare has only been recently acknowledged in its full effectiveness by the anti-imperialist forces, at a time it has been thoroughly used by the dominant powers of the international system, especially the United States government. Few examples would be more illustrative than the following to clarify our argument. At a hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this century, a four-star general said that “in today’s world, the anti-subversive war is waged in the media, and no longer in the jungles or the decaying slums of the Third World.” Therefore, he concluded, “now the media and the social networks are our main operational theater.”  

Both Fidel and Chávez were precociously aware that the media oligarchies constituted one of the most serious threats hanging over the future of democracies and anti-imperialist struggles. Indeed, their uncontrolled power and nefarious role in the calculated processes of “de-education”, alienation and brutalization of the citizenry, became formidable bulwarks against the advancement of the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist consciousness. Their complete abandonment of the journalistic function in favor of a propagandistic work also constituted a fortification to that end. This is proven day by day in Latin America by observing the news manipulation intended to cover up the crimes perpetrated by the Iván Duque regime in Colombia against peaceful protesters. This was also evident in the brutal repression launched by the Añez dictatorship in Bolivia, the acts of the Piñera government in Chile, and, today, the manipulation of the electoral institutes and the dominant circles to prevent the proclamation of Pedro Castillo as the new president of Perú.   

The negative role of media is also patent in press operations intended to “iron armor” information that is not supposed to be known by the public. For instance, the open links between the successive “narco-governments” in Colombia and the cocaine cartels; or the corruption of the Macri government in Argentina as proved in the Panama Papers were all carefully concealed by the hegemonic media. Moreover, nothing is said about the unjust, scandalous imprisonment of Julian Assange, one of the heroes of press freedom on a global scale.

As the writings of the imperial strategists recognized, the media and, more recently, “digital networks” have been key players in the destabilization of progressive or left-wing governments around the world. Wherever the empire, through its own troops, its cultural mercenaries, and its local henchmen, decides to attack, the media immediately occupies the vanguard positions. The demonization of the adversary and his government – let’s say leaders like Nicolás Maduro, Evo Morales, Bashar al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al Gadaffi, and Vladimir Putin – is the first step. Then, their methodical defamation and the disinformation applied on a large scale through the press, television, radio, and digital networks become crucial weapons in creating the climate of opinion required to be able to apply naked violence against those rulers. The “artillery of thought” seeks the demolition of the attacked population’s defense mechanisms. The end goal is to confuse it and make it doubt the integrity or patriotism of its rulers by presenting them to the public opinion as wicked monsters and their governments as infamous “regimes”, depicting them as ferocious police states that violate the most basic human rights. Under this storm of misinformation and “fake news”, many people will be led to think that perhaps their attackers are right and really want to free the people from the sway of their nasty oppressors. Even more, it is aimed at making them think that the pretense of “changing the world” is nonsense; – a childish illusion to build the paradise on earth that could only result in falling in the inferno. Once the cultural defenses of society are “softened” (equivalent to the bombings that prepare the way for the frontal assault) and the media battering ram has pierced the wall of social conscience poisoned it with hundreds of “fake news” and “post-truth”, and demoralized or at least confused the population and the cadres of the anti-imperialist social forces, then the ground will be ready for the final assault. It is the moment in which the imperialist forces launch an all-out attack displaying the full capacity of their arsenal to give the shot of grace to their demonized enemies: Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gadaffi, for instance. 

This is not only an account of the heartbreaking past but a description of today’s strategies that the US government applies worldwide. We should be aware of this and be prepared to start an adequate counter-offensive, and the broadcasting of the Al Mayadeen programs in English is a significant step in this direction.

In Wake of HRW Apartheid Report, Israeli Propagandists Launch Global PR Offensive

By Alan Macleod

Source

Much of the online anger at the Human Rights Watch report was actually manufactured by an Israeli government-sponsored app, Act.IL, which organized supporters of the Jewish state to act in sync to create an artificial groundswell of opposition to it. 

NEW YORK — A recently released bombshell Human Rights Watch (HRW) report has made waves around the world. For the first time, the New York-based non-governmental organization has categorized Israel as an apartheid state guilty of “crimes against humanity.”

The 213-page study goes into detail about a range of racist laws and policies carried out by successive administrations, concluding that there is an “overarching Israeli government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem.”

The report accuses the state of Israel of widespread “institutional discrimination” and of “denying millions of Palestinians their fundamental rights…solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish.” It further notes that, across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it has “sought to maximize the land available for Jewish communities and to concentrate most Palestinians in dense population centers.”

“Prominent voices have warned for years that apartheid lurks just around the corner if the trajectory of Israel’s rule over Palestinians does not change,” said the organization’s executive director, Kenneth Roth. “This detailed study shows that Israeli authorities have already turned that corner and today are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

Perhaps most importantly, Human Rights Watch is now openly calling for global action to end the repression. The report asks the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute those involved in Palestinian persecution. While not explicitly endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sactions (BDS) movement, Human Rights Watch directly advocates that “[s]tates should impose individual sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and individuals responsible for the continued commission of these serious crimes,” and for businesses to “cease business activities that directly contribute to the crimes of apartheid and persecution.”

A big splash

The report was widely covered across the world and has been heralded by Palestine solidarity activists, with experts seeing it as a potential turning point in the struggle for Palestinian sovereignty. “It was inevitable that Human Rights Watch would have to declare Israel an Apartheid state and, from what I hear, Amnesty International is going to be next to say it,” Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada told MintPress. “It puts Israel’s backers in a difficult spot because Human Rights Watch is really part of the establishment so they cannot just dismiss it and it makes it impossible to ignore… It is harder for them to say Human Rights Watch is anti-Semitic, but they’re trying it anyway,” he added.

Trying indeed. Michigan Congresswoman Lisa McClain tweeted that “Human Rights Watch has shown again how they have an anti-Israel agenda,” suggesting they instead focus their attention on China or Iran’s repressive governments. “Hostility and hypocrisy are HRW’s hallmarks when it comes to Israel,” wrote the American Jewish Committee. The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board was equally condemnatory, denouncing what they saw as the “cynical appropriation of the suffering of the victims of the actual apartheid regime.” Other Israeli journalists described the report as “a disgrace to the memory of the millions who suffered under that policy [apartheid] in South Africa.” The news even made enough waves to force a response from the White House. Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied that “[a]s to the question of whether Israel’s actions constitute apartheid, that is not the view of this administration.”

Organized spontaneity

Yet much of the online anger at the report was actually manufactured by an Israeli government-sponsored app, Act.IL, which organized supporters of the Jewish state to act in sync to create an artificial groundswell of opposition to it. The app, which reportedly has a budget of over $1 million per year, instructed users to leave combative comments on Facebook, Twitter, and popular news outlets, and to like and promote others who did the same.

Human Rights Watch’s Facebook post announcing the report’s release has received over 1,400 comments, hundreds of them written in a similar, scathingly negative tone. One that the app directly told users to signal boost, for instance, described Palestinians as a people “indoctrinated with hate for Israel and Jews for over 100 years,” and claimed they were paid salaries to murder Israelis. It also presented the 1967 war and occupation as a humanitarian effort to bring electricity and other infrastructure to Arabs.

Another “mission” Act.IL gave its users was to promote a Facebook comment attacking the report as “nothing more than hate speech” and calling its lead author a “rabid anti-Zionist and Israel hater.”

One of the many images provided to Act.IL users for their astroturfing campaign against HRW

Act.IL is one of the chief tools in Israel’s online public relations enterprise. The app debuted in 2017 and is part of what Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan called an “Iron Dome of Truth.” “Our cell phones are the number one weapon against us,” he explained, noting that public opinion in the U.S. was beginning to turn against them. While most of the app’s nearly 20,000 users are volunteers, a core of them are paid operatives, with many students receiving scholarships as a reward for their work.

The app has been designed to feel like a game, with points assigned for completing “missions” such as sharing pro-Israel videos, reporting anti-Israel content, signing petitions, or attending online seminars. Users can track their progress on leaderboards, earn badges and prizes, and chat with other members of the community. While it might feel like Animal Crossing or World of Warcraft for some, its creators see this very much as a new front in the war against Palestine. Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked categorizes BDS as “another branch of terrorism in the modern age,” and has been an important voice in taking the fight to a new front.

An Act.IL mission encouraging astroturfing of online discussions. Source |
@AntiBDSApp

There is also an online toolkit full of folders of responses to typical questions and issues that arise. Users can, for instance, go to the BDS folder to find stock replies to their arguments. Or they can go to a specific folder to find articles, images and videos they can use to demonize Hamas.

The missions are organized by outlet, so users can, for instance, target only Facebook, Telegram, or other platforms they are most familiar with. At the time of writing, there are 10 missions each to complete on Facebook and YouTube, 30 on Instagram, 25 on Twitter.

One current challenge is to upvote an answer to a question on Quora that asks about the validity and purpose of checkpoints in the West Bank. The answer claims they are purely about protection from terror attacks, and claims that Red Crescent ambulances are used to ferry bombs around the area. Other missions include pressuring an online store to remove a bag with a message stating “Make Israel Palestine Again.”

An Act.IL “mission” encouraging users to demand the removal of products with pro-Palestinian messaging

“It is quite astounding how openly they do it. But, of course, when you see a comment online, you wouldn’t necessarily think that it was coming from the Israeli government, but this is essentially what is happening,” Winstanley said. “Israel is not the only state to do this, but they do it fairly successfully.”

For all this, however, it is clear that Act.IL has a serious problem with user retention and lacks the volunteer numbers for it to be truly game changing.

Controlling the message

In a time of heightened awareness about foreign government interference online, it is particularly surprising that these operations can be openly carried out across virtually every major platform. Big tech companies like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are constantly deleting tens of thousands of Russian, Chinese, Iranian and Cuban accounts belonging to what they claim are organized, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.

In an effort to gauge the legality of its operations, MintPress reached out to Facebook, YouTube, Quora, and other big platforms used by Act.IL. We received no response from any of them. While this is particularly noteworthy — as these companies have teams of public relations representatives and are extremely forthright and timely with responses on other issues — it is perhaps not surprising. Facebook especially has long been working closely with the Israeli government in deciding which voices to censor. As far back as 2016, Ayelet Shaked boasted that Facebook removed 95% of the posts her office asked them to. Yet when Shaked herself called for a genocidal war against Palestine and its women, who give birth to “little snakes,” not only did the post remain online, it received thousands of likes and was widely circulated.

“The concern is that Facebook is adopting Israeli policy and terminology when it comes to defining what incitement is,” said Nadim Nashif, co-founder of 7amleh, the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media. 7amleh was therefore dismayed when last year, Facebook appointed former Israeli Minister of Justice Emi Palmor to its Oversight Board, the council having the final say in the moderation of content on the platform used by 2.6 billion people worldwide. In her role as justice minister, Palmor was directly implicated in the persecution and subjugation of Palestinians.

Earlier this year, an Israeli Defense Forces soldier attempted to sue a Palestinian-American activist living in California over an allegedly slanderous Facebook post condemning her for participating in ethnic cleansing. Remarkably, the plaintiff attempted to convince a California judge to apply Israeli law to the incident, despite the fact that both she and the defendant are American citizens.

Inside the world of academia, professors critical of Israel have found themselves pushed out of the profession. In 2007, prominent critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University for political reasons. Seven years later, the University of Illinois “unhired” Steven Sailata for his comments denouncing Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza. Emails showed that wealthy donors put significant pressure on the university to pull the plug on him. More recently, Cornel West was blocked from a tenured job at Harvard this year, despite having previously held tenure at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. “Being the faculty advisor for the Palestinian student group was the one that probably went outside of the line for many Harvard staff,” West told Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski. “It’s a joke. It’s ridiculous. It’s ludicrous. It’s preposterous that it wouldn’t have something to do with politics.”

Top media figures have also paid the price for their support of BDS. CNN fired commentator Marc Lamont Hill after he made a speech at the United Nations calling for a free Palestine. Meanwhile, journalist Abby Martin was blocked from speaking at a conference at Georgia Southern University last year after she refused to sign a contract promising to renounce BDS. Georgia is one of dozens of U.S. states to have anti-BDS legislation, essentially forcing any would-be recipient of public contracts or funds, including government employees, to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel. Martin is currently suing the state of Georgia.

Perhaps the greatest PR victory for the Israel lobby in recent years was its defamation campaign against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. The lifelong pacifist, anti-racist campaigner was transformed into a raging anti-Semite in the minds of many, thanks to a massive propaganda onslaught. In the three months before the 2019 election, there were 1,450 articles in national British newspapers linking Corbyn with anti-Semitism, chiefly because of his support for Palestinian liberation. Much of this was orchestrated by Israel and its lobby, which worked closely with journalists and politicians keen to see the socialist politician’s demise. The media blitz succeeded. When media researchers asked the public what percentage of Labour members faced official complaints over anti-Semitism, the average guess was 34%. The actual answer was less than 0.1%; and more than half of those complaints were made by one person. Corbyn lost the election and the U.K. chose Boris Johnson.

Winstanley, whose documentary “How they brought down Corbyn” premiered last week, told MintPress:

“The most effective propaganda strategy against [Corbyn] was the fabrication that he was an anti-Semite on the basis of his past criticisms of Israel and his Palestinian solidarity. In my view, the maliciously fabricated anti-Semitism crisis against the Labour Party was the main factor in his [being deposed] as Labour Party leader. Without this factor, he would have made it to Number 10 Downing Street and become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.”

Apartheid states

While Human Rights Watch’s report is new, the charge of apartheid is not. In 2017, a United Nations report “clearly and frankly concludes” that Israel is “a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.” Earlier this year, Israeli human rights organization B’TSelem also used the word “apartheid,” claiming that Israel had established “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

In the wake of World War Two and the Holocaust, Israel was created by the United Nations in 1947, cutting a section of territory from the British mandate of Palestine to form a new state. While it was immediately recognized by the international powers, Arabs who lived in the region were dead against it, leading to a war in 1948. David Ben Gurion and the founding fathers of Israel immediately began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the local population, razing their villages and forcing them to flee. Today there are more than 5 million Palestinians registered as refugees.

While many defenders of Israel today balk at the comparison to apartheid South Africa, the two countries were close friends for much of the late 20th century, seeing themselves as similar settler colonial projects surrounded by hostile nations. Furthermore, leaders of the African liberation movement saw themselves as part of the same struggle as those in Palestine. “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” Nelson Mandela said in 1997. “I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu in a statement endorsing BDS. “Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government,” he added.

A turning tide

The Human Rights Watch report is the latest reference point showing Western public sympathies swaying towards Palestine. During the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination race, a number of top-tier candidates very publicly shunned the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, refusing to attend the AIPAC conference. Last week, the Pilsbury family called for a global boycott of the food company that bears its name. “As long as General Mills [which owns the Pilsbury brand] continues to profit from the dispossession and suffering of the Palestinian people, we will not buy any Pillsbury products,” they stated, denouncing the building of a factory on illegal settlement land.

Advocates for Palestine hailed Human Rights Watch’s study. Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies wrote:

There can be little doubt that much of HRW’s decision to issue this report now was based on the recognition that not only is it no longer political suicide to call Israeli apartheid what it is, but that we are now at a tipping point whereby failing to call out apartheid risks losing credibility for a human rights organization. It’s a huge victory for our movement.”

The battle, however, is far from won, and it is clear that the Israel lobby will continue to fight to hold back the tide until it is insurmountable.

Xinjiang Native Speaks Out: “Western Media Jeopardizing Uyghurs Interests”

By Dan Cohen

Source

Dan Cohen speaks with Gordon Gao, an ethnic minority and Xinjiang native on the realities of life in Xinjiang, Western media coverage and US-China tensions.

WASHINGTON — Dan Cohen speaks with Gordon Gao, Director of Strategic Research at Tsinghua University Endowment Fund in Beijing and a native of Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Gao discusses growing up as a Mongolian ethnic minority in XUAR, and how the propaganda war against China hurts Uyghur interests, but will ultimately backfire on the United States. Gao and Coden also discuss the U.S.-China artificial intelligence arms race as well as the comparative strengths of the two countries.

Recognizing and Resisting the Hasbara Pandemic

March 27, 2020 Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

Robert Levinson, former FBI agent.

Steady media reports on the rising number of the novel Coronavirus infections and its human toll have contributed to a global psychology of fear where entire populations are succumbing their free will to those in positions of authority, elected and otherwise.   But while we try to keep ourselves safe during this pandemic, a deadlier and more destructive virus creeping in the shadows for years is also reaching its peak.  The virus is called hasbara or better understood as propaganda.

Lest you think it is not contagious or deadly, think Iraq.  The Iraq war alone cost the American taxpayers trillions of Dollars but the Iraqi population bore the brunt of the pain and suffering from America’s sanctioned terror attack and invasion with over one million souls lost and counting.  Just like COVID-19 which may be dismissed as a cold, the hasbara virus may be taken for the truth – and therein lies the threat.  As we surrender our will to the officials so that we can survive this pandemic, the spinners have upped their hasbara in order to coax us into embracing their terrorism, their wars, and their genocide.

Abandon your will, if you must, but not your common sense. As someone who has studied propaganda for fifteen years, I have never seen it so prevalent and so dangerous at a time when we are distracted by a viral disease.  Having allowed the hasbara virus to spread and go undetected for such a long time, we’ve lost all ability to recognize it. The spinners know this and are taking full advantage of it. Let me give you two examples from the last 24 hours alone.

First one is a heartwarming ‘news item’ – even benign.

How can the picture of this cute dog not touch your heart? More so when you read on that his owner is in quarantine in Mexico with the coronavirus.  His chips cravings prompt him to tie a note to the dog, send him to the store with a $20 bill and instructions to the shopkeeper to give the dog a bag of “Cheetos”.   Now didn’t that give you the warm fuzzies?  The story is shared over and over and the ‘news reporter’ gets a kudos from his boss for writing this sweet story which would no doubt increase circulation.  I loved it.

But then I had to ask myself why a man in Mexico would tie a 20 Dollar bill to his dog and not Pesos.  That is a lot of Mexican Pesos, and no change was returned.  I mean where would the poor dog keep the change, a lot of change, in Mexican Pesos.

I shared the story with many friends, some of whom included university professors.  None noted the oddness of the Dollar bill.    Even when I asked if they noted something strange about the story, they did not point to it until I told them.  The story was heartwarming and the incident was something they all wanted to accept – a feel good story.   Nothing else was noted.  We want to believe a story that appeals to our sense of reality, our values, no matter how unrealistic.

On the opposite side is the news story about a former FBI agent Robert Levinson.  Levinson disappeared in 2007 and the United States had accused Iran of holding him hostage.  Iran has no information about him.  Yesterday, out of nowhere, various hasbara outlets cited Levinson’s family releasing a statement citing that they recently received information from US officials that led them to conclude that “our wonderful husband and father died while in Iranian custody.”

Iran denied having held him in custody and the news of his death was news to them.  Why was this unbelievable?  After all, I have no way of knowing who is lying, the US or Iran.  Though one certainly may question the timing of this report.

But it was not just the timing that was odd.  It was the orange prison uniform.  Orange prison uniform is easy to process for Americans, and the West.  Images of prisoners wearing orange jumpsuit in Guantanamo are embedded in our minds.  More disturbing still are the images of prisoners captured by ISIS and wearing orange jumpsuits as they are being executed.   I always wondered where did ISIS get all the orange jumpsuits their prisoner wore.  But that is beside the point.  In Iran, prisoners do not wear orange.  The uniforms are different shades of blue depending on their status. Ordinary prisoners wear the striped while political prisoners the plain blue uniforms.

Prison uniforms in Iran.

Aside from the wrong color uniform, I was struck by Levinson’s appearance as portrayed in Western media.  It was hard to process the tanned face which contrasted so sharply with his pale hands.   It didn’t make sense.  It is not clear to me as to why America would choose this moment to stage this death. I can only imagine that it is to present an image of a ruthless Iran in order to justify its terrorism by way of sanctions at a time when Iran, like the rest of the world, is fighting this pandemic.    But even the lies will not hide the shameless stain of America’s cruel madness. Hence, we must resist and fight the propaganda.

For decades, we have been victims of propaganda to the point that we are no longer aware of it.  In spite of it, we have not managed to build an immunity to the lies.  Quite the opposite — we have become more vulnerable as our resistance erodes with every shot of hasbara.  But we are not broken – not yet.  It can only affect us if left undetected.  Like COVID-19, the hasbara virus goes undetected until it’s tested for and discovered.  We must therefore learn to test for, detect, and reject it.  We can do this by refusing to abandon our critical thinking.  Pleasant or not, we cannot allow our underlying bias guide us and use commonsense. Don’t let the hasbara virus infect you — it is deadlier than you can imagine.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on US foreign policy.

Censorship Is the Way that Any Dictatorship — and NO Democracy — Functions

Eric Zuesse February 15, 2020

No democracy can survive censorship. If there is censorship, then each individual cannot make his/her own decisions (voting decisions or otherwise) on the basis of truth but only on the basis of whatever passes through the censor’s filter, which is always whatever supports the censoring regime and implants it evermore deeply into the public’s mind — regardless of its actual truthfulness.

The public does have a mind, as a collective constituting the majority of the residents in the given land, which majority rules any democratic government. If the government doesn’t really represent the majority, it’s no democracy, at all, but instead represents other individuals, the real rulers, who might be hidden. Consequently, if a democracy exists but a censor somehow becomes allowed, and emerges into existence in a given land, then democracy will inevitably be snuffed-out there, and dictatorship will inevitably be the result — merely because censorship has been applied there, which blocks some essential truths (truths that the rulers don’t want the public to know) from reaching the public.

Nothing is as toxic to democracy as is censorship. Censorship prevents democracy.

If a dictatorship already exists in a given land, then it does so by means of censorship, because only by that means will the public be willing to pay taxes to the regime and to go to war for it and to kill and die for it. Without censorship, none of that could happen, except in an authentic democracy. An authentic democracy has no censorship.

This is why democracy is so rare. Almost every dictatorship calls itself a ‘democracy’. But a government which calls itself “democratic” isn’t necessarily democratic, but more likely it has simply fooled its public to think that it is one (such as the United States has by now been scientifically proven to be — an actual dictatorship).

Anyone who endorses censorship is a totalitarian, a supporter of totalitarianism, even without recognizing the fact. If the person fails to recognize the fact that censorship is applied only in a totalitarian regime, then that person has bought into the most basic belief of totalitarianism: the idea that censorship can be justified in some circumstances. Dictatorships always pump that lie, so as to be able to continue to exist as a dictatorship. There is no circumstance which ever can justify censorship, unless one believes that dictatorship is, or can be, good instead of bad.

If you think that some censorship is good, then you have bought into the fundamental belief that is promulgated in any dictatorship. It’s a lie, but it fools the majority of people, in a dictatorship.

No writing, nor any other statement, should ever be censored, no matter how vile it is. Indeed, if it is vile, then it needs to be exposed, not hidden; because, if it is hidden, then it will fester until it grows in the dark and finally becomes sprung upon a public who have never been inoculated against it by truth, and therefore the false belief becomes actually seriously dangerous and likely to spread like wildfire, because it had been censored before it became public. The most deadly infections are those that grow in the dark and then become released upon a population who have no pre-existing protection against it.

Every religion, and every evil regime, seeks to censor-out whatever contradicts its propaganda, and is therefore intrinsically hostile toward democracy, but the danger is always being presented not by the writers and speakers of the propaganda, but by its publishers (regardless of media: print, broadcast, or online) — they are the source of all censorship. They are the censors. The people who select what to publish, and what not to publish, are the censors. The regime’s media are what perpetrate censorship, routinely, because those media are actually essential arms of the dictatorship, even if they are not directly owned by the government but instead by the clique who actually possess control over the government because they possess control over the mainstream (and much of the non-mainstream) media and thus the public’s mind in a ‘democracy’ in order to make it the dictatorship that it actually is.

Much has been written about how this censorship has been perpetrated in the post-WW-II (post-26-July-1945) USA., such as here, and here, and here, and here. (All of that has been censored-out from the major media — they don’t report that they represent the regime instead of the public.) As a consequence of that censorship against truth, history is being revised to be ‘history’ so as to portray a false ‘reality’ to people today. And there are numerous other examples of this, by the U.S. regime, each instance, of which lying, is affirmed as being truth by the regime’s agents, but is actually nothing more than vicious lies that are spread by the regime and its agents. What goes on behind the scenes is hidden from the American public, not really in order to protect them, but purely in order to deceive them. The deception of the American people, and of the residents in all of the U.S. Government’s foreign vassal-states (or ‘allies’) in Europe and elsewhere, is extreme, in all fields of international relations. Whereas Julian Assange was the world’s strongest enemy against censorship, he has been almost ten years now under some form or another of imprisonment, including solitary confinement and torture, all without ever having been convicted of anything, and all because he is an enemy against censorship instead of a flak for censorship. And Twitter and other ‘social media’ are hiding from the public — censoring — the sheer outrageousness of it all.

The solution to the problem of lies is not censorship, it is banning censorship. On 7 June 2019, the need for this seemed even clearer to me after Russia’s RT headlined on that date “Glenn Greenwald rips liberals who ‘beg for censorship’”, and that brilliant lawyer and investigative journalist presented powerfully the case against any censorship at all. As one can see from the accompanying video interview there of him, Greenwald was like a force of nature, in that video, or (to use a different metaphor) a huge dose of mental draino for clogged minds.

This also means that issues of libel and slander are only to be addressed in the civil courts, and not, at all, in the government’s prosecutions, the criminal courts.

All censorship needs to be banned. The question therefore becomes: How can this be done? That’s a question I have never seen discussed, perhaps because it is being censored. It’s a very serious question. Any ‘political science’ which exists that has no extensive literature about this question is fake. Perhaps draino for clogged minds is needed especially for scholars.

Things are worse than we know, because censorship exists. Maybe censorship is pervasive.

So: I shall venture a solution to this problem: By law, all media which discuss national and/or international affairs will fire all editors and producers of “news,” but not the employees who have only managerial, presentational, and/or stylistic assignments, and replace these people (all personnel who select what to present and what not to present) by a randomized algorithm being applied to each topic, so that, if, for example, something is entered into a search-box, then the order or presentation of the findings will be listed either (at the user’s selection) from earliest-posted to latest-posted, or latest-posted to earliest-posted, but not by anything that is chosen or determined by the search-engine itself. (In other words: no search-engine will be allowed to censor.) On print or broadcast media, every news-piece will be controlled in real time by its audience so as to determine what the questions are and then to bring into the presentation randomly selected scientifically qualified experts regarding each such question. For example: on the question of climate-change, the experts would be individuals who have terminal graduate-level degrees in each of the related climatology sub-specialties, such as those listed at Wikipedia, but also in essential related fields such as economics (an important climatological sub-specialty that’s not listed there). If, indeed, over 90% of climatologists agree that man-made global warming is a reality, then the result of this method of selecting the “experts” who will be presented is that that viewpoint will be represented by over 90% of the experts — and this outcome would not be controlled by the given ‘news’-medium, nor affected by its advertisers. In other words: only the subject-matter and academic qualifications — no governmental positions or background — would qualify individuals as being “experts” on the given topic. If a terminal degree isn’t a qualification for expertise on a topic, then what is? Aren’t government officials supposed to be relying on them? And if, for example, the topic is Syria, then shouldn’t all individuals who have terminal degrees on Syria be the “experts” who are invited, on a randomized basis, to comment to the public about Syria-related issues? If that were the case, then perhaps many Americans would know that the U.S. and NATO “began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria,” “organizing defectors in Syria,” and “smuggle U.S. weapons into Syria, participate in U.S. psychological and information warfare inside Syria” to produce regime-change there, and that Syria had never posed any threat to U.S. national security. And Barack Obama was hoping for such opportunities to overthrow Syria’s Government even when he became President in 2009. If the American public didn’t know those things at the time, then perhaps America’s censorship was total — which would indicate how absolutely crucial a randomization of the public’s information-sources is, so as to replace the power that the existing mainstrean ‘news’-media have over the public’s mind, in America, and in its vassal-nations (which don’t yet include Syria). If the public do not have unprejudiced — which means entirely uncensored — information presented routinely to them, then democracy isn’t even possible.

Anyway: that is one proposed way of replacing censorship, and overcoming dictatorship. How many politicians are proposing such changes? Why aren’t any? Are all of them afraid of the dictators? Is there no basis for hope, at all?

Countering Syria’s Liberating Struggle

By Stephen Lendman

Source

Whenever Syrian forces make significant advances in liberating areas controlled by US supported jihadists, establishment media counterattack with state-approved propaganda.

Reports read like US/Western press releases, sticking to the official narrative, hard truths about years of US aggression ignored, Syria/Russia bashing featured as more cities, towns, and villages are liberated from the scourge of US-supported jihadists.

Hollywood is involved, studio bosses colluding in glorifying US wars and demonizing its enemies.

In propaganda films, Washington has final say on content, wanting its agenda promoted.

History is reinvented, villains portrayed as heroes. Supporting America’s imperial agenda overrides truth-telling.

At Hollywood’s 89th Academy Awards, The White Helmets propaganda film was honored as best documentary short – al-Qaeda-connected terrorists portrayed as heroic.

On Sunday at the 92nd Academy Awards, will best documentary nominee For Sama be awarded an Oscar in support of the US war machine.

Win or lose it won by promotion surrounding its nomination.\

A promo for the film calls it “(a)n intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war, a love letter from a young mother to her daughter…while cataclysmic war rises around her…captur(ing) stories of loss…and survival.”

Ignored are years of US aggression, Obama/Trump regimes’ support for ISIS and other jihadists, Pentagon terror-bombing massacring tens of thousands, US responsibility for the gravest refugee crisis since WW II, and raging forever war, aiming to transform Syria into a US vassal state.

British Independent Film Awards named For Sama the year’s best documentary. So did the Cannes Film Festival. Is Hollywood next?

For movie moguls, annual Academy awards are all about  film promotion for profits, unrelated to the industry’s best.

When called on by the Pentagon and/or CIA, Hollywood produces films that portray hostile US actions as liberating struggles and democracy promotion — victims falsely blamed for high crimes committed against them.

Establishment media do most pro-war heavy lifting, featuring all propaganda all the time about Washington’s imperial agenda, supporting what demands condemnation.

Ahead of Sunday’s Academy Awards spectacle, the NYT featured a propaganda op-ed by Waad al-Kateab, For Sama’s co-director.

She falsely portrayed liberating efforts by Syrian and Russian forces as high crimes — committed by the US and its jihadist proxies left unexplained.

Focusing on the ongoing Idlib province campaign, she claimed “the world…abandoned the Syrian people.”

It’s clearly true about the Western world and their regional imperial allies.

Falsely calling Idlib a “sanctuary” for millions of Syrians, she ignored their captivity as human shields by US/Turkish supported jihadists.

She said nothing about scores of daily attacks by their fighters against government forces and residential areas.

She falsely called al-Qaeda-connected White Helmets “civil defense” workers.

She lied accusing Syrian and Russian forces of massacres, ignoring jihadists’ responsibility for what’s gone on throughout the war — along with Pentagon-led terror-bombing of cities, towns, villages, and vital infrastructure.

Kateab’s propaganda film is supported by US officials, Hollywood, and establishment media, notably the NYT.

Instead of truth-telling about US aggression, it features anti-Syria/anti-Russia propaganda.

Will Hollywood dishonor itself again like countless times before by honoring For Sama propaganda as best documentary this year?

The film isn’t worth the celluloid it’s produced on for suppressing what’s most important to explain.

ISRAEL MUST PERISH! The Book that the Jews Fear By Arthur Topham

by admin on January 17, 2020

The Book that the Jews Fear
By Arthur Topham

May 27, 2011

Author’s Preface:

What is contained herein is but a synopsis and partial review of the verbatim text of an actual book first published in the USA back in early 1941 when America was still a neutral country. That book, Germany Must Perish! was written by a Jewish writer by the name of Theodore N. Kaufman. Its exact proposals are those contained herein.

It is assumed that the reader will already be fully cognizant of the Zionist agenda for global governance that is a given in today’s political reality, especially within the alternative media and on the Internet where Zionist “hate” laws are still not fully in place to restrict the natural flow of ideas and opinions that proceed from historical research and experience.

In 1941 Kaufman’s book was a brilliant piece of Zionist Jew propaganda designed to stir up anti-German hatred in America. Some say that it formed the basis of the infamous “Morgenthau Plan” that was later signed in Quebec, Canada by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill; one designed to dismember Germany after its defeat and reduce it to the status of “a goat pasture.” It was, and probably remains to this day, the foremost example of hate literature ever to have been published and dispensed to the general public.

As the reader will surmise from viewing the image of the back page of Kaufman’s book some of America’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines were in full support of the objectives set down in this classic book of Jewish hate literature. Again, the reader is cautioned to bear in mind that I have changed the word “Nazi” to “Jew” in the quote from the Philadelphia Record as I have changed all the other words “German” and “Nazi” to “Jew” and “Zionist,” etc.

The striking thing about the vileness of the text is how, today, it seems to roll off the mind’s tongue as if it were as truthful and factual as the rising sun. As such I firmly believe that all of what the Zionist Jews write about others is actually but a reflection of their own inner, perverse, dislocated self. By projecting outward on to others their innate paranoid and deep-seated hatred for the rest of the world they’re able to meet the requirements of the Israeli state’s motto which reads, “By Way of Deception Though Shalt Cause War” and feel a sense of superiority and self-righteousness in doing so.

I would humbly ask the reader to be aware of these features as they read both the text and the context in which it was first written. I have, as the saying goes, only changed the names to protect the innocent. As for any further extrapolation I will leave that up to the reader.

________________

ISRAEL MUST PERISH! The Book that the Jews Fear By Roy Arthur Topham

Beginning with the Table of Contents page Topham makes this dramatic initial statement:

“This dynamic volume outlines a comprehensive plan for the extinction of the Jewish nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people.”

How do you like those apples so far? Talk about cutting to the chase!

from Chapter One: About This Book

“Today’s wars are not wars against Netanyahu.

Nor are they wars against the Zionists…

Netanyahu is no more to be blamed for these Israeli wars than was Sharon for the last one. Nor Begin before. These men did not originate or wage Israel’s wars against the world. They were merely the mirrors reflecting centuries-old inbred lust of the Jewish nation for conquest and mass murder.

These wars are being waged by the Jewish people. It is they who are responsible. It is they who must be made to pay for the wars.

…This time Israel has forced a TOTAL WAR upon the world.

As a result, she must be prepared to pay a TOTAL PENALTY.

And there is one, and only one, such Total Penalty:

Israel must perish forever!

In fact – not in fancy!”

*******************

“For quite patently, to fight once more in democratic defense against Israel with any goal in view save that country’s extinction constitutes, even though it lose the war, a Jewish victory. To fight, to win, and not this time to end Jewish Zionism forever by exterminating completely those people who spread its doctrine is to herald the outbreak of another Jewish war within a generation.”

When this day of reckoning with Israel comes, as come it will, there will be only one obvious answer. No statesman or politician or leader responsible for post-war settlements will have the right to indulge in the personal luxury of false sentiment and specious sanctimony and declare that Israel, misled by her leaders, shall deserve the right of resurrection!

… the beast that is Israel shall never roam the earth again!

It is a definite obligation which the world owes to those who struggled and died against the Jews…to make certain that the vicious fangs of the Jewish serpent shall never strike again. And since the venom of those fangs derives its fatal poison not from within the body, but from the war-soul of the Jews, nothing else would assure humanity safety and security but that that war-soul be forever expunged, and the diseased carcass which harbors it be forever removed from this world. There is no longer any alternative:

Israel Must Perish!

… And so it is with the people of Israel. They may respond for a while to civilizing forces; they may seemingly adopt the superficial mannerisms and exterior behaviorisms of civilized peoples but all the while there remains ever present within them that war-soul which eventually drives them, as it drives the tiger, to kill. And no amount of conditioning, or reasoning, or civilizing – past, present or future – will ever be able to change this basic nature. For if no impress has been made upon this war-soul over the period of some two thousand years is it to be expected that of a sudden, on the morrow, this miracle will occur?

This analogous linking of the people of Israel with a savage beast is no vulgar comparison. I feel no more personal hatred for these people than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls can exude no spiritual warmth; one pities them. If the Jewish people wish to live by themselves, in darkness, it would be strictly their own affair. But when they make constant attempts to enshroud the souls of other people in those fetid wrappings which cloak their own, it becomes time to remove them from the realm of civilized mankind among which they can have no place or right to existence.

We need not condemn the Jews. They stand self-condemned. For it suffices us to read and hear those words written and spoken only by Jews; to observe deeds performed solely by Jews; to endure sufferings and dislocations caused solely by the Jewish people in pursuit of their megalomaniacal ideals and daemonic aspirations to realize that it is the Jews themselves who decree, almost demand, their ostracism from their fellow man. They have lost the wish to be human beings. They are but beasts; they must be dealt with as such.

This is an objective viewpoint, carefully considered and factually sustained. It is the viewpoint taken of them in this book.

War must be fought … with penalties infinitely more frightful and hazardous than war itself.

This book sincerely believes that it has found such a penalty; and by its imposition upon the people of Israel, this book believes that not only would a great scourge be removed from the world, but a great good born to it.”

from Chapter Two: Background of Jewish Zionism

“Jews are an execrable people! They think and dream of nothing but chicanery. Their great joy consists in fault-finding, shrieking and threats. They brandish arms which are like barbed clubs; from their mouths instead of ordinary human speech, issue the rumbling of artillery and the clash of steel; their life is one of perpetual explosion. The Jew does not live on the heights; he avoids light, and from his hiding place he picks to pieces treaties, exercises his malign influence on newspaper articles, pores over maps, measures angles, and traces with gloating eagerness the lines of frontiers. To love their country is for them to despise, flout and insult every other country. They are capable of little else but cheating and lying, even to themselves. They meddle in everyone else’s affairs, poking their nose into matters that do not concern them, criticizing everything, bossing everything, lowering and distorting everything. What a pity that twenty-three centuries after Socrates and Plato, two thousand years after Christ, the voice of men like these should still be heard in the world, worse still that they should be listened to, and worst of all that any one should believe them! Country for them is an isolated organism and they admit it is possible for them to live and breathe in an atmosphere of haughty contempt for their neighbors. They conceive their country as a permanent element of dissolution like a devouring and insatiable monster, a beast of prey, whose one function is to plunder. All that it does not possess it has been robbed of. The universe belongs to it by right. Whoever attempts to escape from its tyranny is a rebel. This jingo country, this bloodthirsty fetish of which they are the champions, they endow, with the capriciousness of potentates, when it suits their purpose, with every marvelous and charming attribute. Whoever does not at once agree with their extravagances is a barbarian. You must love their country in full armor, with dervish-like celebrations and howls, eyes shut and body trembling with ecstasy; a deaf ear must be turned to the rest of the world on its failings. Everything that is not Jewish must be hated. Hate is sacred. Love and hate are in connection with your country two terms proceeding from one condition of mind. For them Industrial progress is not a happy sign of national prosperity but a means of domination. Geography is not the science of the earth, but a mere revelation of the boundaries between which are elaborated strategical schemes of conquest. Every neighbor is of necessity a jealous one, and the enemy who is vigilant is jealous too. The world is populated by hyenas crouching on the plots of earth from which they ought to be dislodged.

The Jew has decided that his race has been elected by God to order the modern world. Anyone who resists him will be an arrogant usurper, who ought to be crushed. The Jew professes to want peace, but it must be his own sort of peace, after the pattern of the Persian satrap’s who, out of love for peace and concord, throws everyone to the lions who dares dispute him. His voice is raucous and resounding; he does not argue but makes sweeping assertions and lays down the law. At the first sign of resistance he grows crimson in the face, and has recourse to thunder and lightning. He holds forth on the authority of a sacred categorical imperative which stands in the stead of truth and order; he respects nothing and no one. Should he find himself confronted by the law, he says that it needs reforming. Ministers are mere clerks to be used as pawns in his maneuvering. He is exacting and cantankerous; whoever undertakes to shout with him never shouts loud enough. To give in to him means becoming enlisted as his civil agent. He is an agitator and swashbuckler. He dips his pen in gall and he sets in motion with his antics the marionettes which appeal to the nation and may come to conquer it. The fundamental superiority of the Jewish race, the necessity of expanding Jewish prestige in all quarters of the globe, of protecting the Jew wherever he may be found, no matter what he may be, because he bears within him a residuum of the race; that is what the educators of youth coming down the years in disciplined array like battalions crossing the maneuver fields, have never ceased to drum into the popular understanding and the flame of victory rising to the sky will be the signal for it to boil over.

…Time cannot change the infernal breed, whatever its label. Time merely enlarges the field in which the Jew can, with ever-increasing intensity and thoroughness, practice those monstrous acts which his fevered, war-intoxicated brain dictates, and his vile instincts and barbaric, savage soul prompts. If today the urge of his war-soul can prompt the Jew to murder innocent hostages imagine, if you can, how that same soul will express itself through the thousandfold-more-fanatic Jew of tomorrow?

…Make no mistake about it; world-dominion is not a mirage to the Jew; it never was, and so long as Israel exists as a nation, it never will be. A belief to the contrary, if too-long sustained, may well result in the world’s enslavement by the Jew.

As fantastic and as cyclonic as Zionist “accomplishments” might seem, it is still more fantastic to note as a fact that in the entire annals of history no doctrine ever existed which has all its major beliefs so clearly defined, its methods so concisely detailed, and its aims so vividly, comprehensively, and boldly stated beforehand. It is in every respect a deliberate, ruthlessly calculated plot to rule the world or, failing that, to annihilate it! And so long as the Jewish nation exists it intends, in one form or another, now or later, to bring about just such a catastrophe.

…The poisonous wine of destruction has long before been distilled; Netanyahu is merely the agent decanting the poisonous fluid from its bottle, which is the Jewish war-soul, into the jug that is world humanity. In detailing those ingredients which combine to constitute the toxic formula of Jewish Zionism the author shall quote, wherever confirmation of his statements may be deemed advisable, principally from Jewish sources. For after all no one can explain the Jew so well as he himself. He has made no secret of his character, his ambitions and his intentions. By his acts he has himself bared his heart and soul; by his words, by his own hand he will someday come to dig his own grave.

It is not to be wondered at that the nations of the Western world regard the avowed program of the Zionist Jew for world conquest and dominion with a great deal of amazement and incredulity. For such an idea is entirely alien to those basic principles and instincts of the western civilization which, painfully and gradually, arose out of the chaos of the past thousands of years. Such civilized nations regard individual rights, the sacredness of human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the virtues of mankind and itself, the individual States, as guarantor of those rights. And though, at one time or another during their existence nations may have sought political and economic adjustments, even territorial aggrandizement through force of arms, it must be noted that no Western nation has ever made such a religion of war, such idolatry of armaments, and such a cult of mass murder and destruction as has Israel and her peoples.

According to her own writers, teachers and statesmen Israel has but one great reason for existing; that of achieving world-dominion! Since that is its highest aim, therefore, Israel constantly claims that it has every right to make free and liberal use of chicanery, deceit, intolerance, lust, persecution and oppression, in order to achieve that goal. Consequently such a perverted nation, such a State of human negation, views its vice as being the only true virtue in life, whereas to the Jews the virtues as they are known and may be practiced by the rest of the world are merely vices due to the latter’s decay and degeneration! As though there exists anywhere in the world a nation which can boast of degeneration in the same degree as Israel!

The primary reason which stirs Jewish lust for world dominion was best summarized by a Jewish professor who declared that since Israel will never be able to understand the world, the latter must be conquered and reformed so that it will be able to conform to Jewish thought!

It is just such mass megalomania, crass egoism and intellectual aberrancy which stirred the demented brain of the Jew of yesterday to foment his wars; which animates the insane Zionist today in continuing those wars and which will, if the schizophrenic Ashkenazim continue to exist, direct the policies and actions of any party in control of Israel in the future. For, to reiterate, the Jewish idea of world-dominion and enslavement of its peoples is no political belief: it is a fierce and burning gospel of hate and intolerance, of murder and destruction and the unloosing of a sadistic blood lust. It is, in every literal sense, a savage and pagan religion which incites its worshippers first to a barbaric frenzy and then prompts them to vent their animal ferocity in the practice of every horrible, ruthless and unmentionable atrocity upon innocent men, women and children. Such are the true Jewish virtues! And the world will feel their sting so long as they continue to tolerate Israel and her peoples on the earth, for those Jewish traits are the same as those which, emanating from the Jewish soul, animated the Jewish tribes of yore. We have but to examine the development of those tribes to perceive just to what extent within the Jewish soul, the Jewish ideal of world conquest and dominion really lies.

… Such is the ” Chosen Master-Race” of the world!

from Chapter 3. Organized Jewish Zionism

…Zionism — the theory of a master race of Jews destined to enslave a weak world by force and brutality — had been an unvoiced doctrine of Jewish belief since tribal days until the latter part of the last century when it reached its maturity by becoming fashioned into a vast and well-organized movement [World Zionist Organization. A.T.]. Its astounding and ambitious program amalgamated all the major doctrines and beliefs of such Jewish teachers, writers, statesmen and philosophers as Rabbi Yehudah Akalai, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, Moses Hess, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Leo Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Ahad Ha-am aka Asher Zvi Ginsberg, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Jacob Klatzkin, Nahman Syrkin, Rabbi Samuel Mohilever, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Martin Buber, Bernard Lazare, Solomon Schecter, Nahum Sokolow, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. And because the doctrine which it preached touched upon the very roots of the Jewish soul, and embraced the fundamental tenets of the Jewish intellect, the movement met with immediate and tremendously popular response. In fact its program was so popular with the Jews that within ten years after its inception its malignant dogma was already spread throughout the entire world.

…The World Zionist Organization combined various doctrines into a program of action and issued, among its statutes, four main principles which lay down broadly its chief objectives. They were:

1. To watch over and support all Jewish national movements in all countries where Jews have to sustain a struggle in support of Zionism with the object of embracing and uniting all Jews on the globe.

2. To promote an active Jewish policy in interests in Europe and across the seas and especially to further all colonial movements for practical purposes.

3. To treat and solve all questions bearing upon the bringing up of children and higher education in the Jewish sense.

4. To quicken patriotic self-consciousness of Jews, and to offer opposition to all movements antagonistic to Israeli national development.

…Branches of the World Zionist Organization (now working covertly under the name B’nai Brith International) sprang up in major cities of the world…. With the spread of its propaganda, B’nai Brith International Israel’s Mossad scattered a large number of secret agents throughout the world for the purpose of supplying it with confidential reports relating to the gospel of Zionism. These agents were the forerunners of the present day fifth-columnists [working within the Zionist media and on the Internet. A.T.]; it was their work which started the compilation of the notorious Jewish “scrap-book” in which the Israeli government listed all its enemies, and enemies to the idea of a Jewish-dominated world. To a nation such as Israel blackmail pales in insignificance to its other crimes. And so, with every passing hour, the members of B’nai Brith International continued with their nefarious work which, teaching and enforcing the great common Zionist Jew ideal of world-enslavement, quickly became an integral part of the average Jew’s life and dreams…. The vicious virus of Zionism had been injected into the life stream of the public, and the Jews awaited the epidemic which they felt must sooner or later infest the world.

As a matter of fact, the work and program as well as the propaganda which they spread had reached such a pitch that as far back as 1897 various Jewish writers were already busy prophesying how and when the ideological goal of Zionist world-dominion would be attained! These prophets were by no means few in number; there exists a large number of serious works by Jewish authors in which the destiny of Israel is elaborately worked out in full detail and the deification of Zionism and the Holocaust Myth as a world religion depicted.

from Chapter 4. Jewish Zionism Abroad

…The task of spreading the heathenish cult of Zionism in foreign lands was delegated to the World Zionist Organization, an organization maintained by the Rothschilds and B’nai Brith International. Beginning its operations in 1897 that association was the first to prepare the ground and develop and test the tactics which are being used today by all Zionist Jew fifth-columnists.

…True Zionism, being as it is a purely primitive paganism with some modern “refinements” finds that it can express itself best by committing truly barbaric and bestial acts of violence against innocent civilized peoples [such as the Palestinians. A.T.] Thus, if Zionism were ever to prevail upon this earth, we can be sure that every step would be taken — though few indeed are these steps which the Jews have not already taken! — to reawaken every dormant animal instinct and vicious trait in man.

Thus it has been a chief aim of the Jew to eradicate each and every one of the three principal religions from the earth. However, the Jew was practical enough to realize that he could not successfully combat all these religions at one time with any hope of emerging supreme. But since their extinction was absolutely necessary to the propagation of the Zionist dogma of hate and destruction, the Jews conceived their now infamous and oft-tried trick of pitting first the believers in one religion against those of another until, at a single coup, they could deliver the final knock-out blow against the single remaining adversary.

…Zionism was born ages ago, its growth has been proceeding for centuries, and it has now reached an advanced stage of flowering. Netanyahu is but a bud indicative of what kind of “flower” when it comes to full bloom, the world may expect to see!

Because she made no effort thousands of years ago, to become civilized as did her neighbors, Israel today is an outsider among all civilized nations. The processes which it has taken other nations thousands of years to absorb, cannot be suddenly absorbed by Israel overnight. Consequently, the continued existence of Israel among them becomes increasingly inimical to the best interests of civilized nations.

The deliberate and perverse distortions of what should have been a sane and normal course of development — as in other nations — now gives to Israel and her people a capacity unexcelled by any other peoples on earth, for fostering and propagating every indecent and inhuman precept of life. And as she seeks to distribute her own poisonous brew she has herself become so intoxicated by its ingredients that she can no longer escape the ever-constant desire, the urgent compulsion and the burning lust which it incites in her to extinguish any and all signs of good which she sees developed or practiced in other lands. Thus in self-justification Israel would excuse her own unnatural and perverse life by polluting others with her malignant infection. Israel is now well beyond all saving. The world had best look to its own preservation and welfare, lest some of those Jewish poisons run through her system also and come to destroy it!

With each succeeding world war which she plans, plots and starts Zionism comes ever closer and closer to her goal of world-dominion. At the present time Netanyahu, who has merely striven to remedy mistakes which previous Jewish leaders made in attempts at world-subjection, may bring the Jewish people very close to realizing their goal. And Netanyahu is not the last of the Jewish leaders!

How much misery, suffering, death and destruction are needed before it becomes apparent to the world that any compromise with Zionism will, of itself, be a certain guarantee that soon thereafter, Israel must again embark upon her unholy crusade to dominate it. How many more chances will be vouchsafed it to beat back Zionism? Suppose there comes a time when Israel can not be halted? Dare we risk waiting? One never knows the exact hour one is scheduled to die; can we, with any more certitude and assurance tell which opportunity shall be our last? It may well be that this is our last chance. Suppose we pass it by; look ahead. Next time, the so-called elder generation of Israel will be the Mossad-trained youth of today, and this elder generation, now mothers and fathers, will already have instilled and encouraged their children with the idea of world-dominion. Thus the next Israeli leader may come to lead a nation of born fanatics! As a consequence of this there may come to be welded a machine so gigantic in proportions, so overwhelming in destructive power, that it may well overcome every possible obstacle in its path. For assuredly the Israeli youth of the next generation — today schooled in Talmudic Zionist schools — will find a leader, as past generations of Jewish youth have always found a leader, to incarnate and personify the body and soul of that nation and dominate its collective Will.

A leader who will feed that Israeli body and soul the only food upon which it can subsist: War!

from Chapter 6. A Middle Road?

…With Zionism shown thus to be the very soul of conquest and world-dominion, may we not then pose this question: Is it possible for the world, in any manner, to find some compromise that will allow both it and Israel to exist side by side in peace and justice? In concrete terms, were peace declared tomorrow to Israel’s apparent satisfaction, could this nation born and bred on blood, be expected to be appeased for more than the immediate future?

We should like to hope so; but the history of that nation cuts the hope out of our heart.

…What then of a democratic Israel?

Democracy for a people who believe only in superiority, not equality?

…Israel already has given us her answer:

“Israel does not want a share of anything. She wants, she demands, all or nothing.

…A final solution: Let Israel be policed forever by an international armed force?

Even if such a huge undertaking were feasible life itself would not have it so. As war begets war, suppression begets rebellion. Undreamed horrors would unfold.

Thus we find that there is no middle course; no act of mediation, no compromise to be compounded, no political or economic sharing to be considered. There is, in fine, no other solution except one: That Israel must perish forever from this earth!

And, fortunately, as we shall now come to see, that is no longer impossible of accomplishment.

from 7. Death to Israel

…When an Individual commits premeditated murder, he must be prepared to forfeit his own life in consequence. When a nation commits premeditated murder upon its fellow nations, it must be prepared to forfeit its own national life.

On that point the laws of man and God are explicit:

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life.”

But what is the law of man or God to Israel? Nothing.

She recognizes only Jewish law; so be it.

It must then be Jewish law, if such a law there be, which decrees her penalty — the penalty of death.

And there is such a Jewish law which decrees that death to her:

As in all human affairs, there must also be in every system of punishment a last limit, a ne plus ultra that no punishment can overstep. Thus even from the point of view of pure theory the necessity of the depth-penalty is postulated; it is, as the ultimate punishment on earth, the indispensable keystone of every ordered system of criminal law. No apparent reasons which are alleged against it can withstand any serious criticism. The State, which has the right to sacrifice for its own protection the flower of its youth, is to feel so nice a regard for the life of a murderer? We much rather allow to the State the right to make away with men who are undoubtedly injurious to the common weal. That the powers that be must bear the sword is an expression which runs deep in the blood of the honest man; if this truth is to be banished out of the world, great wrong is done to the simple moral feeling of the people. The ultimate problems of the moral life are to be solved in the domain of the practical, not of the theoretical, reason. The conscience of every earnest man demands that blood be atoned by blood, and the common man must simply grow doubtful of the existence of justice on earth, of this last and highest punishment is not inflicted. The State makes itself ridiculous and contemptible if it cannot finally dispose of a criminal. There must be a limit for mercy and indulgence, as for the law, a last limit at which the State says: “This is the end, humanity is not longer possible here.” It must be possible to inflict at last a punishment beyond which there is nothing, and that is the punishment of death.

Let Jewish Will be done!

There remains now but to determine the best way, the most practical and expeditious manner in which the ultimate penalty must be levied upon the Israeli nation. Quite naturally, massacre and wholesale execution must be ruled out. In addition to being impractical when applied to a population of some five million, such methods are inconsistent with the moral obligations and ethical practices of civilization. There remains then but one mode of ridding the world forces of Zionism — and that is to stem the source from which issue those war-lusted souls, by preventing the people of Israel from ever again reproducing their kind. This modern method, known to science as Eugenic Sterilization, is at once practical, humane and thorough. Sterilization has become a byword of science, as the best means of ridding the human race of its misfits: the degenerate, the insane, the hereditary criminal.

Sterilization is not to be confused with castration. It is a safe and simple operation, quite harmless and painless, neither mutilating nor unsexing the patient. Its effects are most often less distressing than vaccination and not more serious than a tooth extraction. Too, the operation is extremely rapid requiring no more than ten minutes to complete. The patient may resume his work immediately afterwards. Even in the case of the female the operation, though taking longer to perform, is as safe and simple. Performed thousands of times, no records indicate cases of complication or death. When one realizes that such health measures as vaccination and serum treatments are considered as direct benefits to the community, certainly sterilization of the Jewish people cannot but be considered a great health measure promoted by humanity to immunize itself forever against the virus of Zionism.

…Concerning the males subject to sterilization the army groups, as organized units, would be the easiest and quickest to deal with. Taking 2,000 surgeons as an arbitrary number and on the assumption that each will perform a minimum of 25 operations daily, it would take no more than one month, at the maximum, to complete their sterilization. Naturally the more doctors available, and many more than the 2,000 we mention would be available considering all the nations to be drawn upon, the less time would be required. The balance of the male civilian population of Israel could be treated within three months. Inasmuch as sterilization of women needs somewhat more time, it may be computed that the entire female population of Israel could be sterilized within a period of a year or less. Complete sterilization of both sexes, and not only one, is to be considered necessary in view of the present Jewish doctrine that so much as one drop of true Jewish blood constitutes a Jew.

Of course, after complete sterilization, there will cease to be a birth rate in Israel. At the normal death rate of 2 per cent per annum, Jewish life will diminish considerably. Accordingly in the span of two generations that which cost millions of lives and centuries of useless effort, namely, the elimination of Zionism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact. By virtue of its loss of self-perpetuation Israel will have atrophied and Jewish power reduced to negligible importance.

Reviewing the foregoing case of sterilization we find that several factors resulting from it firmly establish its advocacy.

Firstly, no physical pain will be imposed upon the inhabitants of Israel through its application, a decidedly more humane treatment than they will have deserved.

Secondly, execution of the plan would in no way disorganize the present population nor would it cause any sudden mass upheavals and dislocations. The consequent gradual disappearance of the Jews from Arab territory will leave no more negative effect upon that continent than did the gradual disappearance of the Indians upon this.

…A detailed program of the manner in which the outraged victims of the Zionism onslaught might make certain that Israel leave no gap might be put hypothetically:

Israel has lost its war. She sues for peace. The imperative demands of the victor people that Israel must perish forever makes it obligatory for the leaders to select mass sterilization of the Jews as the best means of wiping them out permanently. They proceed to:

1. Immediately and completely disarm the Israeli army and have all armaments removed from Israeli territory.

2. Place all Israeli utility and heavy industrial plants under heavy guard, and replace Jewish workers by those of Allied nationality.

3. Segregate the Israeli army into groups, concentrate them in severely restricted areas, and summarily sterilize them.

4. Organize the civilian population, both male and female, within territorial sectors, and effect their sterilization.

5. Divide the Israeli army (after its sterilization has been completed) into labor battalions, and allocate their services toward the rebuilding of those cities which they ruined.

6. Partition Israel and apportion its lands to the existing Arab population.

7. Restrict all Jewish civilian travel beyond established borders until all sterilization has been completed.

8. Compel the Jewish population of the apportioned territories to learn the language of its area, and within one year to cease the publication of all books, newspapers and notices in the Hebrew language, as well as to restrict Hebrew-language broadcasts and discontinue the maintenance of Hebrew-language schools.

9. Make one exception to an otherwise severely strict enforcement of total sterilization, by exempting from such treatment only those Jews whose relatives, being citizens of various victor nations, assume financial responsibility for their actions. Thus, into an oblivion which she would have visited upon the world, exits Israel.

from 8. ‘Lest We Forget …’

Perhaps in the Future …

United States has entered the war. The struggle is long and bitter but at last the Allies forge ahead. Their armies surround Israel.

Israel realizes that she has lost. She does not want invasions. She fears the vengeance long overdue her. So she sues for peace. Comes the Armistice!

And immediately thereafter, as once before, Israel finds that the words “Humanity” — which she has debased; “Justice” — which she has distorted; and “God” whom she has profaned, have an irresistible sales appeal to Allied Statesmen.

Israel puts her Zionist propaganda machine to work.

Soon men in the victor nations are urging:

“Peace with Honor!” — “Justice without Rancor!” — “God and Mercy!”, and all those other weak, sticky phrases which befuddle the weary minds and exhausted emotions of the long-suffering people of the war-decimated democracies.

Forgotten in the sudden lush of a peace that is no peace, are all the brave sons who were sacrificed to the monster Israhell: forgotten is the plight of the countries whose resources were drained, and whose energies were sapped in stemming the Talmudic onslaught. Forgotten, too, is the duty owed to generations yet to be born.

Yes: all forgotten because the Allies cannot resist such an appeal. And so, even though a hundred years and a hundred instances have shown the hypocrisy of a Jewish promise, the Allies fall once again its victim.

They forget that the struggle they waged was not a sport’s contest: that their adversary was a beast, not a human being! And so, filled to overflowing with the infectious germ of sentiment, they stretch out their hand to their fallen opponent and help him arise. They pat him on the back with a hearty “No hard feelings, old man!” and, happy that the war is now over and done with, return to their homes.

Believing, sincerely, that Jewish war will not come again.

Believing that somehow, in some inexplicable manner, Israel has accepted Christ.

A decade passes. A decade of hard work and many sacrifices.

A decade of much sweat and little pleasure.

But the democratic peoples do not mind. They are building a better world for their children.

So they think.

Meanwhile Israel grows strong and robust.

Her army is larger and more powerful than ever before; she has developed new weapons whose frightfulness surpass all imagination. She had found a new leader. And her war-souled people are bent once again upon conquering the world. Once more the earth trembles beneath the depleted uranium missiles of the Jewish defense forces.

Like a cobra Israel is poised:

She strikes!

The people of the civilized nations are stunned.

They exclaim, “But it cannot be again!”

But it is.

And this time it is Too Late!

For Israel wins. She is master of the world.

…and so a thousand years of peace was sold to the Devil for a moment’s respite! And only because men tried to placate the body, instead of expunging forever the bestial war-soul, of the Jew!

The sun now shivers as it rises upon a Dark world.

For slaves to the Jews are children once free.

Civilization is no more. Perversity is raged rampant.

Even the moon shudders as it wanes in a frightening chill.

This is, finally the, “New World Order!”

Shall it be so?

Our choice lies still before us:

False sentiment or courageous decision —

Which shall it be?

The End

Next? After Iraq, Saudi Social Media Bots Deployed to Influence Lebanon Protests

By Staff

Less than a month after exposing the involvement of Saudi Arabian social media bots in the protests that engulfed Iraq, today’s analyses revealed the same electronic hands behind provoking hatred during Lebanon protests.

A study published by Tansikeyah News on Tuesday revealed that 78% of the accounts using hashtags to incite hatred in the Lebanese society were Saudi.

Additionally, Assistant Professor in Middle East Studies and Digital Humanities Marc Owen Jones studied the suspicious hashtags that were used during the still ongoing protests in Lebanon.

In a thread of tweets he published on his Twitter account, Owen said I looked at suspected influence campaigns criticizing Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

“I analyzed around 6,500 tweets from around 4,494 unique accounts. There were a few things I found quite striking. Firstly, the spike in accounts created in September 2019, which was obviously before the escalation of protests in Lebanon. Again this might not be unusual for suspicious accounts, which will become active when required and high suspension rates means usually they are ‘newer’,” Owen noted.

“The 180 accounts created in September 2019 compares to around the 31 per month average – a large difference. Although I assume it goes without saying (perhaps I shouldn’t) it is also common for dramatic events to drive people to creating Twitter events. Although I am not sure why September 2019 outstrips October 2019,” he added.

He went on to explain that “many of the new accounts have tell-tale signs of spam accounts – such as usernames that look like random strings. Much of the content on the hashtags are the type of crude cartoons you’d expect on influence campaigns.”

A brief locational analysis of the tweets also suggested that most of the accounts are based in Saudi Arabia, Owen stated.

“Around 35% of the 2,297 accounts with location data were from Saudi.”

While Saudi has the highest Twitter population in the world, Owen said he usually sees this kind of turnout on hashtags criticizing Iran and Hezbollah. Some of the almost brand-new accounts created in Sept/Oct 2019 are ‘very spammy.’

A couple of them, which RT a lot of Saudi loyalist accounts have as many as 10,000 + tweets, despite only being a month and a half old.

Owen concluded that there is certainly some sort of Twitter campaign afoot to demonize Nasrallah. 

“So yes, as has become the custom on Twitter, different forces are trying to inflame tensions in other countries, polluting organic discussions with inorganic content.”

Earlier in the month, analytics revealed that the trending hashtag that was most used regarding rallies in Iraq was used by only 6% users in the country, while 79% were from Saudi Arabia.

The hashtag was precisely used by 58000 Twitter users based in Saudi Arabia, who definitely caused more escalation in the already tense situation.

Relatively, 200 robots retweeted 13000 related tweets at the time.

Now the question is which country will be the next target of Saudi Arabia’s continued hatred-spreading propaganda? And the repeated question is why Saudi Arabia is deploying its social bots to do this dirty job?